by Jack Twist
Chapter 20
It seemed that from the time of my arrival in-country some nine months earlier there had been talk of a withdrawal of all troops from the war. By the morning of my return to base the rumours had become a reality. I was told we would all be home by Christmas. Militarily at least, Australia’s part in the war would soon be over.
Of course the news was met with great rejoicing, each night the boozer upped its output. Everyone got happier, superficially at least. Because in those final weeks, as the whole deployment drew officially to a close, frictions developed. Differences emerged, or intensified, began to rankle, in ways they hadn’t before. The extra alcohol fired things up, but I wonder now if the withdrawal itself wasn’t behind more of what happened than we realised at the time.
I was as instantly happy with the news as anybody, even though, in quieter moments, caught up in memories of Abbie Klein and all that had happened, I realised that this new and exciting turn of events put an even more definitive line under all of that. Abbie was gone for good. I would soon be home. With all emphasis on getting troops out of the country as expeditiously as possible, there would be no more one-off, out-of-the-blue, special deliveries to Saigon or anywhere else. Not for anyone. The last time I had seen Abbie, sitting in an American jeep, in the safe, sure hands of Sergeant America, and then lost in a swirl of Saigon traffic, those fading glimpses really were the last I’d see of her. So I believed.
Not that any change in our general situation was noticeable on that morning of my return. As I stepped from the airport bus the greeting from Greg Urquhart was all I might have expected.
“Is it true you fragged the prefect?”
I recognised the peremptory tone immediately, partly from memories of our time together back in Enoggera, including the night of our double-date. But I had to look around as the bus swung away before I saw him up on the roof of the workshop shed about to bang in some nails. “Heh. Your bum buddy missed ya.”
He meant Tony Carmody. As our time together in the same platoon went by, Greg Urquhart’s dislike for Tony and me became more obvious. We were tolerant of, almost friendly with Crazy Al Stanley, highly-strung, political Al, the platoon embarrassment. Where most of us used Al as a figure of fun, Urquhart despised him, his slurs, even when laughing, all spite and venom, without humour. He had wanted Al reported and charged for unauthorised discharging of a weapon on the day Al claimed he saw a tiger in the rubber trees. Everybody else was happy to leave it as an in-joke, no harm done. Not Urquhart. He seemed to want an army, perhaps a country, a world, where the Al Stanleys were eliminated and he took any acceptance of the misfit as an affront to everyone else in the unit.
I ignored him and headed straight for the admin office. Larger things held sway in my mind, as rested as it was now. Deliverance from the turmoil of the last few days was a comfort, but the whole thing still weighed heavily.
Urquhart had no further comment. He might even have served a worthwhile purpose, brought me back to the reality of where I was, back with the boys, at the blunt end, and there was considerable consolation in that.
What annoyed me more than Urquhart’s ‘nice to have you back’ was the grin on Lyle O’Malley’s face. Lyle, my saviour from jungle training at Canungra, who had let me sleep for hours while our section of the training platoon lay set for ambush. He was standing beside his truck in front of the shed, looking like he endorsed Urquhart’s suggestion about my part in the death of Lieutenant Jefferies, the prefect.
Back with the boys alright. But I reminded myself that it was Lyle, ‘the Spanner’, our constant and willing volunteer, whose boyish grin was almost a fixture and usually easy to take, in fact good to have around. Still, my sensitivities had been rubbed a bit raw of late and I felt a distance, even from Lyle. His grin struck me just then as not only innocent but ignorant and stupid. I could have grabbed him and shaken him. For Christ’s sake, Lyle, step out of your wonderful innocence for a moment and look at what’s going on here. But he had turned away and found something on his truck that needed fixing. Sometimes Lyle just tried too hard.
I made my way across the compound, intrigued still by that grin, so much so that I almost turned to look back at the shed. Because something about Lyle had reminded me of Lieutenant Jefferies. It wasn’t his grin at Urquhart’s comment about the lieutenant’s death. There was a likeness. Not a physical likeness. Something beyond that. Something more metaphysical. Despite their differences, I decided that the slow-talking, work-loving bushy from the Riverina, and our former terribly correct and disciplined junior officer, had the same sort of innocence about them.
