Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  My ears continued to strain for the slightest sound. The Korean peasants burned charcoal for their cooking fires and as they grew older they developed bronchial problems, so there was always the sound of someone snoring in a hut or coughing in their sleep. Silence was never quite total. Stillness wasn’t emptiness. But the only sound for now came from our boots crunching down on the patches of fresh snow that mottled the compound.

  I was following Johnny Gordon, who was about fifteen yards ahead of me, my mind momentarily distracted by the fact that, even on the crunchy patina of snow, he managed to put his feet down with less sound than the rest of us. If that sounds patronising, well it ain’t – Johnny was the best scout in the group and usually led us into new territory. There were things he would note and a quietness in his step none of us could duplicate.

  Fifteen yards behind me the remaining eight blokes in my section were quietly moving into an arrowhead formation, and further back came the platoon headquarters followed by the remaining two sections in file, ready to deploy if it became necessary. I looked back to see our section commander signalling for Johnny and me to move forward cautiously. I passed the hand signal on to Johnny. It seems stupid now, but my eyes were still on Johnny’s heels when the burp gun opened up. His left heel suddenly kicked backwards and flew up into the air and a moment later, with a surprised grunt, he crashed to earth.

  I hit the ground hard, yelling, ‘Contact front!’ I’d seen the muzzle flash of the burp gun about thirty yards to my left front and was already firing off shots as fast as I could. Catflap Buggins charged up from behind and belly-slid into a patch of snow, bringing his Bren gun into action. Moments later chunks of wattle and mud were flying everywhere, one hut torn to bits by our rifle and machine-gun fire. No return fire followed the initial burst aimed at Johnny and I yelled at Catflap to cease firing.

  In the sudden silence that followed I called out, ‘Just a lone sentry!’ It was an incautious judgement and one too hastily made, conditioned by my need to rush to Johnny’s aid. I told myself the chink who had opened fire was probably dead. If not, he’d be well on his way back to the main enemy position, likely to be well back from us.

  ‘I’m going forward to get Johnny,’ I called out, and ran the fifteen yards between us and dropped beside him. Johnny lay on his back and was jerking as if in a fit. I could see several gunshot wounds across the front of his body. ‘You okay, mate?’ I asked, but he didn’t answer, his eyes turned upwards into his head. I glanced around at the scattering of village huts and my soldier’s good sense returned and I knew we were in real danger. There was no time to waste, so I grabbed him by the ankles and stood up to drag him back.

  Then all hell broke loose. Bullets cracked around my head and kicked up the snow at my feet. I was still holding onto Johnny’s ankles, back-pedalling furiously, his shoulders on the ground, head bumping, when something hit me like a steam train and I flew into the air and landed on my backside three or four feet behind where Johnny lay. He was quivering now, his arms flung out, one of his dark hands resting in a small patch of moonlit snow.

  I had to get out of the enemy line of fire fast. Leopard-crawl away, elbows hitting the ground, knees propelling me forward. I instinctively knew the drill, only problem was I couldn’t move. My elbows dug into the cold dirt ready to go, digging furiously, but the back half, my hips, wouldn’t cooperate. I became aware I couldn’t feel anything below the waist. Shit, I’m hit! was all I could think. I’m hit and I can’t move. Shit,

  shit, shit! I tried once more, elbows digging in, chin thrust forward, frantically willing myself to move, but my legs refused to budge. I was up shit creek with a broken paddle. ‘I’m hit!’ I yelled out, ‘can’t bloody move!’

  I could see some chinks coming in from the left flank, moving tactically, some on the ground firing, others moving forward, lots of them, their shadows like dark capes dragging behind them. Someone called out that they were also coming at us from the right flank. Johnny and I were sandwiched between the enemy and our own blokes. So that our section could retrieve the two of us, the skipper was yelling orders to the section commanders, deploying them forward to take on the Chinese attacking from the flanks. I could hear the artillery forward observer through the clatter of gunfire as he called on his radio, ‘Hello two-three for two-zero, battery target over!’ Funny that, his voice should have been drowned in the furious gunfire but I heard it clear as a bell. The other voices were coming through as well, telling the skipper we were in danger of being overrun. The sections taking on the enemy were meeting stiff resistance, these Chinese weren’t here to hit and run. ‘Can’t get to ’em, skipper!’ was the next thing I heard. Ivan the Terrible’s voice now came through. ‘Stan, move back now!’ he was yelling. ‘Back, get back!’

