Suddenly, Johnny Shoebridge didn’t want to poison anything. He didn’t give a stuff about bloody blackberries ruining decent land. Or the cover they’d give to rabbits. He’d had enough of this liquid pox that clung shining to the soft leaves of the English weeds. He’d knock this slope over and that’d be it. Johnny-boy was over and out. This wasn’t the army.
‘What shit!’ Anger rose as he pumped and sprayed. ‘What utter shit!’
The chemical stink poisoned his thoughts. Just the idea of using it, inhaling the drifting mist, made him sick – and ten minutes later, the slope finished, he walked away from the backpack, the feel of a sweat-soaked shirt more like a memory of the jungle than work just done.
He lit a smoke and gazed at low mountains rising from unbroken bush. No VC in there, sport, he thought. That’s the good news. She’s nothin’ but a bloody garden so cheer up! This, he conceded, was a stupid thought, but the truth held value. He might be half-mental but he was safe.
Glancing around, he saw Malcolm striding down the track in the company of a dark-skinned bloke who wore a red-checked shirt and green work pants. Maybe it was the guy who had been fishing on the other side of the river, Johnny wondered, and uncrossed his arms in an effort to look like an obedient employee and not a good-for-nothing hothead.
Malcolm, stopping, allowed his gaze to travel to the discarded pump.
‘All done, John?’
‘Up to and includin’ this section.’ Johnny bracketed the gully, a smoke between his fingers. ‘But the spray’s makin’ me crook. I’ll have to go on to somethin’ else.’ Or take off, he guessed. Your call, boss.
Malcolm considered Johnny’s response. Or perhaps how it was put.
‘It’s never affected anyone before.’ The tall man spoke slowly. ‘I’ve used it myself. It’s off-the-shelf from the supplier.’
Johnny shrugged. Carefully he ground out his Marlboro and dug the butt into the dirt with his heel. He wasn’t angry, but he’d taken delivery of a solid block of uncooperation. That poisonous crap he would not use. He said nothing.
‘All right.’ Malcolm pointed to a rocky corner. ‘We’ll move on. Perhaps you can give Thomas a hand piling those stones so I can get the tractor in there.’
‘No worries.’ Johnny was pleased to agree because his next move was to walk away, get his gear, and ride off into the sunset.
The big farmer, he decided, didn’t look quite as pleased but with a nod he turned back up the hill. Johnny introduced himself to Thomas, a solemn man who shook hands lightly, as if acknowledging Johnny’s presence but nothing else. Fair enough, thought Shoey. This is your patch, mate. I know something about that story.
As Johnny carried rocks he brought up the image of the one-armed Khan fishing off the old village jetty. Well, the bastard had to do something to fill in his days, Johnny figured. No disability pensions for the communists, no sir. So it seemed reasonable Khan might be fishing, and keeping an eye on his fish stocks while Johnny kept his mind’s eye on him.
So what do you think of the spirit world now, feller, Shoey mused. After the B52s shattered the earth and your people were vaporised? How’d your spirits go with that? Surely that would’ve blown the theory of any sort of a protective higher power? That the gods were solely on your side?
Not entirely, Johnny decided, on Khan’s behalf. It was the North Vietnamese point of view that Trung and Thang had brave, good, and patriotic souls, no matter what the world had dealt to them. And then Khan put forward the theory that if war unleashes evil then might it also prove the existence of good spirits?
Go on, Johnny allowed. Since you’re on a roll, I’ve got the time, and a couple of close mates who deserve a decent life hereafter, if things might be balanced up a bit at this late stage.
Khan tapped cigarette ash. Maybe, he thought, in the next world good might wash away evil like the tide erased footprints?
Could be, sport, Johnny thought, as he put another rock on the pile.
Khan also considered that perhaps the courageous souls of Thang and Trung were helping steer the life of bad brother, Son, in a more worthy direction.
That too sounded reasonable, Johnny decided, just as it was reasonable that one day he would head to Melbourne to see Jilly and find out once and for all if there was anything between them left to salvage.
It was also not beyond Shoey’s imagination to consider old enemies might travel along similar roads in order to reach an acceptable peace – or at least an honourable parting of the ways. Incredible things did happen in war, and after. His surviving those two massive battles for the fire-bases proved that.
