Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  Of course the blokes have a go, they call you a ‘rockchopper’ if you’re a Catholic, but it’s all in good fun, not meant to hurt. They know you’re their family now. There’s this song one of the blokes made up in our platoon, it’s funny that, Tommy talked of Nelson Short and his ukulele at Sandakan, how he cheered them up. Jimmy Stephenson in our platoon is the same, he plays the mouth organ and sings this song he made up. It’s become our song and the idea is to sing it real sad.

  I’m so sorry, Sergeant,

  I can’t come on parade,

  I haven’t had a shave,

  I’ve lost me razor blade!

  Me rifle’s dirty,

  I’ve got no four-by-two,

  To pull me rifle through,

  Oh, Sergeant, dear

  Whatever shall I do?

  So I think you can see that after a while I’ve settled down a bit and finished my training. I’ve got to admit by the end of the three months I’m a bit proud, on parade with the senior platoon ready to march out, and there’s me and the Abo and a dago, the front three marching out, first to be seen in the whole battalion, giving the battalion commander the old ‘eyes right’, our necks stiff as a board and our line straight as an arrow.

  I’m posted to the Royal Australian Infantry Corps and it’s another three months’ training, this time at Ingleburn, outside Sydney. There’s a lot of bush work now and I really like this, I’m in my element. We’re learning section tactics from the sergeant instructor and I enjoy the lectures. There’s one lecture that made me understand how Tommy could have come through what he’d done. When Tommy talked about jungle training, I thought, you know, go into the jungle and rat-tat-tat-tat or out with the knife or fix bayonets and charge. That it’s all like one-on-one, the Jap or you, which turns out not to be untrue, but what’s always worried me is, what if you’re scared and you freeze or run away, like I think I might do?

  Then a lieutenant gives us an introductory lecture that I reckon I’ll never forget. He talks about fear, how would it be if you came up to the enemy all of a sudden. I suppose every bloke asks himself this question at some time or another. Anyway, here is what he says, it’s taken directly from my notes.

  There are four natural reactions to fear. You either freeze, or faint, or run away or become irrationally aggressive. When the enemy fires on your section, you’ll get a helluva shock. If we all reacted in one of these four ways, it would be a disaster. Even if you run away, besides that being cowardly, the action would put you in more danger than if you took more considered action. So, to overcome your instinct to react in one of these ways, we practise ‘contact drills’. We practise them and practise them until they take over from our natural instincts, and replace them with a planned action. It’s the contact drill that allows us to react in such a way that we are ready to take on the enemy and defeat him.

  The army is beginning to make more sense to me. It’s bloody hard work, we practise every kind of contact drill imaginable, we have permanent gravel rash from falling to the ground again and again on to our knees and elbows. Then there are the drills for being ambushed. Now I understand what Tommy was talking about. If you’re ambushed, there’s just about nothing you can do except retaliate by charging the enemy. You are on his killing ground and he’s waiting for you. The best thing you can do is hit back as fast and as hard as you can, because frankly there’s bugger-all else you can do.

  We spend a long time learning how to mount an ambush ourselves. Once you’ve prepared the ambush, it’s the sentry who’s the most important bloke. It’s a huge responsibility because the lives of your mates are in your hands. ‘You’ll never have a bigger responsibility in your life, so DON’T FUCK IT UP!’ is what our sergeant says over and over again. The army is constant repetition. So here’s the next scare, what happens if you fall asleep? The trick is never to be comfortable and to sit in such a way that if you fall asleep, you drop your head and it hits something and you wake up with the shock.

  I suppose because of me and Tommy in the bush, the job I liked the best was forward scouting. You’re the leading man in your section. It is a matter of good bushcraft, of looking for signs of the enemy presence, hoping you see him before he sees you. I know I shouldn’t big-note myself, but when the sergeant says to me one day, ‘Never know, Private Maloney, might yet make a forward scout out of you’, it was one of the bigger days of my life. They don’t throw those sorts of compliments around in the army. But really, I should thank Tommy for that, acute observation of every tiny detail was at the centre of everything he taught me.

