Lunch with a Soldier

by Derek Hansen

  ‘What do you know about these M16 mines?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘Then you watch what I do,’ said Tom. ‘You watch everything I do and make sure I do everything right.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Billy.

  ‘Then I watch what you do and make sure you do everything right, okay? You don’t argue, you don’t question, you just do what I tell you, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Billy.

  ‘Only work at the speed you’re comfortable with, no matter how much shit the NCOs throw at you, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t try to impress me. Don’t try to outdo me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You get us blown up, mate, I’ll fuckin’ kill ya.’

  Billy looked for a trace of a smile but there wasn’t one. Maybe because of his inexperience they were assigned to testing fuses and spent the day pulling pins in a deep cut a dozer had made, making sure they moved smoothly, and replacing them. The job was tedious and undemanding and made even more insufferable by the heat and the NCOs who accused them of slacking off. But Billy followed his partner’s advice to the letter. He worked steadily rather than quickly and maintained his concentration as the day dragged on.

  ‘Do everything as though every mine’s got your bloody name on it,’ said Tom. ‘I know we’re only testing but act like you’re arming. Get used to being methodical, get used to checking everything. Tomorrow we could be arming the friggin’ things.’ That was the closest Tom ever got to small talk.

  To Billy’s surprise, Tom looked for him the following morning and made sure they were partnered up again.

  ‘You got good hands,’ said Tom. ‘And you listen. Keep listening and I’ll keep you alive.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Some of these pricks, mate. Fuckin’ cowboys.’

  ‘Hey! You two lovers. Over here!’

  Billy looked up and realised the NCO was calling to them.

  ‘Oh shit!’ said Tom.

  ‘On the truck.’

  ‘Give us a break,’ said Tom. ‘This bloke’s straight out of Kapooka. He needs help to find his prick to take a leak. Testing’s his limit.’

  ‘Has to learn some time,’ said the sergeant. ‘Get on the truck.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Tom.

  Billy suddenly realised Tom’s true motives. He’d been using him and his inexperience to try to get out of laying and arming the mines.

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ said Billy. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Ain’t just you, mate, it’s the other friggin’ cowboys. These bloody “jumping jack” mines, Jesus, mate, I’m telling you. I heard some poor bastard got killed when one went off and he was just standing around minding his own business seventy metres away. Seventy metres! Ripped his throat out. Just pray we get digging.’

  If Tom did any praying, it didn’t help. Their section was put straight onto arming. The deal was they had to arm twenty clusters before rotating to digging.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Tom. ‘At least it won’t be too hot. There’s nothing worse than arming mines when it’s stinking hot.’

  They ditched their rifles, gear and webbing and assembled by the area where mines had been laid ready for arming.

  ‘You have to wear a helmet and flak jacket,’ said Tom. ‘They stink like pigs shat in them but at least they won’t stink as badly as they will when we’ve finished with them. There’s nothing worse than a friggin’ sweaty flak jacket.’

  Billy pulled on a flak jacket, surprised by how much it did smell like a pig had shat in it.

  ‘Do what I say when I say. Twenty clusters is fuckin’ eighty mines. Concentrate on every one. Work with me. Don’t do anything on your own, understand?’

  Tom had a way of working that was slow and methodical and had more to do with staying alive than killing Vietcong. He seemed to move into another realm. Sweat poured off his brow from both the heat and the effort of concentrating. Billy knew what had to be done but Tom automatically talked through each step of every mine they armed. By the time they’d armed the last of the mines, the heat and Tom’s droning, repetitive litany was beginning to fray Billy’s nerves. Yet he could see the sense of Tom’s caution and admired the way he could shut out everything except the job at hand. Nothing changed the pace at which he worked and nothing broke his concentration, not even the urging and threats of the NCOs.

  They shed their helmets and flak jackets, lay them in the sun to dry out for the next section, and wandered over to where they’d left their gear for a well-earned break and a drink.

