Well Done, Those Men

by Barry Heard

  The bloke with the drawl had returned. Was this the first sign of security? No, he was just curious, and offered me a lift to a nearby street. I jumped into his jeep and took the Camel cigarette that he offered me. We tried a conversation, but I found a lot of his slang hard to understand. I was amazed we could just drive out through the main gate, with no security, and no writing down of my number, name, and rank. Then a Yank bloke saluted me. I couldn’t wait to tell the gang that one!

  We drove into a narrow, busy street, just outside the military complex. Outside, it was another world. Gone were the high-tech mechanised war machines and uniforms. It was like the streets of Manila, except there were a lot more soldiers. The Yank dropped me near a market, and kids ran from several directions waving their arms and greeting me enthusiastically, holding my hands, patting my back, and smiling. ‘Fick fick boom boom Auk ta lio number wan,’ they chorused. Was this a short, patriotic welcome, I wondered.

  I enjoyed the reception, walked a little further, and stopped outside a bar, still beaming with pride. The kids suddenly scattered. Once inside, the thought of a cold beer was uppermost in my mind. The mamma-san or boss welcomed me warmly, and ushered me towards three young women in long colourful dresses. She commented, ‘Auk ta lio? Fick fick? They no clap you girls, number wan!’

  Strange, why would they want to clap me? This continuing warm welcome was a bit much. Let’s face it, I was only a lance corporal. The three girls grabbed my arms and sat me down as I walked towards the bar. With a broad bush smile, I ordered a beer.

  ‘Sorry, sir, no beer,’ they explained. ‘Saigon tea first.’

  I was baffled, but not for long — it was a local drink. So I ordered three Saigon teas. They arrived and then a beer was put on the table as one of the young women massaged my neck. I was looking forward to enjoying the hospitality of the locals (hopefully not touts or hustlers) for just on an hour. My hand reached to my back pocket. No wallet … shit … hang on. I checked all my pockets, stood up, and patted myself like we all do when we’ve lost something.

  It was those bloody kids who’d slapped me so affectionately on the back. They had pick-pocketed my wallet, loose change, cigarettes, and a prized photo. The mamma-san was not impressed. She shouted, calling me ‘cheap Charlie, no fick my girls!’ and pointed to the front door. Disheartened, I walked back to the airbase and borrowed some dough from Stretch. I explained what had happened. What a laugh. They reckoned I was that green I wouldn’t burn. With father-like concern, the others told me that, in fact, a bar was like a coffee shop with a difference. Usually, for every bloke who walked in there were girls ready to come and sit, chat, have a few drinks, and eventually signal that they were available for sex. The girl or girls in Vietnam ordered a ‘Saigon tea’, which was just cold tea or cordial. Not surprisingly, the drink was very expensive, even more expensive if there were several girls at the table. The bar’s profit relied almost totally on the number of Saigon teas it could sell. So, if you didn’t buy the girls a tea, you weren’t welcome. The beer and spirits were for the customers only, but were not overly pricey. Oh, and incidentally, clap was slang for venereal disease (VD) and ‘fick fick’, as you would have guessed, along with ‘boom boom’, was slang for sex. I had much to learn.

  A call of nature saw me back in the main airport looking for a men’s toilet. Sorry, no such thing. I found a toilet. A small and forceful Vietnamese tried to harass me into buying some toilet paper. Bugger him, I thought, as I pushed past into the unisex toilet with no door. There I found a square of concrete two feet by two feet, with a hole in the middle the size of a small saucer. It was blocked with a nine-inch pinnacle of poop protruding at a slight lean above the hole. There was no toilet paper, and little insects like flies hovered above. The smell was rotten, and I doubt if the place was regularly cleaned. Feeling ill, I left and walked back to the hut where we were expected to meet. I was quite happy to ‘crap my daks’ if need be. With a head full of confusing thoughts, I sat and waited for the flight to Nui Dat.

