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Claudine Phan tells Langford point blank that continuing to risk his life going out with
the ARVN ‘means that you live in a dream’, and are ‘always likely to disappear’. ‘It’s sad,
being a warrior’ she tells him, sounding rather like Krishna lecturing Arjuna before battle,
because ‘you’ll always be alone’. Langford has already learned Krishna’s lesson not to be
interested in the tangible results of his profession, but when she tells him ‘you’re the sort of
warrior other men love, because you’re what they wish to be’, she is not flattering him. He is
indeed a hero, but his war is too dangerous for most men since his enemies are demons. She
continues, ‘You’d make a good father. But if you have children, they’ll end up orphans, won’t
they?’(HW, 187). Langford has slipped, along with all of Cambodia, through the looking-glass
into the ‘Otherworld’ called the Region of Dis, one of the final battlefields of the demons’
macrocosmic war which began with the Kali-Yuga and the bloodbath depicted in the
Mahabharata .
12.9. The Land of Dis
In Highways to a War, the invoking of this Black Age is a leitmotif which takes the form
of a personification of universal upheaval called ‘Dis’, the strangest and most invasive of
‘Otherworlds’ imaginable. Koch writes of the ‘calm voice’ of the disappeared and presumed
dead Mike Langford emerging from ‘the darkness’ of ‘that tropical kingdom of Dis he was lost
in, beyond the Thai border’, recounting its tale of an Asia of times long past (HW, 66). Dis is
home to the Grim Reaper figure, cutting down the youth of Langford and his cameraman
companions during their glory years covering the war in Vietnam. Langford is now dead, but
the others cling to the profession, trying vainly to be again what they once were:
It's time for them to hang up their irons.
But how can they do that? The greatest high of all will be gone then: the
one presided over by Dis, commander of the dead, whose other name is
Meaning. (HW, 98)
In introducing Dis into his Asian novels, Koch is incorporating an important Western
mythological symbol into his ontology. Dis is, first, the name of the all-powerful god of Celtic
mythology whose description by Jobes seems written especially for Koch. He carries a
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