  So my life now is route marches with weapons and full gear, nine-mile runs, map reading, which fortunately I knew from fighting fires, and constant contact drill. On the marches the blokes laugh when we’re trudging along and I name all the trees and bushes. Half the time they think I’m bullshitting, like just making up the names. There’s none of them knows Latin so they think it’s just gibberish and the English names I’ve just made up. At first I’d tell them the history of the fires in an area by looking at the burnt-out stumps, after a while I stop because they think either I’m some sort of weirdo or the biggest liar in Australia. Most blokes can’t tell a daisy from a petunia and, in the army, showing you’re different is not a great idea. But I think the instructors cotton on that I’m a bloke who likes detail and takes it seriously.

  Then there’s grenade practice with live grenades, real scary stuff. You think you’re going to freeze and drop the grenade with the pin out at your feet but you’ve practised it so many times with dummy grenades, it doesn’t happen.

  The climax of this second lot of training is the two-week tactical exercises, simulated attacks, patrolling sometimes all night and into the next day so your feet end up just one big blister. The whole idea is to toughen you up, get you accustomed to acute discomfort. Finally the graduation parade comes about and now you think of yourself as Private Mole Maloney, Australian Infantry.

  I’m posted to the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, as a reinforcement. The battalion’s in Malaya and although the Malayan Emergency has come to an end some eighteen months ago, I’m still excited. I’m going to Malaya, it’s the jungle and it’s where Tommy began his fighting career. It all seems an amazing coincidence. The battalion’s stationed at Terendak, the new 28th Commonwealth Brigade Barracks near Malacca. We’re there together with the 1st King’s Own Yorkshire Infantry and the 1st Battalion, Royal New Zealand Regiment, all of us part of the Commonwealth Far East Strategic Reserve.

  I get kitted out and in no time flat I’m in the middle of the Malayan jungle with my new platoon on a training exercise. They tell me it’s to prepare the battalion for operations on the Thai border against the remnants of Ching Peng’s once dangerous Communist army.

  I think I’m a pretty good soldier until I strike Corporal Jake Tingle, who’s my new section commander and has already been in Malaya on one tour when the Emergency was really on. ‘Private Maloney, the skipper tells me you know your way around the bush, eh?’

  ‘No, Corporal.’

  ‘Well, that’s the right reply, because you don’t know your arse from your elbow about the jungle, so from now on you look, listen and keep yer bloody trap shut! Understand?’ ‘Yes, Corporal.’

  And he proves to be right. What we’ve learned up to now is practically nothing. If this is what Tommy did when they put his battalion through jungle training then I can see why they were so much better than the British garrison troops who’d spurned such training.

  The thing is silence. Everything is based on silence, getting somewhere by not being seen or heard. Everything is done by hand signals, then you learn to anticipate changes in section formation, how to look through bushes and not at them, how to recognise ground that might be the killing ground of an enemy ambush. And how to silently and quickly set our own ambush if the scout signals ‘enemy approaching’. There’s squillions of things to lear
n, some of them seem small, but turn out to be critical. Like taking off your boots when things are safe to air and dry your feet. Also, your feet’s worst enemy is socks that don’t fit. If the socks bunch up, they’ll wear the skin off your feet.

  Towards the end of the exercise, Jake Tingle signals me to take over as forward scout. I’m exhilarated but also shitting meself. If I screw it up, I’ll never be able to lift my head up again. So off we go through the bushes, careful as all get-out. Then I stop and see the underside of a leaf on a bush facing up the wrong way. I look more closely and see there’s a couple of tiny twigs fresh broken, a bit of troddendown grass and two small stones kicked out of their original positions. I signal for the corporal. He comes up and agrees a small group of ‘exercise enemy’ has taken a right-angle turn from where we were heading. He looks at his map and sees there’s a little creek nearby and reasons they’ve made for the creek, maybe to fill their water bottles. So we lay an ambush and wait for them to return. They do and we’ve got them. We get a few brownie points for that. Corporal Jake Tingle now calls me Mole and expects me to call him Jake. It’s the sign that he’d trust me in the jungle as a forward scout.

