The Odd Angry Shot (11 page)

‘OK. Prepare yourself for a lecture, my boy,' says Bung, walking over and leaning on the sandbags beside Harry. ‘I'd say that women, especially in the mornings, are the most shit-awful things a man can lay his eyes on.'

‘Go on,' says Harry, amazed.

‘They belch and groan and fart and complain and half of them look nothing like they did the night before when you met them.'

‘Yeah, I'll agree with you there,' says Harry his eyes full of interest.

‘On the other hand,' says Bung, now seating himself on the sandbag wall, ‘you can take a bloke, roll him in the shit, jump on his head, get him pissed and so on, then shove him under a shower, give him a bit of a scrub and nine times out of ten he'll come up good as new.'

‘You're right, you know,' answers Harry thoughtfully.

‘Think you'll ever get married again, Harry?' asks Bung, his eyes fixed in the dirt.

‘Not much chance.'

‘Why's that?'

‘Well, I could say that I got married when I was too young.'

‘How old were you?'

‘About twenty. No, nineteen.'

‘What happened, if you don't mind me asking?'

‘Well I got married with the idea of settling down and looking after the woman. You know, I'd been out rooting birds since I was sixteen, and going nowhere. So I think to myself, now here's one that's different, this one I can really do the right thing by, look after and all, so after a few bust-ups and a few things like an abortion, and her going out with other fellows, we finally get down to the business of getting married. Anyway, from there on in, well from about ten months after the event, she starts to ring up now and again saying she's working late, or at a work party or something, or one of her old girlfriends is in town.'

‘What, was she in and out of the cot with other fellows?'

‘Don't think so, well I don't know, but I'm pretty sure she wasn't then. It just seemed like she didn't want to be with me.'

‘Shit.'

‘Yeah, that's what I thought. Anyway, one weekend, she rings up on the Friday night, it was our anniversary, and says she's been invited out by some people she works with.'

‘Christ, what did you do?'

‘Well, I cut up rough and yelled for a while. Then I started to plead with her.'

‘So what did she say?'

‘She just said she'd been invited and that she wanted to go. Simple as that.'

‘Didn't you ask her if you'd been invited as well?'

‘Yeah, and you know what she said?'

‘What?'

‘She said that they weren't my sort of people and that I wasn't really the type that would fit in with them. So I hung up the phone, packed my case and put it in the wardrobe. I didn't really know if I'd leave, until she came home about three in the morning rotten drunk. Well, she just collapsed on the couch and went to sleep.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Well, I got dressed, took the case from the wardrobe and went and stood at the end of the couch. You know, I stood there for about an hour just looking at her and wishing she'd wake up and say that she was sorry. Anyway, she didn't. So I went up and kissed her on the forehead and told her I loved her.'

‘What then?'

‘I stood at the end of the couch again and told her I loved her, walked out the door, joined the army the next day and here I am.'

‘Shit! What did you do for a living before you joined up?'

‘I was a painter, as in pictures. I even had one or two exhibitions.'

‘I'll be fucked.'

‘Yeah. I was, well and truly,' says Harry sliding down from the sandbags and picking up the bundle of washing. ‘Well and truly.'

THE afternoon sun is stifling. Out of the corner of my eye I am watching Harry pull small shreds of dead skin from his cracked lips.

The stagnant water, home to countless mosquitoes, sits soft and vomit-like in the bottom of the disused irrigation ditch, lapping over and seeping through the lace eyelets in our boots. A wet, sour-smelling line of thirty infantrymen.

‘I'll bet the leeches are having a field day,' whispers Harry, shifting his legs and disturbing the congregation of large blue flies that have found a resting place on his ammunition pouches.

‘If they bite
you
they'll end up pissed,' says Bung, his hand hooked over the shiny black butt of the M-60 that sits on its bipod like an inquisitive lizard held to its keeper by the crumpled belt-chain of linked ammunition.

‘Four fucking hours we've been in this sewer,' snarls a twenty-year-old infantryman as his finger scrapes the collected dust from inside his nostrils.