Stark, often disturbing memories of the lieutenant sat in the back of my mind, and would for a long time after. “We’re on an important mission here, Private Ross. Make sure you’re on your best behaviour.” “Aren’t you forgetting something, Private Carmody?”Those sorts of little pomposities Lyle could never have uttered, no matter what army rank he might rise to. And yet I saw them now as born of an innocence not unlike Lyle’s. With the lieutenant it might have been parceled up in more education and authority, but to me, it was the same sort of thing. An innocence. A wide-eyed, unshakeable capacity to believe in it all. And I realised that, in the army or out, I would never have been friends with either of them for long. They of so much faith. I of so little.
At the office even Joe Bartolino the admin corporal looked at me differently. “Wait there a minute, Mark.” He disappeared into the next room and Captain O’Brien came out behind him to tell me that the major wanted to see me at 0800 hours next morning. There was none of the usual sardonic indifference in his eyes. “Are you all right, Private Ross? How do you feel?”
“I’m okay, Sir.”
“Well if you don’t feel okay in any way come straight back down here and let us know. If you’d like to see a doctor, even just to talk to, you let us know.”
Back in the lines the scrutiny was less restrained. Everyone just wanted to know what had happened. Even Bushfire Daniels said nothing as I retold selected events, concentrating mostly on the killing of the lieutenant.
I got drunk in the boozer that night recounting the details to Tony Carmody, giving more emphasis this time to the Klein family, Lin and her sister. We were sitting at a small table farthest from the bar and when I’d more or less finished he looked at me calmly. “Are you okay?” That was Tony, his focus always on the personal. On our survival. On his wedding plans. The espionage, the politics of it all meant little. I could only imagine him, even during the happy times that he felt were guaranteed, taking each step through a prosperous and ordered life, with the same sober, rational consideration he was giving me at that moment.
For a time I had seen a kind of arrogance in Tony’s absolute confidence in the rightness of his life’s plan. And I admired him for it. It was a strength I didn’t have. I had a thought, after that night, that if my life went off the rails at some time in the future, I could arrive on his comfortable, solid, middle-class doorstep, hug his three beautiful children, kiss his beautiful wife on the cheek, shake his hand and be fed and beered and sent, reassured, on my way. He was my link with stability, sanity perhaps. When I suggested something like that to him he said it would be fine, so long as, should the situations be reversed, I’d do the same for him.
“Is Al around?” I knew Al would be more interested than Tony in people like Jake Klein and Thi Lin Quang.
“Al won’t be coming up. He’s confined to barracks. Guard duty for the night.”
“I thought I was the only one ever to get CB over here?”
“Well you know Al. He had a disagreement with an infantry sergeant in Nui Dat. They’re doing special patrols around there now to cover the evac.”
And so I was given the details. A complete pull-out and this time no rumours. Our transport unit’s job was to bring all troops and gear down from Nui Dat to be put up at Vung Tau to await shipment. Nashos were priority, although as the movers of everything we drivers would be amo
ng the last to go. But the word was that Operation Southward, as it was called, meant we’d all be home by Christmas.
“Well I’ll drink to that.” I stood and headed for the bar.
“Listen,” I said, taking a big swig as soon as I’d sat down again. “It doesn’t mean everyone, does it? I mean, the Yanks are staying?’‘
“No official word. But they reckon they’ll go eventually. Al’s back with us tomorrow. He’ll give you all the details. You know how worked up he gets about it.”
Well no wonder Al Stanley was excited. All his ‘unwinnable war’ stuff was coming true. Of course words like ‘retreat’ and ‘defeat’ would be avoided. We were simply withdrawing. Leaving by the back door, Al would say, which was the way we’d come in. ‘Importunate beggars at the back door’, he’d read somewhere, who had asked the Americans, through the South Vietnamese, if we could take part. Hey, America. Don’t forget us. Give us a guernsey. So said Al. So much so now that it worried Tony.
