‘Sister Phuong,’ Khan whispered. ‘Where did you go?’
Johnny guessed Phuong was a village girl who had also gone south to fight. He’d seen a few of these female Charlie guerrillas. Three he’d helped bury, which had loosened another handful of screws in his head. So this Phuong might also have disappeared into the meat grinder that was the war because it chewed up men, women, children, animals, and trees equally.
Khan contemplated Phuong’s flawless skin and the depth of her gaze. Johnny saw she was not overly beautiful. Instead he judged her intelligent and thoughtful, attributes that he and Khan might agree were of more value than looks and style. For a minute the thin Vietnamese man looked out at the rain that would be swelling the rivers, following age-old patterns, laying down liquid rhythms, and he imagined Phuong’s spirit as a swallow flickering over the water with other swallows on an endless flight. Then he carefully put the photograph away in its silk wrapping, lay down, and slept.
Johnny didn’t rest. He was patrolling, unable to stop until the boys had reached their objective marked X on a map that did not exist. So he kept drinking and thinking, too scared to sleep, knowing he’d dream of friends and enemies circling in the jungle in the pouring rain, both sides seeking an opportunity to bury the other. And when that opportunity came, they would take it.
Eleven
At the first step Shoey took out through the wire, he felt his personality slide away until it locked down in a new place. He was ready and able to kill and knew it. His SLR was loaded. He wore two heavy belts of M60 ammo around his neck and hand grenades in his webbing. Two platoons from Delta Company were now in Indian Country, heading for a village where Viet Cong forces had reportedly been moving at night.
For a while the soldiers walked behind a column of armoured personnel carriers, then diverged into a plantation of rubber trees. Here, shadows tiger-striped the ground and the air was a dense block of humidity. Birds called but the brooding heat, hot as blood, stifled the place.
Slowly the boys patrolled, green men with black weapons, index fingers curled around trigger guards. Johnny could see Lex with his M16, Barry with his M60, every bloke ready to fire, knowing their role in the defensive perimeter if and when they made contact. What he did not know was how he would react if he had to shoot to kill; what he did know was that it would be unforgivable if he didn’t.
Johnny felt totally exposed. A fearful, crawling sensation pulled at his skin and played tricks with his vision. Each second was a self-contained moment. Every sound, sight, and smell was examined. Walls of vegetation imprinted themselves on his eyes, were examined then replaced, reexamined then put by.
At any second he knew he might hear the fast rapping of an AK or the bass-blasting of a heavy machinegun. But so far there was nothing but the muted sound of his combat boots, birds, the damp brushing of his wet shirt, and the see-sawing of his breathing.
‘The good news, JS,’ Lex whispered, ‘is that there’s only three hundred days to go. And that includes Cup Day and Moomba. Put it in your diary, Shoebridge. I’d hate us to miss the plane. You know how time flies when you’re having fun.’
Johnny didn’t think time was flying; it had stopped just about dead.
When Johnny patrolled, for seconds on end, he was able to watch himself from above – this duality was uncanny but not unexpected. Detection of the enemy was so critical to the patrol that it was only natural he put himself in the picture, as if his spirit worked in tandem with his earth-bound self. And now, sitting on the steps of Malcolm’s hut, he could imagine himself hovering over a village where Khan’s D555 patrol, commanded by a captain Johnny decided to call Van, worked at securing supplies for the battalion.
In a granary, Khan, Thang, and Trung shovelled rice into bags. Behind them their weapons leant against the wall. Other men were taking essentials from the houses; essentials that Captain Van had assured his soldiers would be paid for. Secretly, Khan thought this might not be true, but said nothing. The southerners owed support to the northern battalions, and it was a small local boy on a bicycle who informed Captain Van that Australian soldiers were approaching the hamlet from the south.
Shoey saw, from above, that the D555 men were organising to leave. Outnumbered by his own Delta patrol, they’d wait for a better opportunity to engage the Australians. Gathering what had been collected, the North Vietnamese assembled quickly in the village square. There, Captain Van pointed a Browning handgun at the impassive village head man, made the sign for silence, then ordered his men out.
