The Odd Angry Shot

by William Nagle

  Text Classics

  WILLIAM NAGLE was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1947. Educated at St Joseph’s College in Geelong, he left school at seventeen and enlisted in the army. He trained as a cook and in 1966 was deployed with the SAS to Saigon. There he was disciplined for refusing to cook egg custard and later was transferred to the infantry in Australia.

  Nagle was discharged from the army in 1968, and went on to work in television, and on stage with the Melbourne Theatre Company. The Odd Angry Shot, his debut novel, fictionalised his experiences—and those of his SAS mates—in Vietnam. Nagle completed the first draft in one sitting, working around the clock for six days.

  Published in 1975, the novel won the National Book Council Award and became an instant classic. In 1979 it was made into a film starring Graham Kennedy, John Hargreaves, John Jarratt and Bryan Brown. ‘It was a risky commercial venture,’ said director Tom Jeffrey. ‘The Vietnam War was a dirty subject. Few people wanted to be reminded of our involvement.’

  Nagle wrote the screenplay for Death of a Soldier (1986) and co-wrote the screenplay for The Siege of Firebase Gloria (1989), both about the Vietnam War. He worked in film and television for many years in the United States before his death, in 2002.

  PAUL HAM’s latest book, Sandakan, was published by Random House in 2012. He is the author of Vietnam: The Australian War, Kokoda and Hiroshima Nagasaki, published by HarperCollins.

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  Copyright © William Nagle 1975

  Introduction copyright © Paul Ham 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Angus & Robertson Publishers, Australia 1975

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Imogen Stubbs

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079718

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148087

  Author: Nagle, William.

  Title: The Odd Angry Shot / by William Nagle;

  introduction by Paul Ham.

  Series: Text classics.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Ham, Paul.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  A Lower Circle of Hell

  by Paul Ham

  The Odd Angry Shot

  A Lower Circle of Hell

  by Paul Ham

  PITY him at your peril. The typical Vietnam veteran—if any may be called ‘typical’—seems to prefer your anger to your sympathy. To oppose him is to respect him; in his mind, sympathy and respect are mutually exclusive. And that is why so many people fail to understand these men. The Vietnam veteran risked life and limb in the line of duty—surely that demands our respect? But on his return from the battlefields of South Vietnam he got little: mostly contempt, ridicule or, worse, indifference. Hence the rage that burns inside him.

  If you doubt this, join one of the veterans’ chat rooms: it is the verbal equivalent of a body blow. Bullying on Twitter is gentle chiding, by comparison: Give me a fight, or give me nothing, the veterans’ collective rant seems to howl. Feed my self-loathing, my morbid self-absorption. ’Cos I’m fucked up and on the loose.

  Many are indeed fucked up. I’ve interviewed hundreds. Vietnam veterans were the first soldiers to be diagnosed as medically damaged as a direct consequence of their exposure to war. In Australia, decades after the fall of Saigon, about thirteen thousand continue to describe themselves as Totally and Permanently Incapacitated.

  They are sick. Yet their abnormal state is a response to abnormal conditions: the good news is that to face a violent death, or kill another human being, is not, in fact, normal. The condition has been around since the first Homo sapiens raised a club against another. Rape victims suffer from it, as do witnesses to murder. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I Hotspur’s wife observes it in her husband, whose sweaty thrashing about in his sleep she compares with ‘bubbles in a late disturbed stream’.

  Shell shock was the Great War’s grisly contribution to the roll call of the afflicted, in the blanked eyes of the first young soldiers to be ordered to march into modern artillery. Medical euphemisms followed, as the men in white coats belatedly sensed what they were dealing with. But Gulf War syndrome wrongly implied a single war had caused it. Now we’re left with the clinicians’ favourite, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, suggesting a mild interruption in the normal swim of events, an illness that may be cured—surely the grossest understatement of our century.

