Johnny watched from above, or from across the river, trying to see how and why these men were so different from the Aussies. Sure, he knew they were somehow, but he was struggling to see reason enough to have tried to massacre the whole bloody lot of them. Oh, yeah, of course, the government told him to because those men were communists, although Khan was nothing but a poverty-stricken fisherman, and Son little else but a travelling used-car salesman, except there was not a car in sight.
Johnny tried to imagine killing them and couldn’t. The time for that had gone, but neither he nor Khan, although they’d made it home, were free. The road ahead merely continued on from the road behind.
At Son’s suggestion, Khan placed his rods on a bend in the river where the water circled in a deep hole before rejoining the main current. Reeds rustled along the bank, like so many crossed swords.
‘There are many eels here.’ Son sat rather than squatted as Khan did. ‘You should set traps. I could help you. Eels sell well.’
‘They’re your eels.’ Khan watched the tips of his rods, hoping to see one twitch. ‘Your mother’d chase me away with a broom.’
Son smiled, freed his smokes from his shirt pocket. His eyes remained invisible behind sunglasses. He appeared lazy, but Khan knew he traded far and wide on the waterways and lazy, careless people made no profit in that line of business. Or they ended up dead.
‘They are everybody’s eels now.’ Son laughed as he tapped out another cigarette for Khan. ‘Still, we could become communist kings of the communist eel trade and distribute our communist eel wealth. You can marry comrade Lien.’ He wrist-whipped his lighter into action. ‘How would that be?’
Khan nodded his thanks. The American cigarette was rich and smooth. He smoked it without guilt. The spoils of war.
‘Lien would be too much for me,’ he replied. ‘Besides, I don’t think she’d like to be queen of the communist eel trade. She might prefer the silk business or something a little less slimy.’ Khan laughed; it felt good, like a cleansing puff of fresh mountain air.
‘Anyway,’ Son said, pocketing his silver lighter, ‘it was Phuong you liked, wasn’t it, Khan? She liked you, too. I remember.’
Johnny was as surprised as Khan that Son had any idea about this.
‘You’re amazing, Son.’ Khan saw one of his rods quiver. ‘What don’t you know?’
‘I only know,’ he said, ‘that I am privileged to fish with you. And share in a victory I did not fight for.’
Got that right, Johnny thought. You dodged a bullet in more ways than one there, pal. Not the Lone Ranger, though. Plenty of people in plenty of places pulled that stunt.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Khan said. ‘There was a lot of loss involved in winning.’
‘I know.’ Son looked across the river to the flats where rice grew in a hundred thousand fine green tufts. ‘I’m a bad penny, as they say. But believe me, brother, I’ll help you if I can. You just have to ask.’
Khan grinned at the river trader. ‘You don’t even get onto the scale of badness, Son. Badness is those bastards ordering other bastards to bomb us from the stars!’
Son took a deep drag. ‘True, I’m not that bad. But if I could’ve ordered someone to bomb them, I would’ve. They can’t imagine it, can they? What it was like. Even I felt the earth shake.’
Khan reached for a rod that dipped. Thinking of the bombing was too much. He let his mind duck under the water where he summoned a big fat silver fish that would quickly be landed. Fishing possessed a kind of holiness, he felt. He had taken it up not only because it was something he could do, he felt it linked his soul to the river, the creatures in it, and drew him away from the poisoned killing grounds of the past.
A good decision then, Johnny thought.
‘Those B52s,’ Khan said slowly. ‘I never saw one. Ghost bombers. They flew too high, near the moon. But perhaps it is better to concentrate on fish rather than Americans and their warplanes.’
Son watched the water. ‘Indeed. Fish are friendlier and fishing is more productive.’
Johnny reckoned most Charlie liked to go fishing, as did a lot of Aussies. He imagined Khan’s dead young friend, Trung; could see him as a fibbing, smiling fisherman whose monsters always just got away. And Thang, the strong one, the square-head, he’d be one of those blokes who sat by the water, happy to be drinking with his mates rather than wetting a line. But when the Ho Chi Minh Trail called, Johnny guessed that was the end of their time together on the river. And on earth, as it turned out.