‘Everywhere,’ Van whispered to Khan, ‘and everything, is war.’
True enough, Johnny thought. For you guys.
Johnny’s captain, Dan McCrae, had been ordered to search the same village.
‘More of a meet and greet,’ the big man said. ‘Take nothing. Break nothing. Put shit back. But shoot to kill, if you have to.’
‘Well, that’s fine,’ Lex whispered to Johnny. ‘But since these people all look pretty much the same, it’s not that easy. No drivers’ licenses, either, John. Or house numbers. It’s a mess.’ He shrugged. ‘What d’you reckon? Knock over anyone over four feet tall?’
Shoey felt like a giant as he and Lex searched houses for tunnels, weapons, or a cache of anything intended for the Viet Cong. Pots of water sat over smoky fires and tea in delicate cups sat on low tables. He saw his face, strange and unsettling, in a couple of tiny mirrors. There was the spicy smell of cooking and the perplexing odour of people who lived differently. The families looked at him with shining eyes and said nothing. Johnny felt ignorance following him like a dog.
‘Not a skerrick, Shoebridge.’ Lex stood tall and lean in a narrow doorway, M16 comfortably cradled. ‘Surprisingly. So shall we burn the joint?’ He pointed to a thin mattress. ‘Or catch forty winks? Or, if we get Barry, we could do a couple of Bee Gees numbers. The local folks might like that. It’d go a long way to explain our culture and dance moves. And what they’re missing out on in the Melbourne nightclub scene.’
Johnny and Lex left the house. It would not be burned, today, anyway. Tactics changed minute by minute. Objectives, like the enemy, were impossible to pin down. Progress, like victory, was impossible to ascertain. Searching the village was like wading through a swamp. The instant the Australians moved on, the water swirled back even muddier than before.
Everywhere the sun blazed, throwing the darkest of shadows. And in the still, steamy air between the houses, unidentified things passed fleetingly at the sides of Johnny’s eyes. At night, he could imagine this place being purely Vietnamese. Friend and foe would pass, merge, or murder as they had done for centuries. He felt like an alien fallen onto a strange earth.
‘I’m tossing up between looking cruel and menacing—’ Lex turned to Johnny, pulling a mad-eyed face, as they passed a gaggle of silent children, ‘or trying out the old Zig and Zag clown routine. Perhaps you could teach them the recorder, Shoe? Kids love that thing. The whole program been a great success at state schools right throughout Victoria.’
‘I’m stickin’ with the boy scouts.’ Johnny lifted his rifle. ‘Be prepared.’
The boys took up defensive positions around the square as Captain McCrae spoke with the village chief. By a stone wall Johnny saw Barry had sited his M60 to fire across a vegetable garden and adjacent rice paddy. In the hot blue sky, a long way off, there was a triple silver flash. Then the jets were gone and the thunder rolled.
Johnny saw that Khan’s patrol had evaded the Aussies and was now safely bunkered down in the Long Hais. The food liberated from the village had been stored and the men rested. They’d had to fight their way back, he noted – perhaps against Johnny’s own Delta boys – because some of the men were wounded and one was missing.
‘The Australians are tall,’ Khan told Thang and Trung as they cooked rice. ‘They walk carefully and love beer.’ He grinned and spread his thin arms. ‘The Americans are even bigger and noisier and they will never run out of bombs—’ Khan nodded slowly. ‘But w
e will never run out of fighters, so we will win. There is no question.’
You’ve got that right, Johnny thought. Not bad work for a bloke from the backblocks – not good news for the blokes from Down Under, though, at all, really. And that was both a fact and an understatement.
The Australian patrol left the village and filtered back into the bush. Johnny ploughed on, doing his best to stay sharp. Barry, he knew, was on point, machinegun welded to his hip as he led the way like an explorer in a country he did not like. Johnny, on the other hand, had decided to try to like the countryside. He figured that it would open itself up more to him if he embraced it. So far he was not succeeding. Every millimetre of it threatened.
‘We’ll eat.’ Captain McCrae spoke quietly. ‘Take five, eh? Then we’ll get goin’ and won’t stop for a while. Set your perimeter, blokes. Chop chop.’
