Dreaming the Enemy

by David Metzenthen

  ‘Lex, you ever read that book Robinson Crusoe?’ It was one of the only books Johnny had ever finished; a present for his tenth birthday. ‘One bloke on one island. Bloody perfect, that’d be.’

  Lex stopped digging and reached for his smokes. Barry didn’t stop working but slowed down, listening.

  ‘You know, if the boy scouts were running this outfit,’ Lex said thoughtfully, tossing cigarettes left and right, ‘at least there’d be sausages on bread. And we’d be going home at half-past eight. Picked up at the gate by your mum, Baz.’

  ‘Such a poofter.’ Barry speared his entrenching tool into the dirt and picked up the loose cigarette. He lit up and tossed his lighter to Lex. ‘You should be in the navy.’

  Lex laughed, sitting on the edge of his hole, lighting up.

  ‘Barrington,’ he said, ‘I’d prefer to be in the Australian Ballet rather than this bloody cowboy outfit.’

  Johnny managed to grin although he felt closer to crying. Bring on the bloody jets, he thought. Fifty of them. Five hundred! Scare the bastards away; who cares if we don’t kill them?

  ‘Me, too,’ Johnny said. ‘I don’t mind dancing. And there’d be girls. Lots of ’em. Skinny moles but that’s no problem.’ He looked around. The night was about to enfold Fire Base Leslie and draw it in close. Then at some dark hour, the place would explode.

  Johnny marvelled at how Khan’s entire battalion moved silently through his mind towards the Australian base. He watched as line after line of Main Force fighters willingly entered what would be an inescapable tunnel of terror.

  ‘I am so hungry!’ Trung whispered to Khan. ‘I dream of a chicken the size of a pig!’

  ‘Better than a pig the size of chicken,’ Khan replied, trying to keep Trung’s mind off the battle ahead. ‘How about a grilled pig the size of a roasted elephant?’

  Trung grinned and Khan felt as if he had been knifed. The fading light filtered through the branches, gilding the faces of the men. But it seemed to him that darkness walked with the columns, perhaps ally, perhaps enemy. In the distance, through the trees, he figured he could make out the end of the world.

  It was where the bush met the cleared ground around the Australian wire. Arrogantly the enemy had dug into Vietnamese earth and were preparing to defend it as if it was their own.

  ‘This time tomorrow,’ Trung said, ‘we’ll be heading home to the Long Hais, victorious. To that roast elephant.’

  Khan nodded, gripped his assault rifle, and prayed that it might be so. The commanders had decided that this base had to be obliterated. Strategies were in place. Orders had been given. There would be no backing out. They would attack tonight, and attack again, if necessary.

  The hundreds of fighters slowed as each section was told to halt, prepare, rest, and wait. To Khan the soldiers sinking to the ground looked like crops of wheat felled by a sweeping scythe. He squatted, touched the earth, and felt its energy. This was his country. The country of his people. And that does make a difference, Johnny thought. In the most serious of ways. I can see that now.

  ‘Ah,’ said Thang, his AK held muzzle-up. ‘We are here.’ He raised his eyebrows, making it clear to Khan what he meant.

  Khan nodded as he slipped off his pack and rested his weapon. Yes, it was the point of no return. But, he thought, we’ve actually been at that point ever since leaving home. We just didn’t realise.

  No one did, Johnny agreed. We all got into this, digger or Charlie, thinking there’d be an end to it but maybe there never will be; not for the people who were there.

  Thirty-one

  Johnny sat on the step of Malcolm’s hut, lit a Marlboro, and looked at the inlet. The place was so still he felt like he could breathe in the quiet. For a while he smoked then suddenly the smoke tasted flat and useless. It was about time, he thought, to stop thinking and start doing.

  ‘Get up, sport.’ He dropped the cigarette butt and ground it out. ‘And get goin’.’

  There was no choice in what to do next so he started the ute, pumped the accelerator once then drove away from the hut, and Carly, knowing the difference between leaving and arriving was that now he had a destination. Sure, it was a destination where he doubted there’d be any light or joy, but he was going anyway. Not big a drive, either. First stop was a couple of hundred miles away at the most.

  He’d be there late afternoon.

