Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  We were soon to learn that Chairman Mao’s boys didn’t fight like their Korean cousins. That night a couple of thousand counterattacked, determined to knock us off the hill to get to the vital crossing. It was a moonless night and as we sat waiting in the dark I heard their bugle calls and whistle blasts as they marshalled their troops into position in the rice paddies below us. I must say, it was all a bit spooky. No commands shouted out, just the bugles and whistles. Then the attack commenced. A parachute flare sent up by mortar floated down, illuminating the scene. Line upon line of Chinese infantry were leaving the valley and invading the slope below us. I watched as the parachute dropped and their shadows lengthened, giving the appearance of huge dark insects crawling along the ground, coming for us. They wore these canvas rubber-soled boots, so the sound of their advance became a sort of muted thunder, like a storm heard at some distance.

  It was a torrid fight made all the more difficult by the darkness, and could have swung their way on several occasions. By two a.m. they’d suddenly had enough. Bugles sounded and whistles blew and the chinks were gone.

  The following morning at the debrief the skipper told us that the battalion had suffered a lot of casualties – sixteen killed and three times that number wounded. In war, news of the death of your comrades is inevitable but it doesn’t make it any easier to take. You immediately think it could have been you or your best mate, and it’s extra tough if you knew one of the blokes who copped his dose of eternity. But there was something to take out of the fight. The skipper pointed out that, what with the previous day and now the night, we were the first United Nations unit to give the Chinese a good kick in the arse.

  ‘How many chinks we get?’ someone asked.

  ‘We, or the battalion?’ the skipper queried.

  ‘The battalion.’

  The skipper seemed to be thinking. ‘It’s not that easy. We reckon a lot, a real lot. They sustained heavy losses, but quite how many we’ll never know – they took almost all their dead and wounded with them.’

  There was a general murmur among the platoon. You didn’t need to be Einstein to know that these blokes were different. Like us they respected their dead and wounded, and that made them well and truly a cut above the other nogs who left their dead and dying on the battlefield.

  As nothing seemed more certain than that the Chinese would attack again, we started patrolling immediately to try to find out what the enemy was up to. We’d witnessed their determination to achieve their objective and reckoned they weren’t beyond having another crack at reaching the crossings. We moved forward cautiously, first setting up a battalion position then patrolling forward for a day or two before setting up again and moving further forward. The weather was getting increasingly cold, in fact colder than most of us had ever experienced. We began to realise that we were about to encounter an even more dangerous enemy than the Chinese – the Korean winter.

  I’d had some previous experience of cold. On Queen Island in the winter with a gale-force westerly whipping up the seas, the cold seems to get right into your bones. If you are laying or emptying craypots in an open boat you certainly know what cold weather is all about. Now I thought of such conditions almost with affection – the cold that descended upon us at Pakchon was of a totally different order.

  I don’t know how one measures degrees of cold. ‘Biting cold’ is too mild a way to describe it; ‘vicious, flesh-tearing, jaw-snapping cold’ is getting a little closer. If you spilt a mug of steaming tea it would freeze the moment it hit the ground. If you needed a slash you didn’t dare expose your penis to the elements more than to let a very small part peep out of your trousers, and that well protected with a thumb and forefinger wrapped in thick woolly gloves. The moment your piss hit the ground it froze. John Lazarou swore blind that his froze while still in the air, hitting the ground as a frozen arc before shattering into shards of pale-yellow ice.

  You could wrap up most of your body but you could do nothing about your feet. Our boots inevitably got wet patrolling paddy fields and this became an ever-present danger. While you were walking about they retained their heat, but you wouldn’t want to sit in them for too long. At night, when the temperature plummeted, wet boots and socks would be frozen stiff by morning. While you might find another pair of dry socks you only owned one pair of boots, and there was very little comfort in putting your feet into two casts of frozen leather and then hopping around in an attempt to soften them. We soon learned to keep our boots and socks within our sleeping bags, hugging them to the warmth of our stomachs. By morning they would still be somewhat damp, but thankfully not frozen.

  The blokes in transport had the worst of it. In one of those oversights typical of the army there was no antifreeze available, so the jeep drivers had to take turns waking up every two hours to run the engines of all the vehicles for ten minutes to prevent the engine blocks from cracking and the water in the radiators from freezing.