‘I wish I could find Phuong for you,’ Son added. ‘I can generally find what I want, Khan. Somewhere downstream.’
Khan imagined how it might be if Phuong came back. He felt he could love her properly because she had been to the south, and would understand how he had changed. He would not hold back. If she agreed, they could resurrect something from the ruins. Yes, it would be shaped by the war, the awfulness of what had occurred and what they had gone through, but it would also be a great victory; that love could outlast hate, that the state of war was only temporary, that it was possible to regain and share a peacefulness of their own making.
‘I wish you could find her, too, Son,’ Khan said. ‘But even you might find it difficult to row to the stars.’
‘I would,’ Son said, ‘if I could.’ He sniffed and grinned, smoking stylishly. ‘We might do some planning. Nothing is truly lost until you decide it is. She might not have passed on, Khan.’
True enough, Johnny thought. True enough.
Eighteen
Shoey was on point, living a lifetime in every step. The surrounding bush seemed to possess a ceaseless fluidity. Wherever he wasn’t looking melted into tones and textures of liquid green. Wherever he was looking, heart-shaped foliage was imprinted on his brain as sharply as leaves pressed in a book.
He searched the spaces between the trunks. He studied tree stumps and tree tops. He searched for the oddity, the unusual, and the obvious – all the time taking slow steps, putting his feet down as gently as a cat puts down its paws, his rifle at the ready, safety off.
Johnny could feel the space around him through his skin. The fine hairs on his arms stood up. He was aware that he existed in a dimension never before visited, a floating world vibrating with life overlapped by the shimmering shadow of death. Slowly he moved, in a trance of concentration, down a path of his own making.
Ahead, a narrow dirt road curved through a tunnel of thick, whippy growth interspersed with bamboo. Here, reportedly, Charlie had been moving. Johnny stopped and the patrol stopped with him. Fat drops of sweat eased down his legs and back. I don’t like this joint, he thought. It is bloody evil. The wall of tangled greenery radiated suppressed violence. He would’ve liked to burn it, bomb it, back off, and never return, but that was not on the cards. So he willed himself to detect the enemy, knowing if he couldn’t, he would have to move through the place.
The skipper came up and they squatted, stone-like in the heavy heat. Never once did Captain McCrae take his eyes off the wall of green.
‘Story, mate?’
Johnny moved his head a centimetre. ‘Don’t like it. Gimme a minute.’
The skipper nodded, settled in next to a tree, SLR levelled. Behind them the men fanned out and sunk down, every weapon and eye trained outward. There was a thrumming to the silence. Shoey attempted to X-ray the mass of canes. Was Charlie in there, flat-out on the forest floor, fingers curled on triggers, taking aim over black sights?
The air was wrong, holding back like a saved breath. The Cong had many degrees of advantage here. Charlie knew the ground, the plants, night, day, friend, foe, spirit, and neutral. He was born of it, died within it, then became it. And he was a cruel, calculating little bastard.
Seconds passed, compounding Johnny’s perception that the situation was only getting worse. The place was in a state of paralysis but he sensed a signal for action was an instant away. Less.
‘Three o’clock!’ Barry shouted. ‘On the ground!’
The M60 opened up. Pressure waves crossed the road. Dust lifted. Vegetation flew. Shoey hit the dirt and cracked off ten shots knee-high. The bush shook, the sky fell. There was wild movement. The noise lifted, pushed to the clouds, auto and semi-autos firing non-stop. A digger sprawled onto the road, a booted foot at a strange angle, an open hand near a dropped weapon.
Where were the pricks?
Johnny could see none of them when he absolutely hungered to kill all of them. Invisible, they were firing from an impenetrable green blur screened by rolling smoke and rising noise. He emptied his magazine, flicked it out, snapped in another, let go the full twenty. Then possessed by some mad kind of love he found himself crawling like a furious wombat to the downed digger – and with Dave Roberts, they dragged Danny-Boy Jacobs back into the bush by his wrists.
Shoey had never felt fear like it. It filled him, driving out everything except blind strength.
‘Fuck me!’ Robbo yelled, as they hauled Danny into cover. ‘That’ll do! Get down!’ Roberts hit the deck, twisted to his left, the tendons in his neck standing out like reinforcing rods. ‘Medic!’ Then he threw a grenade hard and flat like a cricketer returning to the keeper. ‘Cop that!’
