Smoky Joe's Cafe

by Bryce Courtenay

  Shorty starts talking now, doing what he’s always done, explaining things. I remember now that he thinks of himself as a bit of a war historian, him being all those years in the permanent army like.

  ‘The problem begins with the war we were in,’ he says. ‘It turned out different to the other wars Australia’s been in. We marched away heroes and come back to a country that didn’t want to know us. It’s going out, drums and bugles, flags flying, sheilas crying, then, four years later, they flew our wounded back at two in the morning when the whole bloody country’s asleep. That’s never happened before to a soldier fighting for Australia.’

  Ocker Barrett interrupts, grinning. ‘I had to bang on the kitchen door for twenty minutes to wake my mum up. I’m doing it with me elbows because of me bandaged hands and it’s hurting like hell. When she opens the door, she’s got her curlers in, them twisted bits of paper, and she’s got the same crook-looking dressing-gown she wore before I left for Vietnam. She thinks she’s seen an apparition or something, me standing there at the kitchen door at four o’clock in the morning with me hands bandaged!

  “Is that you, David?” she says, real frightened, stretching out her hand to touch me, see it’s really me and not a ghost with white bits sticking out the sleeves.’

  ‘Me too!’ Bongface laughs. ‘Exact same! Me old man come out to answer the door, coughin’ and swearin’, he’s still half pissed from the night before, “Who the fuck are you?” he asks me, then begins to shout for me mum. “Mary, Mary, our boy’s dead, they’s gorn an’ killed him!”’ Bongface laughs. ‘He thinks I’m come out of the Dreamtime to visit him or somethin’!’

  The rest of us came back on the HMAS Sydney, which was known as the ‘Vung Tau Ferry’. We marched in Sydney but the crowds, that’s a laugh, the people who bothered to come out, didn’t exactly give us a ticker-tape parade! I have to be honest, I didn’t give a continental, I was home again and Wendy come down from Curra-wong Creek and was there to meet me. Me mum’s been long passed away and the old bloke died while I was away, so Wendy’s the nearest thing I have for a relative.

  Shorty carries on with his lecture to us, we’ve heard it all before, but we let him rave on a bit anyway, don’t do no harm being reminded. ‘Like I said before, Vietnam was different. To cut a long story short, some silly bugger in America comes up with something called The Domino Theory.’ Shorty looks around, making sure we’re all still paying attention.

  ‘You know, like dominoes set up on their end in a long line, tap the first one, it hits the next, knocks it over and so on until they’ve all fallen down.

  ‘Some prize prick in the Pentagon persuaded the world that Vietnam was the number-one communist domino controlled by China and if we didn’t take it out of the line, teach them once and for all not to try anything on, then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and so on and so forth would follow until they overran Australia.

  ‘Every bastard buys it, in particular the Catholic Church who are very big in Vietnam, they put the heavy on the DLP, who go to work on the Liberals and Bob Menzies. Pronto, we’re in boots ‘n’ all.

  ‘Sounds bloody stupid now, but at the time with the big Russian bear grunting and thumping its chest and the mighty Chinese dragon huffin’ and puffin’, the idea of them two big Commie countries threatening our way of life sounded pretty bloody convincing to us local cowboys who thought we were bulletproof anyway. We had to stop the number-one domino falling and we were just the blokes to do the job.’

  Shorty senses he’s goin’ on a bit. ‘Okay, there’s not much more,’ he says. ‘We were going to send in the cavalry and come home heroes, the new ANZACS. The folk across the pond, our good neighbours the Kiwis, were comin’ along as well, only a handful, a token artillery battery to start with and an infantry rifle company later on but that made us sort of ANZACS. History repeatin’ itself, Gallipoli and all that.’

  We all clap, sending him up. ‘Jesus, Shorty, you ain’t changed none, still got the gift of the gab. You would’ve made a bloody good DJ bullshitting on American Forces Radio, mate,’ Lawsy says to our laughter.

  Yeah, but Shorty is damn right. We reckoned we’d done a good job and deserved the same as the diggers in the other wars.