  The experience we all dreaded most was frostbite. It was something that could happen very easily if you failed to be careful. I recall how one evening five of us were sent out in bitter weather on a standing patrol. A standing patrol is literally what it suggests – you stay concealed in one spot. We took up our position on a particular hill behind which it was reckoned the enemy would be most likely to concentrate their troops in preparation for an attack. The idea was to give our side early warning if this should occur. Pretty soon Jason Matthews whispered to me, ‘Jacko, are your feet getting numb?’ I nodded; the tingly numb feeling had started about five minutes previously. ‘Pass it on,’ he whispered. Soon there were nods all round. ‘Bugger it,’ I said so they could all hear me, ‘we have to move.’

  ‘Mate, the chinks might hear us movin’ about,’ Jason protested.

  ‘Fuck it, I’ll take the chance. A man’s losin’ the feelin’ in his feet,’ Johnny Gordon retorted.

  ‘As a once lance corporal I’ve got the seniority, I say we walk,’ John Lazarou suddenly piped in.

  ‘That’s bullshit, Lazy, but I agree we walk.’ It was Fitzy, another ginger-haired bloke, like me, from Broome, where his parents ran a greasy spoon famous for its hamburgers.

  We had a unanimous decision, so we up and walked the circulation back into our feet, or so we thought. At first light we began to make our way back to the company position but after only a short distance Fitzy cried out in pain and soon it became agony for him to walk. We improvised a stretcher by cutting two poles from the scrubby bush and strapping Johnny’s and my waterproof capes to them.

  Back home we pulled off his boots and I was about to massage his feet when the company medic came running down from headquarters yelling, ‘Ferchrissake, stop! Don’t touch him!’

  ‘His feet are frozen, corporal,’ I said lamely.

  ‘Never, never, never do that, you hear!’ he said, his voice still on the rise.

  He squatted beside Fitzy and gently pressed his swollen feet. The flesh was a stark, bloodless white, and where the medic touched him the indentation made by his finger remained. ‘Did you go out with wet socks?’ he asked.

  ‘Didn’t have time to change them,’ Fitzy winced.

  Johnny appeared with two steaming mugs of coffee and handed one of them to me. ‘Here, give us those,’ the medic corporal demanded. He took the mugs and placed them on the frozen ground beside him until the steam no longer rose, then he poured the warm coffee over Fitzy’s feet and wrapped him in a blanket and we grabbed a stretcher and carried him up to RAP, the Regimental Aid Post. Well, that was the end of Fitzy’s Korean adventure. They flew him back to Japan where they amputated four of his toes, three on one foot and his big toe on the other. Fitzy was a 3RAR career soldier and so, effectively, his army career was over. All because he’d been careless about changing his socks.

  Fitzy’s frostbite was a lesson to us all. We were learning that in extreme weather it’s the little things you do that count. I mean, you’d quite naturally think that massaging frozen feet was the correct procedur
e to warm them up. That’s fine if they’re simply cold, but frozen means the cells of the skin have literally turned to ice.

  When you place a bottle of beer in the freezer to cool it rapidly and then forget it’s there, you discover later the bottle is broken. The beer has expanded beyond the capacity of the bottle to contain it. Well, that’s pretty well what happens to frozen feet. The liquid freezing inside the skin cells expands and damages them, and rubbing the skin will exacerbate the damage – in a sense, your feet explode. The correct procedure to save the cells from further damage is to slowly melt the ice contained within them by systematically bathing the feet, or any other frozen part of the body, in warm water.

  The army, in its usual bull-in-a-china-shop way, thought they’d solve the frostbite problem by creating waterproof rubber boots. They were rather cumbersome affairs as they needed to be sufficiently large to allow for two pairs of thick winter socks. Good thinking we all thought, until we started to walk in them. Rubber is an excellent conductor of heat and very soon our feet started to sweat and the sweat couldn’t dissipate as it does with leather, and in minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, sweat turns to ice the moment you stop walking. Before you knew it your feet were encased in a thin layer of ice and you’d get that familiar numb feeling. If this happened you needed to keep walking until you could get to a source of warmth and were able to change your wet socks.

