Smoky Joe's Cafe (5 page)

I don't know of any atrocities we committed. We didn't waste villages to get a hard-on. I don't know anyone who fought with me in Vietnam who knew of any incidents we ought to be ashamed of. Maybe they did things to captured prisoners at Nui Dat, but, if they did, I never heard about it.

I do know Charlie had a few nice little habits he'd use on his own kind as well as on us. He'd bury village people alive if they didn't pay their rice tax. He'd kill and torture when he thought information was being withheld.

We saw the results so I know that much was true. You could never truly relax, they were always at it, acid in a bottle of Coke, snake venom injected into a mango, slivers of glass in ice cubes served in a drink, even bombs hidden on a baby's body as a booby trap.

Fair enough, I suppose. If our country was being
invaded I expect we'd do the same. I heard of one time when the Yanks had gone into a village and inoculated the kids against smallpox and that night the Viet Cong came and chopped off the arms of every kid above the inoculation mark as a lesson to the villagers not to fraternise with the enemy.

I didn't see that, I admit, so it may be propaganda put out by our side. There were more rumours around than there were Vung Tau prostitutes and that's rumour saturation. If you didn't actually see something with your own eyes in Vietnam or hear it fair dinkum from one of your mates, you took no notice. If you heard it on the American Forces Radio, that was 100 per cent pure bullshit. But, as I said, atrocities are a part of war and practised by both sides and, far too often, the victims are women and kids. Vietnam was no different.

Shorty starts talking now, doing what he's always done, explaining things. I remember now that he thinks of himself as a bit of a war historian, him being all those years in the permanent army like.

‘The problem begins with the war we were in,' he says. ‘It turned out different to the other wars Australia's been in. We marched away heroes and come back to a country that didn't want to know us. It's going
out, drums and bugles, flags flying, sheilas crying, then, four years later, they flew our wounded back at two in the morning when the whole bloody country's asleep. That's never happened before to a soldier fighting for Australia.'

Ocker Barrett interrupts, grinning. ‘I had to bang on the kitchen door for twenty minutes to wake my mum up. I'm doing it with me elbows because of me bandaged hands and it's hurting like hell. When she opens the door, she's got her curlers in, them twisted bits of paper, and she's got the same crook-looking dressing-gown she wore before I left for Vietnam. She thinks she's seen an apparition or something, me standing there at the kitchen door at four o'clock in the morning with me hands bandaged!

“Is that you, David?” she says, real frightened, stretching out her hand to touch me, see it's really me and not a ghost with white bits sticking out the sleeves.'

‘Me too!' Bongface laughs. ‘Exact same! Me old man come out to answer the door, coughin' and swearin', he's still half pissed from the night before, “Who the fuck are you?” he asks me, then begins to shout for me mum. “Mary, Mary, our boy's dead, they's gorn an' killed him!”' Bongface laughs. ‘He thinks I'm come out of the Dreamtime to visit him or somethin'!'

The rest of us came back on the HMAS
Sydney
, which was known as the ‘Vung Tau Ferry'. We marched in Sydney but the crowds, that's a laugh, the people who bothered to come out, didn't exactly give us a ticker-tape parade! I have to be honest, I didn't give a continental, I was home again and Wendy come down from Curra-wong Creek and was there to meet me. Me mum's been long passed away and the old bloke died while I was away, so Wendy's the nearest thing I have for a relative.

Shorty carries on with his lecture to us, we've heard it all before, but we let him rave on a bit anyway, don't do no harm being reminded. ‘Like I said before, Vietnam was different. To cut a long story short, some silly bugger in America comes up with something called The Domino Theory.' Shorty looks around, making sure we're all still paying attention.

‘You know, like dominoes set up on their end in a long line, tap the first one, it hits the next, knocks it over and so on until they've all fallen down.

‘Some prize prick in the Pentagon persuaded the world that Vietnam was the number-one communist domino controlled by China and if we didn't take it out of the line, teach them once and for all not to try anything on, then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and so on and so forth would follow until they overran Australia.

‘Every bastard buys it, in particular the Catholic Church who are very big in Vietnam, they put the heavy on the DLP, who go to work on the Liberals and Bob Menzies. Pronto, we're in boots ‘n' all.

