This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
First published by Allen & Unwin in 2016
Copyright © David Metzenthen 2016
The moral right of David Metzenthen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the United Kingdom’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
This novel, although drawing on certain factual events, is a work of fiction.
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ISBN (AUS) 9781760112257
ISBN (UK) 9781743368749
eISBN 9781952533495
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Cover images by Larry Burrows/Getty and williammpark
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In memory of Hamish William O’Donnell, a young man of pictures, words, music, love.
My friends have been the trees, the sun, the stars.
My relatives are the grass, the fish, the birds, the ants...
—an Australian Vietnam War veteran’s words on life after combat
‘Charlie’ was a common name given to Vietnamese enemy forces in the Vietnam War by Australian troops.
SLR is the abbreviation for Self Loading Rifle, an assault weapon carried by Australian soldiers in Vietnam. M16 is the name of an American-made assault rifle also carried by Australian soldiers in Vietnam. The AK-47 was an assault rifle carried by many North Vietnamese fighters.
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
About the author
One
They’d played Samurai all summer holidays, Johnny remembered, like the show on TV. Long sticks for swords. Short sticks for star knives. And that Aboriginal kid, David, who was staying at someone’s house for a month, played the game harder than anybody else. Jesus, that old Davey-boy was fierce; Johnny almost smiled. And he’d always insisted on being Shintaro, the good guy.
Johnny looked across the dull green water of the inlet and let his thoughts wander. It was always Shintaro and Tombei against the marauding forces of the evil Iga Ninja. So Johnny had to settle for being a bad guy that January. And maybe he still was, he decided, although Vietnam was nothin’ like Japan and Australia was nothin’ like either of them.
Looking back on days of fighting without hurting anybody, Johnny felt something collapse. How had he gone from a kid holding out a hanky to a fallen warrior to someone casually tossing grenades down an enemy bunker? How had he gone from a kid swinging a stick as a Samurai sword, the star of a flickering home movie, to a nineteen-year-old digger on ambush, prepared to shoot someone in the side of the head?
At school, teachers said Johnny Shoebridge’s stories lacked imagination. Now he seemed to have too much of the bloody stuff. He could call up everything, anything, anyone, and anywhere from here and over there at any time. There was the spray of freckles on Jillian Goldsborough’s bare back. There was the sick crunch of a black scorpion under a jungle boot. There was the severed brown hand found after a firefight. There was the smack of a bullet hitting a jaw. Johnny could recall everything; even shit he hadn’t truly seen or done.
Johnny Shoebridge had perfect recall of one million chopped-up moments, real and imagined. His memory could take him up the narrowest jungle track. His mind could follow any bullet fired, any soldier seen, leaf touched, sound heard, word spoken, smell smelled, or wound inflicted. So it was hard to see a country kid, with a shoe-brown Sherrin footy tucked under one arm, making any sort of a comeback after a year patrolling in the Vietnamese scrub.
Yet here he was trying to do just that. Johnny Shoebridge was sitting on a rock by an inlet in southern New South Wales, trying to fix his head. A single bird call, like a spoon striking metal, came across the water. This, Johnny decided, was a signal that it was time for a smoke. So he lit a Marlboro, smoked it, and felt a little bit better for just a few minutes.
The opposite shore pressed itself on his eyes. Not a soul to be seen. White sand. Hot rock. Dry bush. Silver driftwood. Here might be a good place, he reckoned, to make some kind of a stand. Yes, he would be like the Lone Ranger, without Lex and Barry, or any of the other boys. And yes, it would have to be without the assistance of Brother Rifle, because he was no longer a soldier in any way, shape, or form – except in the dark pressing reaches of his mind.
But them was the breaks.
Two
The surface of the grey laminex kitchen table reminded Johnny of an aerial photograph of a U.S. airstrike. It was amazing how quickly, he thought, bombs turned the skin of the earth into a lunar landscape. He sat back, looked up at the white plastic light fitting, and knew that there was an awful lot of stuff that he wished he didn’t know. Johnny’s mum, April, sat across the table, her hands loosely linked as if she was considering saying grace, or perhaps offering up a small prayer to help the conversation along.
‘Go away for a couple of weeks, John.’ Carefully April poured tea from a yellow pot into a yellow cup. She looked up. ‘Don says take the shop ute. Visit Viv. Or drive to the coast. Think things through.’ Now April Collins advanced a hand towards Johnny’s knuckles and made gentle contact. ‘Give yourself some time before you see Jilly again, don’t you think? Things’ll get better. Let some stuff settle.’
Things get better? Settle? Jesus.
If only he thought they ever would or could. Johnny gave his mum a smile because she was trying hard.