‘Well I hope they get this over before five o'clock. I'm taking a bird out to dinner,' cracks some wit looking at his watch, his face a study of mock annoyance.

‘Bloody hard to get a taxi at this hour of night too,' he adds as an afterthought.

‘Well, I don't know about you,' says Bung, ‘but I think I'll go home and watch television. If I'm lucky I might even catch a war movie.'

‘Shit. Can I come over?' asks the nose-picking infantryman.

‘Only if you promise not to pick your nose in front of the women. They don't mind getting their gear off and a bit of perversion, but they do draw the line at nose picking.'

‘OK. Can I bring my whip?' asks the nose picker.

‘Now look,' says Bung,' these girls are all novice nuns on holiday and I don't want you coming over and boring them to death with dull things like whips.'

Quiet laughter passes up and down the line of ten or so within earshot of the conversation. A series of popping sounds snaps us back from the far-away mood of the hopeless discussion.

‘Mortars!' screams someone farther up the soggy line of men. No sooner has he spoken than the earth around us erupts, showering us with large clumps of earth and sending waves of screaming shrapnel over our heads.

‘Kiss your arse goodbye,' sneers Bung as he plunges into the foul water at the ditch bottom, dragging the machine gun after him. Its linked belt snaps down the ditch side like a length of golden intestine, following him into the slime.

A shower of water and mud, mingled with broken rifles and ripped, green-cotton-wrapped limbs, bursts into the air about thirty feet from where Bung's gun group lies half-submerged.

Then it stops. The only reminder of its savage visit is the cordite smoke that hangs in the air, and the metalpunctured bodies of the wounded.

One of the medics is dragging a casualty over the lip of the ditch, pulling the man after him by the collar. He reaches the flat ground at the ditch front and rolls the man over. A dirty green shirt is ripped from tail to neck revealing a white back spotted with small, contusionringed holes, from each of which runs a rivulet of blood.

‘Where'd they come from?' asks an infantry sergeant, sitting bent double on the edge of the ditch, his face squeezed into a thousand pain wrinkles as he cups his shattered right elbow in his left hand, the blood plooping from the smashed joint into the dust in a taplike stream. ‘What direction?'

The distant rattle of small-arms fire cuts across the query.

‘B Company have sprung a Charlie mortar platoon,' calls the signaller lying beside his radio, his ear glued to the headset.

‘Must be the cunts that hit us,' says the platoon commander, standing knee deep in the slimy water, and wiping his arms with his hat.

A young infantryman, his nerves shaken to the point of no return, lies screaming on the ditch lip while two of his comrades remove the half a dozen or so blood-filled leeches that have attached themselves to the side of his face and behind his right ear.

A medic runs over to where the man lies, drops to his knees beside him and crashes an open palm into the hysterical face.

‘Shut up, fuck you.'

The medic sits the now sobbing figure up and slides his arm around shuddering shoulders.

‘Come on lad, you're OK.'

The man whimpers and sobs nasally as the medic drags him to his feet and offers him a canteen.

‘Want a drink?'

‘No…' Shaking his head.

‘OK. Keep your eye on him,' to the other two.

‘Dustoff's on the way,' calls the signaller again.

‘How many?'

‘Didn't say, sir. Just said they'd scrambled.'

‘Well, we'll know soon enough. OK. We'll move back two hundred metres. On your feet.'

‘Here, you want some of this shit?' Bung throws a one-hundred-round link belt to Harry.

‘Have I a choice?'

‘No bloody way,' answers Bung slamming the black breech cover down and covering the lead that lies there.

We walk through the dry grass to our new position.

‘How's he?' asks Harry of one of the four infantrymen walking beside us. They are carrying one of the stretcher cases, face down, on a dirty green half shelter.

‘Pretty good. The medic just knocked him out with a shot of morphine. He's got a nice chunk out of his arse though.'

‘Jesus, this bloody thing's heavy.' Bung is sweating under the weight of the large black machine gun.

‘Stop moaning, or we'll give you the radio as well,' cracks one of the stretcher party.

‘Up yours.'

