Reporting from the Vietnam War for
The Sunday Times, Jon Swain made the world’s most dangerous boat
journey. Forty years on, he returns to the river. Published: Sunday Times, 8 February 2015, courtesy of Jon Swain.
How many times in the course of the past 40 years have I dreamt of
being back in Vietnam and Cambodia on the Mekong? Ever since I first saw
the mighty and mysterious river while cutting my teeth as a young war
reporter, the Mekong has been impossible to forget.
For me and my
colleagues, many of whom lost their lives covering the war that defined
the 1960s and 1970s, there were moments when its swiftly flowing waters
were menacing and dangerous, a place of raw terror, bullets, shrapnel,
the dead and wounded.
At other moments, though, most particularly
when the sun glittered over its waters at dusk and the fishermen pulled
in their nets, the Mekong was still a vision of serenity and calm.
Somehow, in my experience, wars nearly always seem to be fought in the
most enchanting of countries. Materialism and tourism have inevitably
changed Vietnam and Cambodia, but they’re still places of intoxicating
The Mekong begins its life tamely in the Tibetan Himalayas, then,
fed by melting snow and mountain streams, tumbles down through
steep-sided gorges in southwestern China, twists through the jungly
hills of Laos, descends through a series of rapids into Cambodia, then
flows at a more leisurely pace into southern Vietnam to meander
peacefully into the South China Sea.
It has enriched my life. But
over the years since the Vietnam War, the moment for travelling on it
never properly presented itself to me. Perhaps this postponement was
because, along with all the good times, the pain of memories of the war
endures. Maybe I instinctively kept the idea of returning at arm’s
length. No matter. Last month I found myself back in Saigon, the old
wartime capital of South Vietnam — I can’t quite bring myself to call it
Ho Chi Minh City — for a cruise up the Mekong, all the way to Phnom
The last time I made this journey was in 1974, when my boat
had to run a gauntlet of heavy communist fire as it ploughed upstream
towards the Cambodian capital. Phnom Penh was a city under siege. All
overland routes were cut. The airport was under rocket attack and the
city’s survival depended on convoys bringing ammunition, rice and fuel
up the river. Several boats had been sunk, and many men had lost their
lives on these runs.
I was on Bonanza Three, a rusty old
freighter built in Osaka in 1957, carrying a cargo of rice. The risks
were high. Before we weighed anchor, the skipper, a one-eyed,
battle-hardened Indonesian, showed me the 67 bullet and rocket holes in
its hull from previous Mekong runs, including fist-sized shrapnel holes
in the door and wall of the loo. Not a place to linger. The wheelhouse
was protected by a thick wall of sandbags. The radio officer had been
killed a few weeks before, blasted in his cabin by a rocket, his remains
scooped up in a plastic bag.
No such dangers awaited me on the
Aqua Mekong, the brand-new luxury riverboat that would be my home for
the next four days and nights. At My Tho, a delicate Cambodian woman
welcomed me on board with a chilled towel to freshen my face and a glass
of bubbly. It was a great start to a memorable journey.
shown to my giant cabin, whose sliding doors opened onto a private
balcony with a divan where I could relax and watch the river glide by.
I’d known I wouldn’t be slumming it, but this was a film-star level of
comfort that I never expected. In that respect, there was a huge
contrast between the Aqua Mekong and Bonanza Three. But there was a
common element: both possessed a magic quality that tied them to their
crew, and tied their crew to one another.
The food was gourmet,
the wine plentiful and excellent. The boat had a plunge pool, a fitness
centre, a cinema and a health spa. I quickly got into the spirit of
things with a soothing massage that put me in the mood for a cocktail.
The staff, half of them Cambodian, half of them Vietnamese, looked after
the 20 passengers on board with a cheerfulness that was so heartfelt
and genuine, it was infectious. My fellow passengers were mostly
much-travelled couples who, like me, had found the lure of Southeast
Asia’s greatest river impossible to resist.
What impressed me
most was the golden calm. We were constantly on the move through the
rice-rich provinces of the Mekong delta, its network of canals seething
with life. But on the boat, it felt as if time stood still. Before
falling asleep each night, I thought how privileged I was to be once
more on this river.
This was clearly a very different experience
to my wartime adventure. Despite all the problems that persist here,
peace has given Vietnam and Cambodia freedom at last, and aboard the
Aqua Mekong, I could see the countryside pass by with a fresh and
contented eye. It was good to think of Vietnam as a country, no longer
the name of a terrible war.
Here and there we stopped and made
excursions ashore: visiting a floating market brimming over with exotic
tropical fruit, listening to village elders poignantly describing their
wartime sufferings, riding on bicycles through emerald-green fields.
Beauty lay almost everywhere, and most of all in the faces of the
One day we explored the
former Vietcong stronghold at Tam Nong, transformed in peacetime into
Vietnam’s largest bird sanctuary. It spans nearly 20,000 acres and is
home to a full quarter of the country’s bird population. It is one of
the few places to see the sarus crane, at nearly 6ft the tallest flying
bird in the world, and increasingly rare.
To get a better view,
we climbed an observation platform high above the trees. Instinctively, I
gazed down on the great greenness of the countryside. “What do you
see?” someone shouted. “Vietcong in black pyjamas,” I joked. There was
no one, not even the thread of smoke from a village fire. Just great
flocks of tropical birds skimming over waterways and trees in perfect
harmony. You could hear their wings beating in the still heat.
and by, we crossed into Cambodia and soon were passing the first danger
point of my wartime trip, at Peam Chor, where the Mekong suddenly
curves and narrows to a 500yd channel, an ideal and frequent ambush
point. My eyes strained to see again the forlorn relics of sunken
ammunition barges. Like the Vietcong in the bird sanctuary, they had
vanished long ago.
This section of the Mekong was riddled with memories. We sailed
past the ferry town of Neak Leung, where, in a dawn raid in 1973, an
American B-52 had prematurely unleashed its 30-ton bomb load, turning
the main street into a flattened mess of rubble, killing and wounding
400 people. The tragic error is vividly told in the film The Killing
Fields. Now Neak Leung is a bustling town where a mighty bridge spans
It was dark when we passed the place where Bonanza
Three was ambushed. I deliberately stayed on deck to remember what it
was like: the awful din of battle swirling and eddying around as we took
cover in the wheelhouse, the burst of rockets on the hull, the relief
and exhilaration at being alive when it was all over and we were safely
moored in Phnom Penh. In the present, lost in thought, I went to my
cabin and fell asleep.
I awoke at dawn, refreshed, to a vision of
peace and beauty. The Aqua Mekong was stationary a few miles from the
hurly-burly of Phnom Penh. Kingfishers were darting over the waves and
fishermen were casting their nets, as they have done for centuries. The
war had destroyed almost everything it touched. But not the Mekong. It
was still everything a tropical river should be.