Highways to a War by Christopher J. Koch Page B

sorted through, if I were to do this properly. What I’d have to do first would be to organize all the material into categories: tapes, photographs, work diaries, notebooks, reports and the letters Marcus had given me. There was a small mountain of material: eventually I’d have to start reference cards. I was thinking of a text illustrated with his photographs: a memorial.
    The work would be extensive, but not difficult. His notebooks and papers were well organized and barely travel-stained—like the effects of a fastidious bachelor whose existence was completely stable; even dull. Yes: it was all in surprisingly good condition for the personal effects of a war photographer who moved constantly from country to country and battle zone to battle zone, his existence seen as utterly fluid, rootless and dangerous—especially by certain kinds of safe, wistful men who openly envied him, and who questioned me about him with a common expression of naked yearning on their faces: men who lived as Mike did only in their fantasies, and who wouldn’t have found his reality tolerable, even for a day.
    The work diaries interested me least, containing as they did a bare professional record of assignments covered, costs of film stock, and expenses claimed. But they all had one feature in common that did interest me. Each one of them had the same epigraph written in the flyleaf, in Langford’s small, careful hand:
    You have never lived
Until you almost died;
And for those who fight for them
Life and freedom have a flavor
The protected will never know.
    No author was given. Where did he hit upon it? When I’d first read it, I’d been touched and embarrassed, as though I’d uncovered something no one was meant to see; and I reflected that when a man of action revealed the secrets of his spirit, he was apt to seem jejune. There was something almost schoolboyish about his having faithfully entered that inscription into the work diary every year. But now, looking at it again, I no longer felt so patronizing. This was the creed he’d lived by, and had probably died for. He’d earned the right to inscribe it in his work diaries —even though it did make me see him as incurably young. At thirty and at forty he’d been the same young man, hitting himself each day with the elixir of risk, and writing into the book of each new year the same magic rune that made it all worthwhile. Well, why not? He’d probably lived more intensely in any two weeks than I’d done in a lifetime.
    The notebooks had at first appeared to be personal journals, but had proved on examination not to be. Each of them carried the title “Contact Notes,” and these contact notebooks dealt entirely with other people—mostly political, military and business leaders in Indochina. They took the form of running diaries, detailing Langford’s meetings with the subjects of the entries. Until I’d listened to the tapes, it had been hard for me to see why a war photographer would want background material of such detail, or would record these meetings so meticulously.
    It had taken many evenings to carry out this audition of what I’ll call his audio diary. He had each cassette neatly labeled, and they dated from February 1965 to the week preceding the fall of Saigon—just over a year ago.
    It was clear that in many of these recorded diary entries he had in mind his projected memoirs. There was a good deal of analysis of the progress of the Vietnam War, records of his experiences of battle, and impressions of military and political leaders. Such passages recorded a life lived on the plane of momentous public events; life as history. He certainly documented it well. And I’d begun to suspect that he’d seen himself as living inside his own preplotted story from the time he’d first arrived in Singapore. But many other passages were highly personal. These, as he’d indicated in his taped letter, were pretty clearly records made only for himself. Electrical recording