Smoky Joe's Cafe

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘I’ll have a couple of them dog’s eyes,’ Animal calls out. I can see he’s fair dinkum. ‘Never tasted a meat pie I didn’t like with a drop of dead horse.’

  I start to put together a couple of dozen hamburgers and fry chips for the mob. I want them to be good and you can’t make a good burger ‘n’ chips if you’re pissed and, besides, I’m not the world’s best short-order cook, but a bloke’s got his pride.

  So I’m behind the counter making burgers and as each bloke talks there’s increasingly long silences. I can’t remember what was said exact, not like I do the funny stuff, the humour. Now the brothers are slurring their speech a bit, digging down where they haven’t been for a while, searching for words that don’t come easy or don’t come at all. There are no correct ones, there are never gunna be the right words to kill the pain. We’re all feeling it. Sometimes what they don’t say is the worst pain of all.

  But it makes no difference, I was there with them and in between the sizzle of the onions on the hotplate, the deep fry and the feel of the raw mince in my hands, I can smell the fear returning. It’s always with you, just below the surface, always will be. Mostly the talk is stuff about the jungle, goin’ in scared and comin’ out a month later with a few more live sunrises and sunsets to your credit. Nobody talks about Long Tan.

  It’s hard to describe coming out of the jungle, out of combat, getting back behind the wire. You’ve made it one more time, but there was always a next time, the hole in your guts never gets filled, the fear never stops. When you’ve been out on patrol for maybe ten days or three weeks or more you never seem to come out of it.

  Every step you make every day, right down to finding a place to have a crap. Wiping your arse real slow so the movement won’t disturb the foliage, give your position away. In the field we were issued with three pieces of shit paper per day, one up, one down and one to polish. When you got back to the safety of Nui Dat with all the crap paper in the world, you find yourself breaking off just three pieces, the habit, the fear, still with you even when you’re polishing your arsehole in safety.

  I’ve just said how it was coming out of the deep j. But what I’m talking about is the anticipation. The days of nothing happening but knowing something could any moment. Know what I mean? In fact, while in the boonies it was almost a relief to be up against some real combat. Charlie firing at you, sending over his mortars, returning fire, havin’ a go, working out his range. That was tolerable, you could take that. Warriors havin’ a go at each other.

  It was the silent war that broke you down. Every step of every day, watching Bongface ahead, expecting him to be blown to kingdom come every next step he took, or have him spring a booby trap or dive for cover and yell, ‘Contact Front!’ Then behind him the machine gun moves forward to the higher ground or to the right and opens fire in support of the scout. Now you’re in action, your rifle group moves around you and, as section commander, you can give them orders, maybe a quick flank attack on the enemy. All this is expected, you’ve been trained for it, you’re a warrior doing your job, best you can.

  Then out you’d come, your patrol or operation over. If you were unlucky, minus a couple of your mates wrapped in their hutchies sent ahead. The worst was seeing your flying dead leave you in the jungle as the dustoff came in and carted them off above the treetops to the morgue, and you having to stay behind. Sounds weird, don’t it? Thinking the dead are better off than you. Or some bloke still alive, holding his guts in his hands, seen as a lucky bastard. Shit, shit, shit.

  The last thing I saw of my mate Mo were the soles of his boots sticking out from his waterproof hutchie, which I’d used to cover him. A single yellow bamboo leaf, shaped like the head of a Zulu spear, was stuck to the heel of his left boot. I rushed forward as the dustoff lifted him up from the ground, the chopper blades above my head a wind-rush of cool air in the humidity, and grabbed the leaf off of his heel and shoved it into the pocket of my greens.

  I’ve still got it, stuck onto a picture of him and me in a whorehouse in Vung Tau. We’re holding a bottle of beer up to the camera with two pretty little whores. Wendy says they look like porcelain dolls. They’re sitting on our laps, we were both big bastards, and the girls look like schoolkids. Probably should have been at another time and in a better world than this one.

  You’d come off patrol or some operation and have your first real wash for five weeks. There was always the moment when you took off your greens, which stank of sweat and mud and dirty humans. You’d shower, hoping that by some miracle the hot water would clean not only the outside but what was dirty on the inside as well.