The pile of rocks increased, like the weight of silence between Johnny and Thomas, until Johnny announced it was time for a smoke. Together they sat by the pile, Thomas not smoking, both looking down on bush that rose and fell like a swelling sea.
‘How’s it go workin’ for Malcolm?’ Johnny took a drag. ‘He seems like a fair-enough sort of a bloke.’
Thomas nodded, with one hand on a rock as if it was a child’s head that he was blessing.
‘He’s orright.’ He did not look at Johnny. ‘He said you been to Vietnam. A couple of the black fellers round here went, too.’
Shoey lounged on the grassy ground. It was nice to be close to it. He imagined the springy red worms, the fat white grubs, the soil held together by fine white roots like veins. He’d never had the same feeling in the jungle. The Vietnamese landscape simply didn’t offer him the cover he sought. Or the connection that assured him he was fighting for a just cause.
‘All the black fellers that I saw over there,’ Johnny said, ‘were bloody excellent soldiers. Terrific. Naturals. Top blokes.’
Thomas appeared to process this information as he stared down the grassy slope.
‘Billy Redpath’s still walkin’ it off. Can’t play footy or nothin’. Drinkin’ too much. Smokin’ too much. So he’s walkin’.’
Johnny thought about that. ‘Where’s he walkin’ to?’
Thomas watched over bush. ‘Round here.’ He nodded. ‘His country.’
Johnny did not find that odd. When you found yourself in the wrong space, or with the wrong people, the bad stuff would come bolting out of the blue hard and fast. Better to be a moving target in a happy land. Well, as good a plan as any.
‘I’m walkin’ too, mate.’ Shoey rested on an elbow, appreciating Thomas’s air of difference and indifference. ‘Just about as far away from Vietnam as I can get.’
Thomas looked at Johnny. The sun polished the curved bones of his face.
‘Billy don’t talk. He just walk.’
Johnny took a last drag and felt an idea stir in the compressed smoke in his lungs. At some point he would have to visit Barry’s family and Lex’s. Not only did this have to be done, he needed and wanted to do it. And soon. Of course it wouldn’t be good. It would be bloody terrible, but there was no way around that.
He glanced at Thomas, who stared at the inlet as if the view meant just about everything. No wonder Charlie fought so hard, Johnny thought. You didn’t cough up twenty thousand years of history to foreign bastards intent on bombing you back to the Stone Age. You didn’t bow to generals who drank duty-free whiskey while they ordered the destruction of an entire country’s rice crop. You didn’t give in to invaders, full stop.
Shoey blew out smoke. Politicians could look at a map and see where the mountains and rivers were, but that didn’t tell them anything about the people. The Vietnamese had never been beaten. You could have found that out in the library. But no, the bigwigs wanted their answers spelled out in blood, and that is exactly what they got. This I know to be true, Shoey thought, because I saw it happen.
‘Give my regards to Billy.’ Johnny gave Thomas half a salute. ‘I mean it.’
Thomas nodded but said nothing.
Twenty-two
Shoey lay eyes-shut on his stretcher in the tent, rifle by his head, listening to the night sounds. There was a murmuring like the sea but it wasn’t wate
r. It was the movement of air over a land of paddy, jungle, mountains, rivers, marshes, and bush. It was the gathering of a million whispers in foreign words and it held no comfort or peace.
The Australian base felt like a fully armed pirate ship, he reckoned, in the middle of an enemy ocean. He could feel the massive weight of the guerrilla army out there in the dark. There were hundreds of thousands of the tough skinny strange cruel little men he’d only once or twice seen close up, their faces even more secretive in death.
Day and night, they were heading south down roads, tracks, trails, and waterways. They were living in tunnels and caves and on boats. They were holed up in the hills, villages, and jungle outposts. And they were always planning in that singsong, quack-quack language that no Aussie he’d ever met could understand. There were well-trained battalions. There was village rabble, but their purpose was singular and overwhelming. Get the invaders out. This was the whisper that Shoey and rest of the diggers could hear, a whisper that never, ever stopped.