  The stump of Khan’s arm throbbed as he lay on the sleeping mat in a river village that was unknown to him. He often wondered where it had gone, his arm, after the woman doctor had cut it off. Burnt? Buried? Tossed into the jungle? Who knew? He thought of his lost hand and felt grief like that for a lost friend. A hand was such a wonderful thing. He had never realised how incredible hands were until his right one was gone. There would be no healing, that was for sure.

  Yes, healing was always going to be a problem, Johnny agreed. It would be a slow process for all concerned; that’s if they didn’t run out of time first, because he had the feeling he himself was holding a good hundred years’ worth of damage at least.

  On the other side of the hut Son slept, but Khan was wakeful. He felt as if he was still in the rowboat. It was not an unpleasant sensation because travelling on a river meant you were steadily heading towards something, somewhere, or someone. He lay listening to the rain. There was an openness to the country now, no matter how dark the night, and wild the storm.

  The enemy was gone – from Vietnam anyway, if not his head. It was time to cope with the past, a process like wading a vast river. One slip and you were swept away, dragged into deep water, held under, maybe forever. He listened to the thunder rolling. It is no longer the sound of American B-52 bombers or Phantoms, he assured himself. Or perhaps it was, those bastard crews cursed to bomb the spirit world in ghost planes now and for always.

  ‘It is only thunder,’ he whispered, into the crook of his arm. ‘Calm down.’ Then, before he slept, his last thought was of Phuong, and it made him smile. He was on his way to her, wherever she was, no matter what may have happened to her.

  That’s the way, champ, Johnny thought. We might be enemies but I can no longer deny that you are a human, and you love this girl. In fact, I wish you luck in finding her, although she was also an enemy of mine, and I would’ve killed her if I could have. But that was before they signed the piece of paper and brought all that to an end. So get on your way, we’ll see what happens, and what it might mean for the both of us.

  I can’t be any fairer than that, Johnny decided. I cannot.

  Thirty-two

  Shoey could see it when the Fire Support blokes looked at each other. It was there in the tilt of the head, raised eyebrows, proffered smokes, a shared waterbottle, a nod, and the lightest of slaps on the arm.

  ‘See yers later, boys,’ a digger said, heading to a forward mortar position carrying a box of hand grenades. ‘I hope.’

  ‘You will, prick.’ Barry didn’t watch the soldier go; Shoey saw he stared at the perimeter where the last of the daylight did its best to play tricks with the shadows and trees.

  ‘Ever thought of writing Christmas cards, Baz?’ Lex knelt over his stripped-down M16. He held a square of stained white rag. Johnny could smell gun oil, a good honest garage smell tainted with death. ‘That was really nice.’

  Shoey looked at his own rifle. She was ready to go, leaning against a sandbag. In his pockets and pack he had twenty spare mags. On a shelf cut into the side of his foxhole fifteen more were wrapped in plastic. The land pressed. He could feel the enemy, a thousand cobras in a circular woodpile. His fear was incalculable.

  ‘Hey, cheer up, Shoehorn!’ Lex locked his rifle back together with the precision of a magician closing the show. ‘Why the long face? Look at that lovely hole you’ve dug. I can see you’ve spent some time out in the garden. I bet you love getting in among the geraniums. Probably with no clothes on.’

  Johnny looked at Lex. Blond hair, blue eyes, jutting shoulders, bony elbows, holding his M16 like a cowboy hippy; sudden
ly it felt like he was looking at a saint. Then wherever Shoey looked he saw the blokes were all the same. They carried a glow, a holiness, and he knew this place had become the place.

  ‘Yeah. Well. Mmm.’ He smiled, although it hurt. ‘She’ll be right, dig.’ He spat. ‘Look after yerself. You too, Baz.’

  Lex leant his rifle carefully, its muzzle covered with a sock.

  ‘Well, I’m relying on you boys for breakfast in bed. I’ve set the alarm for seven-thirty. Barry, you can squeeze the orange juice. Jonathan, you can do French toast.’ Lex held up a finger. ‘No Vietnamese spring rolls, I don’t think. They’re more of a brunch thing.’

  Barry tossed smokes. ‘Fuckin’ pansies.’ He sighed, lit up then went back to his M60, the machinegun giving off a dull gleam that spoke of pride, preparedness, and deadliness.

