Dreaming the Enemy

by David Metzenthen

  Later, sitting on a rock, drying off in the sun, Johnny found himself following the one-armed Khan through the tiny streets of an unnamed northern village. It was early morning, Johnny noted, and Khan was also making for the water.

  ‘Good plan,’ Johnny murmured. ‘Good plan.’

  Khan looked at a simple thatched house, Johnny deciding that would be where the stunning girl, Lien, lived. And lo and behold, there she was at a window, arms lifted, bare golden back visible as she dressed. At the sight of her, Johnny and Khan both took a good solid hit to the heart.

  I know exactly what you’re thinking, Khan, Johnny decided. On this subject, sport, I can read you like a book.

  Khan’s feet slowed but he forced himself go on. Eyes forward, he thought. But, oh, the loveliness of her! It filled his heart and head with a wild blurring, an awareness of everything fabulous that the world might bring to a person. But this blissful vision was underscored by loss. He felt keenly that the past was slipping further away and he was going with it. Khan knew, even though he was not yet twenty-four, that already he was as old as the hills and only getting older. No young women for him; not anymore.

  ‘So lovely!’ Khan shook his head, imagining. What could be more delightful than that girl? Nothing, nobody, surely?

  You’re forgetting someone, Johnny suggested. Aren’t ya, mate? What about the other one? Phuong, the plain one. The special one. The fighter. The courageous one. Concentrate on her, champ, because this chick, Lien, will just bring you pain. What you need now is someone who thinks like you, knows what you know, has seen and done what you have seen and done – and might still be able to talk about it.

  Khan walked on, Johnny seeing that he’d arrived at the jetty. Perhaps the veteran had his fish caged here, to be fattened in the forward-thinking Vietnamese way. And this is how it turned out to be, but there was an unexpected hitch.

  Khan saw that someone stood on the jetty. A young man peered into the water, perhaps considering helping himself to what had taken the one-armed fisherman so many days to catch. It was the long-haired village layabout, Son, a so-called trader who carried a reputation as a bad communist. He was also extremely lucky, Khan thought, to be living in such a remote village that so far he’d escaped the attention of party officials.

  Probably the kind of bloke, Johnny mused, who sold cars, fridges, or double beds on every second corner of every Australian town. This Son was nothing more than a salesman; meaning there was nothing wrong with what he did from one point of view and everything wrong with it from another. In a nutshell, Johnny wondered if half a dozen countries hadn’t gone to war over the right and wrong way to sell a fridge – which guaranteed that this meeting between good communist Khan and bad communist Son would certainly be interesting.

  Khan announced himself as he walked onto the jetty, Son looking up, open-faced and empty-handed, apart from a cigarette that smelled sweet on the early-morning air.

  ‘You know, brother Son,’ Khan said quietly, ‘even though I have only one arm, I carried my AK home from the south. I should’ve handed it in when the war was over, but I couldn’t. It’s funny, isn’t it?’

  Johnny grinned and Son smiled, his black ponytail stark against a crisp, clean white shirt. He took a gold pack of cigarettes from a pocket.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone, brother Khan. Smoke?’

  Khan saw there were three cigarettes left. He took one. Son flipped a brass lighter. For a while they stood smoking and Khan found it quite pleasant standing in the early morning with Son, although they had never been friends. He didn’t trust Son. But he did feel he had a certain understanding of the world that others didn’t. Johnny could see that, too; the bloke was a chancer, as old Les would’ve said. A Flash Harry, a professional punter, an unknown quantity – a guy who had somehow managed to dodge the call-up to go on his own merry way, like many blokes on all sides of the ditch.

  Which was how the cookie crumbled, Johnny decided; if you could live with that, so be it. And this feller, Son, appeared to live with it quite easily, a man who plied the waterways alone and out of sight, doing business.

  ‘I would not steal your fish, Khan,’ Son said. ‘Can you imagine me walking through the village with my pockets full of flapping fins and tails? It’s just not me.’ He smiled again. ‘I prefer them cooked. By someone else.’

  These two could end up as friends, Johnny thought. Maybe not yet, but when a bloke got back from a war, you needed as many real friends as you could get. Even if they might not be the type of person you would’ve hung round with before you left. He thought of Carly. Yes, if someone understood something about you, even just a little bit, it would be a serious mistake not to call them a friend.

