South Vietnam, 1967. From Vietnam, Mon Amour.
And I also started travelling out to the countryside with Truong, taking photographs of the people of this small beautiful country we were visiting as if I were a tourist and not part of the media sideshow of an enormous military machine. I was a war photographer but the book I had in mind would have no war in it.
I looked round at the screech of metal chairs being pushed back against terrazzo tiles and saw the large group of people who had been sitting behind me make their noisy, bibulous exit from the roof terrace. My eyes flicked over the messy detritus of their table — the bottles and the glasses, the ashtrays and the empty cigarette packs, abandoned newspapers — even a book.
I called out: ‘Hey! You’ve forgotten—’ but it was too late, they’d disappeared.
I wandered over to the table and picked up the book. It was French and I felt that shiver of ghostly shock run through me as I read the title and the author’s name.
Absence de marquage by Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau.
Vietnam. The noise of frogs, deafening, in the back garden of the Green Tree coffee shop on Binh Phu Street. Truong introducing me to his family, bowing to me as if I were visiting royalty: Kim, his wife, his two tiny daughters, Hanh and Ngon. A thirty-foot high metal hill of malfunctioning useless air-conditioning machines in a field by Bien Hoa airforce base. The Saigon police in their crisp bleached uniforms — the ‘white mice’. The press escort officer who looked like Montgomery Clift. Endless rain in August. The massive percussion of the B-52 strikes — felt ten miles away, a trembling, an uncontrollable flinching of the facial muscles. The tamarind trees in Tu Do Street. The rich Vietnamese kids in their tennis whites at the Cercle Sportif. Black-toothed women at the Central Market selling US Army gear. ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’, a song by the Animals. Motorbikes. Australian troops playing cricket. Beautiful villas on the coast at the foot of the Long Hai Hills — built by the French, decaying fast, empty. Women in conical hats sifting through the waste of US Army rubbish dumps. The smell of joss sticks, perfume and marijuana — Saigon.
I was walking past a bar in Tu Do Street, coming back from my tailor, when I saw a girl sitting outside a shack called the A-Go-Go Club. She was an ordinarily pretty bargirl, her hair teased and lacquered, but there was something about her pensive mood as she sat there dreaming of another life that made me stop and surreptitiously remove my camera. She was wearing white jeans and a white shirt — maybe ready to go on her shift. I snapped her — she never noticed.
‘Shouldn’t you ask permission, first?’
I turned round to see John Oberkamp standing there. He was in jeans and a tight, ultramarine, big-collared shirt.
‘I suppose I should have,’ I said. ‘Do you know her?’
‘She’s my mama-san. Come and meet her.’
Her name was Quyen and she worked in this bar and also at Bien Hoa airbase as a cleaner. She seemed fond of Oberkamp; when she said ‘John, he numba-one man,’ she seemed to mean it. Oberkamp called her ‘Queenie’. We strolled in and ordered a beer. It was mid-afternoon and the place was quiet, the bargirls sitting around in their tiny lurid miniskirts and bikini tops, chatting, smoking, reapplying their make up, waiting for the cocktail-hour rush. Oberkamp told me he finally had accreditation — he was now a recognised stringer for a Melbourne-based newspaper, the Weekly News-Pictorial, and was now spending much of his time with the 1st Australian Task Force at their base, Nui Dat, south-east of Saigon. He came up to the city as often as he could to be with Queenie. He kissed the top of her forehead — ‘My little lady’ — and she hugged herself to him. By coincidence I ran into her again two days later at Bien Hoa where she was polishing the boots of some Air Cavalry gunners. She looked different, hair wild, uncoiffed — a servant, not an object of male fantasy — humble and hard-working. ‘You tell John I love him,’ she said to me. ‘Beaucoup, beaucoup love.’
Two photos of Queenie. From Vietnam, Mon Amour.
For some reason I can’t bring myself to read Charbonneau’s book. Absence de marquage has been sitting on my bedside table for two weeks, now. I know where this dread comes from: without thinking I read the blurb on the back — it was one of those large-format, pale cream, soft-covered French novels, just lettering on the front, no illustrations. Absence de marquage was the story of a young Free French diplomat — called Yves-Lucien Legrand — in New York during the Second World War, so the blurb informed me, and his doomed love affair with a beautiful English woman, a photographer, Mary Argyll.
I actually felt a squirm of nausea in my throat when I read this and dropped the book as if it were burning hot. Mary = Amory. Argyll = argile, the French for clay. A roman à Clay, then, I said to myself — not amused.
Of course it has to be read, and I have skimmed through it looking for those passages that concerned ‘Mary Argyll’, my alter ego, my doppelgänger. . It’s disturbing to read a fiction when you know all the fact behind it. I’ve been consuming it in small sips, as it were, reading a paragraph here, half a page there, only to realise that Charbonneau was recounting episodes of our time together wholly unaltered in any degree, apart from the names of Yves-Lucien and Mary. Here is Charbonneau describing Mary Argyll after their first night together:
Mary Argyll was one of those almost-beautiful women, a not-quite-beautiful woman. But, for Yves-Lucien, that was precisely what made her, paradoxically, more beautiful than anyone he had ever encountered. Beautiful women were boring, he thought; he needed something other than mere perfection to interest him. Her nose was a little too prominent and she should have paid more attention to her hair, which was dark brown and straight, and as a result of this negligence could often look lank and ungroomed.
He loved her body, naked, however. She was so slim that her ribs showed but her breasts were full and generous with small perfectly round nipples. Her feet were a little too large, another imperfection he cherished as it made her seem sometimes graceless and awkward, particularly when she wore her highest heels. Yves-Lucien found this ungainliness un peu loufouque and extremely exciting, sexually.1
My breakthrough as a photographer in Vietnam has occurred with the publication of this photograph of a Huey pilot waiting for his mission briefing. It made the front cover of three magazines and was syndicated to over forty other magazines and newspapers, worldwide. I have to admit I saw its potential as the image was printed. The suspended man, the shades, the ‘danger’ arrow, the can of beer — all perfect juxtaposition. Once again the photograph stops time (in monochrome); the historical moment, with whatever freight it carries, ideally frozen.
I garnered fees of over $3,000 at the end of the day but, more importantly, it saw my name being bandied about — requests came in for more, similar images — and I have suddenly become aware of the commercial dividend of working in a war zone with the eyes of the world upon you. Your accreditation was extra-valuable, not just because it gave you access, took you places other photographers couldn’t go and made you sometimes a unique witness, but also because all that could be turned into cash. This was (I was learning fast) another edge to the stringers’ hunger for action — there was money to be made for putting yourself in harm’s way.
To my surprise, Lockwood was very excited by the response to my ‘Pilot in his Hammock’ photo. I received a rare Telex from him: more of the same, please, now, now, now. People were growing tired of towering GIs and cowering peasants; Zippo lighters firing thatch; muddied wounded being medevac’d — show us the hidden human face of Vietnam, Lockwood urged. I was way ahead of him.