Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  However, in this instance, this was not the case. Or if it was, the veteran had overcome his neurosis and was desperate enough to want to talk to someone.

  Two days later I met Dr Mole Maloney, a noted expert in environmental studies. What began that day between us was to continue for years, in fact, in some respects, it continues to this day.

  It is not usual practice for a patient’s notes to be made available but, as a fellow academic, Dr Maloney has agreed to allow me to publish them in a paper, on the basis that they represent a clear insight into the condition of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder as experienced by an individual.

  For the purposes of this paper I have eliminated my own analysis. Dr Maloney’s verbatim comments during the period of six years while under analysis were all recorded and transcribed. I believe they testify to his mind-set and need very little comment from his analyst. They stand as an epitome of the PTSD condition. They include, of course, not only the narrative yet to come in this final paper but all that has gone before, some 1160 pages of typed notes in his own voice with only some punctuation added to emphasise meaning.

  The clinical reason for these copious background notes is easily explained. Dr Maloney’s condition, though primarily a result of the time he served in Vietnam, is not its sole cause. Dr Maloney’s father substitute, Tommy Maloney, was himself deeply traumatised as a result of being a POW in Borneo. We now know that suicide levels go up in veterans as they become older, so that Tommy’s eventual suicide after showing Mole the big tree is entirely consistent with clinical experience.

  We now begin to know the extent to which the children of PTSD sufferers are affected by all the complex issues that arise in the family. Tommy’s condition would have had a profound effect on all his children, but in particular on the young Mole Maloney who spent the most time with him. Although not recognised until recently, PTSD has been clearly present after every war in which Australians have participated, often resulting in deep trauma in subsequent family life.

  With the returned veteran unable or unwilling because of guilt and fear of rejection to seek help, or even having the ability to admit to his condition, he often resorts to selfmedication, with the use of alcohol and, in earlier times, barbiturates and now drugs, legal or otherwise. The result often leads to disastrous consequences for the veteran’s family and for the veteran himself. Wives end up living lives of quiet desperation. Unable to unburden themselves, their world becomes one of fear and a sense of deep obligation and is completely determined by the moods, needs and demands of the veteran. Their children suffer and continue to suffer from the results of their father’s behaviour. Children often develop a love–hate relationship with him, deeply felt ambivalence. They also feel guilty for resenting, even hating him, a guilt that lasts throughout their lives because in spite of the pain and emotional abuse they continue to love him.

  Putting it into lay terms, I believe that Dr Maloney has received a double dose of PTSD. In a great many respects, he could be said to be in an even worse predicament than that of his surrogate father. Although there seems to be some evidence that the notorious ‘Mr Baloney’, Tommy’s father, a veteran of the Boer War, may have manifested many of the same symptoms.

  PTSD, shell-shock, combat fatigue or whatever name it has been given in the past, has been going on for a long time. There is even some historical evidence that it was present in the male population after the Peloponnesian Wars in ancient Greece. However, the recent experience of veterans in Vietnam contains an extra ingredient not present in the return of most heroes. It is the first time in history that a population has physically spat on returning veterans as happened on numerous occasions to Vietnam vets. The concept of ‘the war hero’ always present in a returning army has been rejected by the general population for these returned Vietnam soldiers and, instead, replaced with vilification and a sense of disgust never experienced before by any Australian soldier returning to his homeland.

  Returning veterans were psychologically tortured by their own people, who largely came to regard them in a deeply hostile manner. Their subsequent medical and psychiatric problems have been ignored or disparaged, and their rightful place in society as the men who believed they had defended freedom has been denied to them. This has had a deeply negative effect which has exacerbated their sense of alienation from the community at large.

  As a matter of possible interest, you will note that as Mole delivers the commentary on his childhood years, ‘the narrative voice’, while always being delivered by an adult and often containing adult conceits, sometimes shifts in emphasis and syntax into a childlike way of observing the world around him.

  Usually this behaviour comes from a greater degree of pathology than PTSD and occurs when a child has been sexually abused or suffered extensively at the hands of a parent or adult, such as being beaten or punished unfairly.

