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Rong’s briefings were translated into English by a ‘sensitive-looking young Cambodian’ poet
who ‘had an air of quiet desperation’ which indicated to the journalists ‘to believe nothing of
what he was being made to say’ (HW, 263-64).
The Cambodian capital is described as a veritable ‘Wonderland by night’ as the Khmer
Rouge forces tighten their strangle hold all round. There are ‘coloured electric bulbs’ and
‘petrol lamps’ flickering ‘like the fairground lights of childhood’. The fragrant air of the
garden ‘suggested peace, but a peace in the process of mummifying’ into a ‘peace of the past,
masquerading as the present for a little while longer’. On the café’s terrace ‘embassy officials,
Cambodian military officers and bureaucrats, Western correspondents, and a sprinkling of up-
market Cambodian prostitutes in black sarongs’ enjoy the orchestra’s rendition of
‘Wonderland by Night’. The mad hatter’s birthday party is made up of the journalists,
‘huddled over their table lamps, faces reflecting the flames of the lamps like those of
nineteenth-century plotters’. They were ‘the noisiest of the groups’, inspiring a ‘note of
hysteria in their laughter’, alternating ‘wild clowning’ with ‘emotional diatribes against the
corrupt Lon Nol leaders’ (HW, 384).
The North Vietnamese Army is not spared its share of absurd and mad characters. In the
NVA’s theoretically egalitarian, non-materialist system, a high-ranking officer can only be
identified ‘from the number of ballpoint pens in his pocket’ (HW, 299). For a variation on the
theme, when the Soldiers Three are captured and brought deep into the forest, their NVA
captors turn out to be the Seven Dwarfs. There is Doc, ‘the medic, with his open boy’s face
and a big cap of hair cut straight across the forehead’; Lenin, a ‘tough-looking man with slit
eyes, who carried the field radio’ and ‘squinted and watched people’, is a sinister remaking of
Grumpy; Weary, who has ‘heavy eyelids, prone to malaria’, is an undisguised representation
of Sleepy; Prince, ‘a quiet, handsome one with a broad face’, recalls Bashful; and Turtle, a
‘stocky, cheerful man who always carried the rice pot on his back’, fits in as Happy. Escaping
such direct correlation are Professor, the ‘one with glasses and a sensitive face’, whose nail-
biting and rereading of old letters from home still characterise him as one of the original
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