‘I'M going to kill you,' says Harry, his face a mask of fury as he enters the tent.

‘Why?'

‘One of those bloody harlots that you organised for that party…'

‘What party?'

‘The party with the two marines in Vung Tau, you stupid shit.'

‘What about the lovely ladies?'

‘One of them's given me a dose.'

‘Of what?' I ask, feigning innocence.

‘The jack, you grinning bastard. What do you think?'

‘Ah well, nothing to worry about,' says Bung, ‘a few jabs in the arse and you'll be as good as new.'

‘The medic's taken me off the booze for a week as well.'

‘Now that's serious,' says Bung, getting up and taking a green can of fly spray from under his bed.

‘Now come here, Harry my boy.'

Harry follows Bung out into the sunlight. They stop and I see Bung turn quickly and start to spray Harry with the contents of the aerosol can.

‘Unclean, unclean,' shrieks Bung as Harry begins to chase him down the line of tents and out onto the road. A roar of laughter goes up from the lines as the two figures, one squirting aerosol spray over his shoulder and the other in hot pursuit of his tormentor, tear down the road, leaving a small cloud of dust behind them.

That was the start of a week of torment for Harry. Bung's new pastimes consisted of piling all of Harry's belongings on his stretcher and dragging it outside the tent with signs around it which read PLAGUE. DO NOT APPROACH. FOUL GROUND and anything else that his agile mind latched onto.

Finally it all became too much for Harry, and in a fit of revenge he chopped off Bung's newly acquired pet tree snake with his bayonet. Not to be outdone, Bung held a simple ceremony and then buried the rotting reptile in Harry's mattress. It stank for weeks.

‘DO you suppose we're doing any good by being here?' asks Bung, his feet immersed in a violet solution of Condy's crystals.

‘Not much,' answers Harry, scraping the soap from his face with the blunted razor blade, the blood flowing in small streams from the nicked heads of the sweat pimples that nestle in the crease between his neck and chin.

‘Why not?' asks Bung, cupping some of the violet water in his hands and washing the lower part of his legs. ‘Fucking tinea,' he adds disgustedly.

‘Because when we get home, we'll be an embarrassment to all of our wonderful nation. The only bastards who'll want to know about us are the silly buggers in this man's army. Let's face it, we've got no one else.'

‘You mean the whole attitude will have changed? About the war, I mean.'

‘Yeah, and the fact that we didn't win it. Oh, we may have held the fort for a while, but the commos will eventually get hold of this place. It just stands to reason.'

‘And what about the people back home?'

‘Well, I suppose it'll just be like it's been after every other war.'

‘How's that?'

‘Oh, a few bods will come along and pat you on the back and tell you what a good fellow you were. That'll last about a week, and then no bastard will want to even hear about it.'

‘Are you serious. Do you really think they'll treat us like that?'

‘Five'll get you ten I'm serious,' answers Harry wiping the razor on a piece of green towelling. ‘They'll make a big deal about it, probably even make it an election issue, and you can bet your arse that within five years, every one of us wearing a uniform from the chief of the general staff downwards will have been sold out by some sticky-fingered bloody politician.'

‘Then what the fuck am I doing here?' asks Bung, a look of annoyance on his face.

‘You're a soldier the same as every other silly cunt in this tossed-up, fucked-up, never-come-down land and that's why you're here; because there's no one else, and everyone's got to be somewhere. And you're here, so get used to it, pal.'

‘Fucking tinea,' says Bung returning his attention to the violet liquid that laps around his feet.

The face of the platoon sergeant appears at the tent opening. ‘I just thought that you gentlemen might be interested to learn that the wharfies back home have refused to load our supply ships.'

‘Nice of them, isn't it?' says Harry sitting on his stretcher and grinning at the sergeant.

‘Maybe they think they're doing the right thing,' says Bung. ‘After all, it is a democracy.'

‘What is?'

‘Australia.'

‘Yeah, if you've got enough dough it is.'

‘Beg pardon?'

‘I said if you've got enough dough it is.'

‘Why's that? What's money got to do with it?'