  The Caribou flew low over rice paddies, jungle, and villages. Vietnam was still in what was called the dry season. A couple of blokes who had served in Malaya explained a lot of what I saw. A few people were working the paddies in lines, bent sharply while attending to their chores. Villages were linked by small dirt roads, which locals trotted along with large loads on their shoulders. Water buffalo pulled carts on the roads, or grazed in the fields. Dirt tracks and narrow paths joined small villages or hamlets made up of small, thatched huts. They said that some of these villages had electricity, but only the larger ones. These had small markets and businesses as well. There were two main modes of transport: motorbikes and the three-wheeled utilities called Lambrettas. To me, everything looked peaceful and picturesque from the air. The settlements looked primitive, but quaint. It was completely different from Australia.

  The Caribou circled the base camp and its long, sealed airstrip. Most of the camp was hidden from the air under a dense cover of rubber trees. The other side of the airstrip was open, fringed with banana palms. Tents and a large artillery complex covered one end. There was an assortment of trucks, Land Rovers, Bell helicopters, and small fixed-wing aircraft, along with larger vehicles, a few huts, and a small covered pavilion with a stage. It was where concerts were held. There was a large cloud of red dust as we landed. We walked across the tarmac to the waiting vehicles. I could see a city of tents and buildings under the rubber trees. Up some steps and close to the edge of the rubber trees, the first building we came to was the post office. Good: a lot of people had promised to write to me.

  Our small group was the 7RAR advance party, sent there to be trained by 5RAR, who had almost finished their twelve-month tour of duty. The remainder of 7RAR would be sailing over on the Sydney, due to dock at Vung Tau, a large provincial city, on the coast, in three weeks’ time. We were loaded into a Land Rover and driven straight to the 5RAR ‘A’ Company lines located at the end of the airstrip in the rubber plantation. It was stiflingly hot and humid. My clothes were wet with sweat within minutes. The rubber trees stood about fifty feet tall and offered welcome shade. They were in lines like a pine plantation. These trees were part of an old rubber plantation that the French had introduced into Vietnam; some trees still had a saucer-like container wired to the trunk that caught the rubbery sap as it drained down the spiral groves still cut into the tree’s bark.

  ‘A’ Company 5RAR had three platoons, and their tents were dotted around in the rubber with company headquarters in the middle. The senior officers had their tents here, too, adjacent to the command post. I looked out of place standing in my neatly ironed summer uniform and wearing rank. A tired-looking soldier in ruffled greens pointed to the Sigs’ tent. Throwing my duffel bag on my shoulder, I walked over. Sandbags surrounded it. I was introduced to Holdy, the Sig, who was to be my mentor for the next three weeks. He pointed out where I was going to sleep — on the floor, surrounded by other grunts. They had beds, and I didn’t. I placed my duffel bag in the middle of the tent.

  THE NEW ME

  CONSCRIPTION HAD CHANGED ME a lot. It had been a long journey from the farm at Ensay to the war in Vietnam. I was now 22 years old and a different young man. I was very fit, wasn’t bothered about being in the service, and at times felt a sense of celebrity attached to the uniform. There was no question that I was slightly apprehensive about going to this foreign country, even if I had missed the trip on a ship. But then again, like Gallipoli all those years ago, this was an adventure of sorts, involving a different culture and landscape, and a war to win. And was there a better soldier than an Aussie?

  There was a stripe on my sleeve, and I believed I was a competent, even skilled, radio operator. Feedback I’d received in Australia told me I handled the responsibility quite well. My preferred cigarettes were Camel; and, naturally, being a Victorian, my ale of choice was Carlton Draught. The lack of experience I’d displayed in ‘mixing it with the men’ was now in the past. Having visited a stri
p joint, understood what a bar was, and gathered as much information about the fairer sex as possible … remember the movies at Singleton? … I was a man. Drinking, swearing, smoking, and heaping insults on my mates were now my strengths. After only one day in Vietnam I had gathered snippets of the local language: fick fick, boom boom, and so on. I had a good Ocker sense of humour, and certainly understood most dirty yarns. Although I was a late maturer, I guessed I had come of age.