  ‘I saw sister Lien on my way down here.’ Khan wanted to change the subject. He was also in need of sharing his feelings. These days he barely spoke to anyone, being the only veteran who had returned. ‘She has everything, that girl. It kills me just to look at her. She is a true beauty. But she makes me feel ancient.’

  Son smoked languidly. Leaning against a post, he looked across the river to the paddy fields that had, as yet, no colour. Johnny knew guys like him were hard to pin down. He also knew they were not to be underestimated.

  ‘I’ve been out walking with her,’ Son said calmly. ‘Lien is a captive to her looks. If she doesn’t give herself to someone soon, she’ll have nothing left to give. Those breasts are like flowers in a vase, Khan. They will wilt. But they are in full bloom now.’

  Khan laughed. ‘Son, you should be a poet.’

  Son put a hand on Khan’s wrist. ‘Well, if not a poet, an optimist and maybe a realist. It’s been good to talk. We will talk again. See you, Khan. If you need anything, just ask.’

  See? Maybe the bastard is all right, Johnny mused. Not everybody in this world has to be the same, think the same, or do the same things. Yet so far Johnny had only heard Son talk; it was action that made all the difference

  Khan held up the cigarette. ‘Thanks for the smoke.’ The ex-soldier looked into Son’s face. ‘Yes, we will talk again. I look forward to it.’

  Son walked off the jetty. Khan and Johnny watched him go. Among the wreckage in my head, Khan thought, in between the tons of shattered equipment, broken bodies, open ribcages, discarded bandages, splintered trees, burnt animals, and poisoned streams I still have a little place for a sneaky, funny man like that. And that is good. The war has not turned me into a policeman of every other person’s life.

  Khan knelt to unlatch the trapdoor of his biggest pen. Below, fish darted this way and that, heading to the surface then diving down. In the water, Johnny saw Khan’s face reflected, wobbling.

  ‘Get big and fat, boys.’ Khan dropped in a ball of food scraps. ‘That’s the idea.’

  Johnny, sitting on his rock by the inlet, lit a Marlboro. The smoke given to Khan by Son was a nice gesture, he decided. Small things, good and bad, were important. They added up, especially when you drifted like a boat in a storm. Or in Khan’s case, Johnny guessed, when you’d been patched up in some rough underground jungle workshop, and sent home carrying the chaos with you – because it would have been impossible to leave it in the south like a destroyed weapon or an amputated arm.

  Johnny wondered if Khan had seen the pile of North Vietnamese bodies the Aussies buried with Brutus, the bulldozer, after the first fire base attack. Perhaps Khan had been near the napalm strikes? Or where three hundred tons of bombs had been dropped from fifty thousand feet by the Stratofortresses? Perhaps he had endured Spooky’s incredible onslaught from the sky? Whatever, everybody suffered, not that he cared much about Charlie’s suffering, but the bastards were human. And they didn’t start the fight, he didn’t think.

  Johnny watched Khan grind his cigarette out but the ex-soldier did not drop the butt into the water.

  ‘You have had enough damage done to you, old man.’ Johnny felt that this is what Khan had said, addressing the waterway that eased its way slowly on beneath his bare feet. ‘I am no
t about to add to it.’

  Johnny continued to watch as the first rays of warmth pierced the watery depths of Khan’s imaginary river. It was a good thing to do, wait for sunlight, and look after the country and its people. Johnny and Khan were agreed on that. After all, supposedly it was what they had fought for.

  Shoey walked along the inlet’s edge to the beach, wearing only jeans and sunglasses, and carrying only his smokes. A few big rocks, like beached whales, were being washed by waves lit by bright morning light. No one was around. He could see along the misty coast for miles.

  Sitting in the dunes, he lit up, and rested on an elbow. The amount of space around him stretched his mind. Everything was close in Vietnam. The country pressed from all sides, even when they’d been out in the open. Then it was worse. It was as if the sky was about to fall on his head, those fat foreign clouds towering. Citadels, Lex had called them. Castles. Fortresses. Strongholds. Or, as he had once added for Johnny’s benefit, Big bastards, Johnny. You know, larger than normal. Size twenty. The opposite to little. In Vietnam, even the sky was against the Aussies.

