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When the three journalists are released, their NVA captors are seen as having aged far
too rapidly and heading toward untimely deaths. Jim Feng reports how one of them ‘looked
very weak, with his thin body and the drooping, old man’s eyelids in his boy’s face’ (HW,
349). Langford’s driver in Phnom Penh, Vora, ‘a man in vigorous middle age, always neat and
lively and well dressed’, escapes from Cambodia after the fall to the Communists, bringing
news of the horror of the Khmer Rouge angka and Langford’s execution. Ray Barton sees
how ‘the small, bent figure that shuffles into the room is that of an old man, and the faded blue
shirt, black short and rubber shower sandals are the outfit of a street beggar’ (HW, 441). Vora
is a man broken by the sight of the devil:
He’s somehow familiar, and his face is gentle and likeable. His hair is still
black, but there are white streaks in it, and his skin is very wrinkled. Looking
up at Jim with an expression that’s half delighted and half stricken, he has his
brows raised high, and this has put a large number of horizontal corrugations
across his forehead. Now in his late forties, he appears close to seventy. (HW,
442)
And yet, once he has relieved himself of his news, Vora cries ‘in a way that Westerners seldom
do: like a child, his mouth open, his eyes staring in a sort of sad amazement, the back of his
right hand held against his cheek’ (HW, 445). It amazes Barton to see this, but for those who
spent years of their lives in Southeast Asia, time is no longer expected to move steadily
forward as in the West.
moment:
In journalists, Koch has found professionals who are fascinated with the fleeting
We journalists love the ephemeral, and there’s no hunger so exquisite as
hunger for the ephemeral; … I wouldn’t be this high in an hour or so, but the
moment lives on, its fragile structure built on air, like all our best moments.
(HW, 220)
Being at the right place at the right time makes journalists feel special. Paradoxically, when
the place and time no longer exist, the memory regenerates—and improves—them. The
Nurseryman reminisces about an idyllic, pre-war Phnom Penh, whose time has even been fixed
to quiet perfection:
Soon we’ll be the only ones who remember the magic peace. […] The French
planters drinking coffee at their kerbside tables. The caravans of oxcarts
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