  You’d get into civvies and if you were real lucky be granted a seventy-two-hour leave pass to Vung Tau. You’d be so pumped up you’d laugh at anything, any small prank played on a mate no matter how stupid, and then you’d get drunk and have sex and get drunk and have sex and get drunk and have sex until it all became a blur, a bottle of Ba Mui Ba beer down one hole and your cock in another. Drinking piss and fucking, the combat soldier’s eternal antidote to stop the fear in his gut and kill the poison in his soul.

  Then back to Nui Dat with the tension still in your entrails. The terror still there, knowing you’d soon be out in the jungle again with the Noggies finding a hundred ways to kill you, the weird crackle-pop of their AK47s burned into your memory forever.

  We didn’t wear underpants in the jungle because they chafed and made the prickly heat rash in your crotch worse. But when we put on civvies we’d put on undergear as well. Then when you returned and it was time to go into the jungle again, you’d give away the Y-fronts. That was it, the real deep fear of dying returned when you put on your fresh greens and let your balls dangle free.

  In less than an hour your greens would be soaked through from the humidity you could never escape. The first of the razor-sharp grass seeds had worked through your trousers and you knew there’d be a hundred more and you’d have to wait ‘til nightfall to pluck the bastards out. Your pack bit into your shoulders and rubbed them raw and your webbing belt pushed down on the bones of your hips with the weight of water bottles, a dozen magazines, grenades and all the other soldiering crap you carried in the pouches hanging off it, not to count yer crossover ammo belt. You weren’t in the jungle ten minutes and you knew it was gunna be a bloody long day, and the fear was back and the fear was you.

  Righto then, let’s begin at the beginning. And the beginning is a brown envelope in the post box to tell you the good news that your number just come up and you are one of the chosen ones. So here’s the next misconception. We didn’t whinge and tell ourselves, ‘Why me? Why not some other joker?’ Most of us were stoked. We were going to war like our fathers and our grandfathers, we were going to be warriors, the lucky bastards, true to the flag.

  On the day I reported at the recruitment centre there were a bunch a protesters with banners outside, well, not exactly a bunch, four women, fat and ugly. Their banner said, ‘Say “No!” to Vietnam! Save our Sons!’ They were chanting, ‘Don’t spill our blood in Vietnam!’ over and over. One of the fat sheilas was shouting and wagging her finger at me and I remember thinking, ‘You stupid old cow, you’ve probably never had a good root in your life!’ Twenty-year-old warriors-to-be don’t want to be saved, they know they’re personally bulletproof anyway and this stupid bitch was trying to stop me having my own war adventure.

  I reckon the people thought it was the right thing to do, to support our American mates. Blokes bought you a beer in the pub. ‘You’re doin’ your bit, son,’ some of the old-timers would say, ‘Good on ya, mate.’

  There was some stuff in the papers about how we shouldn’t be going, but public opinion or, anyway, the stuff I heard on the box and goin’ on around me and on the radio, like, was pretty encouraging.

  We were sent to Kapooka near Wagga Wagga in central New South Wales, that was July 1965, I think. Kapooka was okay, a lot of shouting and drill, rifle practice, fitness, lectures, route marches, inspection, latrine duty and wh
atever else the RDI (Regimental Duties Instructor), a regular army platoon sergeant, thought would successfully beat the crap out of us.

  Kapooka was all the usual bullshit the army carries on to turn a raw recruit into a totally responsive, rigidly starched uniform with boot caps endlessly polished and brought to mirror gloss. There used to be a joke, you polished your boot caps ‘til you could see your face in them, that’s so when you were standing close to a bird you could look down into your boot caps and see up her skirt.

  I don’t remember all that much about it to tell you the truth, I was too bloody tired most of the time, but a good few recruits got sent home because they didn’t cut the mustard.

  There’s a poem written by a bloke named Bruce Dawe that sums up the instructors at Kapooka to a T. I’ve learned it off by heart and I hope he don’t mind me using it now.