  After what Tommy told me, I have a healthy respect for the tropical jungle, but also a fascination. What I know about the Australian bush, I now want to know about the jungle. Of course, that’s impossible, it would take a lifetime, but there’s a good few things you can learn if you keep your eyes peeled and ask questions, like I’ve always done since I was a little kid. Nancy used to say when she didn’t want to answer, ‘Curiosity killed the cat!’ I’ve often wondered how that saying came about, but nobody has ever been able to give me an answer when I’ve asked. See what I mean?

  I was always fascinated about the big tree at Sandakan and how Tommy, when he escaped and thought he was going to die, wanted to die safe in the buttress of a big tree he’d seen while carrying rice. Thank God, he never found it or he may have given up. But the reason those big jungle trees have buttresses is because the soil is very poor and so jungle trees don’t have deep roots and nature’s developed these buttresses to hold them up.

  There’s lots that’s new to find out about the big old blokes and how so much takes advantage of them. The vines in particular use them to grow up the trunks so they can reach the sunlight on the canopy. That’s another thing, the canopy is so thick with vines and leaves that even in a fierce storm the wind doesn’t get down to the ground, the rain will come down in buckets but the ground is otherwise quite calm. It’s also reasonably easy to walk in the jungle because all the action is happening up top, everything stretching for the sun. Orchids, Tommy would always call them epiphytes, ferns and some other small plants simply grow on the tree, doing it no harm. But there’s a group of villains as well, take the aerial herniparasite for instance, it’s a leathery green-leafed vine with white berries, don’t know why but it looks a bit evil too, well, it hooks its roots into the trunk or a branch of the tree and feeds from it. It can sometimes kill the tree outright. There’s mistletoe, you know, the stuff they hang up at Christmas parties where, if you can catch a girl under it, you can kiss her, it’s here in the jungle. I always thought it would be growing in the snow in England or something. I liked the rattan vine, because of what it does for mankind. I suppose you wouldn’t strictly call it a vine because it’s actually a sort of pine, only for jungles. Its trunk is long and very thin and has hooks in it that latch on to the tree trunk and up she goes all the way to the canopy to get its share of sunlight.

  Rattan is the stuff they use to make wicker chairs and baskets and it’s a generally useful sort of plant. Many’s the time Bozo and me have rescued a wicker couch or chair and then got some rattan and mended it and sold it in Wang. Tommy, sometimes when he was hungry, would say, ‘I’m that hungry I could eat a baby’s bum through a wicker chair!’

  There’s lots to learn that isn’t just jungle-fighting tactics and I reckon the more you know, the easier it is to survive. Just one more tiny thing. I’m standing next to this tree, my section’s just returned from a patrol into the protection of the platoon harbour and we’ve having a bit of a smoko. I count, in one square yard, eight hundred or so ants belonging to fifty different species. One of the blokes asks me what I’m doing. ‘Counting ants,’ I tell him. He signals the others to come have a look, ‘Hey, Mole’s finally gone troppo, now he’s counting the fucking ants in the jungle. He’s already up to a hundred billion!’ The point is that everywhere you go in the jungle there’s ants.

  You’ve got to have a bit of luck to progress quickly in the permanent army, it’s like the public service, you’ve got to have done the hard yards and put in the time before promotion comes. It’s different when there’s a war on, of course. Well, I get lucky, and the skipper calls me in and says they like what they’ve seen of me and I’m going to Kota Tingui Jungle Warfare School. Later my platoon sergeant, who’s on his second tour of duty, says he’s never seen it happen before, I’ve been in the jungle less than six months and I’m going to learn from the legendary Blue Johnston. ‘Private Maloney, if I’m still around when you come back, I want you back in my platoon, you understand?’I guess it’s a compliment.

  Blue Johnston, an Australian, is the chief instructor at the Tracking Wing. There was nobody like him in the army that was a white bloke anyway. He could look at and smell a disused campfire and tell you how long ago, up to five years or five minutes, it was used. He could tell to a startling degree of accuracy when a cut had been made in a tree or a twig snapped, or a branch used to construct a shelter had been broken off and so tell you when the camp site was active. He could follow a trail picking up clues that were invisible to all but the legendary Eban trackers from Sabah. In fact, it was rumoured he had learned his tracking from living with the Eban deep in the jungles of Borneo, although he never said.

