The Noble Path

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There is a seventeenth-century proverb which says, ‘When war begins hell opens.’ In this once lovely country in the heart of Indochina, hell opened when the war ended.

This, then, was liberation. Sullen youths in black pyjamas and red-chequered scarves cradling AK-47s with all the warmth they could not feel for their fellow human beings. It wasn’t hate in their eyes. It was hell.

A breeze brushed the faces. The thousands of faces all along Monivong Boulevard. It carried the smell of smoke, a city burning in places.

It carried the smell of fear. They said the Americans were coming to bomb the city; it would be safer in the countryside. No one believed it.

It carried the smell of death. They had emptied the hospitals. Broken bodies wheeled out on hospital beds, the tubes and wires of a discarded technology trailing behind, plasma and blood in their wake. Those who could walk leaned on crutches. Those who could not, died. The debris of this once elegant colonial city littered the street; a child screaming, an old man coughing blood on the pavement, the weary shuffling of a million pairs of feet on a dusty road to oblivion.

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