  When I first questioned Dr Maloney, he denied any such abusive treatment in childhood. Finally he admitted to several occasions when, as a very small child, Tommy had locked him in the garden shed for several hours. Nancy, his mother, had eventually discovered this and the problem had ceased. However, these episodes, and the extreme fear associated with them, almost forgotten by Mole Maloney, could have triggered the episodes of age regression as seen in his therapy.

  In psychiatric terms, this is known simply enough as regression and is an attempt by the subject to dissociate himself from the painful present and to retreat to a place of greater comfort. It is more likely to be the ‘shed incidents’, when taken in combination with his PTSD, that explain Dr Maloney’s inconsistency of voice, both his naivety and sophistication, during some parts of his narrative. Put simply, there are two Maloneys speaking, Dr Maloney and the Mole Maloney still within him, the ‘voice’ of either can appear at any moment during the commentary.

  I have also excluded the logical time sequences and day-by-day routines of Dr Maloney’s second and third tour in Vietnam, initially as a warrant officer and later as a captain and company commander. This is because the primary concern to us is his post-Vietnam psychological and medical experience. Though, of course, some of his three Vietnam episodes, known in army vernacular as ‘tours’, inevitably appear in his own narrative as an explanation of one or another incident of importance to him.

  Signed: Professor A. Lessing, MB BS(Edin)

  FRC Psych. FRANZCP

  THE CONTINUED TRANSCRIPT OF DR MOLE MALONEY’S CLINICAL NOTES

  After my chaotic introduction to Vietnam, I was sent to Tran Xa outpost to join US Special Detachment A115. While I was in Tran Xa, the Yank build-up started. Now the US were sending fighting units as well as advisers, and Australia had contributed an infantry battalion and planned to follow. Towards the end of my year-long tour, I found myself relieving besieged outposts with the Montagnard Mobile Strike Force. By this time, Combustible Jones had been sent home in a body bag and I’d had about enough of the Viet Cong, the Vietnamese National Army, the South Vietnamese Irregulars and even my own Montagnard to last me a lifetime.

  Then I was posted back to the Jungle Training Centre at Canungra in Queensland to help train the increasing flow of soldiers to the war. It was a tough course. Soldiers returning from Vietnam sometimes remarked only half jokingly that they didn’t know if they feared most another tour in Vietnam or another course at Canungra. After almost a year there, I was posted back to Vietnam, this time replacing a 6RAR Company Sergeant Major, or CSM, who’d been evacuated home sick.

  This was a different Vietnam to the one where I was always dependent on local troops with a varying sense of loyalty to the cause of peace in the free world. The Australians were a different kettle of fish altogether, better trained, well motivated, and quick to learn on the job and acquitted themselves with distinction in Vietnam. There is no question that they were the best-trained troops in Vietnam and the NVA, the highly professional North Vietnamese army, grew to fear and respect them to a
very high degree.

  I don’t want to go into my second tour of Vietnam, suffice to say I felt okay most of the time but there were periods when I couldn’t believe I wasn’t coming home at the end of it in a black body bag. At times, life had become somewhat meaningless and I believed myself expendable, which was what was meant by the sign I’d read in the bar at Australia House in Da Nang when I’d first arrived. It was very difficult getting myself through those dark periods but I kept it to myself and did my job.

  I returned home with 6RAR and walked into the terminal at Mascot with my carry bag and a bottle of duty-free scotch, a commodity which had increasingly become my constant sleeping companion and often enough my most cherished and dependable friend. I was drinking heavily and was secretly ashamed of it. You’d have thought Tommy would have taught me that particular lesson.

  Even the Sydney terminal was like a new experience. I’d forgotten what peacetime looked and felt like, it was all so very different to Saigon with its heat and noise and smell of fish sauce and the constant importuning of the local population.