  I could feel my heart thumping and an overwhelming panic made it difficult to breathe. Jesus! They’re going to leave us. The bastards are

  going to desert us, leave us to die!

  ‘YOU BASTARDS!’ I screamed, but they were already on their way out. Johnny gave a final convulsive jerk and died. I lay there listening to the distinctive chatter of our Bren guns and the rrrt rrrt rrrt of the Owens mixed with the sound of the Chinese burp guns becoming fainter and fainter. The Chinese had gone after them, ignoring the two of us. What now? I thought to myself. No way I can get away from here. In my confused state I now thought it was Ivan the Terrible’s idea to withdraw, to desert me – the bastard had finally got me. ‘BASTARD!’ I screamed.

  The adrenaline in my system started to diminish and my pulse began to normalise, causing the pain to surface. If I’m hurt real bad

  they’ll finish me off, I thought. I didn’t quite know how I felt about this. Johnny’s life was over, no more racism for him. He’d given his life for his country and he’d be forgotten in a minute by that fuckwit town in Queensland.

  And me? Well, what about me? Gloria, Sue and the boys, they’d grieve some, but how about Queen Island? Not a sausage. They’d all be at the memorial service, of course, where that ageing old fart Daintree, the vicar of St Stephen’s, if he could still stand up, would dredge up something to say that was complimentary to me or the family. Gloria would put on a bit of a wake, but the grog would soon run out because she wouldn’t be able to afford to quench their all-powerful thirsts and the fishermen would all retire to the pub – I’d be their ‘any excuse to get pissed’.

  With Alf’s death there’d been a hundred stories and a million laughs, whereas I’d just be the McKenzie kid, the solo harmonica player who’d taken over when Alf ran out of puff from the cancer. The young bloke who thought he was too fuckin’ good to go on the boats, always had his nose in a book, too many high-falutin’ ideas that come from him hangin’ round that snotty-nose, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. ‘Broke his mum’s heart goin’ off to the war and gettin’ hisself killed. Useless bastard. Family don’t play the mouth organ no more, it’s because of him pissin’ off like that.’

  Gloria had disbanded the Cobbers awaiting my return. She, like Alf, was a perfectionist and reckoned neither Cory nor Steve had the gift, and she had too much pride to go off with a half-cocked quartet. Dying wouldn’t be too bad – as a matter of fact, it might solve a whole heap of problems. But this was only a momentary thought, immediately overpowered by the urgent need to live. By now I was beginning to hurt a lot and it was getting bloody cold.

  Then a familiar sound set me panicking again. There was a screaming locomotive heading my way, the noise made by artillery shells tearing through the cold air as they suddenly descended. They landed a hundred yards to my left, shaking the earth beneath me. Another salvo landed the same distance to my right and then a third to my front. They’d been laid on to help get Johnny and me out. ‘Bit fucking late!’ I shouted into the mayhem going on around me.

  Almost two years later I would hear the full story. The skipper had hoped to make a clean break, hit the chinks with artillery fire and cause them to retreat, whereupon they’d return for the two of us.
But these were not the North Koreans. The Chinese were in a fighting mood and knew they outnumbered us. They came in for the kill and our platoon was flat out trying to make their getaway. In retrospect it was the correct thing to do – the enemy was the superior force and any further attempt at rescuing us would have caused more casualties.