The patrol settled down, rations heated up over burning C-4 explosive. At four points, fire teams guarded the perimeter.
‘Just like cadets.’ Lex spooned lumpy brown stew from a dixie. ‘Shit food. No girls. Sitting around with a bunch of homos. Did you bring your knitting, Barry? That scarf was coming along nicely. I don’t know how you do it.’
‘You’re a disgrace.’ Barry lit a smoke. His face, camouflaged with green and black greasepaint, only strengthened Shoey’s idea that the guy was receding into the jungle for the purposes of more efficient killing. ‘You are a uni poofter and a dirty hippy. Maybe a bloody commie. Certainly a bastard.’
Johnny forked up a small brown cube of what he guessed was meat.
‘So what are you actually doin’ at uni, Lex?’ he asked. ‘Arts?’ Johnny didn’t exactly know what Arts was, or were, but he’d heard Jilly mention it often enough to put the word out there.
‘Of course I’m doing Arts, Shoebridge.’ Lex shrugged. ‘What else is there?’ He gestured left and right. ‘Just look where it’s got me. And on the subject of general knowledge, and although this might come as a surprise to both of you country boys, did you know that Vietnam is not in Queensland? Anyway, John—’ Lex raised a hand. ‘Throw me one of your government-issued, taxpayer-subsidised smokes. I gave my last one to a little brown bloke who said he was minding a box of grenades for a friend.’
Johnny tossed over a cigarette and thought about Jilly. A sense of pride expanded. She was settled in Melbourne, also at uni, studying to be a teacher. He doubted she’d march against the war. Well, he bloody hoped she wouldn’t. For luck, he touched the letter he carried that outlined her efforts to find a room to rent in Carlton, and her part-time job selling flowers. Her handwriting was large and loopy, leaving no space to read anything between the lines. Looking at it only served to widen the gulf between home and here.
Johnny thought about their last evening together. She’d waited for him at her house, sitting on the front steps at sunset, wearing a dress of pale blue and black lace undies. He wished she would write to him about that instead of netball, the Italians and Greeks in Carlton, and how mad Melbourne was.
The letters he wrote were short. This was mostly because he figured he hadn’t done much. The unspoken message from blokes who’d been in the jungle for a while was loud and clear: just wait, mate, because you’ll see it and you’ll do it, and if you survive you won’t be able to talk about it, either.
‘Vietnam’s not in Tasmania, either, Barry,’ Lex added. ‘If that was going to be your second guess.’
Twelve
At some time in the early evening Johnny threw his swag inside the fishing hut then went back to the step with another beer. The quiet of the inlet, pitch-perfect, and the colour of the water, pitch-black, had weight and substance. The air smelled of eucalyptus, salt, and seaweed. The upstream reaches he could make out were charcoal-smudged and overhung with trees, seeming to hint that the past was really not so long gone. In all this, Johnny could sense the beauty but his despair had fought it to a standstill.
He’d spent months wanting to be alone. Now part of his head needed people like oxygen. If Lex and Barry could have just wandered out of the dark, to sit and drink, he would’ve been fine for the rest of his frigging life.
He’d accepted the loss of other blokes; good blokes, great blokes, blokes he’d helped wrap in rubberised sheets for their last helicopter ride out of the bush – but he’d gone over the edge with Lex and Barry, and doubted he was ever coming back as anything but damaged goods.
He had, from where he didn’t know, amassed a dose of fury that glowed like molten metal in the crucible of his mind. This anger had so little to do with the Viet Cong it was laughable. Yes, those little brown bastards fought sly, hard, and dirty. But they had real faces and real hearts that beat in their chests. The people he was looking for had neither.
He could picture them, though, up there in Canberra; old men in grey suits around a table in a beige government building, setting him up for the longest fall of his life. Then they’d done the vanishing act. Gone without so much as a sorry about how that went, boys, but thanks for giving it a shot.