  There were no MPs with rifles and pistols, no antirocket grenade screens on the windows, no tanks or concrete revetments containing armed F4 fighter bombers, only the bizarre experience of civilian aircraft, their tails painted in bright colours, big and small, bustling about the airport. Most of all, as we walked across the tarmac, there was no oblong stack of shiny aluminium caskets awaiting the arrival of the C5 Starlifter to freight the fresh killed, that is the grunts who’d died in the past seven days, to destinations where weeping mothers were waiting for them at some lonely small-town airport in the USA with the local Lions or Rotary Club members lined up to pay tribute to a son born and bred in Nowhereville.

  We are directed by a corporal from ‘the corps of trucks’ through a door to a secure area, a large room behind Customs where a captain was waiting to address us.

  ‘Men, you’re back in civilisation. If you’ve brought any weapons with you, please leave them in the amnesty bin, the customs officers are waiting outside and I don’t have to tell you what the penalty is for bringing in a concealed weapon.’ Then he told us that if we became ill with malaria or venereal disease to go straight to the nearest base hospital. It was suggested that after the two days of R & R in Saigon, it wasn’t a good idea to have sex with a waiting wife or girlfriend without using a condom for the first two weeks.

  After this bit of a talk, we lined up in front of an army pay clerk to draw our money and receive our leave passes. I received a fistful of money, enough ten-dollar notes to choke a horse and 105 days’ accrued leave, three and a half months sitting on my arse thinking about nothing in particular before I had to report back to the army. After Vietnam, it seemed like a lifetime of freedom.

  A corporal, wearing Vietnam ribbons, yells at us, ‘Okay, you heroes, put your ribbons on before yer go out to meet yer family and friends!’

  It wasn’t something at the forefront of my mind and it must have taken me a good five minutes to find the two of them at the bottom of my carry bag. The two ribbons were on a bar, the Vietnam Medal and the Vietnamese Campaign Medal. I pinned these clumsily to my breast. I must admit, I glanced down to see if the oak leaf was intact on the Vietnam Medal Ribbon. It indicated that I’d been Mentioned in Despatches, which I’d won on the first tour with the Training Team. I’d received it mainly for when I’d rescued Murray Templeton.

  Nancy had been delighted when I told her the story but she wouldn’t tear up the Mention in Despatches citation and send it to Mr and Mrs Philip Templeton like I suggested. But she did take the bus into Wangaratta and have a photographer make an exact-sized colour copy of this latest bottoms-wiping certificate, then did as I suggested, tearing the photo into four and mailing it to you know who. Though when Vera ‘Big Mouth Saggy Tits’ Forbes came around and asked if she could photograph the citation for the Gazette, Nancy told her to go to buggery among other things that shouldn’t be repeated.

  Now here’s the lovely thing. I came out of Customs expecting to climb into the green army Bedford bus that the corporal of the ‘corps of trucks’ told us to look out for and which would take us to Central Station to catch the overnight train to Melbourne. Instead, standing in the arrival lounge, was Nancy, Sarah, Bozo, little Colleen, Templeton, Morrie, Sophie and Mrs Rika Ray. They had this ginormous hand-painted banner which said:

  MOLE POWER!

  We’re soon hugging and kissing. Nancy and Sarah, Sophie and Mrs Rika Ray are having a big bawl, grabbing a hold of each other and Morrie is off on the side doing the same, bawling. Bozo is pumping my hand and little Colleen and Templeton are jumping up and down and pecking me on the cheeks and grabbing me around the waist, I can’t believe how much they’ve both grown.

  Then an RSM in full dress uniform comes up to us, ‘Sorry about this, Mr Maloney, but you’re to report immediately to Colonel Payne at the Education Centre just inside the gates of the Victoria Barracks.’ ‘Hey, wait on! What about my family?’ I protest. The RSM shakes his head. ‘We only have one military vehicle, a Holden, it can take four of them, driver’s waiting outside.’

  ‘She’ll be right,’ Bozo says, ‘We’ve hired a great big Merc, the rest of us will meet you there.’ I notice he’s put on a bit of weight. ‘Oh, Big Jack Donovan sends his best, he’d have come but he’s got a police conference on this weekend.’

  We get to Victoria Barracks about four in the afternoon and there’s a guard of honour standing at the gates.