‘Sounds bloody stupid now, but at the time with the big Russian bear grunting and thumping its chest and the mighty Chinese dragon huffin' and puffin', the idea of them two big Commie countries threatening our way of life sounded pretty bloody convincing to us local cowboys who thought we were bulletproof anyway. We had to stop the number-one domino falling and we were just the blokes to do the job.'

Shorty senses he's goin' on a bit. ‘Okay, there's not much more,' he says. ‘We were going to send in the cavalry and come home heroes, the new ANZACS. The folk across the pond, our good neighbours the Kiwis, were comin' along as well, only a handful, a token artillery battery to start with and an infantry rifle company later on but that made us sort of ANZACS. History repeatin' itself, Gallipoli and all that.'

We all clap, sending him up. ‘Jesus, Shorty, you ain't changed none, still got the gift of the gab. You would've made a bloody good DJ bullshitting on American Forces Radio, mate,' Lawsy says to our laughter.

Yeah, but Shorty is damn right. We reckoned we'd
done a good job and deserved the same as the diggers in the other wars.

I've never marched in an Anzac Day Parade, haven't joined the RSL neither. Some of the blokes tried to do both and soon got jack of being told by some half-pissed old digger that they hadn't been in a real war, not like the Second World War, that we were a bunch of little boys who liked to whinge. Maybe they didn't understand the different nature of the Vietnam guerilla war, but when the RSL sided with the government over the Agent Orange issue, that was the finish. We didn't want a bar of them or the parade.

Shorty's not quite finished yet, despite the applause that tells him we know the rest. He looks at Gazza and Bongface. ‘Yeah, you're dead right. They were telling us that what we done and what we'd been through meant bugger all. “Go home, little fella, have a good night's sleep and forget you ever went to Vietnam and fought with our good friends, the Yanks. Mind you, they're still our good friends, ‘All the way with LBJ' but just don't talk about it. Okay? Now bugger off, soldier.”

‘I know we weren't alone in this. The big brush-off. The brothers in America copped the same treatment as us and they're suffering from all the same problems
Vietnam caused. They've got the same kind of shit-for-brains leaders. What pisses me off is the politicians who started it all and then ran for cover and Veterans Affairs and the RSL who treated us like we'd disgraced the colours, that we'd let the fighting tradition of Australia down.'

‘Yeah, remember when some bastard reporter writes in the
Sydney Morning Herald
,' Ocker now says, ‘how we were issued with American rations and served hot three-course meals delivered by chopper when we were out on patrol? Gordon flamin' Blow, or whatever that Frog who does French cooking is called. Turkey and jello, canned fruit, chocolate, cookies and Coke. How we was livin' in the lap of luxury, about the soft war for dolly birds that we're fighting in! I'd like to have found that bastard and taken him and his typewriter into the jungle for a couple of weeks! Make the bloody idjit eat his words!'

‘Jesus, yes! Them Yank ration packs,' Animal shouts, missing the whole point, ‘They was bloody good!'

Animal was the only one who would carry the Yank rations intact, the rest of us would get rid of at least half the stuff in them. They weighed a bloody ton, about three times as much as our own rations. One Yank
ration meal was more than our own rations for the entire day. When you went out on patrol your pack and gear weighed 80 pounds, we'd even cut off the handle of our toothbrushes, squeeze half the toothpaste out the tube, anything to keep the weight down. You carried nothing you didn't have to, in the heat it was much better to eat less than carry more.

Animal's got his name because he'll eat and drink anything and throw up and start all over again and, as well, make a serious attempt to screw every bar girl in Vietnam.

Here's an Animal joke he tells everyone he meets: ‘Vietnam is a place where a Nog in black pyjamas carries two buckets of shit across his shoulders using one stick and then uses two sticks to eat a bowl of shit.' See what I mean?

Macca now comes in. ‘Christ, yes, I remember I once got one o' them Chinese fortune cookies in my Yank rations and I break it open and feed the crumbs to the chomper ants and read me fortune on this slip of paper inside. “Your ship of life will always sail in calm, contented waters, romance will come your way by the next full moon.” We're in the second day of a three-week operation in the jungle, it's full moon in two nights and just after sunset on the night of the full
moon, we walk into a group of Viet Cong strolling along the river and I reckon I've got a choice; I can fuck Charlie and find true romance under the light of the moon or sink the ship of contentment and shoot the bastard who's shooting at me and get some real satisfaction.'

