by Barry Heard
‘He’s onto it, mate. It appears those that kidnapped him are all over his phone, computer, and other personal stuff. He didn’t say much, but two things were very obvious. He said nothing to acknowledge his whereabouts or the details of what happened, and gave me a word that we haven’t used in years. Fraggles. Thinking like the way we did all those years ago in Vietnam. Yes, he finished by saying, Is Fraggles okay, Basil?’
‘My God, he’s in big trouble. What does he plan to do?’
‘He’ll send us his new phone number tomorrow, to this phone, via Fraggles.’
Basil held up his own mobile. Harry nodded.
‘That’s smart. Typical of Wally, canny bastard.’
The number of the golf club had been in Wally’s phone, so it was in Hanif’s database. Admittedly, access to call records for a landline in Australia would be hard; tracing back across an international connection would be even harder. More immediate was the response to calls from Indonesia to Tom’s and Mandy’s mobile phones. Mobile-phone records were easy. Hanif and his crew had a lead — to the Maple Hotel and Guest House, ten minutes from Wally.
Chapter 22
The sad story of Chris and Fraggles
From the day they met him to the day of their last regular get-together before Wally went overseas, Wally, Basil, and the other ex-army radio operators loved stirring Chris, their mate Chris Breen. Stretching over fifty years, this constant bagging of Chris began in Puckapunyal, Victoria, 1966.
They all stood together on that first daunting day at the beginning of their time in the army, conscripts into the National Service facing recruit training at this countryside army base. Yet Chris stood out. He wasn’t a sportsman, an academic, or much to look at. Like Wally and Basil, he came from farming land in a remote part of the state. Unlike them, he wasn’t off a farm himself.
Chis had been a log-truck driver for just under two years, very young for that occupation. He lived in a town called Swifts Creek, and, on leaving school at fifteen, he’d started working for the local sawmill as a timber stacker. His dad, Charlie, owned and drove the log truck, but his eyesight got so poor he couldn’t even see the traffic coming the other way. Charlie had to retire early, and young Chris — there were no P-plates back then — took over. Daily, Chris drove up the long, winding gravel road to Mount Nugong, a steep, steady climb taking nearly three hours to reach the vast logging area. There, local timber cutters loaded Chris’s log truck by forcing the logs off a roadside bank and onto the trailer with a bulldozer. The truck took a maximum of five regular logs, but some of the logs were huge, cut from mountain ashes over fifty metres tall. Once the truck was loaded up with however many logs they could fit on, Chris made the return journey. A forty-four-gallon drum of water sat over the truck’s rear wheels, to slowly drip-cool the brakes, which would otherwise overheat on the way down. Three hours became four: the truck crawled along the mountain road in first gear, its brakes squealing, steaming, and jerking from the punishment. When he reached the flat country along the Tambo River, Chris would stop for a pee and a stretch before making the twenty-minute drive to the sawmill. He did two trips a day, starting at 5.00 a.m.
It was a solitary job. He didn’t turn the radio on, nothing, just enjoyed the beautiful landscape — the same every day. Occasionally, Chris had a visiting passenger, usually someone keen to venture into this magnificent mountainous region. For Chris, a passenger was someone to yarn with, but most days it was just Chris — oh, and Fraggles. Yes, the dog Fraggles, his best friend. His permanent companion. People always waved at Fraggles and Chris, Fraggles sitting on Chris’s lap as he drove.
The two adored each other, and there were reasons. Dogs, when travelling in a truck, Land Rover, or ute cabin have one bad habit — they continually fart. Many a dog has been cursed and asked to leave, ‘get in the back’, thanks to a smell that at times could be likened to mustard gas. Not Fraggles; he was smart. Come time for a fart, Fraggles would gently rise, step over to the passenger’s side (the windows were always open unless it was snowing), point his backside outside, raise his tail to the vertical, and, there, let out a long, vibrating fart. So considerate.
But there was one habit even more impressive in a cabin dog. As the log truck moved down the twisting mountain road at walking pace, there were times when Fraggles needed a crap — badly. As you might expect, Fraggles had this personal matter under complete control. From Chris’s lap, under the huge steering wheel, Fraggles would rise and elegantly jump out the driver’s side window. After landing on all fours, always, he would trot some several hundred metres ahead of the truck, stop, spin in three circles, and then plop out the neatest turd. After wriggling his backside to his satisfaction, Fraggles would trot even further down the road and sit on the bank. Chris, having witnessed the entire event from some distance, would react as he approached by opening the driver’s door, leaning back against his seat, and waiting for Fraggles to make his graceful leap back into the cabin.
Was it any wonder that all those Vets — now old men, that era decades behind them — remembered the name ‘Fraggles’? Wally, when talking to Basil at the golf club, could not have offered up a more powerful word.
Yet in the 1960s, Chris was still waiting in line at Puckapunyal, recruit training and Vietnam ahead of him. Back then it was accepted that most Australian twenty-year-old men, including those who were called up, were ‘savvy’ when it came to girls, condoms, dirty yarns, blue movies, and Playboy — a popular magazine that offered young men the chance to stare wide-eyed at numerous stunningly beautiful naked young women. However, there was an entrenched division separating the youth of that era.