  I’ve never marched in an Anzac Day Parade, haven’t joined the RSL neither. Some of the blokes tried to do both and soon got jack of being told by some half-pissed old digger that they hadn’t been in a real war, not like the Second World War, that we were a bunch of little boys who liked to whinge. Maybe they didn’t understand the different nature of the Vietnam guerilla war, but when the RSL sided with the government over the Agent Orange issue, that was the finish. We didn’t want a bar of them or the parade.

  Shorty’s not quite finished yet, despite the applause that tells him we know the rest. He looks at Gazza and Bongface. ‘Yeah, you’re dead right. They were telling us that what we done and what we’d been through meant bugger all. “Go home, little fella, have a good night’s sleep and forget you ever went to Vietnam and fought with our good friends, the Yanks. Mind you, they’re still our good friends, ‘All the way with LBJ’ but just don’t talk about it. Okay? Now bugger off, soldier.”

  ‘I know we weren’t alone in this. The big brush-off. The brothers in America copped the same treatment as us and they’re suffering from all the same problems Vietnam caused. They’ve got the same kind of shit-for-brains leaders. What pisses me off is the politicians who started it all and then ran for cover and Veterans Affairs and the RSL who treated us like we’d disgraced the colours, that we’d let the fighting tradition of Australia down.’

  ‘Yeah, remember when some bastard reporter writes in the Sydney Morning Herald,’ Ocker now says, ‘how we were issued with American rations and served hot three-course meals delivered by chopper when we were out on patrol? Gordon flamin’ Blow, or whatever that Frog who does French cooking is called. Turkey and jello, canned fruit, chocolate, cookies and Coke. How we was livin’ in the lap of luxury, about the soft war for dolly birds that we’re fighting in! I’d like to have found that bastard and taken him and his typewriter into the jungle for a couple of weeks! Make the bloody idjit eat his words!’

  ‘Jesus, yes! Them Yank ration packs,’ Animal shouts, missing the whole point, ‘They was bloody good!’

  Animal was the only one who would carry the Yank rations intact, the rest of us would get rid of at least half the stuff in them. They weighed a bloody ton, about three times as much as our own rations. One Yank ration meal was more than our own rations for the entire day. When you went out on patrol your pack and gear weighed 80 pounds, we’d even cut off the handle of our toothbrushes, squeeze half the toothpaste out the tube, anything to keep the weight down. You carried nothing you didn’t have to, in the heat it was much better to eat less than carry more.

  Animal’s got his name because he’ll eat and drink anything and throw up and start all over again and, as well, make a serious attempt to screw every bar girl in Vietnam.

  Here’s an Animal joke he tells everyone he meets: ‘Vietnam is a place where a Nog in black pyjamas carries two buckets of shit across his shoulders using one stick and then uses two sticks to eat a bowl of shit.’ See what I mean?

  Macca now comes in. ‘Christ, yes, I remember I once got one o’ them Chinese fortune cookies in my Yank rations and I break it open and feed the crumbs to the chomper ants and read me fortune on this slip of paper inside. “Your ship of life will always sail in calm, contented waters, romance will come your way by the next full moon.” We’re in the second day of a three-week operation in the jungle, it’s full moon in two nights and just after sunset on the night of the full moon, we walk into a group of Viet Cong strolling along the river and I reckon I’ve got a choice; I can fuck Charlie and find true romance under the light of the moon or sink the ship of contentment and shoot the bastard who’s shooting at me and get some real satisfaction.’

  Rations, yes, it’s true, we sometimes used American rations and they were better than our o
wn, which wouldn’t have been too hard. But here’s the first thing most people don’t understand about us and the Americans. Though we fought in the same war, we didn’t fight in the same areas. We had our own area of operation to fight in, us in Phuoc Tuy province and them pretty much everywhere else in South Vietnam.

  We didn’t even get invited to any of their concerts when Bob Hope and all of their sexy singers and movie stars came to entertain. As a matter of fact, our company didn’t even see Col Joye and Little Pattie when they come to entertain us, because we was otherwise occupied in a stoush down the road that’s come to be called the Battle of Long Tan.