  As the days grew shorter the cold increased in severity, and even the sweat under our armpits or on any other part of our bodies would routinely freeze. If you’ve ever seen monkeys scratching for fleas, that’s how we were with ice. You’d feel a small sharp sting somewhere, in your crutch, under your arm or in the hollow of your neck – usually the first places to sweat – and your hand would dart inside your waterproof jacket or trousers to pick the tiny but sharp slivers of ice from your skin.

  Sleeping warm was yet another difficulty. We were out in the field and except for those assigned to the battalion commander and a handful of the other brass, there were no conventional tents. We made a tent-like structure for two men by combining our waterproof capes, a shelter that became known as a ‘hutchie’. A hutchie had both ends open and no way of closing them, so the wind would come whistling through. With a wind-chill factor even lower than the ambient temperature outside, a hutchie made for less than ideal sleeping quarters. The Americans had ‘arctic’ sleeping bags and they did the trick, but the Australian ones were hopeless and we were issued with two extra blankets. By wearing all the clothes you could find and two pairs of socks (a third pair wouldn’t stretch over the bulk of the other two) you just about managed to survive a freezing night.

  There was one incident it took me several years to talk about. I’m not sure why, perhaps because it showed how foolish I was and clearly demonstrated that in cold weather it is the little details that save you. One minus-twenty-degree night I was woken to take my turn at sentry duty. Still half asleep, I put on my socks, boots and fleecy-lined ‘pile cap’ and staggered over to the sentry’s weapon pit. The Bren gun was set up at the entrance to the pit and as I stepped down into it, to steady myself, I grabbed hold of the barrel. My hand immediately froze to the metal and I was unable to pull it away. If I hadn’t been so zonked I would have put on my gloves that were in the pocket of my battledress before leaving my hutchie. I can tell you I was fully awake in a moment and shouted out to the departing sentry to come back.

  ‘Shit!’ was all he said as he realised what had happened, and in a trice he’d pulled out his donger and pissed on my hand. The warm urine freed it from the Bren barrel but left a fair slice of my skin behind. Much to my chagrin, in a ceremony the following day, the platoon awarded him the DSO (Donger Service Order).

  If the enemy had only known how completely ill prepared we were in the early-winter fighting conditions they could have strolled in and captured us without a shot being fired. For example, during the cautious move forward after the Battle of Pakchon, when we were all still a bit jumpy from the fighting, the sentry on duty thought he heard movement. Maybe it was the Chinese back for another go, he thought. He decided to wake us all, his decision based on the military principle that it is better to be safe than sorry. Staying alive even takes priority over a semi-warm sleeping bag and I slipped into my damp boots, this time making sure to wear gloves, grabbed my rifle and dropped into my weapon pit while calling for a sleepy John Lazarou to follow. I could hear the blokes all around me doing the same. As we began to routinely check our weapons, the muffled cursing began. Moisture had frozen the moving parts of our rifles and Owen guns, the ice virtually welding the rifle bolts and Owen cocking handles to the bodies of the weapons. If this hadn’t been a false alarm and the Chinese had happened to attack at that moment they could have captured us using a pop-gun. In recruit training, soldiers are told to ‘love your weapon’. From that time on we slept with them, keeping them warm, snuggled close to our bodies all night.

  Life goes on, even in the cold, and a fortnight or so later the skipper called 12 Platoon together for a briefing. He told us that as a result of patrolling across the entire Korean front little contact had been made with the Chinese.

  ‘They’ve scarpered,’ he said.

  ‘Why, skipper?’ someone asked. ‘They can’t have lost that many men.’

  ‘I can only hazard a guess,’ Lieutenant Hamill replied. ‘They’ve been at war with each other for damn near twenty years with Mao Zedong finally downing Chiang Kai-shek and with the Japs somewhere in the middle of all that. Perhaps they’ve had enough. The expeditionary force they sent against us did not go well for them and they’ve decided to hang up their boots. Who knows, the push to the Yalu is on again right across the front with the Allies meeting very little enemy opposition. If that’s the case, as the top brass seem to think, this time General MacArthur may even be right.’ He paused as we all laughed – MacArthur’s broadcasts were a standing joke. Then he continued, ‘I have a message passed on from company headquarters.’ He opened his field notebook. ‘The supreme commander has said, and I quote: “I hope to have the boys home for Christmas.”’

