Smoky Joe's Cafe (6 page)

The only thing the movies seemed to get half right is showing the street scenes in Saigon City and other
towns, the whorehouses, the girls and the cheap bars with the walls made out of flattened beer cans. The strip. You could see the same thing in Bangkok or pretty well in any other place in Asia.

In Vung Tau, where we'd go for a seventy-two-hour break, this particular area was known as the front beach and the back beach, with ‘The Flags' the centre of the front beach. There were hundreds of bars and brothels, or brothels with bars as most of them were. The front beach was where we went and the back beach was out of bounds. The rumour was the back beach was where the Viet Cong went for their rest and recreation.

The subject of Vung Tau now comes up and Flow pipes in, ‘There was this time Animal and me got separated from you blokes at The Flags. We're a bit pissed and Animal's thrown up a couple of times and someone's told him the Viet Cong pussy is better than our own, that they're keeping the best for the enemy. I'm the only one who's stupid enough to believe this or to think it's a good idea. So him and me decide to go to the back beach.

‘We get to this bar and it's filled with Vietnamese blokes dressed the same as usual in black pyjamas. We order a couple a beers and two bar girls come and sit with us. They don't look much different to the ones
we've just left behind. Pretty soon the locals are sending us over half a dozen beers and we're returning the favour and we're having a bit of a laugh, though we can't understand their lingo nor they ours. Then suddenly one of them says something and they all get up and go out the back and next thing they're back and they're carrying AK47s.

“Shit, Flow!” Animal whispers, “It's time for the last rites and there's no flamin' priest in sight!” But the Viet Cong smile and nod and give us the thumbs up as they leave. Animal turns to me and says, “Whaddaya say, Flow? I think I prefer the sheilas back at The Flags!”'

‘Yeah, and I got the clap that time too!' Animal remarks.

This brings up a real big snort all round, because Animal got the clap every time. In fact about 25 per cent of the battalion had it at one time and the MO decides it's way out of order and he calls each company separately into the mess for a bit of a chinwag and general dressing-down. ‘You've all been issued with condoms and you're not using them!' he shouts down the microphone. ‘The VD statistics in the battalion have reached alarming proportions and you've got to clean up your act!'

The doc walks up to this big blackboard and he takes a piece of yellow chalk and on one side he writes a huge ‘60%', filling half the blackboard, and on the other side he writes ‘20%' just as big.

‘Right, get this into your thick skulls, gentlemen,' he says. ‘Sixty per cent of the prostitutes in Vung Tau have venereal disease and 20 per cent have tuberculosis!' He pauses to let this sink in.

Suddenly Animal shouts from the back, ‘Does that mean we only fuck the ones who cough?'

For us, though, Vietnam wasn't an occasional leave pass to the bright lights of Vung Tau but endless patrols and operations in the jungle, keeping Charlie on the move. Sometimes these operations would last five weeks where you seldom got to wash and you shaved every morning using the sweat on your face for lubrication. At night, if you were lucky, you erected your hutchie. Often, though, we just wrapped the hutchie around us and threw ourselves on the ground to sleep. You suffered prickly heat, crotch rash and footrot. The dust in the dry season was filled with fleas and when the monsoon rains came they brought the leeches and the mozzies and the mud. You'd spend an hour every night under your hutchie, wet and miserable,
burning the leeches off every part of your body with the tip of a cigarette.

That was just for openers and had nothing to do with the fact that Charlie was stalking you and you him. If you were an ordinary infantryman, a grunt, you knew nothing about the operation you were on and told bugger all. Fortunately, in our platoon we had Shorty. He had the ear of the platoon commander and, if the truth be known, probably the company commander as well. Most of the time he seemed to have some idea of what we were supposed to be doing and where we were supposed to end up and he'd tell us corporals who ran the platoons, so that, as section leaders, we'd know what was expected of us. But the grunts in many of the other platoons didn't know if they were comin' or goin'.

We were the best-trained jungle fighters in Vietnam. Possibly the world. Our instructors at Canungra in Queensland had fought in Korea and in the Malayan Emergency and some had even fought in Vietnam with the training team. They knew what to expect, how to train us in the craft of jungle fighting for what they knew was to come.

