The Book of Science and Antiquities

by Thomas Keneally

  “Ah,” she said, “I am a fortunate woman.”

  Then she laughed, tickled with herself and, I could tell, willing to warrant my membership in the league of men.

  Oscars

  THE ACADEMY AWARD for Best Documentary came my way as a result of the film Andy and I made about the walk-off of Aboriginal stockmen and their families. It wasn’t the walk-off documentary that actually won the Academy Award, but it was the documentary on the strength of which we were able to go to Vietnam, where we further traveled by US helicopter to Phuoc Tuy Province and the Australian camp and fire base to film Shakespeare in Nui Dat.

  Before we left for Vietnam, the Australian and British television networks who’d commissioned the film had insisted Andy and I clean up our partnership and have at least a letter of agreement concerning advances and residuals and, in the remote possibility that one of us was killed or injured, the disposition of rights over footage shot by the unfortunate one.

  We thought we knew what we were filming, but going out that day with Andy for routine patrol footage and nifty shots of light through the foliage of rubber trees, we would soon encounter what Vietnam and its insurgents did not usually deliver: an old-fashioned, unambiguous action, a version of the Battle of the Little Big Horn or Rorke’s Drift, redcoats holding off the Zulus! It would be an action that, taking place without any choice on the part of me or Andy, could be seen as a feat of honor of the kind the public did not generally associate with Vietnam, however much they wished it.

  On the strength of that action, on the accident of my being there, and on the basis of witnessing mangling and the reduction of men to bundles of clothing, I would in the end be rewarded with an Oscar. Our government had by then half repented of the war and decided to cut down on the number of decorations awarded for Vietnamese actions. As a result, few of the soldiers, the survivors and the dead, were ever honored.

  I have lived so long since that day, and my accidental and richly rewarding fame was that precisely … accidental! It was built on all that young flesh, that multitude of gifts and desires quenched in the skirmish/battle and dismissed from the earth too early.

  There was a moment, therefore, when Dr. Gleason gave me the initial pronouncement of Jack the Dancer, that I thought, Here’s justice, Shelby, and not a moment too soon.

  * * *

  In the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s there’d been a long sleep for the film business in Australia, except for American films of course. The distributors were all American-owned. But in the 1970s there was a gesture of survival in the Australian film industry starting with a film eccentrically named The Coonamble Bush Shakespeare Prize. Its formula involved rock musicians in bush towns competing in country pubs to stage the best updated versions of three scenes from Shakespeare—a mad scene from Hamlet, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and an Away-with-the-Fairies love scene involving Queen Titania and Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The lead parts were all taken by Australian rockers and the country loved it—Shakespeare brought down to Australian demotic, and Australian romance elevated to Shakespearean weight and moment.

  Now the cast was on tour in Vietnam, performing scenes and songs from the film for the Diggers in the big Australian camp at Nui Dat. Andy and I had arrived at the Australian base by Iroquois helicopter three days before. By then we had already filmed two shows the Australians, unfamiliar with international cachet, had staged for the Americans at Bien Hoa, and an extempore show they had put on amongst the spices in the long, impossibly humid aisles of the Saigon markets. So I had plenty of footage of the performance, but needed the eager faces of the Australian regulars and, as I liked to think of the conscripts, the innocents.

  The film Andy and I had planned was designed to be subversive of the Vietnam project the Americans and their allies were pursuing, and we were all nuance as we arrived amongst the bunkers and weapon pits of Nui Dat. Soon nuance would be driven out.

  Nui Dat was a serious-sized camp with a Vietnamese village in the midst of it. Most of the Australians lived in sandbagged huts or house-like canvas tents, and every man had his own weapon pit in the event of an attack. Patrols went out beyond the perimeter every day—for that reason, there were at least two concerts, and Andy and I had already shot the initial one. There was a nice sense of tension added to the first day’s excursion by the fact that the previous day’s patrol out in the rubber plantations had been briefly shelled by mortars and had driven some Viet Cong off, causing some of the insurgents to abandon the base plates of their weapons. The captured base plates, brought back to camp, served as props adequate to show the war was real, and Andy and I took hungry footage of them.

  Overnight, some mortar rounds had been directed at the camp itself, landing in an area some distance from us, and there’d been the thunder of recoilless rifle rounds in reply. There were reports of North Vietnamese Army units in the area—a more serious proposition than the Viet Cong on its own. But if so, this fact did not seem to cause massive concern amongst the Australians; indeed it was seen as not much more than the “amateurish gestures” of the late-night Viet Cong who had left their base plates. Not that they had sounded “amateurish” to Andy, me, and the rest of our group, but a briefing officer used the term in speaking to us. It was frightening enough and exciting enough for us—those crumps and thuds had been potential death. But Andy, I, and the others were the gifted children of the Flower Power Age, one we expected to survive, as Andy and I had survived the arid, stony Buntine Highway.