  True, we were supported by American air power and their choppers, along with our own. They often brought out our wounded or ferried us from the Kanga Pad at Nui Dat to our operational areas or directly into combat. This last was known as a ‘hot insertion’. They also dropped ammunition where we needed it, and their assault helicopters, called Cobras, rocketed and strafed in really close support for us.

  I recall one time, it was early morning and we were out on patrol, when suddenly the sky lit up as a squadron of B52 bombers dumped several hundred 750-pound bombs on the Long Hai Hills just ahead of us. The earth shook, like there was an earthquake going on. Some of us were thrown to the ground.

  We’d been using our hexe stoves at the time to ‘brew up’ and I can remember the stove and the mugs on them just took off and these arcs of boiling water criss-crossing like in slow motion twenty feet above the ground. We were thrown onto our arses, yet the bomb drop was several miles away. It was the most awesome spectacle I’ve ever seen. If Charlie was somewhere underneath copping this load of instant death out of a drizzling monsoon sky, and I guess they must have been, the Long Hai Hills were a favourite place for the Noggies to build bunkers and underground caves, they would’ve been bloody uncomfortable for a bit. I’ll say this for the Yanks, they never did things by halves.

  We also used their artillery a lot of the time. Matter of fact, located about a mile from Nui Dat was an American battery of self-propelled eight-inch guns, really big buggers. They’d be used for long-range targets or for targets that needed busting open. You could always hear their big kerboom over the sound of the other artillery. You could usually sleep through a salvo of the other guns but not those big bastards. And sometimes they’d fire H & I all through the bloody night. H & I means ‘Harassment and Interdiction’. Our artillery would fire at irregular intervals at VC resupply routes and known areas thick with Charlie’s bunker systems. The idea was to keep the VC from thinking they owned the night, which they most surely did. Make them know that something nasty could land in their midst at any time and almost anywhere.

  I suppose it worked, nobody really knew.

  ‘Remember H & I?’ I now say, ‘The big guns goin’ all day, all night. Remember how every time one of the real big bastards went off it would make the dunny seats in the camp fly open? If you happened to be sitting on one having a quiet crap, you got a blast of hot air up the arse that fair made you take off.’

  This brings another laugh. Funny how you remember the little things. At Nui Dat they’d dig a big pit about fifteen yards long and put a cement slab over it with holes to accommodate about thirty cement cones upon which they placed dunny seats, the whole thing in the open, no walls, just a tin roof to keep out the sun and then the rain in the monsoon season.

  Naturally, after a while, the pit would get a trifle on the nose and besides would become the home to all manner of insects who were partial to a bit of a chomp on the family jewels.

  ‘Remember The Blowfly?’ I ask and there’s nods all round. The Blowfly was a private in the Hygiene Unit. He’d mix three gallons of diesel fuel with maybe a quarter of petrol and pour it down the dunny holes and set the whole box and dice alight, kill the creepy crawlies and turn the turds to ash in one big whoof of flame.

  One day something happens to The Blowfly, he’s reported sick or he’s got a leave pass or something and they send in an assistant Blowfly. The new bloke gets the mix vicki-verka and a quarter of a gallon of diesel with three of petrol and blows the whole lot to kingdom bloody come. We reckon there must have been VC in the jungle wearing dunny seats for collars, wondering what next the Yanks at H & I were gunna think of doing to them.

  The only thing the movies seemed to get half right is showing the street scenes in Saigon City and other towns, the whorehouses, the girls and the cheap bars with the walls made out of flattened beer cans. The strip. You could see the same thing in Bangkok or pretty well in any other place in Asia.

  In Vung Tau, where we’d go for a seventy-two-hour break, this particular area was known as the front beach and the back beach, with ‘The Flags’ the centre of the front beach. There were hundreds of bars and brothels, or brothels with bars as most of them were. The front beach was where we went and the back beach was out of bounds. The rumour was the back beach was where the Viet Cong went for their rest and recreation.

  The subject of Vung Tau now comes up and Flow pipes in, ‘There was this time Animal and me got separated from you blokes at The Flags. We’re a bit pissed and Animal’s thrown up a couple of times and someone’s told him the Viet Cong pussy is better than our own, that they’re keeping the best for the enemy. I’m the only one who’s stupid enough to believe this or to think it’s a good idea. So him and me decide to go to the back beach.