  Then there was the added bonus of fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Yanks; this would be fun. If John Wayne was a prototype for the American Marine, it was going to be a privilege. Sure I missed home, the farm, and friends, but I was having more fun, and enjoyed a different freedom in the army. As well, this was a war — a war to stop the spread of communism that we had been called to fight. I was about to become an ANZAC. Without a doubt, we had received enough training to be good soldiers. The army told us that we were more prepared and better trained than any other Australian battalion. We’d had eight months, in fact, and that didn’t include Canungra. We’d heard reports that some of the American troops had only been trained for a couple of months. They must have been green.

  As I gathered my thoughts and quickly adjusted to the changes of early departure and being alone in a foreign country, I vaguely recalled my only piece of knowledge about Australia’s participation in Vietnam. I’d read about it the year before, in August 1966, just after we finished jungle training at Canungra, and were heading back on the train to Pucka. The newspapers had reported on a battle in Vietnam at Long Tan. As we glanced at the newspapers being passed around, we quickly formed blurry alcoholic opinions about the event. All I could remember was that we, the Australians, had flogged the enemy. It was never talked about, that battle. The press at the time printed superlatives which reinforced the belief that those involved were reliving the digger tradition. A wonderful word, ‘tradition’. In this context, it beggared description. The incident was given scant attention by us, and was never acknowledged by the army at the time. It rang no warning bells nor dented my youthful exuberance.

  Now, at the beginning of my tour of duty, I was ready. That was all I knew. I was prepared to follow any order from the army. ‘Ready for what?’ was a question I could never have answered at the time.

  That I was about to face killing, deprivation, death, and a life almost devoid of social contact had not occurred to me. From being a quiet, sensitive young man, I would turn into a cold, emotionless old man. There is such an absence of reality in the mind of a young soldier about to face war. It is so cleverly masked by intense training and blunt, impersonal mentions of an evil enemy. Added to this is the propaganda perpetrated by politicians and the press. We were swamped with words that always flow freely from those in power. We were now brave, courageous, fine young men, prepared to die for their country, blah, blah, blah …

  THE 5RAR EXPERIENCE

  I STARED THROUGH the rubber trees as I heard the Caribou turn and roar down the airstrip. It flicked through the trees as I could just see it building up speed. The A Company lines were only a hundred yards from the busy stretch of tarmac that was the centre of Nui Dat. In the Sig’s tent my duffel bag became my seat. The four others laid back on their beds, smoking in silence. Occasionally one would talk briefly, then the silence returned. They appeared very tired.

  The tent smelt like wet washing a week old. It was a musty stench that signalled perhaps that the beds had never been aired or that these blokes were slack with their hygiene. Each bed had a transistor radio beside it, and Armed Forces Radio blared with a crackpot broadcaster butting into music and talking too much. There was no evidence that this was a Sig’s tent. There were no radios or batteries — just rifles, boots thrown casually on the floor, and crude desks made of boxes that also acted as cupboards. At the end of each bed was a stack of webbing that they must have used in the jungle. It was filthy, stained red, and not the regular webbing that we had been issued with in Australia. As they lay underneath their mosquito nets with only a pair of pants on, their skin glistened with sweat. The air was filled with foul body odour and the smell of stinking feet. How could they stand living in such squalor? One of them glanced at his watch.

  ‘Time for a beer?’

  With nods of agreement, the four occupants headed to the company boozer. I was invited. The boozer, a modified shed, was full of men drinking heavily and chain smoking. They made me feel young and clean, as if I had invaded a family gathering of men who were weary, haggard, and aged well beyond their years. Rank meant nothing here; they were all good mates who spoke a whole new language laced with constant, foul swearing. While I was a little nervous they were relaxed, even though some had just come back from the jungle that day. They had been in Vietnam for almost a year, and I was inundated with questions about home. It was good to be the centre of attention. I was still in my neat summer uniform, and proudly wore my 7RAR lanyard on my shoulder. There has always been rivalry between battalions, and I stood a little taller when I spoke about our extensive training and preparation.

  Suddenly: crack-boom!

  Shit. I dived to the floor, leaving a sample-sized urine stain in my undies. I had never heard a noise so loud. My hands were jammed on my ears. Everything shook and rattled. My chest thumped. Jesus. Were we being attacked? The bursting noise continued. I looked for a table to get some cover. As I stretched out to slither across the floor, I noticed my hand was shaking.