  Johnny listened for choppers, hoping there might be one last desperate supply drop before dark. He’d salute any man, weapon, box of ammo, roll of wire, or extra bloody ray gun but there was nothing. Colour, he saw, was evaporating from the sky as if it was being sucked into outer space. The clock was ticking.

  The battalion rose and Khan found he could hardly breathe. Around him was a sea of tiny sounds as the fighting force moved into final positions. There was no clanking of advancing tanks. No planes roaring overhead. No booming of heavy artillery. There was only the sound of rubber-soled sandals, the brushing of cotton and leaves, and the occasional metallic click of small arms being shouldered.

  But I heard you coming, Johnny thought, because those trails that you came in on are trails that I travelled in my nightmares.

  Thang tapped Khan’s elbow and gave him the thumbs-up. Khan understood. Their world had shrunk. Time was limited, filled with love for comrades and country, and commitment to battle. Now he was gliding through the trees, advancing until again they lay down within easy running distance of the open ground.

  Darkness arrived like a falling axe. The fire base was swallowed whole but Khan could feel it bristled low down, tensed like a furious dog. Still, the Australians had barely had one full day to secure the ground. There would be weaknesses, and now that D555 had been joined by two battalions of extremely young but fanatical-looking fighters, Khan felt it might truly be obliterated.

  Bugles sounded through the trees, their tinny braying bouncing in all directions. This, he knew, was intended to unsettle the Australians. It unsettled him too but it also comforted, as if he lay in the middle of a protective net ten kilometres square. He hoped the bush was filled with thousands and thousands of fighters – and when they attacked it would be with a flash of fire like an atomic bomb.

  Tiny lights flared, moved, and blinked. This was another tactic to work on the minds of the men inside the wire. It seemed even the rocks changed places, as if they too were part of the assault force. Nothing was what it seemed except Khan’s fear. Everything possessed a fluidity magnified by the night. The countryside ebbed and flowed with fighters. Shadows moved through shadows in Johnny’s head, the horror real because it was not imagined but remembered.

  Sections of Main Force men slipped forward, running to the flanks. Hundreds of others crawled out onto the open ground to lie like fighters already dead. The silent army was about to throw itself at the enemy base that stood like a boulder in a river – a boulder, Khan thought, that might exist only for a fleeting moment of history. He’d soon see.

  Oh, you’ll see all right, Johnny thought; whether or not you’ll live to remember what you see is a whole other thing.

  Thirty-three

  Johnny pushed the old ute through mile after mile of parched paddocks until he glimpsed the Murray River. It was a strangely dark and sombre waterway, slow-flowing between trees like the passage of time. In his head he held thoughts that were olive-green and brown: army shirts, dried blood, whipping leaves, camouflaged choppers, bodies wrapped in ponchos, and a patchwork of rice seen from the air. Here he was seeing only tones of grey and brown, moisture sucked away by the long days of a relentless summer.

  The dryness agreed with him. It suited his thinness, his narrow purpose. He was nothing but a rusty nail being driven into hard wood, to fix something in place, however un-tradesman-like. He did not know how he was going to deliver his message to Barry’s folks, but deliver it he would. At a white service station at a crossroad he filled up with Caltex. Paying, he asked directions to the Graingers’ fruit block.

  The woman, small and pale, took his ten-dollar note and put it slowly in the till. She glanced at his green shirt then set to work on his face.

  ‘Did you know Barry, love? In the army?’

  Shoey could see the thread this woman held, as fine as cotton, as strong as wire. Barry was known here; his family, their way of doing things. They came in for petrol, bread, and milk, and had done so for decades. Barry had stood right here in a cut-off red Wrangler shirt buying Coke and smokes. This image, this truth, unleashed a flash of grief that almost brought Johnny to his knees. He blinked.

  ‘Yeah, I did,’ he said. ‘We were mates. In Vietnam.’ That was all he had but it was rock solid.

  The woman pointed to the west. Carefully she gave Johnny directions that included a red shed, a left turn, and a mile of driving. Then she walked out from behind the counter, as if to get a better look at him. In a short-sleeved blue dress, dark hair going grey, she reminded him a bit of his mother.