  The cure, however, lies deeper: in human beings, and governments, facing the truth about war and actually deciding to end it. And that is the triumph of this mighty little classic. The Odd Angry Shot reveals, in a mere 140-odd pages, the face of war: how it damages and destroys not only life and limb, but also the brains, hopes and dreams of everyone involved. First published in 1975, it is an Australian Dispatches and—like Michael Herr’s classic, which came out two years later—it rips the scales from our eyes.

  The Odd Angry Shot moves like a roving lens around this dreadful world, capturing a few brief months in the lives of an SAS squadron deployed to Vietnam in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, the bloodiest of the fifteen-year struggle. The experiences of Harry, Bung, Bill, Dawson and Rogers tell us more about the causes of war trauma than any doctor or medical analysis could. Their lives attune the reader to the reality of how men react to the dirtiest of jobs. They’re cut adrift in a war their government has ordered them to join; yet they couldn’t care less why, or for what purpose. And therein lies their tragedy, and ours: they are doing their duty for a nation that couldn’t give a damn.

  It is all so brutally honest—in the coarseness of their jokes and ribaldry, in the stench and dirt. Their lost lovers and estranged families exist somewhere in a far-off alien world called Home. We see and feel the damage being inflicted on these blokes; we sense the broken and disabused lives forming before our eyes—that is, for those of them who survive.

  Having witnessed their friends’ deaths—and The Odd Angry Shot spares no detail of the gruesome handiwork of a ‘jumping jack’ mine—these men grow even harder, more hate-filled. They hate the Vietnamese, the nogs—enemy or ally. They smash up one who dares try to steal from them; they push an innocent bicycle rider off the road, for a laugh; and they watch an enemy soldier roll about in white phosphorus agony before someone has the humanity to shoot him.

  William Nagle knew his stuff. Himself a Vietnam veteran, he was assigned to the SAS Regiment, initially as a cook and then as a member of 3 Squadron, in Vietnam. The SAS he portrays is not the one usually described with hyperbole as the ‘toughest’, ‘most elite’, ‘most secretive’ unit in the Australian armed forces, whose big laconic heroes casually cheat death when not administering aid to the natives.

  The SAS may be all these things; but it is also something else. In ’Nam they were in the business of ratcheting up the infantry’s body counts, usually through lethal ambushes. The soldiers of one SAS unit in Vietnam celebrated reaching their first hundred ‘kills’ with a barbecue. And why not? It was a war. That was their job. They were not only intelligence gatherers; they were hunter-killers. So afraid were the enemy of the SAS they dubbed them ma rung�
��phantoms of the jungle—and put a heavy price on their heads. There is a desperate irony in the fact that in 1968 the North Vietnamese, at least, respected them.

  If these men were the best trained killers in Australia, they were also the brightest—the thinking man’s thug—and The Odd Angry Shot presents their war through a professional’s prism. The SAS trooper scorns higher rank in other units, because he can; he doesn’t play by the infantryman’s rules. He does as he chooses. During range practice, for example, the men shoot up a large water drum, clearly not a target:

  The drum leaps into the air and slams into the sandbags that line the range wall.

  ‘Drinks for my friends [the insects],’ grins Bung, removing the magazine from his rifle.

  Predictably, we are soon joined by an enraged range supervisor.

  ‘Weel,’ screams the corporal…‘what smart prick did that?’…

  ‘Fucked if I know, mate,’ answers Rogers, wiping the dust cover of his rifle…

  ‘Must’ve been a ricochet,’ says Bung, looking innocently at the furious NCO.

  And the SAS trooper remembers. The repetition of that word ‘remember’ haunts the text like a recurrent curse: remember the losses; remember your dead friend; remember his guts spilled on the road; remember the baying protestors; remember the deceit and hypocrisy of politicians. Let this book again be a warning to all those newly minted warmongers, Anzac Day zealots, hero-hunting journalists and populist storytellers posing as historians who seem to have forgotten what war is and does. The fallen deserve to be commemorated—but we must first remember them, and what actually happens in a war. Lest we forget.