  ‘Got a stiff neck,’ said Tom. ‘Always get a stiff neck arming mines. Friggin’ tension gets me every time.’

  ‘Wasn’t so bad,’ said Billy.

  ‘It’s not us I worry about,’ said Tom. ‘You saw those cowboys, arming single-handed while their mate nicks off for a smoke. You heard them, talking about their girlfriends and the bar girls. You think they’ve got their mind on the job? They fuck up and we cop it as well. Pricks.’

  Tom’s whining and negativity ran contrary to Billy’s nature. Arming mines was dangerous but the procedure was straightforward enough and he was convinced they could have worked half as fast again without any increase in risk. Still, he decided, better safe than sorry. He’d swallowed two bottles of water without making much impact on his thirst when they got hustled away to start laying mines. The heat and humidity felt as though it had doubled since morning. Billy looked across at the section taking over the job of arming. He’d sweated enough in the flak jackets but the new blokes would cook.

  Billy was busy digging when he heard the mine go off. Tom hit the dirt so quickly Billy thought he’d been hit.

  ‘Fuckin’ arseholes!’ said Tom. ‘What did I fuckin’ tell ya?’

  Billy spun away from his whinging mate. Someone had started screaming and others joined in. A puff of blue smoke looking like nothing, looking harmless, drifted slowly away. Uninjured sappers near the site of the explosion stood motionless, either in shock or counting their blessings that they’d escaped relatively unharmed. As quickly as he could, Billy retraced his steps and, once he was clear, ran back to the armed mine area. A sergeant who’d given him an earful for being too slow was standing white-faced by the edge of the minefield, yelling at everyone to stand still. Billy ignored him and walked straight in, stepping in the footsteps of others who’d gone before.

  ‘What are you doing?’ screamed the sergeant. ‘Enemy mines! It wasn’t one of ours. I saw it happen. Stand still! Use your bayonets. Follow procedure!’

  Billy ignored him. Following in the footprints of soldiers in army boots and flak jackets through undergrowth was a piece of cake compared with tracking a wild pig across the concrete-hard country he was used to. By the time he reached the site of the explosion, the uninjured and lightly injured were already trying to help their mates. Other soldiers came racing in to help along the same path he’d taken. Billy stopped dead in his tracks, stunned by the carnage. Someone elbowed him aside. One soldier had taken the blast full in the face and upper body. He’d lost both arms and blood squirted intermittently from an artery among the pulp that had been his neck, the volume and pressure fading till it became no more than a trickle then stopped flowing altogether. Others had lost hands, arms, legs, had torn faces and throats. Somebody grabbed his arm.

  ‘Go get some pins to put back in these mines. And tell the fuckin’ sergeant to jam it. It was one of ours that went off.’

  Billy turned and ran back towards the sergeant, grateful to be doing something to help.

  ‘It was one of ours,’ said Billy. ‘It’s confirmed. I need some pins.’

  ‘Pins!’ shouted the sergeant. ‘Who’s got pins?’

  ‘Here!’

  The reply came from a sapper who’d just reached the scene.

  ‘Retter, you go with this man,’ ordered the sergeant. ‘Disarm the mines around the site and along the route in. Goddamn it! Where’re the company medics?’

  Bi
lly and his new partner raced back to the site and began to disarm the mines. Retter was at least ten years older than Billy and worked at four times the speed of Tom. Billy had to ask him to slow down.

  ‘What’s your problem? You new or something?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Billy.

  ‘Tough.’

  Billy couldn’t keep up and was reduced to handing pins to his partner as he needed them. Everything Tom had told him about cowboys came flooding back and Billy grew more apprehensive by the minute. There was no need to hurry. The infantry company medics had arrived and the word was, the dust-off choppers were already on the way.

  ‘Slow down, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘The last thing we need is another fuck-up.’