‘Yeah, I might take off for a while.’ He reclaimed his hand. ‘Good if I did, I guess.’
April Shoebridge sipped tea with sudden enthusiasm, put her cup down smartly.
‘I think so.’ She nodded, as if she was sure they were onto a winner. ‘You can work things out, John. It’ll all come right in the end. Back to normal. You’ll see. You’ll be right.’
Johnny considered that highly unlikely but the advice was better than anything he could come up with, so he chose to take it.
‘I will,’ he said. ‘Clear me head.’ Of landmines, he was tempted to add, but figured he’d spooked the old girl enough with his sitting in the backyard, smoking and talking to the little black ants that he admired a lot.
‘Hullo there, boys.’ Johnny would watch them running here, there, and everywhere. ‘What are yers up to today? Out and about? Keepin’ busy?’
Great little fellers, the ants, Johnny thought, wishing he was one and could do ant things, think ant thoughts, and that would be that. But he wasn’t an ant. So he’d take the ute, give his sister a miss, and head to the coast – with the few hundred bucks his mother had pushed across the table as if she was paying to see his poker cards.
A day later Johnny said goodbye to Cam, his fat, simple mate who traipsed around Taralia, shoes on the wrong feet, in a happy world of his own. Then, driving slowly, Johnny shook loose the small dry town as he juddered out over the railway line, leaving its bare hills and struggling sheep farms to finish off a hard summer without him.
‘Gimme air.’ Johnny spoke to the shotgun-blasted population sign. ‘Or somethin’.’ He accelerated, thinking at least he was going forwards, hopefully not into an ambush as he’d been there, done that, and had not enjoyed it one little bloody bit.
Three
Green men spread out in green bush. Silently each rifleman swivelled through the heavy heat, independent but chain-linked. The hush in the heavy undergrowth was like unexpressed hate. Look. Listen. Smell.
Wait out.
Nothing.
All clear.
Move on.
Johnny looked around, up, sideways, down, and inwards. There was nothing he recognised in this place, not even himself. He was now fair and square in the middle of the Asian killing fields. His past was flying away at a million miles an hour. His future was one step away.
Or less.
Johnny heard that single bright bird call – tonk! – come across the calm green inlet. Yes, he was listening to the bush and looking at the water but he was thinking about Lex and Barry, wondering where they were at this moment. Somewhere? Nowhere? Everywhere?
He rubbed out his cigarette and buried the butt. Ask the Vietnamese where the boys were, he thought. It was Charlie who wrote the book on the spirits of the dead. Civilian or soldier, friend or foe, Charlie had the lowdown on the life hereafter; never forget them, was basically it. Offer them what you could. Give them what you had. Visit their soul place. Stay tuned to Radio Deceased.
I will, Johnny thought, scanning the beach, his heart keeping time, insisting on slow searching for camouflaged humans hiding in the bleached dunes or the low patchy scrub. Was that the bottomless black hole of a rifle muzzle? A square of green cloth? A trip wire? Did that leaf twitch or twig snap? No, there were only five grey gulls loitering at the waterline because this was February, Australia, 1973, and Johnny knew he shouldn’t have a worry in the world.
Wrong.
‘Jesus,’ he murmured, his eyes narrowing, jaw tightening. ‘Where’d she come from?’
A girl wearing a white dress sat in the low grassy dunes looking at the water, hands locked around her knees. Shoey appreciated her stillness, her slender bare arms and brown legs, but he wondered how he’d missed her because he had not missed much over there. Johnny Shoebridge had walked point as good as anyone. Still, it was a terrible mistake because he held the lives of all the boys in his hands. Or he had once. Now he pretty much held nothing but a pack of smokes and a few lost souls.
Settle down, Lex said, looking at him from under a wide, pale brow, his hair the colour of dry grass. Those lovely days in the jungle have gone, feller. Relax. You’re not dead. You’re just a country-and-western lunatic trying to get your shit together. Buy a Cat Stevens record, man. Get on the peace train.
Yeah, get a grip, Barry added. You’re home and hosed in the land of the living. Maybe a ’roo or two loose in the top paddock, bud, but eh, the beer’s cold and the fight’s fuckin’ over. Move on.
‘I wish I could,’ Johnny murmured, but he knew the fight wasn’t over, he wasn’t home and hosed, and he was not even close to getting his act together.
Right now a newsreel was running in his head starring himself, Andrew Lexington, Barry Grainger, and thirty of the other Delta Company boys. Out they scrambled from hovering Hueys like green seeds from steel pods, shit-scared as they hit the deck in a landing zone so hot it smoked. Weapons up, pounded by down force, loaded like donkeys, they scanned the waving bush as more choppers dropped in and more diggers scrambled out.