  Nagle was charged and punished for refusing to cook egg custard. It must have been a very funny act of defiance. His humour is born of darkness; in places this book is the blackest of black comedies, as if some malevolent spirit had dropped the men into a lower circle of hell and they survive by laughing at it. The duel between Bung’s pet spider and a sapper’s scorpion is funny because the insects have as little hope as their owners.

  Yet The Odd Angry Shot is, at heart, a tragedy. The joke, ultimately, is on them—and in a wider sense, us. ‘We are stuck here, refusing to admit defeat,’ the narrator warns, ‘an army of frustrated pawns, tired, wet and sold out…You [the politicians and the people] have lied to us for the last time. We, the survivors, will come home, will move amongst you, will wait, will be revenged.’

  A page later he portrays the once-proud SAS soldier in Vietnam as ‘an organ grinder’s monkey dressed in green’. The identity of the organ grinder is monstrously clear.

  The Odd Angry Shot

  STANDING beside a forty-four gallon drum filled with coke at the airbase. Richmond, wasn’t it?

  Shit it’s cold. Pissing rain. Remember how your back froze when you turned around and your front froze when you did the reverse.

  Harry arrived with two cups of cocoa made on milk.

  ‘You know we’re getting Armalites when we get there.’

  ‘What, straight away?’

  ‘No. When we get to Nui Dat.’

  ‘Shit, we’ll stir the indigenous population up then, eh?’

  ‘Remember what the man said: “You are visitors in South Vietnam,”’ said Harry.

  ‘Thank the Jesus that it’s over there and not here.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘That we’re visitors.’

  Remember Smokie Dawson on the other side of the forty-four gallon drum and the way his face seemed distorted by the heat haze.

  ‘I can just see my old lady’s face if the old moll next door came in for a natter and sprayed the lounge with 7.62 tracer.’

  ‘It’d scare the fuck out of yer flying ducks,’ said Harry.

  Remember when he said that I laughed. The plastic mug warmed my hands. Harry and I were mates.

  ‘Ready to emplane in fifteen minutes. Ready to emplane in fifteen minutes. Ready to emplane in…’

  ‘Jesus, does he think a man’s deaf, bloody RAAF pogo.’ Grab your rifle boy, kiss goodbye to the southern land of the Holy Ghost—that’s what they called it in grade four.

  A Qantas 707. ‘Shit! This is the way to go to war,’ said Harry.

  Sleep a little. Wake up after a short while, check my pistol. Most illegal—half the units carrying their own. Beretta 7.65 mm—just in case. Only a pro would have his own pistol. Sleep. Bye-bye kids and parks. We’ll protect you.

  REMEMBER the bus, chartered, seemed all a bit unmilitary, but what the hell anyway, your mate Charlie had come out to see you off.

  ‘Take care of yourself, you skinny shit.’

  ‘Make sure they’re all dead when I get there.’

  ‘Don’t drink all the piss over there.’

  It had dawned on you as you pulled your greatcoat collar up around your ears that you were going to war. No—it had dawned on you a few days earlier when you were slumped on your bed in Room 17 and for a moment you were scared. ‘Shit,’ you thought, ‘you’re a pro. Pro’s don’t get scared, and if they do they certainly don’t show it.’

  You remembered that someone had said that more people die in road accidents in Australia than get killed in Vietnam. That was reassuring. You told yourself that you didn’t need reassuring, you were a pro—you’d jumped out of planes, climbed cliffs, had wings on your sleeve—you were better than the rest of them already; you could take it; what the hell anyway.

  You hoped that the bitch who hadn’t written to you for weeks would miss you when you were gone. She’d write—she’d wake up to the fact that you were a man and that you were the type of man who would look after her and protect her etc.

