Buying the Night Flight (43 page)

Indeed, to carry it to another plane, it is typified in the words of my dear friend, Ernie Weatherall, a fine foreign correspondent, who was confronted by some little snake in the grass who insisted that, because of my work, I was probably "not good in bed."

Ernie rose to the occasion as the man he is and defended me soundly. "She is too good in bed," he said. Then later he asked me in bewilderment, "Before, I was supposed to say you were a virgin. Where are we?"

But if my generation -- my often-tormented generation -- was anything, we were also rather special. For we were the women in between, haunted by the old devils, by the "evil" of sexuality within ourselves, lured by men and determined not to betray our intellects. So it was that we saw more, knew more, felt more, suffered more, had greater joys and greater tribulations and darker disappointments. We had old morality and new female ethics.

But my generation had also an obstinate pride in being "new women." A dear friend became pregnant by a European in a love affair. She knew that if she told him she was pregnant, he would marry her. But she could not. Unlike the women who came before us, we were too proud and too honorable to trick men or, more, to trick ourselves by using our bodies in this time-hallowed manner. We were the women who, in our very selves, as though we were the laboratory of our times, represented the great drama of the changes in women's lives. We were trying to raise ourselves above the "realm of necessity" of children and caring for home and hearth and onto the "realm of freedom," in which the independent will and intellect and soul could operate. It was very, very difficult, and what it took out of us -- and of me -- is more than I can measure. But at least we were no longer women dominated totally by the rolls of the dice. We suffered the pains and the glories, but our heroism is that no other generation will know it exactly the way we did.

Why, then, did I never marry? You see, all the first part of my life I fooled myself. I pretended, oh, with great ability and agility -- over and over that, yes, I certainly did want to get married. I usually put it in the future tense, which should have been a clue. And then I wanted, yes, to have children, so long as they looked just like me and wanted to be foreign correspondents. I usually put that in the future tense, too, which should have been another clue. And then ... each time I went through agonies until the situation was finally resolved with my going "free" and taking off for points East of Suez.

In part, to be fair to myself, it was because of the inequalities of the basic independent/dependent setup between men and women. This is certainly no fantasy and this exists full-blown and not really very much changed, to this very day. I saw every love relationship in terms of my being totally absorbed and even destroyed by the relationship. I would cease to exist; it was really that simple. And what had been utterly crucial to me in the entirety and scope of my life -- the exercise of sovereignty and spirit -- would be exactly what I could never again enjoy. I had seen no women, tied, who did; and I still see very few. But there were always a lot of men in my life, and I related to them on many levels. I could never treat men one-dimensionally, any more than I expected or wanted them to treat me in that way. My deep relationships had to be primarily emotional: passionately so. Confounding all my mother's generation's warnings, I have more interesting and loving men in my life now than when I was twenty-three -- the cutoff age after which they solemnly assured me no man would ever again want me! And, living your own life as a woman and not the life others set out and contoured for you, you find you have men who are sometimes lover-colleague, or colleague-mentor, or lover-student, or, well, many things that were not "supposed to happen." But one thing was absolutely crucial for me: I had to care about them deeply, on many levels. No relationships were superficial or exploitative.

I was also trying to figure out how to live on other levels, and the enormous tragedies and setbacks in the world sometimes drove me to despair. Once when I was confused about where we were going and how ideologically to stand, my old friend, Father Roger Vekemans, the Jesuit priest from Chile, wrote to me. "Ethically, I confess not even to see the problem. No fight against the Right has driven me to the Left and no fight against the Left will drive me to the Right. Once and for all I have chosen the extreme center and whatever storm is coming, I shall stand fast at any price. It is not a matter of balance; it's a matter of conviction. The battle against both extremes at the same time may be hopeless. I am aware that the center is not holding. Still I will keep on fighting. I am responsible for my fight, not for the outcome!" That is exactly the way I felt -- "I am responsible for
my
fight .... "

***

Vietnam was the one area I never felt I mastered -- but, then, nobody else really did. But I did uncover some interesting changes and trends. I did a series on the U.S. army called "The GI Who Wants to Know Why," which really came far before others understood the changes in the U.S. soldier, who was becoming a far more autonomous individual. And occasionally I would take short trips around Asia. My very favorite place was Phnom Penh, when Cambodia was still beautiful, that graceful city of water festivals and French culture. Indeed, at the end of 1967, I was able to get in at a time when Prince Sihanouk had thrown all the Western correspondents out. Being new and unknown in Southeast Asia, I was not on his "list."

I started making the rounds: everyone from Wilfred Burchett, an Australian communist journalist who could get you into Hanoi if he wanted, to our embassy, to Charles Meyer, a French economist who had been very close to Sihanouk.

I met Meyer (pronounced Mey-
YEAH
) in his graceful old French mansion in Phnom Penh and we chatted for a long time about the economy. Then I asked him how I could get to the Prince.

His eyes opened theatrically wide. "But, mademoiselle," he said, "you know he will not see any American journalists. If he sees you, he will surely throw you out."

"I know," I said calmly. It was an enticing idea.

What I did not know at the time was the fact that Meyer was on the outs with Sihanouk. Meyer was a Maoist, and Sihanouk was, despite our shabby American intelligence, violently anti-Communist. Meyer wanted to get even with the Prince by playing a small joke on him and if the joke was me, well, so be it!

"He is up at Angkor Wat," Meyer told me dryly, "making another movie." I knew already that the Prince, with his beautiful wife, Princess Monica, made his own movies. Being a confident man, Sihanouk starred in them, directed them, produced them, and wrote the music for them. "He likes very much American tourists, and if you go up and tell him you are an American tourist, he will surely see you." When I left him, Meyer had the touch of an amused smile on his lips.