‘It is over.’ Johnny looked at waves breaking white at the mouth of the inlet. ‘It is finished. It is done.’ Except that memories with the weight of a lake were flooding the deepest valleys of his mind. ‘Oh, Jesus. Now what?’
The girl had seen him. So Johnny raised a hand, impressed he’d been able to do that. I am not the enemy, he thought. Anymore. Or among the enemy. Nor am I a ghost. Although I do know quite a few, brown and white, it has to be said.
Four
Johnny had first glimpsed that skinny, quick Main Force enemy fighter in a battle in the Suoi Chau Pha valley. He hadn’t had time to kill the guy as the young bastard in black sprinted between rice paddies while American Cobra gunships tore the village apart. But he’d had too much time to ever forget him. So Johnny gave him a name and a life because they’d crossed paths more than once in the war, and now it seemed they would cross paths always.
Johnny called the fighter Khan. He was tall for a Vietnamese and perhaps older than the other two guerrillas he ran with. All were soldiers who’d most likely trekked south for months down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to join the fierce D555 battalion. This battalion, living deep in the caves of the haunted Long Hai Hills south of Nui Dat, had the sworn duty of removing Johnny Shoebridge’s Royal Australian Regiment from the very ground they stood on.
Johnny fired five times at the fast-moving Khan, dirt and water spitting up around the Viet Cong’s knees. Then incredibly the skinny bastard stopped, turned, levelled his weapon, a weapon with a bayonet, and aimed. Johnny threw himself sideways as half a dozen bullets chopped yellow chunks from the trees around him.
‘Faaaark!’
Johnny fired again but with true VC flair the fighters disappeared into the bamboo as smoke and fire bloomed over thatched roofs, people and animals died, and the volume of the battle doubled – as did Johnny’s fear.
That morning his fear was so great it felt as if he was lying naked between screaming sawmill blades. Things flashed from the tree line. Metal whipped by his face. Greasy black clouds billowed and through them the Cobras dived, flex guns roaring, rockets ripping, the enemy dead accumulating to wash carelessly in crazed waves as muddy geysers rose and fell across the flooded rice paddy.
That was the first time Johnny and Khan had tried to kill each other. Now the Viet Cong fighter wandered Shoey’s mind at will, rising from cover, a wraith with an AK-47, only to slip silently back into the jungle of twisted dreams and a faulty imagination. So Johnny had to live with the enemy he’d dubbed, Vietnamese-style, Older Brother, as compared to the two younger fighters he’d seen that morning.
In this way Khan had taken Johnny prisoner, and Johnny knew that if he didn’t somehow neutralise the ghostly enemy, he’d remain a prisoner of war for the rest of his life, possibly even after.
‘Jesus Christ.’ Folding his arms, Johnny figured he had a
fair idea what Lex might say about the situation – if he wasn’t dead.
I suggest you smoke plenty of dope, Johnny-boy. Lex would make his I’m-really-serious-about-this face and nod his beachside blond head. Move to Byron, wear a sarong, live up a tree. Pretty soon you won’t remember a thing. Take Barry with you. He’d love to be a vegetarian.
Barry, if he also wasn’t dead, would nail Lex with his bushman’s stare honed and hardened under twenty searing country summers.
You hippy poofter long-haired dole-bludging uni wanker.
And Johnny would have laughed; even now he might have smiled if he could remember how.
You can never go back. Shoey had heard that said a lot but it was bullshit. He couldn’t stop going back. That was the problem. There was nothing that could be unseen or undone, but that did not stop him revisiting the battlefields again and again. And everything from the simple to the brutal was there to be relived.
The touch of a ponytail of a dead female fighter was seared like a brand on his brain. The afternoon Lex tie-dyed Barry’s army shirt pink was there. As was the evening Barry machinegunned Lex’s bamboo flute, the morning they saved a pup from a Vietnamese butcher, the cool click and cold glint of new ammo, the dark grace of an oiled weapon, the long shot that hit a distant head, the frightful scream from a deep black valley that no one was ever going to investigate. It was the complete catalogue of chaos, carnage, and beauty, every moment perfectly preserved then pinned on the page like rare, dead insects, most poisonous, a few perfect.
And when Cam Pyke, Johnny’s Simple Simon mate from Taralia, asked him what the war was like, Johnny’s answer was weightless.
‘Terrible, mate.’ He’d dropped a hand on the big boy’s shoulder. ‘You don’t wanna know, Cam. Bloody awful.’
‘Guns and things, Johnny?’ Cam had looked at him hopefully. ‘Jets? Bombs? Noisy?’
‘Too noisy.’ Johnny had evaded everything by offering the kid a chocolate Paddle Pop and a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. ‘Deafening.’
Dreaming the Enemy Page 1