River of Time- Jon Swain (1996)

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Jon Swain first set eyes on Indochina in 1970, arriving in Phnom Penh as a reporter for Agence France-Presse. It was the beginning of a love affair with the old French colonies of Southeast Asia that clung to Swain ever after, although he only spent a brief five years in the region where he later worked as a freelance reporter. It was not just the exotic location that stole Swain’s heart, but the heady climate created by a region at war; this was a beautiful, tragic world on the brink of collapse with Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos about to fall separately to communist control in 1975. To Swain and his correspondent contemporaries, the combination of exoticism, lust, death and war that came together in Indochina at this time was something to capture the soul. On his first evening in Phnom Penh, Swain, then an exuberant twenty year-old, was offered a premonition by veteran Asian hand Bernard Ullman: ‘Indochina is like a beautiful woman; she overwhelms you and you never quite understand why. Sometimes a man can lose his heart to a place, one that lures him back again and again’.

These words were to stay with Swain as he found himself enraptured by the jasmine-scented streets of sultry Phnom Penh in the midst of a time and place that was about to be lost forever. River of Time, his memoir of his five years in Indochina, holds a cautious, tender nostalgia. The book is named after the Mekong River that weaves through Indochina, bearing witness to the atrocities endured by three countries with a shared history. The dead bodies that Swain saw floating on its water were one testament to this. But just as the river continues to eternally flow from its source in the Tibetan mountains to its end in the South China Sea,  the Indochina that Swain lived and loved was a fleeting moment of history, as doomed as his love affair with his French-Vietnamese girlfriend Jacqueline, whom Swain abandoned in the days before the fall of Saigon. It was on the banks of the Mekong that Swain nearly met his death, captured by Khmer Rouge boy soldiers during the fall of Phnom Penh, held hostage with a pistol to his head. “There did not seem to be any reason why he would not pull the trigger.” Swain remembered. “Today, I still have the uneasy feeling that perhaps I should not be alive”. His survival can be credited to the late Dith Pran, Cambodian photojournalist and partner to New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg. The remarkable story of Dith and Schanberg is documented in the 1984 film, The Killing Fields.

Swain had made the daring and critical decision in April 1975 to leave Vietnam, where he had lived for four years, to return to Cambodia on the last commercial flight into the country as all other foreigners fled. As one of only twenty-two journalists sheltering in the sovereign territory of the French embassy, Swain received the prestigious British Press Awards Journalist of the Year title for his reporting of the fall of Phnom Penh, but it was a move that shattered his relationship with Jacqueline, his greatest love, and which nearly cost him his life.

Swain’s childhood experiences may go some way to explaining the adventurous, restless spirit of his character that fuelled his passion for war-torn Indochina and that led him to gravely dangerous situations more than once throughout his journalistic career. Born in England, he was raised until the age of six in colonial India; as a teenager he joined the French foreign legion. As described in a chapter of this book, Swain was kidnapped for three months by rebel soldiers in Ethiopia, and, three years after the publication of River of Time, narrowly escaped death at the hands of a militia gang in East Timor.

Swain’s descriptions of the haunting beauty of Phnom Penh and Saigon in the early nineteen-seventies are wonderfully touching without being overly sentimental. Nonetheless, there is a harrowing contradiction between the magical beauty of the lands of the Mekong and the enormous human suffering engulfing them at that time. Swain has no illusions about his role in this scene; as a self-confessed ‘witness’ to the tragedy of others, he is able to frequently escape the danger that is all too real to those around him because of the colour of his skin. He writes with real compassion for the suffering for Cambodian and Vietnamese civilians; however this juxtaposes with his romanticised notions of French colonialism and conviction that the American intervention in Indochina was done ‘for the best of reasons’.

For me, Swain is successful in relating his personal experiences alongside the tragic stories he heard first-hand from those who had endured Indochina’s greatest sufferings- the ARVN soldiers; the boat people who fled Vietnam after 1975; the survivors of Cambodia’s killing fields. Some accounts were so heart-wrenching I had to put the book down for a moment. Without pretension Swain describes the Indochina he saw through his eyes at this time, one in which he often got as close as possible to danger but without ever knowing the depths of suffering endured by its populace. First and foremost this is a personal memoir, a remembrance of a time that still holds the author’s heart. Certainly it is possible, particularly at the beginning of the book, to feel repulsed by the author’s unashamed enthusiasm for the lifestyle that Phnom Penh and Saigon allowed foreign correspondents in the midst of war- a lifestyle defined by smoking opium and enjoying the company of local prostitutes. Nonetheless, Swain is undoubtedly a courageous and commendable journalist who risked his life innumerable times to report on the events unfolding around him. Above all else he writes beautifully and lucidly, capturing with tenderness the essence of war-torn Indochina that drew in a generation of correspondents like him. At the same time, he offers a chilling report on the terrible destruction condemned onto the region he loves by decades of war.