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NVA’s central headquarters for South Vietnam., reportedly located in Cambodia. Yet, even
COSVN remains in obscurity, as Harvey Drummond asks:
Did it even exist? I still wonder. Like so much else about Cambodia and the
war itself, COSVN was a secret inside a secret. The sanctuaries and the
unofficial bombing both had an existence on the level of rumour, and the
Central Office in the jungle lay in the realm of legend: a final secret at the
heart of things, tantalizing the Americans. (HW, 215)
The mystery of the NVA tunnels recalls the White Rabbit’s hole, the doors of
Hamilton’s dream, and, among many other instances, of Clare farm, where the hopfields ‘are
represented as rows of green tunnels, the hop-pickers are a somewhat fey folk, keeping to
themselves, disappearing and re-appearing’ mystery-like, and give ‘access to a green
underworld, to a kind of enchantment; and there is an appropriate musty smell that goes with
it’. Both the hop fields and the NVA bunker imply entry into a world of faery, and, Mitchell
writes, the constant repetition of this ‘device of structural echoes’ which keeps inviting us into
another world demonstrates that there is ‘a pattern which exists outside of us. We are not all
the world that there is’, and the world, like Mike Langford, is largely unknowable (Mitchell,
1996, Ancestral Voices, 5).
It is the secret hideout of a secret enemy in a secret war, in a world Koch describes as
lying somewhere on the edge of reality. Cambodia was at first somehow not a serious land to
the correspondents. Harvey Drummond says, ‘We saw it as a country of make-believe: our
land of Holiday’. They did not care then that it was nonsense to think so. ‘Phnom Penh was
our place to escape to from Saigon and the war: our capital of pleasure, and of opium trances
at Madame Delphine’s’ (HW, 214). Phnom Penh itself was a city which had escaped the
violence of its historical and temporal landscape, ‘a city of charmed peace, in a kingdom that
had once reached to Malaya. Old Phnom Penh, which no longer exists, which will never exist
again, was a French city on the Mekong coloured Mediterranean pink and cream’ (HW, 213).
This dream land, whose ‘noises were the magic, muted sounds that come to you in a doze’
(HW, 214), belongs to the world of fancy, but threatens to overwhelm the real world. The
Khmer Rouge too ‘belonged to the dream at the edges’, but ‘were suddenly moving to the
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