“He’s not so easily scared any more. Mouths off about it more than ever. I’m starting to wish they’d sent him home when they had the chance. I think there’s a real paranoia taking over. Worse than ever. He’s talking ... mutiny.”
“Mutiny?” I laughed. “Mutiny against what? The army?”
Tony laughed too but it was muted. “Yeh, well, if it wasn’t such a joke it’d be scary. He reckons …” He smiled in spite of himself.“He reckons we should make a stand. Make a stand! Like he’s in a movie or something. He’s losing touch with reality.”
I took another swig. It was good to feel my senses being numbed. I laughed again. “Make a stand how? Against what?”
“He says we’d have everybody on side back home if we all refused to take out more infantry, on their patrols. The press would grab it and with all the demonstrations and protests back home we’d go back heroes.”
“Heroes? Don’t you get shot for mutiny?”
“Used to. I’m not sure what would happen now. But we wouldn’t be heroes, that’s for sure.”
“I wonder why they didn’t send him home in the first place. Couldn’t they see he’s nuts?”
“I think it’s called confronting your fears. And it’s not working. We’re about to go home and he wants to get thrown in the lock-up. He doesn’t care anymore. He sees this withdrawal as some kind of personal victory. The Yanks’ll go too soon, he says. Pull out and lose the war. The mighty Americans.”
“The Americans are just people.”
He watched me for a moment before he said, “And it’s a much bigger deal for them.”
“It sure is.”
“Al says when it’s all over the Australians will count their dead in hundreds. The Americans in thousands.”
“And the Vietnamese? What does he say about them? Millions?”
“He says there’s too many to count. There’ll only be estimates.”
“And when does Al reckon the Americans will go?”
Tony didn’t know. He watched me take another big swig of my beer can. He wasn’t one to get drunk very often but seemed more flat and disconsolate than I would haveexpected, given the news of withdrawal. When I asked if he was okay his nod was not convincing. “What’s wrong? You’re supposed to be happy. ‘Specially you. So much to go back for.”
“That’s what Chris said in her last letter. That I should be getting happier, I mean.”
Christine was now into her second year of teaching, something of a sore point with her conscripted fiancé, simply because it was where he wanted to be. Tony Carmody was one of a family of seven off a dairy farm near Warragul. He’d met Christine at teachers’ college and I knew that their marriage-to-be was their life. And we had all seen what letters could do. I looked at him before I said carefully. “You didn’t get a...?”
“Dear John?No. No, she said in one of her letters that her eighteen year old brother was thinking of joining the army. I told her I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, certainly not on her brother.”
“So?”
“Well, she said I sounded bitter, when I should be getting happier. I think she must have told her family and it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.”
It didn’t seem cause for a break-up, but it worried Tony. In the following weeks of the withdrawal he tried on several occasions to leave with an earlier flight than his time in- country allowed. Blowfly volunteered his seat on one of the early flights but each request was denied.
It was felt by some that Tony’s recalcitrance, though polite and restrained, was a consequence of his failure to make it into the conscripts’ officer training course at Scheyville during basic. He had the education and leadership skills but not the attitude. I felt I knew him better. He just didn’t want to be where he had to be, no matter where the army decided to place him. Never popular with the officers and NCOs, in the end he would leave with the final flight of national servicemen out of the country.
“Tell me about the redhead. What was she like?”
“Nice,” I dropped the can heavily onto the table. “And educated. Got some sort of literature degree.”
“But not much common sense.” I looked at him and his expression turned apologetic. “I mean, to come over here.”
“Yeh. She says herself it’s crazy. I think, really, she’s just ... lonely.”
“That’s not really surprising, is it? It’s a funny place for a girl to be.”
He listened as I lapsed once more into recent memories. At closing I staggered as we stood to leave. The canteen corporal watched us from where he was cleaning up behind the bar. “Don’t stand too close,” he called. “He’s jinxed.”