Johnny grabbed his weapon, the grenade exploding across the road as if a teacher had smacked a yard ruler on a desk, demanding silence. But the firing went on as if half the world was involved. Shoey clicked out the empty mag, smacked home another, and blasted off half to suppress the bastards if nothing else. Twenty metres away he saw a thin, black-eyed fighter retreating but his AK was coming up, needle-pointed with a silver bayonet.
It looked like that bastard Khan.
Johnny fired twice.
Later, Johnny had pictured the ambush from Khan’s side of the road, and was able to access another angle on how this firefight had been. He could see the enemy guerrilla in a depression filled with dry leaves, his oiled weapon resting steady on open palms, as he stared into the bush where the Australian patrol had taken up position. Johnny saw Khan blink. Was that a shirt button, the enemy soldier asked himself? A white finger? A green knee? A black barrel? A shifting shadow? Was anyone actually there?
Oh, we’re here, all right, Johnny thought. We’re here big-time.
Khan studied the bush, heard a bird, wished he was one then banished the thought. He was here to fight and if necessary die – but still his guts squirmed, his skin registering every prickling needle of vegetation. Now he felt what might be a scorpion creeping into the folds of his shirt but he could not move.
Do not sting me, brother scorpion, he prayed. If you are there.
Khan sensed his comrades ranged around him. Each was camouflaged with fresh-plucked leaves attached to their helmets and packs. Each was committed to the moment, this one battle of fifty thousand, to kill or be killed or both. Khan also sensed the imaginary scorpion had departed and was grateful. To strengthen his resolve he allowed the feeling of the earth to heat his belly, the power of it to strengthen his heart, its history of victory to put molten steel into his blood. This is our land, he thought. We are men of this country. Get ready, mercenaries, you’re about—
‘Fire!’
The bush opposite blew outwards. Vegetation above Khan’s head was chopped into fragments. Dirt leapt as he fired at weapons firing. Leaves shook and were blown away, then remarkably Khan saw a soldier sprawl onto the track, a large Australian with blond hair. It was so unexpected it was if the man had fallen from the sky.
The enemy had spread. Khan’s section was taking heavy fire. He emptied his weapon across the road, remembering to shoot low. Ramming home a fresh magazine, he saw two soldiers drag the wounded man into the bush, the three so suddenly gone he had no chance to shoot.
Captain Van swore as another M60 opened up. Now a grenade exploded to the right, the bush disintegrating, splinters whirling.
‘We’re out!’ Van swept an arm. ‘Fire and move! Withdraw! Go!’
Yeah, as bloody usual, Johnny thought, but it was with a disgusted admiration he watched Khan and the Charlie fighters evaporate calmly into the bush. Black magic, that was. Vietnamese voodoo. Good tactical soldiering.
The fighters around Khan moved, keeping low. Disciplined and brave, they fired as they backed out along tiny tracks. Then Khan was following, firing from the hip as he gratefully reached a pair of trees. Taking a final look across the road, he saw a prone rifleman with a grease-blackened face, elbow coming up as he levelled his weapon. Khan fired, bullets flicking bamboo fronds, and a year later and three thousand miles away, Johnny was astonished.
Yes, I did see the bastard again, he thought. I really did.
Two rounds sizzled inches above Johnny’s head. And now, like always, Charlie was gone, probably a mile away in ten seconds. But as spooky as the little bastards were, Johnny held on to the sight of the Main Force fighter as proof the pricks were human – so they could be killed, they could be blown up, they were not ghost men, and that was reassuring.
The firing stopped. Men moved towards men. Urgent words travelled short distances. Orders and instructions were fed through the undergrowth like wires. No one stood. Shoey saw an intravenous drip rise, the clear line unfurling like a snake escaping. A radio squawked, the skipper calling for a chopper as Johnny slotted home a fresh magazine, and searched the bush opposite. To underestimate the enemy would get him, or worse still, someone else, shot in the head.
