Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  I can hear legs brushing against the foliage and twigs breaking. Then a lowered human voice. Then two. The enemy have stopped twenty yards away.

  I wonder if I can catch them by surprise and whether I can take them out. But a recce patrol will probably be of section strength and include a machine gun, so I can’t really take them on. If I try to drag Murray Templeton, they’ll hear us. If I pick him up, they’ll see me and I’ll be helpless to defend myself. My mind is in turmoil. There’s no chance now of both of us getting out of this. Maybe on my own. I’ve done the best I can for him. Taken him out of his pain. What more can I do? I’ve got a right to try and escape. In fact, it’s my duty. But in my mind’s eye I see Tommy kissing The Gold-Toothed-Shin-Kicking-Bastard’s boots, begging for the lives of his mates, knowing they’ll kill him. I have to stay. Fuck! I’ve been in active combat three hours and I’m going to die. All that training, and I’m dead meat the moment I step into a jungle where there’s a fair-dinkum stoush going on.

  I look up, there’s a big tree, not as big as the Maloney tree, but big, buttresses stretching fifteen feet, splayed out like toes gripping the earth, their walls four or five feet above the ground. I can’t believe my eyes. It’s a big buttress tree, just like the Mengarris, the big tree at Sandakan. It must be some sort of sign or am I just bullshitting myself, clutching at straws trying to make my own luck?

  Then it happens. Just like Tommy said it happened that first day when they discovered they were going to build an airport at Sandakan. The heavens opened. That’s the whole point about tropical rain, there’s no warning, it’s all or nothing, a deluge coming down in seconds. It buckets down so that you’d have to scream hard to be heard as the water crashes into the vegetation. If a shot went off, you wouldn’t know where it was coming from and it’s impossible to see more than ten yards. It’s my chance to escape if I can carry Murray Templeton.

  I get up and hoist him onto my shoulders, I can’t believe my luck. I move forward about twenty paces when my foot goes into a hole and I crash down and I spill Murray Templeton. Christ, I hope the morphine’s working, though luckily he falls fairly softly. But I realise I’ve done my ankle. I try to walk on it, but I collapse, I’m history. Somehow I manage to grab a hold of him and drag him along the ground to the big tree and shove him between two thick buttresses with walls on either side about five feet off the ground. Then I crawl in beside him and strap my ankle as tight as I can.

  It rains for half an hour and stops as suddenly as it started, just like Tommy said it did that day at Sandakan when they were cutting a path to where the aerodrome was going to be. Suddenly there’s silence, the odd drip, drip, drip of water splashing off the bigger leaves. I hear voices again. I take my rifle and limp around the buttress and take a look. It’s the enemy, four of them, they’re taking off their waterproof groundsheets and shaking themselves like dogs. They’re in NVA uniform and carrying AK47s and are preparing to continue their reconnaissance. Four soldiers doesn’t mean there ain’t more, I’d expect a recce patrol to have a few more, including a machine-gunner.

  I try to think, keep my wits about me. This is not a target to be taken out with a burst of automatic fire; automatic fire makes the rifle jump and it takes too much time to reaim. I’m a good shot, I don’t like to say it, but I’m close to the best in the battalion. The task now is to fire with complete finesse. Four beautifully aimed shots so fast that the enemy soldiers don’t have time to react. I’ve done it hundreds of times with rabbits, four bunnies going like the clappers of hell for their burrows and bang, bang, bang, bang. Tommy would laugh and say, ‘You done good, all four good shots.’

  But these Nogs are not bunnies, they’re elite fighting soldiers, trained to react quickly and fire back. They’ll start moving any second now and then I’ll lose my chance. I slip the catch on my M16 to single shot. I become calm, visualisation is everything when you’re going for this kind of multiple shooting. The universe recedes, it’s just me and the rifle and the four chests in front of me crossed diagonally with canvas magazine pouches.

  One gone, he topples backwards, not even a sound. Two gone, he didn’t even have time to move. Three looks surprised but his brain doesn’t work fast enough as he’s hit. The fourth is on his way down to take cover as I readjust my aim slightly and he spins as the bullets knock him off his feet.

