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Jim Feng says during their capture, ‘He was tender with me, and it somehow healed me, and
brought back my courage’ (HW, 340), and yet Langford’s compassion and influence are
multifaceted, sometimes becoming relentless and confrontational. When Volkov drops from
exhaustion, and Lenin is about to shoot him, Mike shows how he could also be ‘like a buffalo:
one that would charge’. Langford slowly squats down ‘next to Volkov, his eyes never leaving
Lenin’s’. He picks Dmitri up and, though suffering from the same dysentery and exhaustion as
the others, carries him. Lenin watches him, ‘his eyes shining with anger’ and ‘still wearing his
grin of hate’, but, though hungering for an excuse to do so, he does not shoot (HW, 341-42).
Something appears to be protecting Langford from Lenin, the one member of the NVA
group who has a pathological hatred of the Westerners. Later, when Volkov is shot on the
road, Langford carries him to the side, and Feng is amazed that he was not also shot when so
exposed. Jim Feng postulates that Lenin had ordered Dmitri killed; the one Asian among the
correspondents, Feng is naturally the most steeped in Taoist pragmatism. Still, he is resistant
to accepting Eastern points of view when they do not fit his purposes. This leads to Feng’s
often logical but only conjectural explanations for things. He does nevertheless admit that
‘there was something supernatural’ about Langford which was guiding and protecting him.
‘Nothing’, Feng notes, ‘seemed to break him or change him’ (HW, 339). One key to this
steadfast association of Langford with the Tirthankara and Bodhisattva lies in the discipline of
tapas, by which the ascetic cultivates in himself ‘a state of psychophysical heat’, which
bestows on him ‘a certain sovereignty over the forces of the macrocosm by virtue of the
conquest of the parallel forces in the microcosm’.
The glowing ascetic cannot be crushed or frustrated by the forces of his
environment—nature, the weather, animals, or society. Asserting his superior
strength, he defies them. He is fearless and cannot be intimidated; he is in
control of his own reactions and emotions. (Zimmer, 1969, 536)
C. J. Koch carefully develops the required ascetic characteristics in Mike Langford,
without which he could hardly be considered as being of the lineage of the Tirthankaras or
Bodhisattvas. At the same time, to write of Langford as such a holy man just would not be
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