But, for your average grunt, it was still a bloody big mystery. We were against blokes in black pyjamas with
AK47s who were fighting and dying for their country, their wives and kids, and maybe even for something else they believed in. We were chasing them around their own jungle backyard shitting ourselves. And what for? Buggered if we knew. There was a saying: 'If I had a farm in Vietnam and a home in hell, I'd sell the farm and go home.'

As the evening wore on and we got really pissed the blokes started to talk about the hard parts. I suggest some tucker before I get too pissed to make it. I've got meat pies in the oven but I warn them they're best left unet, I explain that Willy McGregor makes them up the pub from scrag-ends. ‘They're for the drunks.' I'm about to go on and say we only sell them from the cafe to the boongs when I remember Bongface. ‘They're rat-shit,' I say instead.

‘I'll have a couple of them dog's eyes,' Animal calls out. I can see he's fair dinkum. ‘Never tasted a meat pie I didn't like with a drop of dead horse.'

I start to put together a couple of dozen hamburgers and fry chips for the mob. I want them to be good and you can't make a good burger ‘n' chips if you're pissed and, besides, I'm not the world's best short-order cook, but a bloke's got his pride.

So I'm behind the counter making burgers and as
each bloke talks there's increasingly long silences. I can't remember what was said exact, not like I do the funny stuff, the humour. Now the brothers are slurring their speech a bit, digging down where they haven't been for a while, searching for words that don't come easy or don't come at all. There are no correct ones, there are never gunna be the right words to kill the pain. We're all feeling it. Sometimes what they don't say is the worst pain of all.

But it makes no difference, I was there with them and in between the sizzle of the onions on the hotplate, the deep fry and the feel of the raw mince in my hands, I can smell the fear returning. It's always with you, just below the surface, always will be. Mostly the talk is stuff about the jungle, goin' in scared and comin' out a month later with a few more live sunrises and sunsets to your credit. Nobody talks about Long Tan.

It's hard to describe coming out of the jungle, out of combat, getting back behind the wire. You've made it one more time, but there was always a next time, the hole in your guts never gets filled, the fear never stops. When you've been out on patrol for maybe ten days or three weeks or more you never seem to come out of it.

Every step you make every day, right down to finding a place to have a crap. Wiping your arse real slow
so the movement won't disturb the foliage, give your position away. In the field we were issued with three pieces of shit paper per day, one up, one down and one to polish. When you got back to the safety of Nui Dat with all the crap paper in the world, you find yourself breaking off just three pieces, the habit, the fear, still with you even when you're polishing your arsehole in safety.

I've just said how it was coming out of the deep j. But what I'm talking about is the anticipation. The days of nothing happening but knowing something could any moment. Know what I mean? In fact, while in the boonies it was almost a relief to be up against some real combat. Charlie firing at you, sending over his mortars, returning fire, havin' a go, working out his range. That was tolerable, you could take that. Warriors havin' a go at each other.

It was the silent war that broke you down. Every step of every day, watching Bongface ahead, expecting him to be blown to kingdom come every next step he took, or have him spring a booby trap or dive for cover and yell, ‘Contact Front!' Then behind him the machine gun moves forward to the higher ground or to the right and opens fire in support of the scout. Now you're in action, your rifle group moves around you and, as
section commander, you can give them orders, maybe a quick flank attack on the enemy. All this is expected, you've been trained for it, you're a warrior doing your job, best you can.

Then out you'd come, your patrol or operation over. If you were unlucky, minus a couple of your mates wrapped in their hutchies sent ahead. The worst was seeing your flying dead leave you in the jungle as the dustoff came in and carted them off above the treetops to the morgue, and you having to stay behind. Sounds weird, don't it? Thinking the dead are better off than you. Or some bloke still alive, holding his guts in his hands, seen as a lucky bastard. Shit, shit, shit.