  Johnny could see himself, a rifleman in green in an extended line of riflemen in green. Armed foreigners crossing a foreign landscape. It was something to be proud of, though, he reckoned. The stuff those Viet Cong had done to their own people was unbelievable. He flicked ash. Heads on stakes and kids buried alive. True stories. It wasn’t hard to want to kill the bastards. All you had to do was flip the switch.

  Good luck with ever trying to flip it back again.

  Looking along the beach, he saw a girl walking, holding her thongs, and knew it was Carly. Same white dress. Same lank brown hair. Same hard life. He got up, drawn to her and her history, her understanding and suffering.

  Strange days.

  They stayed in the dunes to escape the wind, letting it get on with the job of blowing sand to the south in stinging sprays.

  ‘Do you want to work, Johnny?’ Carly lined up, with coarse-looking fingers, spiky brown banksia cones that reminded Johnny of old hand grenades. ‘You know, now, around here?’

  Work? Jesus Christ. Shoey knew he wasn’t up to much as far as work went. Those gears, all four forward, were pretty much rusted solid. He’d concentrated so hard for every second of every minute of every day for a year that he could hardly concentrate on anything anymore. It was as if he was slow in the head, like Cam, his lumbering mate from Taralia. It scared him. And it was another thing that made him angry.

  ‘Well, maybe.’ He looked at her. ‘I’m kinda not up to much, though. Why?’

  Carly abandoned the banksia cones. She looked along the beach, eyes narrowed against the glare and lifting breeze.

  ‘You should go see Curtis at the CES,’ she said. ‘Ask about the dole or whatever jobs are around. Which won’t be many.’ She gave a casual shrug. ‘That’s what you do. Here.’

  Johnny had never been on the dole. It was something never talked about at home. It wasn’t for people like the Shoebridges. It was for spongers, dope smokers, and useless bastards.

  ‘Are you on it?’ Shoey avoided saying the word, pretty sure it would feel like he was offering an insult.

  Carly sat, arms wrapped around her legs. She had a light blue windcheater tied around her waist as if she intended to spend the whole day, and perhaps the evening, outside.

  ‘Sometimes.’ She lifted a slender angular shoulder. ‘No work, no choice, eh? Although sometimes I do stuff on the farm for Malcolm. You could too. Anyway, go see Curtis at the CES. In town.’

  Johnny nodded. It was an idea, if not a great one. Welcome to the new, dole-bludging, system-screwing Shoey. Still, it wasn’t as if the system hadn’t screwed him. Raffling off someone’s life had shifted the goalposts considerably. Giving him an assault rifle and ordering him to use it, he figured, had put him in a very different category to nearly every other Australian citizen. In short, he owed the bastards in Canberra nothing, and would never believe what they said again.

  ‘I go see Curtis?’ He considered the possibility. ‘In Adden Bay?’

  ‘Yep.’ Carly looked at the sea. ‘He’ll help you. He helped me.’

  Johnny watched waves trumping waves, criss-crossing, overlapping, and undercutting. Shifting sands. Invisible currents. Changing tides. The way of the world, he thought. Decisions, decisions, decisions. But they were hard things to make. He was out of ammo. No, he had one shot left.

  ‘Curtis helped you,’ he said courageously. ‘You help me.’

  Carly looked at him. ‘He’s a good person, Curtis. I’m not. I’m a mess.’ She shrugged, turned her hands up as if showing him something of no value. ‘Dropped outta school. Hung out with the wrong people. Probably was one of ’em. Did the wrong things. Had ’em done to me. I can hardly read or talk, Johnny. I couldn’t help anyone. Not myself, anyway, that’s for sure.’

  Johnny let the words settle, extracted as much meaning as he could before reaching for Carly’s left hand. He could feel the bones, fine and strong.

  ‘I think you’re beautiful.’ He couldn’t believe he was saying this; he’d never said it to anyone but it was the truth. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you. You’re a good person, Carly. Just talking to you makes me feel better. You’re the only one who’s done that since I got back. It’s a big thing.’

  Carly allowed him to hold her hand. Borrow it.

  ‘Really?’ She looked at him, unconvinced. ‘Because I’m pretty sure no one else around here’d agree. They think I’m just some lazy feral.’

