[Beware of the Past 01] • Highways to a War

"Pick any highway, I was told: all of them go to the war. I thought it was a joke, at first."

Ray Barton travels to war-ravaged Southeast Asia to search for his missing friend Michael Langford, a brilliant, risk-taking combat photographer who has stolen into Khmer Rouge Cambodia on a mysterious mission and disappeared. The search illuminates Langford's heroism, his fierce loyalties, and the personal highways he has traveled to war. Langford's empathy for the brave but poorly commanded Cambodian troops and his love for a young Cambodian woman have led him in the end to put down the camera and take up the gun in a foreign struggle he has made his own.

Koch richly evokes Indochina--from the deceptively tranquil rice paddies of South Vietnam to the corrupt, doomed pink-and-white city of Phnom Penh. "Highways to a War" is a story of intense relationships forged in a dangerous and hallucinatory land continues to haunt the American soul.