  ‘D’you want a cuppa tea, love?’ She put a cool hand on his forearm but Johnny felt it burn. ‘Before you drive out? Or you can eat with us, if you like. We’ve got a nice little spare room, too. You could see the Graingers in the morning when you’re fresh. You’d be most welcome.’

  Johnny had to bolt. He could feel his eyes darting like a pair of cornered rabbits. If he lost it here, he might never get it back. He had not factored this in.

  ‘No, thanks, I’m fine, really. Thanks very much.’ He backed out, hand up. The pull of his ute drew him like steel to a magnet. ‘Thanks. But I’d better go.’

  The woman nodded. Perhaps she’d glimpsed a sliver of his panic. ‘Godspeed, love.’ She followed him, a step or two behind, concern so obvious she walked as if on automatic. ‘You need anything, you come straight back. Drive safe. You know where you’re goin’, don’t yer? You know where we are.’

  Johnny nodded five times then thankfully, eventually, drove away. The directions he’d been given were gone but the road was like a runway and the fence posts like old friends. So he drove the way he found himself heading, clueless.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said softly, reaching for his smokes, seeing a red shed and a dirt road. ‘I call time-out, boys.’

  He turned off the bitumen, stopped on gravel, and got out. With a dying wattle and a piece of road kill for company, he smoked in stillness so complete it was as if he was the only human being within a hundred miles.

  I cannot tell Barry’s people everything, he thought. My job is to look after that stuff and tend it like a garden. Then it has to be locked up behind a high stone wall where eventually something will grow over it. Hopefully bloody flowers and not cancer.

  Son had traded whiskey for a parachute and cigarettes for an American Ka-Bar knife. The knife he handed to Khan as they drifted away from the village. I can see, Johnny mused, that you guys love that quality US gear. It’s just a pity we decided to fight over it, and not simply sell it to you cheap, because that would have saved a lot of trouble.

  ‘The Yanks make good things,’ Son said.

  Khan hefted the knife. Its handle was stained. There was a silver mark on the blade that might have been made by a glancing bullet. It was indeed a good thing but he was tempted to drop it into the river.

  ‘Also the most awful things in the world.’ He slid the knife into its sheath. ‘Then we have to pick up after them like spoiled children.’

  ‘Keep the knife, Khan.’ Son dipped an oar. ‘Use it as a letter opener.’ He laughed. ‘Or to free a princess from her tower.’

  Khan did not really want the knife. Jo
hnny did not blame him. Memories were the most powerful souvenirs from a war. Memories and scars. Enough was enough.

  Thirty-four

  Wherever Shoey’s eyes lingered, things seemed to crawl. In the trees there was an oceanic blackness where lights blinked and bugles blasted strange, sour notes. If anyone had asked him how he felt he could not have told them. The night gripped the earth with claws and there was a seething that reached to the stars. No one was going anywhere. It was way too late for that.

  ‘Our little brown friends are gathering,’ Lex said. ‘How’d I get here again? I can remember jumping on the Number 16 down St Kilda Road, but after Luna Park, and having fairy floss, John, it’s all a blank.’

  ‘Raffle.’ Barry’s voice, from his sandbagged position, was muffled. ‘Winner.’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’ Lex’s face appeared over the wide lip of his hole. ‘I’d forgotten about that, Barry-boy! I was hoping it’d be a Yammy dirtbike but this is far more exciting!’

  ‘Fuck.’ The word shivered in Shoey’s lungs. ‘What time is it?’ He prayed daylight might be a remote possibility.

  ‘I make it three thirty-thr—’ Lex’s voice was blown away as the night lit up. Rockets and mortars exploded and the ground jumped. From twenty places M60s opened fire, turning the air into supersonic highways as streams of red and green tracer crossed paths. ‘Holy shit!’

  Shoey looked out of his shell scrape. He could see nothing but flashes and hear nothing but firing. Then, over the explosions, he heard yelling. It could have come from a thousand throats and probably did. A human stampede was crossing the cleared ground. Charlie was running headlong for the wire like a demented football crowd.

  Straining to see, Shoey fired off five rounds then another five at distant movement. The kicking of the SLR banished his nervousness but not his fear. He was fighting for his life and would kill anyone in any way possible.