The last thing I saw of my mate Mo were the soles of his boots sticking out from his waterproof hutchie, which I'd used to cover him. A single yellow bamboo leaf, shaped like the head of a Zulu spear, was stuck to the heel of his left boot. I rushed forward as the dustoff lifted him up from the ground, the chopper blades above my head a wind-rush of cool air in the humidity, and grabbed the leaf off of his heel and shoved it into the pocket of my greens.

I've still got it, stuck onto a picture of him and me in a whorehouse in Vung Tau. We're holding a bottle of beer up to the camera with two pretty little
whores. Wendy says they look like porcelain dolls. They're sitting on our laps, we were both big bastards, and the girls look like schoolkids. Probably should have been at another time and in a better world than this one.

You'd come off patrol or some operation and have your first real wash for five weeks. There was always the moment when you took off your greens, which stank of sweat and mud and dirty humans. You'd shower, hoping that by some miracle the hot water would clean not only the outside but what was dirty on the inside as well.

You'd get into civvies and if you were real lucky be granted a seventy-two-hour leave pass to Vung Tau. You'd be so pumped up you'd laugh at anything, any small prank played on a mate no matter how stupid, and then you'd get drunk and have sex and get drunk and have sex and get drunk and have sex until it all became a blur, a bottle of Ba Mui Ba beer down one hole and your cock in another. Drinking piss and fucking, the combat soldier's eternal antidote to stop the fear in his gut and kill the poison in his soul.

Then back to Nui Dat with the tension still in your entrails. The terror still there, knowing you'd soon be out in the jungle again with the Noggies finding a hundred
ways to kill you, the weird
crackle-pop
of their AK47s burned into your memory forever.

We didn't wear underpants in the jungle because they chafed and made the prickly heat rash in your crotch worse. But when we put on civvies we'd put on undergear as well. Then when you returned and it was time to go into the jungle again, you'd give away the Y-fronts. That was it, the real deep fear of dying returned when you put on your fresh greens and let your balls dangle free.

In less than an hour your greens would be soaked through from the humidity you could never escape. The first of the razor-sharp grass seeds had worked through your trousers and you knew there'd be a hundred more and you'd have to wait ‘til nightfall to pluck the bastards out. Your pack bit into your shoulders and rubbed them raw and your webbing belt pushed down on the bones of your hips with the weight of water bottles, a dozen magazines, grenades and all the other soldiering crap you carried in the pouches hanging off it, not to count yer crossover ammo belt. You weren't in the jungle ten minutes and you knew it was gunna be a bloody long day, and the fear was back and the fear was you.

Righto then, let's begin at the beginning. And the beginning is a brown envelope in the post box to tell
you the good news that your number just come up and you are one of the chosen ones. So here's the next misconception. We didn't whinge and tell ourselves, ‘Why me? Why not some other joker?' Most of us were stoked. We were going to war like our fathers and our grandfathers, we were going to be warriors, the lucky bastards, true to the flag.

On the day I reported at the recruitment centre there were a bunch a protesters with banners outside, well, not exactly a bunch, four women, fat and ugly. Their banner said, ‘Say “No!” to Vietnam! Save our Sons!' They were chanting, ‘Don't spill our blood in Vietnam!' over and over. One of the fat sheilas was shouting and wagging her finger at me and I remember thinking, ‘You stupid old cow, you've probably never had a good root in your life!' Twenty-year-old warriors-to-be don't want to be saved, they know they're personally bulletproof anyway and this stupid bitch was trying to stop me having my own war adventure.

I reckon the people thought it was the right thing to do, to support our American mates. Blokes bought you a beer in the pub. ‘You're doin' your bit, son,' some of the old-timers would say, ‘Good on ya, mate.'

There was some stuff in the papers about how we shouldn't be going, but public opinion or, anyway, the
stuff I heard on the box and goin' on around me and on the radio, like, was pretty encouraging.

We were sent to Kapooka near Wagga Wagga in central New South Wales, that was July 1965, I think. Kapooka was okay, a lot of shouting and drill, rifle practice, fitness, lectures, route marches, inspection, latrine duty and whatever else the RDI (Regimental Duties Instructor), a regular army platoon sergeant, thought would successfully beat the crap out of us.