Llyn De Danaan
Llyn De Danaan is a writer and anthropologist who was also a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sarawak, British North Borneo, during 1962. She was a friend of Fritz Klattenhoff who was rescued from the hands of the TNKU during the assault on Limbang.

It might have been a paean to the glory of the commonwealth, a hymn to Apollo or Mars. The opening scenes of Return to Limbang—the gathering of old warriors, medals glinting under an autumn Manchester sun—seemed to set us up for that treatment. Then there were the shots of a plinth, inscribed with the names of those who fell in the 1962 assault on the Limbang police station, “evidence of British Colonial Rule,” the narrator tells us. But, more poignantly, surely, evidence of lives cut short. The opening sequences of the film invoke Rupert Brooke’s 1914 poem, The Soldier:

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.”

Brooke himself died, a handsome, promising young poet, during World War One.

But Martin Spirit, a skilled filmmaker, moves quickly from the obvious to tell a much more complex story, one that explores the depths of the human heart and the capacity of those who have the privilege of long life for forgiveness.

Spirit’s rendering of the story is not a little like Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey. What was it that brought these young men to that small village along a muddy river in Sarawak and led to the death of many more than were rescued? The Malays, members of the Tentera National Kalimantan Utara (TNKU), were driven to passion and sense of justice by the overheated political rhetoric of then Indonesian President Sukarno. The British Commandos were following a tradition of service and sense of duty in a far flung Crown Colony. A young American Peace Corps Volunteer was answering the idealistic challenge of his President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. All of them barely, if indeed, out of their teens, and maybe, just maybe, brought there to Limbang that day in an effort to make the lives that lay before them meaningful—to somehow transcend the dank industrial towns, or kampongs, or farmlands of their youth. Was it divine intervention that allowed some to live to tell their stories? Was it capricious fate that claimed too many of them?

This is more than a film about war. In fact, the project of making it was a catalyst for memory and reconciliation. Its viewing is a lesson about “men who have grown to forgive,” whose hearts “still bleed for dead friends” after forty years. The film is about the futilities and ironies of war.

Along the waterfront, two old soldiers meet. Salleh bin Sambas, the early 1960s leader of the TNKU unit that captured the Limbang police station and who, for a time, had held the lives of several British and American citizens in his hands, stands apprehensively, incredibly small and harmless in appearance, next to the tall British Marine next to him. He is a “gentle” man we are told. Greeting him is Marine Brian Downey, a gracious, clearly loving man who lost his best friend during the intense ten minute exchange of fire between the TNKU at the Limbang police station and the British who had come up river on the only water craft they could commission at short notice. Their job: to rescue the prisoners and reclaim the town. Downey tells Sambas about his lost friend, his pal who died as the guns blazed. Sambas blurts out, “sorry, sorry.” Downey replies “It was war. These things happen.” But then he seems really to see Sambas, the little, perhaps frightened, perhaps regretful, man before him. “Is he all right?” he wonders aloud to the translator. Downey reaches down and hugs Sambas who has seemed to shrink to an even smaller size before our eyes. Downey’s loss is overwhelmed by his concern for this old enemy, that he be “all right.”

Downey has the last word in the film. Facing the camera, after all that has gone before, he says, “They call us heroes. We’re not heroes.” Clearly moved by his own thoughts, his own recollections, maybe even bitterness at the folly of it all, he stands and moves out of view of the camera. He won’t make it easy for us to decide what to think about the return to Limbang and those ten minutes that ended some lives and changed others forever. Neither will Martin Spirit.