Charlie had flown. Johnny could imagine the fighters backing down tracks more like burrows, carrying their wounded and dead. They had the toughness of bull ants, he thought. You could jump on them with everything you had and they’d still come up fighting. And they’d leave nothing behind but blood, spent cartridges, and the smell of strange men floating among the blue stink of gunpowder.
Shoey stayed prone, SLR into his shoulder. His mind screamed at him to think about a thousand things but he refused. He shut out everything except his duty as a forward scout and a killer of Viet Cong. He knew he was changed. Maybe it occurred to him there and then. Maybe that’s why he mistakenly labelled it as unimportant and temporary.
His brain was hardened. His head was only interested in the business of searching the bush, knowing who was friend, and who should be shot. His old self, a knockabout kid called Johnny Shoebridge, was gone, replaced by a stranger he didn’t dislike or disown because this stranger had proven to be reliable where it was deadly – and that was something of immense value, purchased at great expense.
Johnny was rotated off point. With Lex and Barry he prepared to cross the road. The wounded had been choppered out, Shoey watching the Huey lift off, thinking it the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, vanishing like a dream into wakefulness, leaving him rooted to the spot.
‘You know,’ Lex said, his M16 held in the crook of his arm as if he was an English lord out shooting pheasant, ‘this just seems to be getting more and more dangerous. I’ll be bringing a note from home. I have a severe allergy to violence directed at myself. I’m a student of the arts, John. I’d be a lot happier writing about this in a poem than actually doing it. I need a year off. At least.’
Shoey felt a momentary release of pressure, but his head was jammed with his time up-front and centre. He smiled but wherever he looked a merry-go-round of greenery spun. Thousands of decisions made wiped away thousands of memories held. These firefights were tempering his personality like iron. He was changing by the second although he didn’t know what he was changing into.
Barry, two metres away, shook his head as if Lex was as foreign to him as the VC.
‘That bloody school you went to, Lex, it rooted your mind.’
Lex appeared shocked. Up went his eyebrows. He clamped a free hand to his hip. ‘Really, Barry? Well, amigo, I think you’re being bloody ungrateful, you know.’ He exhaled at length. ‘Just because I told you two boys that forks go on the left? It’s something that’s puzzled Shoey for years. And now he can confidently go ahead and set a table without a worry in the world.’ Lex rai
sed a finger triumphantly. ‘And that’s the benefit of a private school education.’
A column of angry-looking red ants marched past Johnny’s boot. He gave them space. A thought struck him like a forearm to the face.
‘Just wait till we have to defend one of those fire bases.’ He checked his rifle for the tenth time in two minutes. ‘That’s when the shit’ll really hit the fan.’
Lex sniffed hard. ‘Not me, sport. I have a piano exam. Grade Two. We’re a musical family, Shortbridge. My sister is a gifted xylophonist, despite her extremely large tits. We’ll be touring old people’s homes up and down the Gold Coast when we get home, John. I’ll get you a free ticket.’
‘I’m busy.’ Johnny grinned. ‘But I like the sound of your sister.’
The order to move out lifted the patrol from the undergrowth. Shoey, knowing he had no choice, stepped onto the road. Every time he put down a foot he expected to hear a click, and to be engulfed in fire and flying metal. The place reeked of danger. He had the urge to scream or vomit.
The vegetation rose like the hair of a madman. Charlie had had days to booby-trap it, but the patrol moved on and in. This slow-motion pursuit reminded Johnny of the Hare and the Tortoise, yet the Aussies were neither hare nor tortoise, and Charlie was both. He stopped. Something like a badly poached egg hung from a thorny stem; it was the remains of a human eye. Johnny ignored it, searching doubly hard, trying to out-think Charlie’s mine-laying strategy of striking when attention was directed elsewhere.
Clear. As far as he could see. Which wasn’t nearly far enough.
‘God help me,’ he whispered, and meant it.
Moving forward, he considered the company’s upcoming role as defenders of a proposed fire support base. This base, an artillery battery and HQ, would serve as bait to entice the VC to attack in the open and in numbers – an invitation, Shoey thought, Charlie might just decide to take up.
Bigger battles lay ahead. Things would escalate. No one could stop it. Only the generals welcomed it.
Dreaming the Enemy Page 9