  ‘Relax. Ain’t gunna be another fuck-up.’ The sapper looked up from the mine he was disarming and locked eyes with Billy. He kept working while he stared at Billy, his smile widening as Billy’s terror bloomed. ‘You heard of Mad Mike? Mad Mike Retter? That’s me. The best mine man in Vietnam. I can arm and disarm these suckers with my eyes closed.’ To make his point, he closed his eyes.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, watch what you’re doing!’ Billy’s voice was shrill and almost pleading. Mad Mike just laughed. In horror, Billy looked down to see what Mad Mike’s hands were doing. They never missed a beat, which was more than could be said for Billy’s ticker.

  He returned to base that afternoon burdened by the knowledge that three of his fellow engineers, three men who’d left camp with him on the truck that morning, were now dead; four more would live the rest of their lives missing a leg or an arm, if they were lucky enough to pull through; and five or six others had injuries serious enough to get them sent home. All because of what? All because someone got careless, lost concentration, goofed off, got too hot, what?

  What?

  It was all so pointless, so needless.

  Up until the mine went off, the war had been something that happened to other guys in other sections and his war experiences had all been second-hand. 2 Platoon C Company had been ambushed on patrol and suffered two dead and five wounded. A soldier in B Company trod on a mine which killed him and two others and made a mess of another four. Some positions had been mortared but he wasn’t sure of the casualties there. And one of those freaky things that happen in wars occurred when a sapper out on patrol caught a stray bullet in the head while he was fast asleep under his hoochie.

  Billy had heard the stories, but they meant no more to him than road accidents had back in Jindalee Downs. For as long as he could remember, accidents had taken the lives of young people in the northwest. Everybody felt bad about them at the time, but life went on as normal. He was largely untouched by the tragedies, even when two-twenty-year olds from Walgett, who’d been a couple of classes ahead of him at school, wrote themselves off against a tree on their way home from an all-night party. Accidents happened, people got killed but it didn’t really touch him. That sort of thing didn’t happen to him. But suddenly his whole universe had changed. What if the guy who fucked up had been in his section? What if he’d been alongside? What if Mad Mike had finally got it wrong? He could, so easily and without fault, have been one of the casualties, even one of the dead. He realised then and there that he somehow had to take more control over his destiny.

  The first time he was sent out on patrol he made sure everyone knew about his special skills, his bushcraft. He talked to forward scouts and sappers coming to the end of their tour and learned how the Vietcong operated and signposted their traps. Once he was reasonably confident, he put his hand up for a more active role. If someone had to check out a rest site he wanted it to be him, because he trusted his ability to find mines and booby-traps more than he trusted anyone else’s. If there were claymore mines to be laid around the perimeter of their overnight positions, he made sure he got the job so there were no fuck-ups. When they found tunnels, he volunteered to go down first for the same reasons. He was more scared of being killed by someone else’s mistake, oversight or lack of ability than he was by the Vietcong.

  For two months his system had worked like a charm. He’d found mines out on patrol and on cordon and search operations, and had either disarmed them or blown them up. When the forward scouts had found something unusual, Billy had gone up to help them work out exactly what kind of surprise the Vietcong had prepared for them. By taking responsibility and not relying on others, Billy believed he was taking the best possible care of himself.

  Underground, it had been the same story. He’d found one booby-trap in a communications tunnel, a trip wire connected to a grenade, and neutralised it. He’d found trapdoors leading to rice and weapons caches, all of them booby-trapped, and dealt with them. By going first into the tunnels and keeping his wits about him, he genuinely believed he was minimising risk. But then all of the earlier tunnels had been cold.

  ‘Time to go, Barb.’

  The sound of Lieutenant Brennan’s voice brought Billy back to the present. The lieutenant had followed Billy’s tracks and was crouching over him, concern evident in both his face and his voice.

  ‘We’re about ready to move out.’

