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10.4.2.2. The ‘People Over There’, and the War on the Edge of Reality
Mike Langford makes new contact with the evil figures when he arrives in Indochina.
At first, he expects he has found them in the Viet Cong, but then realises that while the people
sometimes call them the Black Ghosts, the real demons are not these soldiers:
When I filmed these dead VC close up, their faces surprised me. I’d imagined
them as some sort of demon, I suppose. But instead, lying there in their black
pyjamas and those crude rubber sandals they make out of car tyres, they had
faces just like those of the ARVN troops. Very young: peasant boys. (HW,
143)
The VC are very much like the ARVN soldiers Langford goes into the field with and
gains mutual respect for. They are better called ‘The People Over There’ as Koch gives them
generally positive while ambiguous presentation, but they are caught up in the chaos of
adharma welling over Southeast Asia. Harvey Drummond experiences this breakdown of
reality during a firefight. He finds himself running without direction, surrounded by the
whining and cracking of bullets, exploding mines, shouting and cursing, and falling bodies
strewing the earth, until he along with all of reality loses identity:
I was no longer Harvey Drummond; I was an anonymous dreamer, the
landscape of whose dream kept maliciously breaking up, while he tried to get
back to the place where he’d left his real life behind. Pebbles and pick dust
and emerald leaves were all in bits, in disconnected fragments, bright and
precise, flying by me. I’d lost the Soldiers Three, and badly wanted to find
them. (HW, 174)
The world becomes a battleground from which he and the others on the ground seem
unconnected. The warriors are insects, some invisible, others ‘insidiously throbbing’, and the
scene is dominated by the orange and yellow colours which Koch repeatedly uses to symbolise
the world of dream and irreality.
Helicopter gunships had now appeared over the trees, insidiously
throbbing, searching like intelligent insects, spraying the invisible VC with
fire. Other choppers were dropping smoke grenades to mark the VC position,
and lurid orange and yellow smoke clouds began to fill the clearing, making it
like an outrageous fairground. (HW, 174)
The war in Indochina is not like other wars. It is fought on that edge of reality which,
Koch writes, transgresses the barriers of the looking-glass. The images are typically of a
horrendous typhoon coming out of another reality, ‘a nightmare vagueness, and this dry, huge,
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