  I cannot deny that Andy and I were playing with Vietnam, and did not know how stupid that was. And we were febrile, up early on the morning after the base plates were found, and making a nuisance of ourselves in the battalion headquarters. There was a company due to go out on patrol towards the southeast, to relieve the company that had already been sent out there to hunt down the source of the minor fury unleashed on the camp overnight. Everyone seemed calm about us going out with the infantry company patrol.

  We had breakfast with the Shakespeare people, who were wan and tired but up for another performance that day. I told them we might be going out with the infantry company. But the added benefit was that we would be able to hear them out there in the rubber trees, as their music and good humor reverberated through the plantations of Nui Dat. This would be wonderfully strange, and it would be bloody subtle, and not like anything that had been filmed about this war. Diggers going on patrol, and in the background the comforting sounds of Shakespeare as transmuted by Australian rockers. “Ophelia, you got me / Feelin’ the blues / I ain’t the man for you / And that’s hardly news …”

  Naturally, I felt that morning that all the elements of art were coming together for us. The idea that the North Vietnamese Army might have its own intentions caused me no doubt. In fact, a tall Australian major, the company commander, met up with us and seemed almost tolerant of our artistic intentions. We were issued field rations and ordered to stick with his signaler—behind him, that meant. “You know you’re missing out on the concert?” he said.

  We filmed the company commander speaking to his platoon commanders—young men who seemed too busy to extend suspicion or contempt to Andy or me. Soon enough we were led out into the numbing glare of day and the thin shade of rubber plantations, advancing in the rear of the company signaler, exercising the same caution as the infantry up ahead, though not as competently. And I remember thinking with some national pride, These boys are good. The boys of southwest Victoria and western New South Wales, the boys of the central vacancy of Western Australia and of Far North Queensland, the boys of Pommy and German migrants in South Australia, conscripts and Australian regulars. They went forward, if carefully.

  It was hot to the point it took one’s breath.

  Patrolling south, two platoons ahead to right and left, and one in reserve screening our pretensions, we felt very alive and very much at one with the young warriors. And from the camp still came the sound of rock Shakespeare—a promise that we would be going back soon
, with a bit of fill-in footage, and that this withering tramp in boots that sloshed with our sweat would operate as a nice counterpoint, together with a few other patrols we’d done earlier in our Vietnam stint. And when we went back to camp again tomorrow morning, Andy and I would fly out in an Iroquois to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon, and after a few days take an uncomfortable Hercules back to air-conditioned Bangkok.

  We were creeping forward to the place where the base plates had been found the day before, and at last in sepia heat the soldiers ahead came upon weapon pits where they found a shell casing from the recoilless weapons that had interrupted our sleep the night before. We continued on, following a track amidst the rubber plantation, and when the track split one platoon was sent down the north branch and one along the south, while we waited with the headquarters platoon.

  After a while Andy and I sought permission to go forward from the company headquarters’ position and film the faces of some of the advancing infantry. The major agreed and sent us up under the care of an NCO, and as we went forward under advice to bloody hurry up from our escort, we had the extra small frisson of meeting the other company, the one sent out in the small hours, now returning and rendezvousing with ours amongst the trees. The two companies of men spread out in the long grass like school chums, chatting while their officers conferred and their scouts were ahead somewhere keeping watch. It was great footage and I played merry hell with my portable, after which Andy and I conferred happily, liking what we had. I even unscrupulously took footage of a young soldier vomiting with heat exhaustion. When he was finished, orders were called and the other company disappeared towards camp and concert.

  We crossed a quiet road through the rubber plantation, two platoons still forward on parallel tracks, one in reserve, then Andy and me. At some stage I looked at my watch and saw it was after three in the afternoon. I saved and relished my thirst for another forty minutes or so. But before I could reach for my canteen, there were a few bursts of gunfire, and then massed fire sounded in the trees ahead.

  I heard one of the headquarters platoon around us cry, “What in the fuck are they doing there?” Indeed, unlike all other military signs of the enemy we had encountered until now, this noise, in its demand for our total attention, did not seem temporary or merely insurgent. How did those young men in front of us know how to respond coherently when all I wanted to do was drop on my stomach and hug my knees up under me as a means of becoming smaller, and ask myself how so much unplanned and chaotic reality had intruded into our documentary? There was a continuous thump-thump in my spine. I briefly recalled what my father had said about North Africa: while you were being shelled in the open, it was impossible to believe you would live.

  It seemed to me the nameless men who were loading the shells that exploded ahead were using my fluttering body as a registering device. And the sound of automatic weapons had joined in, not there one second, massively there the next. All terrible in scale, a sound in its own right, independent of who was making it. I knew from zapping and thumping sounds near me that a soldier was wounded or dying. I saw Andy on his stomach but deploying his Arri camera levelly and with care, panning without panic. Whoever had been wounded was at the limit of my periphery and beyond Andy, but the damage was implicit in the very scale of things.

  That afternoon I was shooting on a new Baillieu lightweight camera, like a true French filmmaker. It was hard to handle in this circumstance because of its long lens mechanism. Following Andy’s example, however, I turned and sat up a little and shot footage of the company commander and the wireless operator conferring over the fact that the wireless antenna had been shot through. In this torrential fire, nothing was too thin to be shot through.