  The artillery ceased at last, and miraculously I was still alive. I couldn’t fault the Kiwi forward observer on his map references. Several of the huts were ablaze and others torn to shreds, but he’d left a safe island for Johnny and me. I waited in the silence, though not for long. Soon enough I heard the softer trudge of rubber-soled canvas boots, and shortly after a group of Chinese soldiers arrived. One of them stood immediately behind me, his rifle pointed at my back. Another approached my lifeless feet, kicking away my weapon and prodding me in the side with the barrel of his rifle – fortunately not the side where the bullet had smashed into my upper leg. I winced and he laughed, the others grinning like a group of chimps who have just caught a small monkey they intend to rip apart and eat. Then, satisfied I was harmless, he slung his rifle and grabbed the foot of my wounded leg and started to drag me. It was as though I’d been struck by lightning – the pain seemed to electrify my entire body. I screamed, and he dropped my leg in surprise. Then the pain overwhelmed me and I lost consciousness, though the last thing I remember was hysterical laughter.

  I awoke to a sea of oriental faces surrounding me. They must have taken me into a partially demolished hut because a large hole in the thatch revealed the moon with its frosty aura, a great searchlight beaming down at me, bathing the hut in moonlight. I looked around to where several of the soldiers were examining my rifle and Johnny’s Owen, one of them removing the magazine and ejecting the round in the breech, then cocking the rifle and pointing it at my head. ‘Bam!’ he said, as he pulled the trigger. More laughter. These coves amuse real easily, I thought, in an attempt to ignore the terrible pain in my leg.

  My eyes explored the rest of the hut and saw that they’d made it into a temporary first-aid station. Several wounded Chinese, no doubt the result of the artillery barrage, lay on stretchers to the right of me. The bloke nearest me had his arm ripped off and I could see the tourniquet tied a couple of inches above his ragged flesh. This wound would have been caused in the same way as Charlie Green’s death – a decent-sized piece of red-hot shrapnel scooping out the contents of the commanding officer’s stomach and, in this case, slicing through the chink’s upper arm, severing it, bone and all. The tourniquet was so high up that it couldn’t adequately stop the bleeding, and blood dripped slowly from his severed arm like a slow-leaking tap.

  Three Chinese soldiers were going through my combat pack and soon enough found the small bar of chocolate we carried as a quick sugar fix in the field. The incident I’ve noted previously took place, which ended in the unfortunate chocolate eater snatching up his rifle and smashing the butt into the side of my jaw, breaking several teeth. I would never again eat a chocolate without thinking of this moment. It was also a lesson in understanding different cultures. Whoever would have thought chocolate could be repulsive to anyone? But it was a lesson well learned – I would never again take anything for granted when dealing with someone from another culture. Assume nothing. I was to use this lesson time and time again in the years to come and would refer to it as ‘the chocolate-bar factor’. Little did I know, when the butt of the Chinese rifle smashed into my jaw, that as a result of this single retaliatory blow I would end up making millions of dollars.

  But right then I needed morphine urgently. ‘Morphine!’ I said through my swollen mouth. They looked on blankly. I opened my forefinger and largest finger slightly and pushed my thumb forward in the action of a syringe. ‘Morphine?’ I repeated. We’d been told that the North Koreans knew the name of the painkiller and I assumed this was true of the chinks as well.

  They still looked unknowingly at me and I repeated the action, saying the word a third time.

  One of the soldiers shook his head. ‘Morp,’ he said. I took this to mean they had no morphine. I should have worked it out for myself – the Chinese wounded, particularly the bloke with the severed arm, were in obvious pain and plainly hadn’t received any morphine. They were not just holding out on me – they had none, even for their own.

  My next request, for a smoke, was more successful, and one of them handed me the cigarette he’d just lit for himself. The right side of my jaw was swollen from the hit to my mouth and I tasted blood, but I managed to push the smoke into the left side of my jaw. The cigarette seemed to consist largely of saltpetre, and it flared every few seconds with the smoke drawn hot into my chest as I inhaled.

  I decided, while I was still conscious and semi-focused, to try to do something about my broken leg. The ends of the bones were scraping against each other and I concluded that if I could get the chinks to fix some sort of splint to straighten my leg I’d be much better off. I reached for a length of straw among a small heap that had fallen when the roof had partially collapsed. First, pointing to my broken leg, I snapped the straw. They all nodded. Good, at least they knew I had a broken leg. Now for the splint. But all my miming was to no avail, they didn’t seem to cotton on to my request. Then, in part due to my befuddled mind, I did something incredibly stupid. My .303 stood against the wall and I reached out and grabbed it, intending to show them that they could use it as a splint. But that’s not the message I transmitted. Chinks dived from everywhere, wrenching the rifle from my grasp. I then felt the butt of a Chinese rifle land across my mouth, this time harder than the first, knocking several more teeth out in the process. Another chink butt-stroked me across the back of the head and knocked me out.