That night at the Hotel Royale, now a hotel of ghosts but then one of the most luxuriantly lovely hotels in Asia, I met (I think by accident) a fascinating man, Kurt Fuerrer, now known throughout Asia and a man whose sagacity is respected by spy author Le Carré. Kurt, a husky, utterly charming man, was a Swiss ship's captain, as unlikely as that may seem. To this day I do not know exactly what Kurt was doing, but he knew more about Cambodia than practically anyone I knew. Over dinner, when I told him I was going up to Angkor to pique the Prince, he asked if he might go with me. I immediately said yes.

The next morning Kurt and I took off for Angkor Wat and its gorgeous Khmer ruins and checked into one of those lovely motels that Sihanouk had built in the jungles. Soon we were riding through a sun-stroked jungle in one of those open carts that used to grace this land. We ran into some of the Prince's soldiers near a river where His Highness was bathing, and Kurt helped immensely by talking to them in French. Yes, Sihanouk would see us the next morning at nine o'clock. I was delighted.

Knowing what has happened to Cambodia today, I find it odd to think back on those days. Kurt and I sat that evening in the exquisite bar and restaurant of the motel, talking, laughing, lingering into the most mellow of evenings. The lost Cambodia of another age.

And, indeed, the next morning, we were duly ushered into the Prince's royal presence. I will never forget the scene. Sihanouk, a medium-sized, pudgy man with large, quizzical eyes, was standing as regally as a short pudgy man could stand in front of the great, whispering trees of the enchanted forest of Angkor Wat. He was the grace of Southeast Asia incarnate. And as we talked for twenty-five minutes, he revealed to me many things he had never said before. He admitted to me, for instance, that there were indeed thirty-five thousand Viet Cong troops in Cambodia but that Cambodia was a small country with a small army and "What am I to do?"

But back in Saigon it was never forgiven that Sihanouk did not try to expel the Viet Cong. And when we did try, we brought on the horrible Khmer Rouge communist regime that wreaked the terrors of the grave upon that quiet, that perfect land. These were the sins of Keyes's generation.

Kurt and I drove back to Phnom Penh by car, observing the beautiful, quiet, incredibly prosperous Cambodian countryside. Once the terror started I was always to think of that perfect land and how unnecessary "revolution" was there. But Sihanouk always knew it would come. When I left Cambodia that time I thought he would never permit me to return, since I had lied to him. On the contrary. He liked the article so much that within two weeks he sent me a cable. "Permit me to congratulate you for your objectivity and to compliment you for your talent. With my respectful sentiments, Norodom Sihanouk, chief of state, Cambodia." I always felt he had known who I was.

But Sihanouk knew very well what was coming to his doomed land. Once, when a group of us met him later during a festival in the north at Battambang, he was showing us through the kind of motel he had learned to love and emulate in the States and he suddenly put his champagne glass down and said without emotion, "But soon we all will die."

Another time on that trip Sihanouk was reviewing a cadre of blue-uniformed young people from a factory. He was sitting -- we of the press corps behind him -- on a palatial stand, with Oriental carpets under him and a fluted tent of many colors over him. With his special, wry, bemused charm, every once in a while he would turn around and say something humorous to us.

At one point he gave some command in Khmer ostentatiously to the young workers and they immediately broke out into a joyous dance.

Sihanouk turned around and said to me with a wink, "I told them to dance."

How could this joyful, happy, rich kingdom go down into the savagery of the Khmer Rouge? How could this kindly people be brought down by a brutal regime that killed four million of its seven million people, mostly with axes? It is a question I have pondered many times in my darkest moments; it is a question that still has only a few answers.

Certainly the refusal of the U.S. to support Sihanouk -- indeed, our officials in Saigon were always trying to think up ways to bring him down because he was so independent -- contributed to the unspeakable tragedy. Certainly the mixture of French Marxist training and Khmer tradition was lethal to the minds of the Khmer Rouge: something, interestingly enough, that Sihanouk foresaw when he (too late) stopped Cambodian students from going to Paris. And, certainly, we had underestimated the sheer cruelty within the Khmer history and tradition. We had not yet learned how a new heretical movement, like the Khmer Rouge and others, takes on these particularly bestial qualities.

What we saw with them are elements we should watch elsewhere. Among the warning signals were the fact that after the Khmer Rouge took over, they did not use names. Anonymity in revolutionary movements is always extremely dangerous, for it designates a special madness and unwillingness to take responsibility for your deeds. These were movements, which wanted to obliterate the past, to destroy identities, to build new classes,
to destroy
culture. We must, in the world now and in the world to come, watch for their deadly signs, because they are everywhere.

The world moved on. My involvement with Keyes moved on. I began to write books,
The New Latins
,
The New 100 Years War
,
The Young Russians
, but I did them like I had done everything: by myself, with no one to advise me or tell me how to write a book.

There were not only no role models for women, there was precious little advice from anybody. Perhaps it gave us a freshness. We were cracking the world anew with each step. I also began to speak publicly, and it took a long, long time before I could do it without the most abject terror. People perhaps find odd or even unbelievable this contradiction: courage overseas, persistence in interviewing world leaders for instance, and shyness approaching breakdown at home. Certainly I found some special freedom, as a woman and as a human being, in cultures other than my own beloved one.

And as I was changing and developing, so was the world of journalism changing and developing. In Vietnam particularly, we journalists stopped being simply the conveyors of the announcements from the institutions of society that we had been in my early days working in Chicago -- and we became what I have called the "arbiters of truth." So many official Americans lied that it was left to us to decide what was true and what was not. We became moralists -- and many of us mistook our relative judgment for absolute moralism. "New Journalism" reporters began to judge and criticize, to take it upon themselves to reform, if not the world, at least their own evil country. These same saw goodness everywhere, except in the United States.