On one side of this imaginary line:
The music lovers, who worshipped the cool, guitar-twanging Bob Dylan or John Lennon-type music, which usually contained some hidden message about peace, love, or revolution. Long hair, bare feet, long loose clothes. Smoking dope. Sex for everyone — share it around; just enjoy, brother. Camps, festivals, communes. Dancing passionately in styles not remotely related to ballroom dancing. Women who bared their breasts to the music. Packed rallies on city streets with chants in unison demanding that the world needed to change.
On the other side of the line:
The remainder. Not so passionate about the world’s future, ‘let’s come together’, or groupies. This lot were more down to earth, even primal. Yes, they barracked with a passion for well-known footy or rugby teams, dedicated themselves to one type of beer, one make of car — either Ford or Holden — and one brand of cigarette.
Life for these two diverse young groups of adults was complicated, serious, exciting, and so different to life for their parents.
However, like a rare species living on a remote island, the odd twenty-year-old didn’t fit in on either side of the line. Not among the groupies or the revheads. These uncommon types were from a different cultural era — one that celebrated 1940s band music, formal dancing, good manners, ties, sports coats, polished shoes or riding boots, and Blue Hills on ABC radio. Chris Breen was an example. His 1960s savvy amounted to little compared to that of the masses. He was the ‘gentleman’ who smoked, played footy, and didn’t swear (apart from ‘bloody’ and ‘bastard’, which didn’t count). He had partnered his sister at the deb ball in a black suit and had a girlfriend — their two-year relationship had advanced to holding hands in public. On most dates, they went to the drive-in theatre or dances, with Fraggles the dog in the back seat of Chris’s car (his girlfriend approved).
Wherever he went, Chris stood out. He stood out like an American president wearing a blond wig and a Superman costume — starring on a TV show. When he first entered the army, just after his twenty-first birthday, he was disgusted at the level of swearing, the endless discussions about sex, the boozing, and the obsession with fast cars and sport that he found in his fellow conscripts. From the very beginning of recruit training, everyone knew or had heard stories of Chris Breen, the
bushy bloke from the High Country. Chris became the fall guy of countless jokes, pranks, and embarrassing set-ups. The platoon corporals, sergeant, and other trainers were continually amused by his naivety. Chris’s response to all of the above: he would simply shrug his shoulders.
The new recruits’ first army accommodations were sixteen-man huts. In Chris’s hut, most found him boring and childish, and they somehow tolerated his unending supply of dull yarns about life in the High Country. Chris loved to yarn; it was how he’d grown up. There’d been no TV for him, just a little radio and a lot of social get-togethers. Mixing and respect went hand in hand. He regaled his fellow recruits with talk about the bush, locals back home, tough times, and certain characters. Most of all, he talked about Fraggles, his dog, ‘my finest friend, Fraggles’. There were too many stories. No one would forget how Chris boasted nonstop about the dog and its manners. Some of the tales were funny, others were amazing, but the overall effect was so dreary.
Their training over, all from that hut were sent to Vietnam.
Chris no longer stood apart. Training, a foreign country, and war brought him into the fold. Made them all close mates. They were radio operators, and Chris was part of the team, highly respected for his fantastic memory. Recruit training had changed his habits — quite a bit, as he now drank, enjoyed blue movies, visited strip joints, and so on.
However, after only a month in that war zone, things were beginning to change. Slowly, Wally and his mates became tired, exhausted soldiers, always keen to get back to that safe area, Base Camp. There, they’d quickly check for mail, and then grabbing a beer became the highest priority. The original endless banter of their time in Puckapunyal, about sex and footy and everything either side of the cultural line — gone.
Now, in Vietnam, their social time became precious. Sitting, having a beer, and yarning was the new culture. Chris, he enjoyed the change; it was his old way of life, and soon his mates were encouraging him to tell his yarns about the bush, share a bit of local gossip, and read aloud the frequent letters he received from back home. He did all of this, and his mates relished it.
It was 1967, and they were A Company, 7RAR.
One day, this group of young men sat in Wally’s tent discussing a tragic incident that had occurred in the jungle. It involved a mate and a tracker dog. Such awkward discussions never included much detail, mostly compliments about the lost soldier and questions about who would replace him — poor bastard, and his dog. Yet tragic as the incident had been, Chris appeared unusually gloomy and dejected, prompting one of his mates in the tent to ask him, ‘Are you okay?’
That question touched a raw nerve in Chris, a sad memory from long ago. To answer his mates’ concern, the embarrassed Chris felt compelled, for the first time, to tell the story he had never told, the last story about his own dog, Fraggles. The tragic death of his finest friend, Fraggles. It had happened the year prior to Chris getting conscripted.
A heartfelt story, it had every bloke wiping his eyes, pretending they itched. In fact, tears were the truth.