  There is silence for a moment then a machine gun opens up. There’s two or three soldiers left, which is what I supposed, and they’re moving to get a better shot at me. I return fire. There’s tracer from the machine gun whizzing above my head, knocking chunks out of the tree and getting closer, more accurate.

  I reckon with only three of them I can hold them off for a while, but it’s a machine gun against a rifle and the odds don’t stack up, three to one and the machine gun, it’s only a matter of time.

  Then I hear more rifles firing. Shit, that’s it, there’s more of the bastards coming. At least I’ve seen a bit of action before I die, I think. But it’s not the enemy, it’s the Montagnard. The rest of the choppers must have come in and, with the whole company together, the Montagnard have been persuaded to head down the ridge. Then I hear Combustible Jones calling out through the gunfire, ‘If you is there, don’t despair, I’ve come to save your soul, brother Mole!’

  Almost at once the enemy machine gun goes silent, they’ve taken it out. I’m pretty whacked, and shaking like a leaf after the adrenalin is out of my system. But as they carry us out, I can’t help thinking what Nancy’s going to say when I tell her the story of Murray Templeton’s rescue.

  She won’t say anything, of course, because she’ll know in her heart that I’ve done the right thing. But they’ll probably give me some sort of commendation. The army’s pretty big on pieces of paper. Suddenly I know exactly what she’ll do. She’ll tear the bottoms-wiping certificate they give me down the centre and then into four pieces, stick them into an envelope and send it by registered letter to Mr & Mrs Philip Templeton. As Nancy says, ‘If you wait long enough it all comes round, the good and the bad.’

  EPILOGUE

  1989–1999

  I recall the day in 1989 when the phone rang for two reasons. I was marking my first set of mid-term papers at my new university. The writing standard of the first-year students wasn’t exactly blistering and I recall wondering whether I had done the right thing leaving America. The second reason was that the weather outside was blowing a gale and had been doing so for three days.

  I picked the phone up with some impatience, it hadn’t stopped ringing all day. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Michael Proctor here, Professor Lessing. Come over right away, we’ve got a bit of a crisis on.’ It was the deputy vice-chancellor being his usual abrupt self. No first name, no initial greeting, no polite request, nothing except a short, sharp instruction that just naturally sounded as though it contained a liberal dose of invective as a part of its hidden meaning. Without waiting for a reply from me, I heard the clatter of the receiver being replaced.

  A visit to Mike Proctor was the last thing I needed on a day like this one. You sometimes wonder where some men learn their manners or what it is in their childhood that makes them so bloody rude as adults. I’d known him at Edinburgh, though not well enough to call him a friend, if indeed he had any friends. He’d been in part instrumental in recruiting me to my new position, so I suppose I was under some sort of obligation.

  His office was an eight-minute walk across the campus, normally nothing to be concerned about except for the gale outside. So, cursing the man under my breath, I put on my raincoat. ‘Must get a new raincoat,’ I reminded myself. I’d been reminding myself to get a new raincoat every time it’d rained for the past ten years. My raincoat was never exactly smart or, for that matter, ever new. It had been bequeathed to me second-hand when I’d arrived in England from Australia twenty-eight years ago. Too big for me then and still was. I recall being embarrassed that I had to roll up the sl
eeves and that the hem came down almost to my ankles in a city where the miniskirt was becoming all the rage.

  Still, in a country where the rainy days outnumber the ones that contain a modicum of sunlight, it was an essential item and after a while it didn’t seem to matter. The raincoat was a discard back then and I dare say even a pervert would turn his nose up at it now. I’ll go into the city to David Jones and get a new one, a posh one, maybe an Aquascutum, to make up for all the shabby years, but I knew I was kidding myself, and the next time I needed to wear a raincoat I’d be going through the same silly litany whilst pushing my arms through the broken lining of this one.

