by Jack Twist
Chapter 5
Lieutenant Jefferies warmed to the trip and the ladies were treated to commentary on our platoon’s work in the local Phuoc Tuy Province. I suppose he would have liked to have added some blood and glory but he was a transport officer. Pogos they called us up at Nui Dat. ‘Personnel on garrison operations’ who weren’t called on to go out into the battlefields.
But Jefferies was an honest man. “The idea of the Civil Aid Programmed is to win over the hearts and minds of the locals by helping them with new roads, bridges and buildings,” he told Abbie Klein. “We put up a complete new school out at Dat Do recently. It’s an American idea of course and they’re doing it on a much larger scale.”
“Yes. I’ve heard my father talk about it. It’s a bit like what he does. His company is helping the locals find oil, using his expertise.”
The lieutenant nodded but he had a story to tell. “Dat Do is quite a dangerous district.”
He went on to tell the girl about the truck that was blown up out there when it ran over a mine, neglecting to mention that it had happened over a year ago. The incident had given Dat Do a reputation. It was said to be the hairiest place we worked in, with a network of communist support, even if the villagers didn’t show their true colours by day.
I thought of some Dat Do stories I could have added. When he talked of the dangers of driving on the beach where we collected sand for the school’s construction, and our need to drive in each other’s tracks, I could have quoted Al Stanley who reckoned everyone in Dat Do would have appreciated a new school building, including communists. I could even have passed on the rumour claiming that many landmines in the Dat Do area, killing Australian troops, were originally laid by our own forces. Although at that time the story seemed too preposterous.
There were incidents I would not have recounted, mostly through embarrassment. Like the time I helped Tony Carmody change a flat tyre out there, observing nervously, as we worked, two women squatting beneath the awning of a nearby house, chatting as they prepared food beside a large bowl, chewing betel nut, and ignoring us. Nor the old man who shuffled by, even if he looked to me like he could have been Ho Chi Minh’s brother. And I certainly would not have mentioned the approach of Moll’s truck at the time, the backfire he produced by switching his ignition off and on again, nor the way we scrambled in the dirt for our rifles. Nor his laugh as he drove by. “Get some war up, pogos!”
And then there was Bushfire Daniels’ sale of the sand he collected from that beach to the owners of various backstreet Dat Do homes, at five American dollars a load, or its equivalent in piastre.
On Dat Do, it was perhaps just as well the lieutenant was doing the talking.
I caught sight of Lin again in the mirror. She had her hands rested on top of her stomach. She showed some discomfort when we passed over a rough, pot-holed patch of road at the approach to Baria but nodded calmly when the lieutenant asked if she was okay.
Abbie put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Are you sure you’re okay, Lin?” I watched the woman smile at her.
“How close do you think she is?” asked Jefferies.
“To the birth?”
There was a pause while Abbie waited for Lin to answer herself. Her voice, when it came, was steady. It betrayed no pain, though she must have been quite uncomfortable by then. “Soon. Up and down, up and down in the car make it soon.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Any more pot holes, I’ll slow down.” I was already driving as slowly as I reasonably could, a night in Saigon in the back of my mind.
The lieutenant insisted we stop in Baria to buy cokes at a roadside stall. He wanted to give Lin a break and both of them some relief from the heat, although the drinks were only warm coca cola poured over a small block of ice and served in paper cups. Abbie checked with Lin first and she nodded agreeably, but I’m sure she would have preferred to have kept on going, on to her home in Muc Thap, to await her baby’s imminent arrival.
We attracted some attention, sitting there in a parked Land Rover sipping Coca Cola, even from the normally indifferent locals. It was Abbie. The people were not used to seeing western women.
The lieutenant was able to turn around more now in his seat. “Were you involved with the oil company before coming over?”
“No. No, I was in college, mostly.”
“Oh. What were you studying?”
“Comparative English literature.” Jeffries nodded. “Not much use to a geological exploration office,” she explained, as if to confirm any disappointment that he, a practical army officer, might have felt. “Luckily Lin made up for it. She has been of invaluable assistance to my father. With her knowledge of language, the country and the people.”
“How long has your father been here?”
“Since the end of the war, I mean the war with the Japanese, on and off. He’s spent almost as much time here as he has at home. He worked with the French up until Dien Bien Phu, with American support. He’s the geologist in charge of the exploratory section of the company and he has big plans in this country, when the war is finally over.”
“You might be back then, one day?”
“Me? I’d like to think so. But the war would have to be well and truly over. It worries my father too much. And I have things to be home for.”
“Marriage?” The lieutenant smiled as he turned his head around, to counter the presumptuousness.
“No.” She said and I wished I could have seen her face.
The lieutenant collected their empty cups and with a quick hand movement ordered me to start up. I looked in the rear-view mirror and noticed, through the crowds of bikes and pedestrians, a small American jeep parked some twenty metres behind us. As I edged my way out I saw the driver start the engine.
We crept through the crowded Baria streets and waited at the water tower intersection for the white-shirted traffic cop to wave us on while push-bikes, motorbikes, Lambrettas and the occasional car crisscrossed in a confusion that only he seemed to understand. No one spoke for a while. Then crowds, traffic and ramshackle little buildings fell behind us as the rice fields opened up again. Up ahead a company of helicopter gunships crossed the highway heading southeast, on their way, I guessed, to the Long Hai Hills. We were in open country, on Route 15, the road to Saigon.
Just before the border into Bien Hoa Province we passed a group of soldiers gathered in the scant and ineffective shade of a few trees.
“Are they Australians?” The girl asked.
