Highways To A War
(CHRISTOPHER J KOCH)
When legendary Australian war photographer Mike Langford
goes missing in Khmer Rouge Cambodia
in 1976, childhood friend Ray inherits his taped diaries. Using these, his own
memories, and the recollections and records of others, Ray attempts to
reconstruct Langford''s life, to understand how he became a myth and why he went
back into Cambodia.
Eventually this will lead Ray to Thailand, to the Cambodian border
and the truth about Langford''s fate.
Though different parts of Highways to a War are told from different
perspectives, the overall result is a coherent narrative and a portrait of a
life. It begins with Langford''s childhood on a Tasmanian farm, his novitiate in
Singapore, where he nearly
starves before finding work, and his early experiences in Vietnam, in Saigon
and in the Mekong Delta with the ARVN, the South Vietnamese army. The story
then jumps from Saigon in 1966 to Phnom
Penh in 1973. Among other dramatic episodes, Langford
is captured by North Vietnamese troops and witnesses the fall of Saigon. The story is tense and gripping, but the center
remains Langford''s development: he is a tough man, a survivor, but he is also
an idealist and, when he loses his objectivity and becomes involved with the
Free Khmer, his fate has a tragic inevitability to it.
Its unity comes from its focus on Langford, but Highways to a War
has plenty of other memorable characters. His fellow photographers and
correspondents are a fascinatingly idiosyncratic bunch. And Langford''s romantic
idealization of women makes them a key part of his life: in Australia, the daughter of a poor fruit-picking
family and then the wife of his mentor, in Saigon an older French-Vietnamese
woman, and in Phnom Penh
the Cambodian woman whose fate becomes tied up with Langford''s.
Highways to a War also offers a vivid perspective on the course of
the Second Indochina War. This, however, is implicit: Koch makes no attempt to
write a history of that war (and readers without any background knowledge may
find parts of Highways confusing), or to take sides in the debates
over that history, and it is through personal stories and personal tragedies
that he sheds light on the broader tragedies.
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