Chris quietly explained how his dear companion Fraggles was killed accidently when he’d jumped out the window to chase a wombat as the log truck crawled down that steep mountain road. Fraggles loved leaping out, not only to shit, but to scoot after a fox, wombat, lyrebird, kangaroo, or any other bush creature. Often this saw Fraggles dash over the rim of the road, into the bush, barking and threatening to attack. Sometimes, Chris wouldn’t see Fraggles for ages, and then, out of nowhere — there was his Fraggles, sitting on the side of the road, panting. Chris would lean back and open the driver’s side door, and the grinning Fraggles jumped in.
Until that day. Fraggles, madly tearing into the bush … didn’t return. It took a while for Chris to become curious, wary, and finally concerned. Over an hour of no Fraggles. Chris stopped at the bottom of the steep, winding road. He listened to the Tambo River and waited and waited … then he drove to the mill. Nearly two hours later, on his return trip …
He found his precious Fraggles … a squashed-up mess on the side of the road. Worse, Chris believed he had run over his own dog. So many times in the past, he had glanced at the mirror as movement caught his eye, only to see Fraggles, behind or close to the log truck — pursuing his prey.
But this one time, Fraggles had misjudged his movement and run under the trailer. Goodbye, Fraggles.
Chris had picked up his beautiful mate’s crushed body and sat it on his lap in the cab. He drove to the top of Mount Nugong, loaded up, said nothing, then drove all the way back to Swifts Creek. People waved as they always did — not noticing Chris’s tears, not knowing that Fraggles, curled up on Chris’s lap, was dead.
Late that night, Chris went down to the Tambo River near the town of Swifts Creek and buried his mate with a ceremony fit for a king. He wrapped Fraggles in a white sheet and placed him in a small grave, a lush bone over his body for later. Then he covered his friend with a beautiful quilt made by his mum.
‘Goodbye, my precious friend Fraggles.’
Years later, another night, that night in the tent at Base Camp, after listening to Fraggles’ story, these young men stared at the floor, said little, patted each other’s shoulders, and wanted … home, peace, a stop to this madness.
They went back to their own tents and packed for a return to the jungle the next day.
Helicopters, leaving the airstrip, nose to tail, so close. Flying over treetops, so close. The briefest of exits, soldiers, heavy packs, some with a short antenna protruding, the men bent half-running into the jungle and heading for the designated ambush position. Later that same day, thumbs down, a short, sharp contact, return fire, calls over a radio to stand by as artillery or jets might be required. Then it happened. It was only their fourth venture into the jungle. None of the radio operators in Wally’s network were ready for this new problem. Their radios jammed — every operator. Communication impossible apart from the briefest of moments — maybe five to fifteen seconds. Not enough time to communicate a message — even as short as ten words when the operator included a callsign and the ‘over’ or ‘out’ acknowledgement. A dire situation never experienced before, all soldiers in danger — so vulnerable.
Thank God, they got out. A quick clamber into the choppers and returning to Base Camp safely. All thanks to the lucky chance of running into an SAS team, who called in the choppers on their network.
At Base Camp, urgent meetings were called at the highest level. Only Wally attended, as he was his company’s senior operator. Quickly, they got down to business. How do we stop this deadly intervention should it continue? They could change frequency, of course, but first they’d need to let the others know the new frequency, and exactly when they’d be switching to it. How could they communicate all that in just a few seconds while keeping the information secure? Talk soon centred on the idea of using top-secret phrases, possibly even single words, that would alert the receiver to danger and tell him to use a specific code to decipher the sender’s next message. New codes, created by the operators themselves, each identified by its own unique word or phrase. The operators would carry these codes in their heads, not in little books wrapped in plastic bags and stuffed in their trouser pockets. Every group of operators had to come up with their own codes, and the alerts they’d use to refer to them. Thumbs up, a good idea, but bloody difficult.
Back in Wally’s tent at Base Camp, this new idea of communicating via catchwords was initially met with confusion. Typically, though, these smart young men came up with a clever system in no time. To communicate numbers — new radio frequencies, grid references on a map, or the like — they hit upon using a code word that stood for a ten-letter word or phrase that would act as a cipher. No one could break such a code, not in a hurry, anyway. Perhaps over a period of weeks, yes, but they’d use each code only once, as a precaution, and they’d always have a minimum of three spare codes. Basil, Wally, Harry, Chris, and th
e others had lots of ideas, and soon had a list of code words to choose from — words that meant something to all of them, words they’d recognise and understand instantly. It wasn’t at all surprising when the word ‘Fraggles’ became the first-ever secret code word for the radio operators of A Company, 7RAR, the Pigs …
None of those young radio operators would ever forget the story of the dog Fraggles.
But how did the system work? What did the word ‘Fraggles’ tell the listener?
Put simply, when the word ‘Fraggles’ came over the network, it indicated danger and instructed the operators to await a series of numbers, a new frequency, to be sent in code in the following ten seconds. To explain:
The word ‘Fraggles’ told the receiver to use the sentence ‘walk the dog’.
‘walk the dog’ contains ten letters, all different — perfect for sending numbers. In fact, the letters are actually used as numbers:
w
a
l
k
t
h
e
d
o
g
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
Of course, you weren’t limited to this simple mapping. But how would you determine which letter represented which number? That required a hint from the radio operator. For example, he might say, ‘Fraggles don’t jump, out.’