“Yes. Infantry,” the lieutenant told her.
They gave us guarded acknowledgement, in that loose, quietly confident way they had.
We looked on infantrymen with considerable respect. Sometimes, out in convoy, we passed them along the sides of the roads, trudging, heads down in single file, weighed down by their packs, their faces smeared with camouflage grease. Theirs was a different war from ours.
Occasionally we were reminded that myths and reputations didn’t always give the full picture. One night in town Greg Urquart introduced a few of us to an infantry soldier he knew from basic training, and someone asked if he had seen much action. “None, so far. And I hope it stays that way. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes either. Those trucks must make easy targets.”
The lieutenant looked back at the road ahead and sat quietly. He had no infantry stories to tell.
In Bien Hoa Province we encountered more Americans, their vehicles displaying slogans likeJust do it,We can do itandNo job too big, written in bright white paint on dull green bumper-bars. The Lieutenant was inquiring about Abbie’s plans during her short Saigon stay when Lin interrupted politely. The side road to Muc Thap was up ahead.
Almost as soon as we left the highway I felt like we’d slipped into a world of the past. There was nothing anywhere to indicate that we were in the twentieth century and nothing suggestive even of the war. Rice paddies surrounded us. Off to the northwest, roughly in the direction we were headed, a low mountain formed the horizon. The rest w
as flat, wet and green; the southeast Asia we’d all seen in geography books, and strangely, there wasn’t a man, woman or child to be seen. At that moment even the sky was devoid of helicopters. Lieutenant Jefferies seemed absorbed by it too so that we all sat in silence until he asked, “How far exactly to Muc Thap?”
“About sixteen miles from the highway,” said Lin, and I noticed how American she sounded.
The lieutenant nodded and we resumed our silence. Off to one side, some distance from the road, a line of people came into view, bending at their work in the rice crop. In the distance beyond the mountain ahead, a Hercules was dropping down slowly to land, an indication of our nearness to Saigon. I took a glance at Jefferies. I’m sure he was looking forward to unloading the pregnant woman and getting to our headquarters in the big city as much as I was.
He turned to the woman. “How far now, do you think?’
“Just a couple of miles,” she said quietly. I looked at her in the mirror again. She was in some pain but said nothing else so I saw no reason to increase speed, in particular on this rough, dirt road. As I watched her I was surprised to see an American jeep loom up at our rear, alone and approaching fast.
I moved over on the narrow road as it came up behind us but it slowed and fell in behind. I was about to inform the lieutenant that we were being followed when the driver swung out to pass. I felt momentarily relieved.
The lieutenant turned to look just as the shots rang out. In spite of the noise of gunshots, even in those dire seconds, there was something unreal and confusing about it all. I ducked my head instinctively as I drove but presumed they were shooting somewhere else.
Then Abbie screamed. I turned to see her terrified, distraught face as she reached across for Lin. The man on the jeep’s passenger side opened fire again. He was turned completely around in his seat, up on his knees and blasting away at us with a pistol. I swung the Land Rover off the road and up onto a low levee bank that ran along the roadside between it and the rice paddies. I had to turn back towards the road to keep the vehicle upright and by then the jeep was speeding away. I stopped.
Abbie was sobbing uncontrollably, wiping away the blood from the woman’s head. I jumped out and found the first-aid kit and we took out bandages and began soaking up blood and trying to make her comfortable. We found wounds on the side of her head, the side of her neck and one through her left shoulder, low down, but it was the head wound near her left ear that did most of the bleeding. It wasn’t until we could see her face again and see that she was alive that I remembered the lieutenant.
A bullet had entered at his left eye and the helmet still sitting squarely on his head mocked the tragic state of him. My hands were shaking as I lifted and dragged him out and laid him down beside the Land Rover, choosing a place beside the bank where some grass grew, off the hard roadside. As his head hit the ground I saw that there wasn’t much left at the back of it.
I turned to Abbie. She kept cleaning Lin’s wounds as best she could, crying openly. “You okay now, Lin?” she was asking. “You okay now?” She was dreadfully afraid that her friend would die. She was so upset I began to worry that she might faint or become hysterical. But as she sobbed she cleaned and dressed the wounds with bandages. Lin winced when she dabbed the shoulder wound and she looked at Abbie sadly but with the same remarkable patience. “Baby, Abbie. My baby.”
“Oh my God,” said Abbie.
“Go to my grandmother.” she whispered. “My grandmother.”
“Where?”
“My grandmother.” She looked at me. “In Muc Thap.”
She had a swathe of bandages around her head now and a smaller one on her neck. She moaned as we put her left arm in a sling. It was the first cry of pain she had made since she’d been hit.
I had to pick up the lieutenant again and realised I’d only taken him out of the vehicle in a nervous haste to remove him from our sight. When I had him in the back compartment behind the seat I took some clothes from his bag and covered him as best I could. I was detached, emotionally, from all of these people because I hardly knew them, but I felt myself wanting to be sick as I arranged the lieutenant’s body, making sure that his head was well covered.
I started the vehicle as Abbie continued to comfort Lin and as I moved back onto the road I realised that I had been as lucky as the lieutenant had been unlucky. The right-hand-drive Land Rover had kept me away from the passing jeep and so out of the firing line.
“Why?” I heard Abbie cry above the whine of the engine. “Who were they?”
“They’ve been following us. I saw the jeep back in Baria.”
I caught sight of Lin’s face once more. Her eyes were pressed down by the blood-soaked bandage but she managed to look back at me. There was no more calm. Her eyes were full of terror.