Until he had hit the jungle, Johnny had never felt the magnetic pull of his own country. Now Australia was a dream as bright as a bloody Bristol paint chart. The sun back home was the same simple yellow as Golden Circle pineapple. The people were hardly mysterious. There were no punji stakes set to spear you through the guts. No stolen landmines to blow your legs off. No kid giving you a grenade as an early birthday present. But this place, Vietnam, existed in the shadow of shadows as complex as an endlessly shuffled pack of playing cards.
As Shoey drifted through the haunted landscape of a soldier’s sleep, he sensed the rustle and sigh of the VC moving. And five seconds after the first mortar rounds hit, he was running blindly through smoke and fire, love and hate, shouting and shooting, caught in the strike zone where armies collided.
Outside the wire, inside the compound of Johnny’s mind, Khan hugged the ground. With volcanic intensity the Australian base opened up with artillery, M60 machineguns and semi-automatic rifles. Five seconds later the thumping whump of mortar shells kicked Johnny and Khan in the kidneys, as opposing crews went at it punch for punch like fat men fighting. In midair the shells crossed before plummeting dumbly to earth. And there, luckily or unluckily, an explosion might be traded for body parts.
Khan was ordered forward to probe the defences and provide covering fire for the sappers. Stiff with fear he crawled out of the trees. Beside him were four brother fighters. In front, two sappers snaked away across the ground that had been cleared by the Australians.
‘This is not good!’ Thang hissed, the low belly of the sky slashed with red and green tracer. ‘This is hard!’
Khan had no time to reply as an M60 from the base sent fifty rounds scorching a metre over their heads. Now a searchlight joined the battle, relentlessly exploring as grenades like hammer blows exploded on either side of the fence. The sappers were at the wire, cutting carefully, wearing packs loaded with explosives. So far so good; the team was unseen, working in the roaring flashes of the firefight.
A thought touched Khan like a warm hand. Thank goodness Trung was on a scouting mission to an Australian base sixty kilometres away. As a sapper-in-training, tonight, he would’ve been sprinting with the others towards the artillery batteries. There, he would’ve found himself within the jaws of a hundred barking weapons that sought to take his head off.
An explosion rocked the ground and a fireball rose. Within a circle of moving light Khan could see men, artillery, and tree stumps. Blackness returned, the gunfire ceaseless as he waited, pressed to the ground, for the sappers to return.
It seemed impossible he would not be hit. Every time he fired, an enemy pinpointed the muzzle blast, and sent back a bullet or three. Metal flew, artillery thundered, and just when Khan felt he was to be killed a bugle sounded. The raid was over.
Thang shouted, ‘We wait twenty seconds for the saps! All right?’
Khan nodded. A pendulum, like a guillotine blade, swung over the back of his neck as he hugged the ground. Then, spotting a lone figure leap out through the wire, he and Thang turned, to scuttle like crabs for distant cover. The other sapper, they knew, was gone as surely as yesterday.
I knew you were out there, Khan, Johnny thought. Or someone just like you.
Shoey shot at shadows and the brief fiery stab of muzzle blasts. The bush appeared to swarm with fast-moving fireflies. If he hit anyone, he didn’t know it, as the enemy remained virtually and intentionally invisible. Lex, beside him, smacked home a fresh magazine and worked a round into the breech.
‘They’re just stuffin’ aroun—’
An explosion ripped the sky, smacking down every other sound for the count of three. A mushroom cloud of light and heat floated away like a hot air balloon.
‘Er, maybe not.’ Lex ducked into his weapon pit. ‘That was the real fuckin’ thing. And I don’t mean Coca-Cola, John. Or marra-yu-whana. I think that was what some people around here might call a bomb.’
There was screaming and controlled shouting. Two more machineguns opened up in crazy counterpoint to a bugle that sprayed the darkness with notes that rose and fell with no rhyme or reason Johnny could detect.
It was as if a switch had been hit. The firing beyond the wire stuttered, like the last few hailstones on a tin roof in a summer thunderstorm.
‘Geddown, you stupid pricks!’ Barry yelled, lying prone behind the heavy weapon perched on its black bipod. ‘It ain’t over, you dumb bastards!’
