Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

cyclo for his first visit to Madame Claudine Phan’s home. ‘The cyclo boy wanted to wait, but
Langford told him to go, and paid him off. They boy pedalled slowly away under the
streetlights, looking back with lingering reproach’ (HW, 123). Even when using the cyclo for a
more respectable purpose, it waits hungrily for the opportunity to take its client to hell. These
crows have made themselves known to Mike Langford since his youth on the Tasmanian farm
when ‘The ancient, baby voices of crows complained always in the heat’ (HW, 21). This
malevolent, conspiratory heat later torments Harvey Drummond who reports, ‘My head ached
from the weight of my helmet, and the heat began to seem malignant to me, like a secret
weapon of the Viet Cong’ (HW, 173). The crows, heat, and dried-out landscape are leitmotifs
which recall the forbidding Australian outback and which are even waiting on the edges of the
shadows to pick away at the remaining bits of humanity when the light is extinguished.
In an especially apt vision in a Cambodia about to be sucked into the darkness, Trever
Griffiths pays tribute to another evil bird, the B-52:
The supreme vehicle of death! Flies as high as fifty thousand feet, with a
range of twelve thousand miles. Bombs inside; bombs under the wings.
Beautiful as an eagle. At that height, it can’t even be seen: you know nothing
until the bombs arrive. The crew of a B-52 are innocent: they do not see what
they do. But down here, villages disappear into chasms, trees go down like
grass, and the noise can make you lose your mind. Terrible beauty, brothers!’
(HW, 239).
Griffiths does not get much support from the other journalists, not even for his fitting allusion
to W. B. Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’, but his interpretation proves close enough when the Soldiers
Three experience a B-52 bombing raid. Though a few miles from the target, Jim Feng finds
himself clinging to the earth which ‘heaved in a huge spasm’ as
a roar engulfed us unlike anything I’d ever known. I’d never imagined such a
sound. It was not a sound, it was something beyond sound; it opened a gaping
hole in the world and in my head, making my mind cry out in terror, making
the whole world rock and sway. The palms and bigger trees nearby were
bending like grass. (HW, 312)
Griffiths hardly seems to deserve the horrifying ancient Assyrian mask Drummond imagines
him wearing, but this is what Koch says happens when in an ‘age of nihilism, which this one
clearly is, the impulse to good is perverted, coming out in various forms of fanaticism’. Men
- 246 -