  Ahead of us I saw a young, well-barbered soldier buckle and fall on the far side of a rubber tree, and on the flank a rush of unfamiliar figures dark amongst the trunks, and under someone’s orders. So there was an enemy. The “enemy.” What a shock! His pith helmet and dark khaki clothes and the humanness of his movement. He was both strange and yet like a revelation, a brother whose existence you never expected to have proven, whose ever-familiar, ever-alien features you never expected to adapt your life to. And his movements were careful. He was one with me in not wanting to die.

  Brave Andy was capturing it all, around the trunk of a rubber tree, in a careful superhuman pan, barely interrupted by the violent vibrations of the earth. Again, I felt I had to do the same out of pure industrial equity. I was so dazed that I could not explain to myself what was happening. But somewhere in the back of my panicking brain I was confident Andy could suggest what narrative to impose on the footage later. I believed somehow we would find the story for the images after getting the images for the story.

  I could hear the headquarters radio close by. A young lieutenant commanding the platoon on the southern track was reporting to the major that there were at least two companies, if not a battalion, pressing forward to his direct front. I heard that squawking statement between mortar rounds. Soon, mortar rounds began to fall only a little way off to our left, and the major ordered us all to move away, which Andy began to do with the soldiers around him, and I then did too, in wooden imitation. With the sharp and high-velocity thudding and hissing amidst the grass, I simply chose not to define what it was. Newly settled by a more southerly rubber tree, I watched Andy change film while lying on his back. I did the same when my camera warned me, and could manage it chiefly because I had seen Andy do it already. Then the major called the base for artillery support, and those rounds began to fall with new and even more massive detonation ahead of us. FFE, they called it apparently. Fire for Effect. The effect was that the jolts of this prodigious if friendly fire drove the casing of my camera painfully into my cheekbone.

  I’ll tell Andy about this ridiculous episode when things are quiet, I promised myself. Someone in all this noise and shuddering could be heard occasionally talking calmly to the artillery, so they could adjust the arc of their trajectory.

  Communications were lost again, and then again, and again and again restored. Amazing that men had the time to arrange this amidst the tumult. The major ordered the platoon a little ahead of us to move forward to take pressure off the one to the south. Andy and I filmed them going forward and saw some fall over in alarming compliance with the fire from ahead. I did not use the word “enemy” in my mind. I simply saw men scythed down by a natural force. My imagination still refused to extend itself to the concept that this was the work of a foe, despite what I had seen of the careful soldiers in their sweat-darkened flimsy uniforms and pith helmets. Some of our men who’d continued struggling forward now came back to join us. I filmed two carrying a damaged third. Thus the wounded were brought back, gravely altered and bloodied, through our line. And when I saw them placed on the ground behind us and then one of those tending them slapped to the ground by some projectile or other, I knew we were all but surrounded by spiteful forces.

  And as if the heavens wanted to own up, it began to rain, and all around the drops were so large and heavy that they raised a little mist of mud, a brown speckling of the film I was shooting. It rose and threatened to obscure the filmable world. The rainfall was astounding, like another dimension, with no apparent consciousness of ever planning to stop. Somehow I saw and filmed a dead face with rain in its visionless eyes. It was a young lieutenant nearby. Twenty-three, it would turn out. Even younger than me. And there was nothing there, in the vacated face. I filmed him as if to save myself from being infected by his nullity.

  I saw smoke grenades nearby seething in the rain and a soldier reaching up to receive a case of ammunition from a low-hovering Huey chopper that I had not even noticed was over us, such was the combined racket. The major was yelling into the radio for APC, which, it would turn out, as they groaned up towards us through the trees by the last light of day, were armored personnel carriers. Then there was the wail of fighters overhead, but they dropped nothing into the murk for fear of napalming their own.


  The rain ceased, though it seemed the bruised air ached for it to start again. I saw a tousle of clothes beside me nestling the Arriflex and a bag with film containers marked with sticking plaster and pen by Andy. There was a bloody puncture in Andy’s khaki at the hump of his shoulder and I asked him if he was all right. But he had left the world of polite inquiry. Late in the day’s firing, a splinter of mortar casing had entered his shoulder near his neck. Andy had apparently died softly and without any complaint at this intrusion, and without my noticing. The casing had traveled down the length of his body and exited by his left buttock. That was worse, I saw. The exit wound.

  * * *

  It turned out we had been attacked by a full regiment of the North Vietnamese Army, a regiment of provincial and irregular Viet Cong, and a third battalion of North Vietnamese in support. Without knowing what else to do, Andy and I had shot the only footage of an old-fashioned heroic standoff.

  I watched as Andy was collected up by the medical corps, and I got aboard an APC with him and his gear as he was taken off for the trip to the refrigerated morgue. I was appalled, of course, but saved from grief because I could not believe it had happened. I believed Andy would be with me at breakfast.