  Then the noise stopped. Cautiously rising, I peeped up and saw that not one of the 5RAR blokes had moved a muscle. Unperturbed, they were still sitting on stools or standing, and just kept on drinking. The noise had lasted for several minutes. Shaken, not sure what sort of evasive or engaging action I should take, I was at a loss. My ears were ringing, as the noise had hurt them. Then it occurred to me that most of the blokes were looking in my direction. Stunned by their calm, and totally confused, I sat back on the barstool, picked up my can, and tried to look relaxed.

  Suddenly they had lost interest in me. They reverted to their own interests, and spoke in a language in which every second word was ‘fuck’. I wanted to leave the boozer, but had nowhere to go. My body language must have touched a cord in one of the blokes. I’m sure I looked pale and probably shook a little. He decided to politely tell me the source of the noise.

  ‘Don’t worry, mate. They were enemy mortars, but not real close. I’ll tell you when to duck.’

  Shit, he was so calm he winked. No doubt, he was already a veteran of many battles. I was petrified. Then, within minutes of his explanation, the bloody noise started up again, and I made several more dives to the floor, grunting in fear each time. The boozer actually rattled. However, the 5RAR blokes just continued drinking, talking, and smoking. By now I was quite shaken, and started to believe these dickheads were bloody suicidal. Shouldn’t we be in trenches or something?

  Finally, someone weakened and explained to me that the noise was from the large 155 American artillery guns located on the edge of the airfield. Every evening about 6.00pm they fired sporadically into the jungle, avoiding our troops but leaving the Viet Cong guessing. If the shells were fired over your area in base camp, there were two almost instantaneous noises — that of the gun going off and the projectile itself breaking the sound barrier. Great. His advice to me gained him a lot of heckling and shit from his mates, as well as a few laughs. But the shelling continued on and off for over half an hour, and still frightened the hell out of me. When it was finally over, I ended up drinking on my own, leaning on the bar for support. Along with these hardened soldiers, I drank myself to sleep that night. Well, that’s not quite true. I flaked on the floor, dozed for an hour, and was woken up by a strange bobbing noise like a bullfrog on top of the tent. Then Holdie fell on me and cursed as he went to do his piquet in the command post. I lay awake the rest of the night. Never had I heard so many strange sounds; I guessed they came from wildlife.

  The next morning I got up, shaved, and received a briefing. I would b
e going out with a platoon to a nearby village. I was attached to a section that would be doing sentry duty at an entrance to this village. It was for the day only. I was issued with some live ammunition, and told to go down to the back of the three platoon lines and test my rifle. It was strange just shooting into the ground. The rifle no longer felt comfortable. Now I was testing my rifle in case I had to shoot it. No, I didn’t have to carry the radio. I was a rifleman.

  We were taken by APCs (armoured personal carriers) to the small hamlet, where engineers had strung a barbed-wire fence around the perimeter. There was only one guarded opening for the locals to walk through. The section commander explained that we had to check the ID tag on every villager who came to the checkpoint. All their necessary details were hung on a card around their necks. That was clear, so I saw this as an opportunity to ask the corporal about touts and hustlers, as I was still worried about them. The question was greeted with side-splitting laughter. Instead, he explained that the locals would be heading into the rice paddies or working around the village. I was relieved. Obviously, the army had planned this as a gentle introduction to the ‘war zone’.

  Armed with a loaded rifle, I was put on the first guard on the narrow dirt road leading out from the village. A sweet old lady dressed in black silky pyjamas waddled up to me, carrying several crude farm tools on her back. Her face was worn and heavily wrinkled. It looked like an enlarged walnut. Her eyes sagged like an old beagle dog’s. She was bare-footed and stooped. Immediately I felt sorry for her. She was only about four feet four inches tall, and looked too frail for physical work. A smile appeared on her face as she approached. Her cheeks bulged with food. I greeted her with slight bow, and then indicated I wanted to see her card. She coughed, hacked, almost choked, and then spat an enormous red globule of phlegm at my feet. It looked like she had coughed up a piece of her liver.