Dear friends and colleagues
“I knew that a film could indeed portray everything that might happen outside oneself – while under no circumstances could it tell an individual what would happen inside him.”[1] Oliver Campbell, the photograph of whom we discussed in my last letter, is reflecting on what happened when after months of patrols though mountains and marshes in Malaya during the emergency, he and his platoon set an ambush opposite a path only a few miles from Kuala Lumpur and, after a week of waiting concealed, surprised and killed two known “Chinese terrorists.” A third Chinese terrorist dropped his gun and escaped in the darkness. Beside the two bodies half blown apart by their fusillade of machine gun fire, Campbell and his soldiers found sacks of root vegetables that they were carrying back to their jungle hideout.
“Yellow bastards, Yellow bloody Chinese bastards.”[2] One of his soldiers exclaims as the gunfire ceases.
To Campbell, a young man drafted as a second lieutenant under National Conscription, Malaya and Singapore were incredibly exotic. The “natives” still wore ethnic costume, even the Chinese women in Singapore still wore cheongsams or silk pyjamas. Earlier, from the hospital where he had been sent with glandular fever, Campbell watches a young Chinese woman in a car parked outside. “She was wearing the usual pyjamas, in dark purple-red with a crimson pattern, the trousers very loose, the jacket reaching almost to her knees, the sleeves to the elbow. Little red slippers with wooden clog soles, that grated on the gravel… Like most Chinese she seemed to have an instinctive knack with children… She had the unashamed animal attractiveness which Asian women all seem to have until they get too fat, or too old, or too tired.”[3]
He is a sympathetic viewer of all around him and yet when he writes all the prejudices of his time and class, racist and sexist, slip out.
The book is full of descriptions of all the things he saw – too many in fact. This is very much a first book, where the writer feels obliged to give the set piece descriptions an English teacher of the early fifties would have wanted – long and rather self-conscious purple passages. But what he is mainly interested in is his own reactions to the experiences that he is going through. Immediately after the ambush he admits:
“I was badly shaken. Those few cries from the grass had been like a bucket of cold water in my face. I was awake, gasping with shock. This was real. This was happening. We were shooting people. We were killing them. At first, I had been living from second to second, automatically, but now I was awake. We had worked for this for months. This was raw, savage success. It was butchery. It was horror.”[4]
Later on, he reflects:
“I remembered my ambush. My own reactions had not been at all what I expected. At the first burst of firing, my actual consciousness had changed – the actual sensations of living had been instantly different… My mind was quickening, moving faster and faster, its colour vanishing, its emotions gone, its form evolving from second to second into a living, steely, icy mechanism functioning with split-second precision.
“And as it did so I had felt something quite physical snap shut in my brain – I felt it quite consciously, quite clearly, knowing I felt it. It was as if the engineer in a vast control-room had thrown every possible emergency switch, all at once, and great banks of connections, great complexes of circuits and dials and batteries had all gone dead. Whole parts of me had vanished. Now I was thinking thoughts I had never thought before. And I was using a whole calculus of priorities which I had not known existed, and yet the moment it did exist I knew it by heart and there was nothing to learn – there was only the ice-cold imperative, the need to force these new mechanisms into action, faster and faster.
“When we went forward from the path, into the tall rustling grass, I was conscious not just of my mind, but of my mind in relation to what was around me. As we crossed the path into the grass I felt I had crossed a mental boundary as well. Now I was in the forbidden land. Every sanction, every moral scruple, every scrap of mental conditioning built into me during all my previous life had gone.”[5]
He writes about his awareness of being part of a group, the leader, and of how after that first step, “I would have killed and killed and killed, cold bloodedly, deliberately, with my eyes open, for as long as necessary – and without permitting myself or anyone else the smallest instant of hesitation. As I went forward, as I fired, I knew this. And it was knowing this that was most terrible of all.”[6]
He thinks back to his training in the Jungle Warfare School of how it both told him he would know nothing until he was in this “forbidden land” and, also, prepared him for it. Now, afterwards, he reflected, “To say the very least, I found it very sobering to have committed murder.”[7]
So, these, presumably are the sorts of thought going through his head in the photograph that we looked at. I can’t but remember that wail of the mother of Paul Meadlo, one of the US soldiers who confessed to killing women and children at My Lai: “I raised him to be a good boy. He fought for his country and look what they’ve done to him – made a murderer out of him.”[8] Whether Crawford could have gone on to kill someone other than an armed communist terrorist, who would have had no compunction in killing him, remains unknown. Soon after the ambush Campbell developed rheumatic fever and was sent back to the UK.
Speak again soon,
Tony