Rations, yes, it's true, we sometimes used American rations and they were better than our own, which wouldn't have been too hard. But here's the first thing most people don't understand about us and the Americans. Though we fought in the same war, we didn't fight in the same areas. We had our own area of operation to fight in, us in Phuoc Tuy province and them pretty much everywhere else in South Vietnam.

We didn't even get invited to any of their concerts when Bob Hope and all of their sexy singers and movie stars came to entertain. As a matter of fact, our company didn't even see Col Joye and Little Pattie when they come to entertain us, because we was otherwise occupied in a stoush down the road that's come to be called the Battle of Long Tan.

True, we were supported by American air power and their choppers, along with our own. They often brought out our wounded or ferried us from the Kanga Pad at Nui Dat to our operational areas or directly into
combat. This last was known as a ‘hot insertion'. They also dropped ammunition where we needed it, and their assault helicopters, called Cobras, rocketed and strafed in really close support for us.

I recall one time, it was early morning and we were out on patrol, when suddenly the sky lit up as a squadron of B52 bombers dumped several hundred 750-pound bombs on the Long Hai Hills just ahead of us. The earth shook, like there was an earthquake going on. Some of us were thrown to the ground.

We'd been using our hexe stoves at the time to ‘brew up' and I can remember the stove and the mugs on them just took off and these arcs of boiling water criss-crossing like in slow motion twenty feet above the ground. We were thrown onto our arses, yet the bomb drop was several miles away. It was the most awesome spectacle I've ever seen. If Charlie was somewhere underneath copping this load of instant death out of a drizzling monsoon sky, and I guess they must have been, the Long Hai Hills were a favourite place for the Noggies to build bunkers and underground caves, they would've been bloody uncomfortable for a bit. I'll say this for the Yanks, they never did things by halves.

We also used their artillery a lot of the time. Matter of fact, located about a mile from Nui Dat was an
American battery of self-propelled eight-inch guns, really big buggers. They'd be used for long-range targets or for targets that needed busting open. You could always hear their big
kerboom
over the sound of the other artillery. You could usually sleep through a salvo of the other guns but not those big bastards. And sometimes they'd fire H & I all through the bloody night. H & I means ‘Harassment and Interdiction'. Our artillery would fire at irregular intervals at VC resupply routes and known areas thick with Charlie's bunker systems. The idea was to keep the VC from thinking they owned the night, which they most surely did. Make them know that something nasty could land in their midst at any time and almost anywhere.

I suppose it worked, nobody really knew.

‘Remember H & I?' I now say, ‘The big guns goin' all day, all night. Remember how every time one of the real big bastards went off it would make the dunny seats in the camp fly open? If you happened to be sitting on one having a quiet crap, you got a blast of hot air up the arse that fair made you take off.'

This brings another laugh. Funny how you remember the little things. At Nui Dat they'd dig a big pit about fifteen yards long and put a cement slab over it with holes to accommodate about thirty cement cones
upon which they placed dunny seats, the whole thing in the open, no walls, just a tin roof to keep out the sun and then the rain in the monsoon season.

Naturally, after a while, the pit would get a trifle on the nose and besides would become the home to all manner of insects who were partial to a bit of a chomp on the family jewels.

‘Remember The Blowfly?' I ask and there's nods all round. The Blowfly was a private in the Hygiene Unit. He'd mix three gallons of diesel fuel with maybe a quarter of petrol and pour it down the dunny holes and set the whole box and dice alight, kill the creepy crawlies and turn the turds to ash in one big
whoof
of flame.

One day something happens to The Blowfly, he's reported sick or he's got a leave pass or something and they send in an assistant Blowfly. The new bloke gets the mix vicki-verka and a quarter of a gallon of diesel with three of petrol and blows the whole lot to kingdom bloody come. We reckon there must have been VC in the jungle wearing dunny seats for collars, wondering what next the Yanks at H & I were gunna think of doing to them.