  Weapons Training

  And when I say eyes right I want to hear

  those eyeballs click and the gentle pitter-patter

  of falling dandruff you there what’s the matter

  why are you looking at me are you a queer?

  look to your front if you had one more brain

  it’d be lonely what are you laughing at

  you in the back row with the unsightly fat

  between your elephant ears open that drain

  you call a mind and listen remember first

  the cockpit drill when you go down be sure

  the old crown-jewels are safely tucked away

  what could be more

  distressing than to hold off with a burst

  from your trusty weapon a mob of the little yellows

  only to find back home because of your position

  your chances of turning the key in the ignition

  considerably reduced? allright now suppose

  for the sake of argument you’ve got

  a number-one blockage and a brand-new pack

  of Charlies are coming at you

  you can smell their rotten

  fish-sauce breath hot on the back

  of your stupid neck allright now what

  are you going to do about it? that’s right grab and check

  the magazine man it’s not a woman’s tit

  worse luck or you’d be set too late you nit

  they’re on you and your tripes are round your neck

  you’ve copped the bloody lot just like I said

  and you know what you are? you’re dead dead dead

  Then it was on to the School of Infantrymen at Ingle-burn, near Sydney. There we learned our contact drills, section attacks, platoon attacks, patrolling, digging weapon pits, firing M60s, Owen guns and throwing grenades, and so on until we dropped with exhaustion.

  I know we thought we were pretty ridgy-didge when we come out of Ingleburn. We could march in a straight line, fire a rifle, stop on command with a single sound as our boots hit the deck. We’d lost most of our puppy fat and we could run a mile with a full pack and rifle and we could do all the things a warrior has to know to stay alive. Ha bloody ha, if only we’d known what lay ahead!

  A mob of us were sent to join 6 RAR at Enoggera Barracks in Queensland. That was when Shorty got hold of us. Christ! He made our training at the School of Infantrymen seem like a sheila’s knitting class. We ran miles with full gear, we practised mounting and dismounting drills for armoured personnel carriers and jumping on and off bloody choppers ‘til our legs went to jelly. We practised ambushes, we dug holes, built barbed-wire obstacles, practised clearing mines and booby traps, we fired our weapons and endlessly practised patrolling. We worked sixteen hours a day in the bush and sometimes Shorty kept us going for days without sleep.

  We thought that what Shorty was putting us through was tough, but really it was just a warm-up for Canungra, the jungle training centre in south-east Queensland. They must have searched the whole flamin’ country to find this particular shithole. That’s what it was, a big hole with hills called yamas surrounding it, filled with muddy water that might as well have been shit. It felt like shit. Tasted like shit and smelled like shit when you fell into it. And it stuck to you like shit sticks to a blanket.

  We’d go out on patrol among the yamas, where they’d set up all sorts of so-called nasty surprises, shooting galleries and sneaker ranges. With the shooting galleries, cut-out targets would suddenly appear which we were supposed to destroy with a single shot, Audie Murphy style. Most of them looked as though they’d been there forever with no bullet holes to show, which gives you some idea of how effective we were gunna be in the killing fields of Vietnam.

  The sneaker ranges I have to say were a bit more predictable. We’d be sneaking along a path, SLR at the ready, and the instructor would pull at some concealed rope or wire and, lo and behold, a target would be facing us. We were required to put three shots into it in the time it took us to blink. After a while, we could do this. I hasten to say, not because we were any better than before with the shooting galleries but because the bushes and foliage in the area of the target were so shredded by blokes who’d been before us that we could anticipate the enemy before the wire was released and so had plenty of time to get the three shots away.

  Later, in Vietnam, when the same thing happened for real and this VC suddenly appeared in front of me, I seem to remember shitting my greens. No, I mean it, I shat meself. Fortunately I think he did too. I finally got the first three rounds off, all of which missed and the VC scarpered into the jungle before I could get another crack at him. So, Canungra style, I destroyed all the surrounding shrubbery in the direction he’d taken.

  We never found him, not even a blood spot. I guess I missed Charlie with about a hundred rounds fired into a bamboo thicket and, I remember, I had a hard time convincing Shorty I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. We passed the spot a few weeks later and Spags Belgiovani said, ‘That’s where Thommo shit himself and murdered a perfectly innocent bamboo thicket.’