  Though there aren’t that many of them, I was discovering that a foul day in Sydney could be just as bad as a miserable one in London or Santa Monica, California, for that matter. Fighting the weather, I was annoyed with myself for not showing my independence with the deputy vice-chancellor by delaying my departure for at least fifteen or twenty minutes before venturing out into this windblown, rain-torn, miserable dog’s day afternoon.

  ‘You’re weak, that’s what you are, too willing to please everyone, time you stood up for yourself, you let people like Mike Proctor walk all over you.’ I knew this wasn’t true, but I was feeling sorry for myself. We’re all allowed occasionally to indulge in that sort of specious analysis, particularly if one is a psychiatrist and so can dismiss it as a perfectly normal bout of self-castigation, positive proof that, unlike most of your profession, you are still perfectly normal.

  Perhaps I should explain myself. I took my initial medical degree at Edinburgh and then my postgraduate training at the Maudsley in London, where I did my thesis on the effects of the concentration-camp experiences of victims of the Holocaust. Here I received tuition on desensitisation programs and relaxation therapy.

  After that I spent eight years as a research fellow at Sepulveda Veterans Administration Hospital in West Los Angeles near Santa Monica. In conjunction with my work at the hospital, I was an assistant professor at UCLA, which has its campus practically next door and where I completed my doctorate. My patients at first were soldiers returning from Vietnam. Treatment, which included counselling, consisted mostly of group therapy and training in relaxation with some form of medication added, the most popular being Valium.

  Then later, when Vietnam veterans started being admitted with unexpected complications, we realised that we needed to develop new forms of treatment and that a great deal of research was required in the trauma area. We simply did not understand much of what appeared to be happening with these post-war patients. Though I must say the US government was less than interested in our gaining any further knowledge into what would become known as PTSD or Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. The grants that enabled us to continue researching had essentially come from private sources and from the university itself.

  The offer of a full professorship meant I could come home, back to Australia, after many years abroad. The States had seen my marriage come and go with all the bitter recriminations and acrimony not unusual in a man who had been badly spoilt by a doting and interfering mother and a family loath to part with a cent in a divorce settlement, even though Californian law allowed for me to receive half of our joint assets.

  My desire was to continue to work in the same field, that is in the new area of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and in particular with Vietnam War veterans. Australia had participated in the Vietnam War and so I was anxious to continue my research here amongst my own people. I quickly enough discovered that the Australian government’s attitude to the problems experienced by Vietnam veterans, like that of the US, could best be described as one of white-hot apathy.

  Even the RSL was rubbishing the symptoms we were increasingly beginning to see in outpatients. They called the vets ‘a bunch of whingers who never fought in a proper war’. As well, the students in my lectures would constantly question me. Their attitude to Vietnam and its post-war effects, which they’d largely learned from the media and the movies, was that Vietnam veterans were baby-killers. The famous picture of the little girl torched by napalm running down the road had fixed this notion in their minds and they’d transferred it to every Vietnam veteran. Public sympathy hardly existed, the vets were seen as an embarrassment, almost un-Australian.

  I tapped on Proctor’s door, only to hear a single ‘Come!’ ‘Your usual charming self, I see, Deputy Vice-chancellor.’ I was determined to start with the advantage this time around. I hung my coat on the stand next to the door.

  He didn’t appear to hear the gibe, looked up and said again, ‘We’ve got a crisis.’ ‘Yes, so you said on the phone.’

  ‘One of my senior lecturers has walked out in the middle of a lecture and handed in his resignation. Sit down, Professor,’ he pointed in the direction of a well-worn, comfortable-looking leather couch and its matching club chair, the leather rubbed dull at its arms from constant use. Both the couch and the chair contrasted strangely with the aluminium and glass office interior with its battleship-grey carpet and strong sense of indifferent government architecture. It was as if a couple of bushies from the country had happened into the city for a day wearing their working clothes. I chose to sit in the old chair, it seemed a less female thing to do.

  ‘I imagine that’s happened before, it’s not unusual in academic institutions,’ I replied.

  ‘Of course, but not with this man. He’s one of the most popular lecturers at the university. His lectures are always packed. You’re right, some academics just wear out, but not this chap, he loves his job, he’s popular with the faculty, students love him and he’s active on a number of the university committees and his papers are widely respected.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you expect me to do as a clinical psychiatrist.’