  There were cheers all round and the blokes with families in Japan started to look happy again while Catflap Buggins was grinning fit to bust, no doubt thinking of resuming gymnastics with his little Japanese sheila.

  That’s the trouble with knowing a bit but not enough – it just didn’t seem right to me. But what’s a baggy arse to know or dare contradict, even in his mind, the opinion of the top brass, who now clearly indicated that they considered the Chinese army a spent force.

  I guess I would have made a bad general, because the thought persisted that the Chinese wouldn’t give up this easily. That night, taking a break on the reverse slope of our hill, a few of us sat around a forty-four-gallon drum we’d converted into a brazier by knocking holes in the side and lighting a fire within it. We were just rabbiting on when Ernie was foolish enough to ask my opinion of what the skipper had told us. ‘The chinks fought pretty hard, those blokes weren’t cowards by a long shot. Why would they suddenly up and disappear on us? What do you reckon, Jacko?’

  Usually we’d sit around, and I’d wait until my hands were warm enough to remove my gloves, then I’d play the harmonica in what was known as ‘Jacko’s Musical Requests! Brought to the Australian forces in Korea by the one and only maestro of the golden harmonica, Lucky Lips and Paddy Slips McKenzie and his playful organ!’ This introduction wasn’t of my making, it was the work of ‘poison lips’ – Ivan the Terrible. Well, I started talking, not meaning to say much, but my previous thinking must have been backing up in my mind and now my thoughts just seemed to tumble out like a dam wall suddenly breached.

  ‘Mao Zedong has only recently become what amounts to Emperor of China, though the term the communists use now that everyone is equal is “Chairman”. He has just defeated a modern army bankrolled by the Yanks and is left with five million fighting men at his disposal. He has no reason to love the West, who have humiliated Chi
na more than once – the British, the Americans and the Germans, in particular. The Chinese never forget an insult nor a humiliation, and they’ve built up a fair few whoppers over the last century or so.

  ‘Now, put yourself in Chairman Mao’s place. Here in neighbouring North Korea is yet another case of the West heading for the Chinese border. So what is he going to do? Here is the enemy, not just the Americans, but every Western nation who’s ever humiliated you, with the exception of the Germans, gathered in one spot at your doorstep. Your troops are combat ready, hardened, the toughest in the world. Their morale is sky-high having wiped the floor with America’s darling, Chiang Kai-shek. What’s more, you have absolute control over them – if a million die fighting the West, who gives a shit? You don’t need to answer to anyone. If two million die, that’s acceptable odds given the circumstances, and your need to avenge the past. So you send 20 000 out to test the enemy, a mere toe in the water. They have a bit of a go, check us out then quickly withdraw.’ I paused to catch my breath, afraid to look at the faces around me. ‘Mao Zedong was only briefing himself with that offensive.’ Then I foolishly added, ‘I don’t think, like the top brass said, he’s sitting across the border licking his wounds. You’ll see, he’ll be back.’

  ‘What utter bullshit!’ John Lazarou shouted out. ‘Home for Christmas, that’s what the man said!’

  ‘Yeah, mate, better stick to the mouth organ,’ Jason Matthews advised, receiving a gratuitous laugh.

  I could see they all thought I’d suddenly gone bonkers – stark, staring mad. So, to hide my acute embarrassment, I brought the harmonica to my lips and played through the whole of the ‘Colonel Bogey March’. In the meanwhile thinking, Why the fuck did Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan have to pick me out on the library floor all those years ago? ‘My goodness! Could it be possible that we’ve spawned an intelligent McKenzie at long last?’ I wasn’t even able to console myself with the knowledge that, when it came to world politics, the rest of the blokes sitting around the brazier were a pretty ignorant lot. Even so, the big brass wasn’t, and I’d effectively told the blokes around me that the Allied high command were a bunch of wankers. I mean, c’mon, how arrogant is that? It was going to take a fair bit of time to live this one down – good thing we’d be home for Christmas.