Shoey looked into the gathering dusk. He’d been sold down the river, all right. He and the boys had fought the fight as fair and well as they could, yet now everyone was saying the whole thing was rigged, rooted, and wrong – although he didn’t care too much about losing, if they had. The politicians would have to live with that little hiccup while he would have to live with the lost lives of the boys.
‘My bloody head hurts.’ He ran a rough hand across the bristles that stuck out of his scalp like nails. ‘Jesus Christ!’
He’d lost his best mates, and their families, girlfriends, favourite pubs, bloody dogs, and futures had lost them. They were so gone, the boys, that layers of pain just kept stacking themselves on top of each other like cold sheets of plasterboard. And Johnny was now stuck, because to leave the boys behind was to see them dudded twice.
Suddenly, on the far shore in the black bush, he saw flickering lights. Automatically he lifted his weapon but he had no weapon. Next moment he found himself sliding like a snake for a log, waiting for the flat crashing of Claymore mines, the body-punching of M60s, the flames of thirty firearms barking back and forth in the blackness. But there was only pressure in his head, panic in his chest, and a fiery burn on his forearm where he’d lain on his smoke.
He listened. Nothing. Not a bloody thing.
The lights moved steadily on up the inlet then turned jerkily towards the water. Bloody fishermen. Now Johnny could hear them talking and made himself laugh; fair dinkum, just a couple of bloody fishermen with rods, bait, beers, smokes, and one stupid Eveready torch between them.
He got up, brushed himself down then sat on the log. The hut stood behind him like a big rock. His arm stung, his head pounded but he smiled into the night.
‘You’re safe, sport,’ he murmured. ‘You’re safe.’
He could see the moon, not white and not yellow but bright, sailing through the spread fingers of high branches. Watching it, he realised with a surge of joy that he was not hiding in the bush, it was the bush that was hiding him.
Johnny could feel the goodness of the place. Trees stood their ground like team mates. All stars, including the Southern Cross, were present and correct, and a soft sea breeze brought him the tender calls of night birds as they reassured each other that all was well – this suddenly counting for nothing as tears blew from his eyes and a wave of sorrow held him down until he struggled to the surface and sat blinking, half-stunned. What could he do for Lex and Barry now?
That was the question.
‘Have a smoke, for a start.’ He lit up, took a drag, and wondered where the one-armed Khan was, and what he was doing. Even the enemy had a right to be heard. Especially since the bastard wasn’t personally or technically his enemy anymore, because someone somewhere had signed a piece of paper and everything, supposedly, was all over red rover.
Well, far fuckin’ out, Johnny thought; if that was all it took, perhaps they should’ve got round to it a little bit sooner.
Johnny found Khan staggering alone down a night road. He could see the one-armed fisherman held a bottle and a badly rolled cigarette flipped on his bottom lip. Pissed, Johnny figured. Look at the bloody drongo. About to fall in the river, if he’s not careful.
‘You’re smashed, boyo.’ Johnny might have said this out loud, he wasn’t sure. ‘Ya sad mongrel.’
Anyway, spoken or not, Khan replied that he was drunk and went on and on about being a one-winged, brown-backed beetle who had returned from a torturous journey and yet felt he still was on the Trail.
You’re home, pal, Johnny counselled. Be thankful.
Khan looked around, inhaling the moist agricultural air. The welcome of the earth was like a feather bed. The country acknowledged him as a simple saviour, as much a part of the natural world as the bough of a banyan tree, or a grove of bamboo that had sheltered him a hundred times.
‘We go on, the both of us,’ Khan muttered. ‘The country and me. It’s a miracle that I was spared, that I am here, alive.’
You wouldn’t be, Johnny thought, if I’d had another second to get a decent sight on your head – unless, as Johnny had also considered, you actually were a ghost that could not be killed by bullets or bombs – or your gods stepped in to decide your fate. Or you just got really, really lucky.
Johnny was aware that parts of North Vietnam were relatively untouched by the fighting. The people weren’t but the earth was. To the south of the country and the west, the land had been so badly tortured it writhed like a harpooned whale. To return home to a place virtually whole, as Khan’s village appeared to be, was indeed a great thing.
Dreaming the Enemy Page 4