  But what they really rammed into us at Canungra was contact drills. We did them up yamas and down cliffs, across rivers and any other obstacle that would make our life a misery. There were contact drills for everything. ‘Contact Front’ when the forward scout opened fire. ‘Contact Rear’ if Charlie had a go at the tail-end. ‘Ambush Left’ and ‘Ambush Right’ if the enemy came from the sides.

  We even practised contact drills in trucks. We’d be driving along some jungle track in an army truck packed in like sardines, rifles sticking up in the air to make more space for bodies, when suddenly some joker with blank ammo opens up on the vehicle from the bush with a machine gun. We then had to swing into contact drill pronto, which meant jumping from the moving truck to take up our defensive positions on either side of the vehicle, then lay down covering fire as the troops in the truck following us did a sweep to take out the machine gunner and whoever else represented the enemy.

  It all sounded simple in the lectures but have you ever tried jumping from a moving truck seven feet above the ground with every bloke in the platoon trying to do the same thing at the same time with their rifle and bayonet, entrenching tool and machete and spare ammunition?

  The driver, often as not, puts his foot on the accelerator in panic when the shots come, then jams on the brakes a moment later, or vicki-verka. You jump and hope for the best and collect a kick in the head from the bloke jumpin’ behind you. Or the bloke in front of you jams his rifle butt into the difference between you and your sister. If you were real lucky you made it with only a couple of dozen nasty bruises and a fair amount of gravel rash.

  At Canungra they drove us until we dropped and then thought of some way else they could persecute us. ‘It’s gunna be a lot worse when you useless bastards come up against Charlie, you’re gunna die and they’re gunna die laughing at your attempt to kill them!’

  Because I was such a big bastard, 6′6″ non-metric, they loved to have a go, ‘Thompson, you big, dumb useless, uncut prick! The Viet Cong are going to drop to their knees and thank Buddha when they see
you coming towards them!’

  It went on like this all day and half the night as a regular army sergeant mouthed off at you. The worst part was that the bastard could do all the stuff that was breaking your heart and your bones and not even crease his jungle greens. There was a fast-growing agreement among us that the brown envelope wasn’t such a shit-hot lottery to win after all.

  Slowly we got the hang of this kind of soldiering and developed into something we’d never thought we could become. We became lean as a drover’s dog, fit as a mallee bull and, most importantly, we’d learned to act and think for ourselves. It probably saved our lives a dozen times over in Vietnam. If there are three words that are sweet to the lips of any Vietnam vet it is them three – ‘Contact bloody Drill’.

  When we got to Vietnam we found that the Australians were the only force there who were jungle ready. Hardened to the fray.

  And so to South Vietnam, Phuoc Tuy province and Nui Dat, the headquarters of the 1st Australian Task Force, 1 ATF for short. Nui Dat was situated in an old rubber plantation about twenty miles from a town named Baria. They called it the Funny Farm, because there was nothing funny about it. Just people in black pyjamas and conical hats who all looked and dressed the same, friend and foe alike.

  These were a people who, during the dark of the night, would send seven-year-old children, mostly little girls, into the six-mile minefield we’d laid between the Horseshoe and the coast. The minefield was supposed to form a barrier that would prevent the VC, who were hiding in an area known as the Long Green, from getting to the villages and their rice fields.

  Patrolling the boundaries of the minefield was the responsibility of a South Vietnamese infantry battalion and some Regional Force units. Not being the most interested soldiers in the world, they didn’t bother. Now you might as well not have a minefield if you don’t keep a careful watch over it. So these skinny kids, about the size of an Australian four-year-old, would sneak into the minefield at night. Their tiny feet and delicate sensitive toes were like little noses sniffing out the M16 jumping jack mines. They would shuffle along, their toes scraping the surface of the earth until they gently nudged the metal prong or side of the mine, trying to be so gentle so as not to set the mine off. Then the mine would be lifted and put someplace else they weren’t meant to be so we’d be the ones to step on them next day.