Lex laughed, his teeth bright in the dark. He shouted back, ‘Barry! Is it your birthday, mate? Is that your idea of a speech?’
Johnny stayed in his pit, pretty much stuck in the mud anyway. Reloading, heat from his weapon rising into his face, he listened as the sound of firing eased – only to make way for the sounds of the wounded.
‘Better go see what we can do.’ Lex stood, coated with mud, the butt of his M16 tucked into his hip. ‘The arty boys have copped it. Bring the bandaids.’
Around them men appeared from the ground. The base was like an ant nest stabbed with a stick. Shoey, Barry, and Lex headed towards the artillery battery that had been bombed by sappers. Sandbags had been hurled sideways and a mortar was on its side. Men crouched over men down. Orders and questions cut across the cries of the wounded. The ground seeped fumes. Somewhere a shot was fired.
‘Nightmare on a loop.’ Lex lit three cigarettes, handing two over. ‘Anyway, welcome to Marlboro Country, boys. I hope my horse is all right.’
Johnny watched as the docs and medics went calmly to work.
‘This was just a test,’ he said vaguely. ‘Two thousand would’ve turned up if they were really fair dinkum.’
‘Ding dong.’ Lex inhaled long and hard. ‘Avon calling. Next week, Aussie pigs, we bring tanks.’
Johnny grinned, and saw Barry shake his head as he scanned the perimeter, his M60 held across his hip. Outside the wire, fires burned eerily as if the country was devouring itself. What did Bazza see out there? He saw the future, Johnny decided – because that was the direction it always came from.
In a solid downpour the boys began rebuilding the artillery position with sandbags. Johnny thought the place had the soft dreamy look of a chalk drawing fading in the rain. But when he found part of a foot, he knew this was no dream but a man-made thing, and that surely someone must take the blame.
Captain Van seemed happy, Khan thought, as the fighters travelled through farmland towards the Long Hais, the haunted hills that dominated Johnny Shoebridge’s mindscape. This was despite the loss of two sappers, three other fighters, and twenty wounded, one who’d been shot through the stomach and was about to die.
‘The Australians think we are weak.’ Van strolled around as the men stopped in a dark village to fill their water bottles. ‘They’ll soon see that we’re not.’
Khan sat slumped against a stone wall. The people of the settlement kept out of sight. A wise decision, he decided. After a firefight the captain was in the mood for anything. Khan had seen him execute two informers w
ith his handgun after an ambush went wrong. Thang lit a hand-rolled cigarette, drew on it, and passed it over.
‘The little boss has big plans.’ He indicated the small man with a subtle nod. ‘Seizing a fire base is one of them. The impressive victory.’
Khan knew this was true because it had to be true. The war could not be won by harassment alone. Van was a man who studied history and applied what he learned ruthlessly. Within weeks the northern battalions would hit the Australians with force as unexpected in the south as an avalanche. But it wouldn’t be a wall of ice and snow but waves of men and weapons that would bury the tall white bastards twice; once when they were overrun and again when their countrymen put their skulls in the ground.
‘It will be a glorious battle.’ Khan used the word glorious instead of victorious, because he also knew that not every battle had to be won to win the war. ‘One way or another.’
It was about bleeding the enemy into submission. Even if it took a hundred years and five million dead. The French had discovered that at Dien Bien Phu, in a deep valley where they were slaughtered in their thousands. Khan expelled a breath. Even his cheeks felt tired. These battles were like the universe, he thought. They went on forever, raiders falling on Vietnam like meteors, the people fighting back with everything from garden hoes to a handful of Russian MiG jets.
He looked up, hoping to see the silver spread of stars. Instead it began to rain. Someone said comrade Truc had died. Dispirited, Khan rested his forehead against the stock of his AK, and shut his eyes.
The only way out of the fighting was to fight. No mercy, no forgiveness, this dangerous road had to be travelled until a final victory, as bright as the sun, was achieved – but to get there, Khan knew D555, and hundreds of thousands of others, would have to travel many miles through the treacherous dark.
And we were always waiting, Johnny thought, with firepower.
Dreaming the Enemy Page 11