Playing war correspondent

Conflict: Journeys through War and Terror in Southeast Asia

By Nelson Rand

Published by Maverick House, 2009

Available from Maverick, Bt495

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

THE NATION

 Nelson Rand probably deserves credit for parlaying his travel adventures into a book when most people would be content to dole them out between a few beers in the bar, but his anecdotes are a cut above the usual booze banter and he is, after all, a "journalist".

 The Canadian had been living in Vietnam when he decided, for the hell of it, to track down some danger in Cambodia while the Khmer Rouge was still causing trouble. Then it was the ethnic warriors of Burma, and then the hapless Hmong of Laos, and finally the feuding parties of the troubled Thai South.

 In those locales he stalked thrills and the flashes of gun muzzles, strictly on a freelance basis. These constitute the "war and terror" of the book's subtitle.

 "I arrived in Cambodia about a week after Pol Pot's death on 15 April 1998, with the aim of travelling to Anlong Veng to launch my career as a journalist," he writes, plunging in chockfull of youthful bravado. A decade later he retells the tales, now flavoured with braggadocio.

 That Pol Pot was dead - having already been found and interviewed by Nate Thayer, an actual journalist who put a lot of hard work into the effort - serves to sum up Rand's book: Nothing much really happens at all because his timing's so poor.

 In Burma he witnesses a Karen militia raid with plenty of gunfire and some gore. A landmine or two goes off. The rest of the time, things are pretty peaceful, leaving Rand to give the reader the perspective of history, which he does fairly well. He's a decent writer.

 He qualifies as a journalist in the sense that he's willing to go to unpleasant places and talk to people about the conflicts that have befallen them. His credentials suffer, though, when neutrality goes out the window - not that it's easy staying neutral when you're writing about the Burmese junta.

 So, Karen National Liberation Army: good (he twice in quick succession refers to its soldiers by name and as "my friend") and Burmese troops: bad. Cambodian infantry: good; Khmer Rouge: bad. Hmong guerrillas: good; Lao People's Army: bad.

 Southern Thailand throws him off his stride, however. Embedded with government security forces, Rand is full of admiration for the rank-and-file soldiers doing their best, but he can also see the injustice of the Muslim citizenry's maltreatment, so he can't make up mind where his sympathies lie.

 In Yala's Ramen district, 40 women assemble to recite a litany of complaints for him, evidently hoping his reportage will swing fortune their way.

 In Cambodia, though, everything's clear-cut and, since that particular conflict is swiftly getting cold, Rand gets mercenary.

On his initial visit to "the front" around the Khmer Rouge holdout at Anlong Veng, he buys a photograph of Pol Pot for $5 from a government soldier - an interesting shot of the infamous despot cuddling a toddler.

 On his return to Bangkok he flogs the picture to Associated Press for $75 and revels in "the excitement of my first journalism sale". Then he's told he could have sold it for $10,000. Stung, he returns to Anlong Veng "to get more shit" to peddle, meaning more Khmer Rouge keepsakes - "as well as information".

 Watching a KNLA trooper butcher a dead Burmese soldier gets him thinking about quitting this awful business, but he gets over it at a five-star Bangkok hotel with his Karen girlfriend. Ultimately he's happy to leave Burma, yet the hawk in him has no regrets.

 "In battle, life becomes centred around the moment and everything else becomes meaningless ... I have never felt more alive than in battle, or never more at peace than in its aftermath."

 You'd think he'd stormed Juno Beach and saved Private Ryan. Instead, Rand spends pages complaining about the blister he got on his foot walking around the Burmese countryside, yearning every other paragraph for the cold beer waiting for him in Mae Sot.

 By the time Rand gets to Yala he's a wisecracking veteran with a John Wayne swagger, declining an AK47 to carry "not so much because of journalistic ethics, but more because I didn't want to carry the extra weight ... Besides, when under fire, I'm far more comfortable shooting a camera than a weapon."

 Nelson Rand really needs to read "Page After Page", photojournalist Tim Page's memoir about life on the real front lines of Southeast Asia.