  Once again it was time for Billy to face the enemy, to pit his wits against their mines, booby-traps and ambushes. When he’d first arrived in Nui Dat, the battalion CO had told all the new arrivals that they would never be off-duty so long as they were in Vietnam. He’d told them their job was for twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week and they should accept that and never relax their guard. He warned them that Australian soldiers in the province saw action as much as six days out of seven. Billy had thought it was just the usual bullshit pep talk. Now he’d learned differently. The war made no concession to him or anyone else, regardless of what they’d done or been through. He rose heavily to his feet.

  ‘You okay?’ The lieutenant hadn’t moved.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Billy. ‘Laughing.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘They’re calling their company Camera.’

  ‘Camera?’

  ‘I guess that’s as close as Cameron could get to putting his own name on the shingle. That’s what he wants but that would be just too much of a blow to Grant’s ego.’ Albert Larkman, Linda’s office manager, rose from his chair and wandered over to the bench above the mini-bar to pour himself another coffee. ‘Get you one?’

  ‘No,’ said Linda. She’d booked a suite at the Country Club in Dubbo with a large living area that could double as her temporary office. ‘As much as we can do without the competition, I hope they succeed. In fact, I’m counting on them succeeding. I can’t come back to Sydney until Grant gets back on his feet and the money starts flowing. I won’t be safe until he’s got something to lose.’

  Al Larkman put his coffee down on the table and slumped into the chair opposite Linda.

  ‘Camera will succeed because Cameron will succeed. He’s driven, the classic poor kid made good. But whether Grant can cut it again, or even be sucked along in Cameron’s wake, is another matter. A lot of agency people will boycott Grant out of loyalty to you and right now you’ve really got the sympathy vote. We’re picking up business for no other reason than people want to show their support. So long as our quote is in the ballpark, we’re in.’

  ‘Tell them if they want to help, give Grant the job.’

  ‘I’m not going to do that,’ said Al. ‘Right now your exile is working for us, but what’s going to happen down the track, six months to a year from now? It’s your company. People want to deal with you.’ Al took a sip from his coffee and screwed his face up in disgust. ‘Must be the water. Look, Linda, I know you want Grant to succeed but don’t count on him getting an easy ride. It’s going to be hard for him. You know better than I do that there are a lot of new directors around with interesting ideas. Agency people want edgy stuff and these new whiz-kids are probably the ones who are going to provide it. We’ve brought two in as a matter of fact — at the request of the agencies involved — working on a couple of our current jobs. T
here’s a lot they don’t know but, by the same token, there’s a lot they’re teaching us. It’s been fun.’

  ‘And profitable?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I wish I was there,’ said Linda.

  ‘We all wish that.’ Al sighed and leaned back in his chair so he could look out over the golf course. He was an anomaly in the commercial film business in that he was an accountant by profession and preferred a suit and tie to the standard office garb of jeans and T-shirt. Prematurely bald, overweight and entirely unathletic, his concession to Dubbo was to wear casual slacks and remove his tie. His strength lay not only in his financial expertise but also the fact that he had a touch of the entrepreneur about him, which made him ideal for the film business. In an industry noted for brilliant creative but poor commercial judgement, Al provided a voice of sanity Linda could rely on. ‘God knows Dubbo makes me appreciate Sydney, Linda, but I don’t think either of us can expect an early end to your exile. I think you’d better face up to that and factor it into your plans. Okay?’

  ‘Let’s just wait and see.’

  ‘Your call. Now, where do you want to start? Do you want to review our quote/win ratio, review individual quotes, check the numbers, review personnel, what?’

  ‘I want to review everything. I want to be convinced that my absence hasn’t made way for bad habits or slackness. But first I want you to assure me that you’re the only one who knows my phone number and that you haven’t written it down anywhere.’

  ‘Linda, for God’s sake —’

  ‘Indulge me.’

  ‘I even have the phone accounts passed through to me unopened so I can black out your phone number.’

  ‘What?’ said Linda. Colour drained from her face.

  ‘The numbers for all STD and international calls we make are listed on the account. You know that. That’s how we allocate calls to the cost sheets of each job. I black yours out so nobody sees it.’

  ‘Oh my God …’