  Remember when you got to the airport, seven days’ pre-embarkation leave, that’s what it said on the leave pass, you had to stand in the queue and wait to check your baggage in, but you didn’t. You knew that they were only civilians, and you somehow felt better than them—superior—you were protecting them. Luggage checked in. ‘Go for a walk, eh?’ Yeah, let’s have a bit of a stroll around the place. Strain your ears when you walk past groups of people; they knew you were going to war; they knew you weren’t like all these long-haired bastards; they knew that you were one of the gutsy ones, you’d lay down your life for them—and, by Jesus, for your country too—yeah, your country was important, they knew that.

  Strain your ears a bit more, are they talking about us—they looked at us—shit, they might be here to see us off. Isn’t that bloody nice of them, you know they’re the type of Australian we’re fighting for. Good on ’em. Notice a poster—WELCOME HOME ROBYN. Remember feeling like you wished that you could have taken Robyn’s place—it wasn’t us after all—feel a little stupid? Fuck ’em, rotten bastards, they could all drop dead right now and you wouldn’t lose one ounce of sleep—wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

  Courage regained, you’re still on top. Who the hell was Robyn anyway—your war was in the papers every day.

  Bloody Robyn wasn’t more important than you anyway.

  THE party tonight, you weren’t nineteen until Monday, but it was better to hold it tonight. It’s only a day, you shrugged to your mother. Your bird had arrived—she was a bit pissed by nine o’clock—everyone was there, all of them, about eighty people. Shit! Eighty people.

  ‘Well, a bloke could get his arse shot off,’ ruggedly.

  ‘Oh yes, I expect we’ll see a bit of action,’ nonchalantly.

  ‘Don’t worry, they’ll get you, too, soon,’ knowingly.

  Eighty people—and the presents.

  Shit, it was good of them to give you all those presents wasn’t it?

  Travelling cases, shaving kit in a leather folder.

  Records—that’s a bit impractical, but thanks, Jesus, thanks anyway.

  Everyone’s pissed. Some bird being groped at the top of the stairs.

  You’d got yours out in the back yard—remember how you’d got her out there and grabbed her straight between the legs.

  Well you had kissed her first—shit, a man didn�
��t go the grope straight off. You were nineteen.

  Remember how wet she was—that was good eh, meant she wanted it.

  You’d laid her down beside the garage.

  ‘Will someone come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. No one will come.’

  Pink panties coming off. Remember finding it—the slippery, wet slit. Going in. She moaned. She’s enjoying it.

  ‘Ah, fuck me!’ Moves faster. She’s blown. Squeezes her thighs into you.

  ‘Come out,’ she says. Surprise, she’s sucking me off.

  And I thought I wasn’t going to get anything.

  You kissed her again, went inside, no one missed you. You’d do it again later; she was staying the night anyway—enjoy yourself.

  We’re all singing songs. We’ll drink a toast to the future. No longer will men suffer. That’ll upset the neighbours.

  ‘GET one fer me.’ Yeah, you bet, mate.

  Stand on the station.

  ‘See you mate.’ Remember the handshakes, the twinge when you pulled out of the station. You hung out of the window—waved—yes, keep waving. Hang on. This is it.

  A curve in the line. They’re gone; for twelve months they’re gone. Find some comrades. What, a suitcase full of large cans? Shit, yeah, forget all that family shit; you’re a pro, pro’s don’t have families. You are a member of the Elite Regiment of the Australian Army—you’re a pro.

  ‘Got an opener?’

  REMEMBER Saigon, Jesus, Tan Son Nhut. You’d never realised just how much equipment the Yanks had.

  Squat down next to the coke machine, notice the holes in the metal work, mortar shrapnel. Things go better with coke—even mortars. Packs arranged in neat lines of threes, ham steaks courtesy of Qantas for lunch.

  ‘Christ, look at that,’ says Harry.

  ‘Where?’ I’m nearly asleep. Shit, I’m thirsty.

  ‘The Hercules.’ My eyes travel onto a four-engined cargo plane. A group of Americans in fatigues are loading large plastic bags from trolleys.