  Well, you don’t get someone like that every day of your life, do you? And I’m asking him a heap of questions whenever it seems appropriate. He is surprised I know about the jungle plants and insects and have a bit of general knowledge and he doesn’t put me down, but explains things. Sometimes the other blokes are looking up at the ceiling, impatiently rolling their eyes, even though, like me, they’re handpicked for extra jungle training. But I can’t help myself, like I said, I never grew out of asking questions.

  Anyhow, I learn later that Blue Johnston gives me a commendation in my pass, which again is something he’s never done before. But, of course, he doesn’t say anything to me. Except when we leave the course, he comes up and shakes my hand, ‘You done good, Private Maloney. Good luck, son,’ is all he said.

  When I got back to the battalion, maybe because of what Blue Johnston had said in my report, I’m sent to a Junior NCO course. Again it’s a bit on the quick side, I should have had another year in the army before that happened. Next thing I know, I’m a lance corporal and because the corporal section commander on our platoon goes down with malaria and there are no senior soldiers in our platoon, one of whom would automatically have got the job, it’s given to me.

  After I get back from Blue Johnston’s training camp, the battalion does the best part of a year on the Thai border chasing the die-hards in Ching Peng’s army. I suppose all this training and endless tracking and setting ambushes for these few ever-elusive terrorists is a bit boring, but it’s important, because it means I’ll know what I’m doing when I eventually get to Vietnam.

  The battalion is sent home from Malaya in August 1963 and when we get back I’m sent on the Senior NCO course. After that I’m promoted to sergeant and posted as an instructor to the Battle Wing of the Infantry Centre at Ingleburn again and now I’m one of those bastards who made my life a misery when I joined up, I’m a Corps Training Instructor.

  I’m the first to admit, it’s not me that’s made such rapid progress in the army, it’s what Tommy taught me. If it hadn’t been for him teaching me everything as a kid, I reckon I’d just be your ave
rage army shit-kicker and would have stayed a private all my life.

  At the end of 1964, they tell me to pack my kit, I’m off overseas again, going to Vietnam where I’m posted to the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, shortened to AATT or just ‘the Team’.

  It’s a Qantas flight to Singapore and overnight at Nec Soon barracks, then on a Pan Am flight to Saigon. All of this is done in civilian dress as our presence in Vietnam is hush-hush. It’s impossible to pack an Australian slouch hat for fear it will get out of shape. (In fact, it is forbidden in this man’s army.) I can’t help wondering what the people at Singapore airport must have thought about a civilian carry ing an army hat, sporting an army haircut and carrying a civilian suitcase, lining up to fly to Vietnam. It wouldn’t have taken a master spy to figure it out.

  Half an hour out of Saigon I do as required and go into the toilet to change into my uniform. I’ve left my run too late and I’m just about ready when I’m knocked arse over tit in the toilet as the Pan Am jet makes a steep spiralling descent over Tan Son Nhut airfield, so as to be less exposed to any enemy fire aimed at it from the nearby swamplands. Back in my seat, I see the sun reflecting off the rice paddies that seem to stretch out forever from the airfield.

  As we taxi in, I get a whiff of what the Yanks mean by war and I can’t help wondering, even in a guerilla war, how an enemy with almost no resources will be able to stand up to this lot. We pass planes parked seemingly everywhere, Phantom jets, Caribou and Hercules C130 Transports, helicopters, dozens and dozens in clusters and, in the distance, the huge, lumbering B52 bombers that carry racks of 1000-pound bombs. Then I see one of them trundling along a runway and I think of a pelican back home. Pelicans don’t look like they can fly, they almost can’t walk, each step in slow motion and they really seem to battle to get into the air, but once airborne they are one of the mightiest fliers of them all, graceful and beautiful to behold in flight. The B52 miraculously rises into the air, so slowly I think it must fall out of the sky any moment, but it doesn’t, and like a pelican, once up, it appears to fly effortlessly.