  Shoey let his grip slide. ‘Well, they’re wrong. I mean it.’ He smiled and for once it felt okay. ‘You’re a good person. You are.’ Although, he thought, I’m not – even if what I did was done under orders, was my duty, and had been a matter of life and death. Even if it was demanded by the country. Even if the Prime Minister had shaken his hand at Nui Dat and said that the battalion was doing a fine job – well, it didn’t feel like a fine job. It felt like twelve months of bloody madness.

  The boys would know what he meant. Anyone who fought over there was pretty much carrying the same load. Apart from the dead blokes, because surely they would have no load to carry at all.

  ‘Come into town, Carly.’ Johnny felt a spark. ‘Show me where to go. I’ll buy you a coffee.’

  Her hands sought each other. He didn’t think he had succeeded in giving her much to go on with.

  ‘No, thanks, Johnny.’ She glanced at him and away, down the beach, into a pale misty distance where she might have been able to see something of her future or her past. ‘I don’t like town. You can’t miss the CES. It’s got a red and white sign. Open nine till four in the main street.’

  Shoey’s jaw clamped shut. Anger brimmed in his eyes. Faaaaaark! This was the first time since getting home that he’d offered someone something other than a punch in the mouth – and instead, he’d got a smack back. He forced himself to breathe.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s the people in town I don’t like.’ Carly, this time, looked at him. ‘Not you. You’re nice. Thoughtful.’

  Shoey laughed. It felt like an infectious cough. Thoughtful? Yeah, but not in a good way.

  ‘I’m a head case, Carly.’ He touched his temple. ‘And if I’m thoughtful, it’s generally only about myself.’ Or the boys. Or those other dreamed-up bastards, Khan, his two dead mates, and that cheating son of a bitch Son.

  Carly looked at him from under perfectly curved eyebrows. Her index fingers created the point of an arrow.

  ‘That’s not true.’

  He felt her hand, dry and light, on his forearm. Warmth flowed. She was trying to calm him, if he could be calmed. It struck him some people did have the power to help. She did.

  ‘Thanks, mate.’ He reached for his smokes. ‘I mean it. You do not know how much.’ His face felt like twisted leather.

  ‘You’ll feel better,’ she said. ‘I promise. One day. Maybe we both will.’

  He nodded slowly, the two of them sitting in silence that s
eemed to have blown in on the wind.

  ‘Everyone’s always got something—’ she appeared to study the clumps of black seaweed on the beach that reminded Shoey of dead bodies, ‘—to get over. That’s life, eh?’

  Johnny came up with a quick smile, perhaps from his childhood – before things hit the fan, anyway.

  ‘It is.’ He lit a smoke, felt it sort his thoughts then lay them down in a quiet hollow. ‘Anyway, I’ll go see Curtis. And I’d like to see you again, Carly. You know, around. Just to talk.’

  She seemed not to have heard. Or what she’d heard wasn’t particularly good.

  ‘Oh, sure, maybe,’ she said. ‘I ain’t goin’ anywhere.’

  Fifteen

  The riflemen spread out, infiltrating the bush, the heat holding low to the ground. Johnny, loaded with belts of M60 ammo, moved forward with Barry. To his right he saw Lex, black barrel of his M16 swinging gently, as if the tall guy was a diviner and his weapon a divining rod. A bird twittered then abruptly stopped. Johnny’s guts tightened another notch. Charlie had to be close. Closer than close.

  Side to side, up and down, Shoey scanned the ground and greenery. It was endless what he had to look for: a wire, a cord, a slit in the ground, a broken stick, snipers in trees, the tiny prongs of a mine, the eyes of camouflaged men, and the muzzles of loaded weapons.

  A whispered message was relayed from point.

  ‘Bunker. Hold up. Geddown. Cover everybody.’

  Johnny and Barry sank into the leaf litter. With practised care they set up the machinegun, keeping the belts as clear of the ground as possible. Silence assembled itself from the top of the trees down. An acute sense of waiting intensified as the seconds ticked by. Another whispered word.

  ‘Standby.’

  ‘Fire in the hole.’

  There was a brief rustling forward then an explosion that jerked the ground. Two more flat, hard bangs followed. Smoke rose. Barry raised his eyebrows then turned back to his weapon. At any second Johnny expected the place to explode as triggers were held on full auto and everybody, VC and Aussies, let loose.