  ‘Well, you’re a specialist in trauma, aren’t you? That’s the fancy name they’re giving to a bit of stress these days, isn’t it?’

  I don’t bite. ‘Depends on what caused it. Stress and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder are not the same thing. My clinical work is mostly in PTSD. Your lecturer may, as you’ve said, be under a great deal of stress and needs a break because it’s all become rather too much for him. There are others on campus who might do a better job with him than me.’

  ‘He’s been working pretty hard. That’s probably it.’

  ‘Has he shown any previous incidents of erratic behaviour?’

  ‘On the contrary, he’s a pretty easygoing sort of chap. Relaxed. As I said, he’s a charismatic teacher and a wellliked member of the faculty. Always seems to be in complete control.’

  ‘Always?’ I didn’t like the sound of this affirmation. People who are always in control are, well, to put it simply, seldom in control.

  ‘Yes, very together sort of chap. I’ve already told you that.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No, he’s a bachelor.’

  ‘Homosexual?’

  ‘Not that I know, certainly doesn’t give that impression.’

  ‘Any past drinking problems?’

  Proctor shrugged. ‘Nothing unusual, he likes an occasional drink like most of us, though I’ve never seen him under the weather. Now I want you to have a word with him, get to the bottom of this incident. Get him to withdraw his resignation. A quiet chat is all I think will be necessary.’

  ‘If, in your opinion, that’s all he needs, why haven’t you talked to him yourself?’

  ‘I have, woman!’ he roared, annoyed at my persistent questioning. ‘He wasn’t very responsive. I suggested he calm down and then come and see me again. But then I thought of you. You know, a softer touch.’

  ‘You mean someone who doesn’t go at things with a sledge hammer?’

  He looked surprised but said nothing, it was one infinitely small blow for the female of the species. ‘Has he always been an academic?’

  ‘Interesting you should ask that. No, as a matter of fact he sp
ent part of his working life in the army, permanent army that is. Quite a remarkable story, he rose from the ranks, all the way from private to lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. Everything about this fellow is fairly spectacular. He attended Macquarie University on a military scholarship after returning from Vietnam. Brilliant student, they had to get permission to let him submit for his doctorate in only three years, part-time.’

  ‘Vietnam? Why didn’t you say so?’ I was suddenly interested.

  ‘Oh, is it important? He doesn’t talk about it much. It’s well into his past by now, I should think.’ ‘Is he willing to accept help, treatment?’ Michael Proctor had pulled back in his chair, tilting his chin. ‘Treatment? Oh, I’m not sure it’s as bad as that! Help, yes, I’m sure he’d be willing to have a talk with you. That’s why I called you in. I’m told you’re good at your job. I’d be surprised if you don’t get to the bottom of this fairly quickly, we certainly don’t want to lose him.’

  I ignored the subtle sexism of his remarks. What was the point? The Mike Proctors of this world have hides like a rhinoceros. ‘He’ll have to agree to see me and that might not prove to be as easy as you think.’

  Mike Proctor raised one bushy eyebrow, his expression clearly indicating I was making much too much of the situ ation. ‘I’m sure you’ll manage it, Professor.’ He had plainly completed what he had to say to me and wished me to leave. Picking up his fountain pen, he continued working at his desk.

  ‘And how might I contact this man, whatever his name is?’

  He looked up, impatient. ‘Well, naturally I’ll arrange that and give you a call.’ ‘And his name?’

  ‘I’d rather call him first, reputations may be at stake. Loose lips sink ships.’

  It was a stupid remark, the campus would have been full of the rumour of the lecturer’s walk out and resignation. A university, even a new one, is simply an advanced high school. People don’t basically change and the gossips would be having a field day. A couple of phone calls would have revealed his identity. It wasn’t worth pursuing. The Vietnam veteran would either agree to an initial interview or stick to his macho image and refuse. If he was like most Vietnam vets, he’d be confused, ashamed and somewhat bitter, thinking himself weak if he asked for help.