  ‘We get to this bar and it’s filled with Vietnamese blokes dressed the same as usual in black pyjamas. We order a couple a beers and two bar girls come and sit with us. They don’t look much different to the ones we’ve just left behind. Pretty soon the locals are sending us over half a dozen beers and we’re returning the favour and we’re having a bit of a laugh, though we can’t understand their lingo nor they ours. Then suddenly one of them says something and they all get up and go out the back and next thing they’re back and they’re carrying AK47s.

  “Shit, Flow!” Animal whispers, “It’s time for the last rites and there’s no flamin’ priest in sight!” But the Viet Cong smile and nod and give us the thumbs up as they leave. Animal turns to me and says, “Whaddaya say, Flow? I think I prefer the sheilas back at The Flags!”’

  ‘Yeah, and I got the clap that time too!’ Animal remarks.

  This brings up a real big snort all round, because Animal got the clap every time. In fact about 25 per cent of the battalion had it at one time and the MO decides it’s way out of order and he calls each company separately into the mess for a bit of a chinwag and general dressing-down. ‘You’ve all been issued with condoms and you’re not using them!’ he shouts down the microphone. ‘The VD statistics in the battalion have reached alarming proportions and you’ve got to clean up your act!’

  The doc walks up to this big blackboard and he takes a piece of yellow chalk and on one side he writes a huge ‘60%’, filling half the blackboard, and on the other side he writes ‘20%’ just as big.

  ‘Right, get this into your thick skulls, gentlemen,’ he says. ‘Sixty per cent of the prostitutes in Vung Tau have venereal disease and 20 per cent have tuberculosis!’ He pauses to let this sink in.

  Suddenly Animal shouts from the back, ‘Does that mean we only fuck the ones who cough?’

  For us, though, Vietnam wasn’t an occasional leave pass to the bright lights of Vung Tau but endless patrols and operations in the jungle, keeping Charlie on the move. Sometimes these operations would last five weeks where you seldom got to wash and you shaved every morning using the sweat on your face for lubrication. At night, if you were lucky, you erected your hutchie. Often, though, we just wrapped the hutchie around us and threw ourselves on the ground to sleep. You suffered prickly heat, crotch rash and footrot. The dust in the dry season was filled with fleas and when the monsoon rains came they brought the leeches and the mozzies and the mud. You’d spend an hour every night under your hutchie, wet and miserable, burning the leeches off every part of your body with the tip of a cigarette.

  That was just for
openers and had nothing to do with the fact that Charlie was stalking you and you him. If you were an ordinary infantryman, a grunt, you knew nothing about the operation you were on and told bugger all. Fortunately, in our platoon we had Shorty. He had the ear of the platoon commander and, if the truth be known, probably the company commander as well. Most of the time he seemed to have some idea of what we were supposed to be doing and where we were supposed to end up and he’d tell us corporals who ran the platoons, so that, as section leaders, we’d know what was expected of us. But the grunts in many of the other platoons didn’t know if they were comin’ or goin’.

  We were the best-trained jungle fighters in Vietnam. Possibly the world. Our instructors at Canungra in Queensland had fought in Korea and in the Malayan Emergency and some had even fought in Vietnam with the training team. They knew what to expect, how to train us in the craft of jungle fighting for what they knew was to come.

  But, for your average grunt, it was still a bloody big mystery. We were against blokes in black pyjamas with AK47s who were fighting and dying for their country, their wives and kids, and maybe even for something else they believed in. We were chasing them around their own jungle backyard shitting ourselves. And what for? Buggered if we knew. There was a saying: ’If I had a farm in Vietnam and a home in hell, I’d sell the farm and go home.’

  As the evening wore on and we got really pissed the blokes started to talk about the hard parts. I suggest some tucker before I get too pissed to make it. I’ve got meat pies in the oven but I warn them they’re best left unet, I explain that Willy McGregor makes them up the pub from scrag-ends. ‘They’re for the drunks.’ I’m about to go on and say we only sell them from the cafe to the boongs when I remember Bongface. ‘They’re rat-shit,’ I say instead.