  ‘We’d better wait, something’s happening,’ I tell Nancy and Sophie, who take up the back seat, the rest of the mob are in the big black Mercedes following us.

  A staff sergeant comes up to the driver. ‘Mr Maloney?’ he asks. I nod. He instructs the army driver, ‘Take the car to the Education Centre and drop the visitors off.’

  ‘There’s others following, Staff,’ I tell him, ‘in a black Mercedes.’

  ‘Righto,’ he says, ‘Would you mind coming with me, sir?’

  Next thing I know I’m being escorted by a guard of honour to a flag pole within Victoria Barracks. The Colonel is waiting for me and he congratulates me in front of my whole family and tells me the Queen has approved the award of the Military Medal for bravery whilst serving in the Training Team in Vietnam.

  It turns out that Colonel Murray Templeton has been the moving force behind the recommendation and that the US Army has also made a submission to the Australian Army from US Marine Captain Elijah Combustible Jones. It’s dated two weeks before the US Airforce mistakenly dropped napalm on their own troops and Captain Jones was included. Born in flames, died in flames.

  All I can say, it’s a day of tears, though in the end Nancy says, ‘It don’t mean Murray Templeton is any less a coward and a little shit for not fronting up for what he done to Sarah!’

  But Sarah says, ‘Mum, it’s the best thing that could have happened. We’ve got Templeton and we’ve showed them it’s the Maloneys who have the real class in Yankalillee.’

  We stayed the night in the Hilton in Sydney at the expense of Crowe Transport, drinking Great Western champagne half the night. Last thing I remember is Mrs Rika Ray saying, ‘We are thanking the Lord Vishnu very, very much and we are burning the incense forty days and forty nights and putting some gold leaf on the God for safe deliverance. Only I am asking one thing, why is the Queen of England, Her Most Gracious Majesty with the handsome Prince Philip, not giving our Mole the Victoria Cross?’

  I think I passed out on the plush carpet. It had been a bloody long day and I’d been sipping scotch since the 707 Qantas flight left Saigon, twenty-two hours earlier.

  I woke up thinking I was back in Nui Dat with the usual hangover and with two days to recover from it before I was back on patrol. I was still in my uniform, lying on the softest bed I can ever remember with Templeton in pink rosebud pyjamas, asleep beside me, sucking her thumb. Later I would learn that the treasured pyjam
as bore the Suckfizzle label.

  The 105 days of freedom pass in a blur. Nothing much has changed in Yankalillee, people greet you in the street as though they’d seen you only yesterday, incurious and complacent. My whole life has been turned upside down, I’ve been killing people in black pyjamas who are equally determined to kill me and all they could talk about is the weather, the weekend footie results and the price of cattle at the Wodonga saleyards.

  I must admit, there wasn’t any of the recriminations the blokes who lived in the city copped from the assorted dogooders and pot-smoking weekend hippies. The bush simply didn’t care that much. You were back, safe and sound, have a beer, son.

  The nights are beginning to be a difficult time for me, they hold black dreams, night sweats and startled awakenings. I tell myself I must be in control, same old Mole that people know. I’ve become a secret drinker, not daring to go into the pub but with a bottle of scotch tucked away where I can find it any time I need it. I’m popping Valium and Vietnam seems more real to me than the small town I’ve lived in all my life.

  I return from leave and report to the Eastern Command Personnel Depot at Watsons Bay in Sydney where I’m given a medical and a new posting as Warrant Officer Instructor in the Tactics Wing at the Infantry Centre at Ingleburn. I take to the job like a duck to water and simply love the teaching involved. The one thing I know hasn’t changed is that I need to know things. The old Mole, full of questions, is still alive within me.

  In November 1967 I see an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s for a third university that’s only been going a year at North Ryde, Macquarie University, where they’re offering positions to full or part-time students. I think about it for a while then I come to the conclusion it would be a good way to keep me out of the sergeants’ mess where my own bottle of scotch resides under the bar counter. I’ve bought myself an almost new 1964 Toyota Crown from a sergeant who’s been posted to Vietnam and the university is no more than an hour and a half from the barracks, so why not?