  When I eventually came to, I was on a stretcher and on the move. The moon was much lower on the horizon and the night darker. The chinks were vacating the village, assuming a larger force would soon be arriving, and as it grew light, they knew a spotter plane would be circling overhead and seeking a target for an air strike.

  We followed a very poor mountain track of rocky, uneven ground, and with every jolt the jagged ends of the broken bone in my leg scraped together causing me to cry out. On several occasions the stretcher bearers stumbled, tipping me out, and I screamed out in agony as I landed. I became conscious that my captors might decide my screaming was putting them at risk and simply shoot me and dump me for the pigs and crows to eat. I was also aware that my fellow wounded remained quietly stoic – occasionally a soft moan came from their stretchers, though never a scream. I promised myself, should I be dropped again, somehow I would remain mute. But I was dropped and couldn’t keep from crying out. The pain totally possessed me and my screams were entirely involuntary.

  We walked steadily, climbing into the hills, and then took cover at dawn in a large cave where I was lifted onto a platform with ten wounded Chinese soldiers. By sheer coincidence the soldier lying beside me was the bloke with his arm severed up near his shoulder and now, surprisingly, he smiled at me. I tried to return the smile but my swollen mouth began to quiver and I could feel hot tears running down my face. Shit, what a fucking wimp!

  Without the constant bumping of the stretcher to distract me, instead of the pain lessening, it now seemed to grow worse. I kept moaning as the spasms of pain hit me, yet I can remember being ashamed of myself. I was surrounded by the uncomplaining Chinese wounded and the particularly poor bastard with the severed arm who’d been steadily losing blood and yet was capable of a sympathetic smile. It was the all-conquering white man who was doing the wailing. I was failing to keep up my end, unable to show the same courage as my enemy.

  It isn’t true that the Chinese don’t feel pain the way we do: they had a discipline born of years of guerilla fighting that allowed them to stay stoic under the most onerous conditions. I once read somewhere that in convict times an inmate might receive a hundred lashes with the cato’-nine-tails, the flesh of his back exposing his rib cage, yet he’d not cry out. The article went on to say that the same
treatment today would most likely kill a man. Humans can learn to endure incredible pain but it is something we acquire gradually, our pain threshold built up over long periods of hardship. Twenty years at war and the effects of the Long March had inured these Chinese against hardship where pain was a constant part of their daily lives. If these blokes were representative of their kind, then the enemy opposing us was tough, formidable and dangerous – one who might, in the end, prove too much for the soft Caucasian soldier to handle.

  The one-armed soldier, observing my involuntary tears, had somehow managed to roll and light a cigarette and now placed it between my lips. Using the back of my hands I wiped my eyes and smiled my thanks and he returned my smile. Then I watched as, one-handed, he rolled a cigarette for himself and lit it and we smoked silently together. Quite suddenly he gave a soft sigh and his chin dropped and he jerked forward, his mouth open, and with the cigarette still glued to his bottom lip, he died.

  I left Korea with some harsh memories that would haunt my sleep for the next fifty years, but this was one of the most poignant. On Anzac Day, and if I happen to be in a RSL Club at sundown and the lights are dimmed and ‘For the Fallen’ is read:

  At the going down of the sun

  And in the morning . . .

  We will remember them.

  I remember Johnny Gordon, his dark hand lying in a patch of pristine snow. Then I see the little chink smiling and placing a cigarette between my lips and it is to him that I finish with the words, ‘Lest we forget’.

  Years later I would tell this story to a physician and question why the Chinese soldier died so suddenly. ‘Trauma and the loss of blood, although fairly slow, say ten hours, would finally shut down his kidneys, in fact shut down everything, and this would cause him to have a massive heart attack,’ is how he’d explained the soldier’s death. Then he’d added, ‘He must have been extraordinarily tough to have lasted that long.’