Dead and Kicking

by McGeachin, Geoffrey

  Melbourne-born photographer Geoffrey McGeachin has had a varied career shooting pictures for advertising, travel, theatre and feature films. His work has taken him all over the world, including stints living in New York and Hong Kong. He is now based in Sydney, where he teaches photography and writes. His first novel, Fat, Fifty & F***ed!, won the inaugural Australian Popular Fiction competition. His other novels, D-E-D Dead! and Sensitive New Age Spy, are also published by Penguin.

  For Wilma, as always — with much love, as ever

  GEOFF MCGEACHIN

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2009

  Copyright © Geoff McGeachin 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may 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 written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 9780857966421

  ONE

  I was hunkered down in a shallow depression off to one side of the trail, my position concealed by a thick layer of branches and bamboo. While the camouflage protected me from being spotted, it also sealed in the heat and humidity, and the cramped space was like an oven. My neck was aching, I was tired and soaked in sweat, and something nasty had crawled up the leg of my combat fatigues and was busily biting me on the bum. I’d have given a million bucks to be anywhere else but I knew I was probably only going to get this one chance and I needed to make every shot count.

  The soldier resting on his haunches on the trail in front of me could smell the approaching patrol before he could see it. A sort of meaty fug was pushing ahead of the men, spreading lazily on the late-afternoon breeze. It was an acrid co-mingling of mouthwash, bug spray, cheap aftershave and the sweet-sour aroma of mildewed army fatigues left wet too long. There was also the smell of cigarettes and sweat, and the unmistakable scent of fear.

  Then the noise came: talking, forced laughter, the clanking of equipment and ammunition knocking against weapons, and the sound of a tinny PX transistor radio tuned to Armed Forces Radio Vietnam. Glen Campbell was mournfully wishing he was back in Galveston when the patrol’s point man ambled around the kink in the trail and stopped suddenly.

  The whole idea of the point man is that he should be far enough out in front of his unit to spot any trouble before it happens. In this case, however, he’d been standing still for barely ten seconds before the rest of the patrol bumped into him. There were about a dozen men in the group, bunched up, walking close together on the trail. Most of them looked like they should still have been in high school and they started griping and cursing until they saw what the point man was staring at, and then they shut up.

  A dozen yards further along the trail, the soldier stood up slowly and faced the patrol. He smiled, showing them his empty hands, palms outward. Someone switched the radio off, truncating Glen Campbell just as he watched ‘the cannons flashing’. The song was about the long-past Spanish-American War but that particular summer there’d been a lot of songs about other wars that were really about this one.

  The point man looked around at the lieutenant, who looked back at the sergeant, who shrugged.

  ‘He ain’t shootin’, Lieutenant,’ the sergeant said, ‘and he’s smilin’ and ain’t no gook so I guess that makes him a friendly.’

  The sergeant had the kind of aged, weather-beaten face that said he knew what he was talking about. The tone in his voice indicated that what he’d just said should have been pretty bloody obvious to his superior officer.

  The lieutenant nodded and walked slowly towards the soldier. The sergeant followed, keeping the muzzle of his M16 down but pointing forward, his index finger resting on the trigger guard. The soldier casually studied the rest of the patrol as the two men approached. Most of the grunts had their flak jackets gaping open, understandable given the fierce heat of the afternoon, but potentially deadly in a mortar attack. They were still standing grouped together, an easy target for any Vietcong in the area who might want to take them on.

  The biggest man in the patrol was carrying the M60, the unit’s heaviest weapon. It rested over his shoulder on a folded towel, while his right hand held one of the bipod legs near the muzzle to steady it. In an ambush Charlie would aim to cut him down first in a withering hail of bullets from AK-47s on full auto. With its hundred-round assault pouch, the M60 general-purpose machine gun would be a good thing to have out of the way.

  Next, the VC would take out the man with the long, slender antenna of the PRC-10 radio, or Prick 10, waving above his helmet. No radio meant no calls for artillery support from the nearest firebase, no air support from Skyhawks or Phantoms dropping their shiny canisters of napalm, no helicopter gunships swooping in to strafe and rocket the tree line, and no dust-off choppers to medevac out the wounded. The man standing closest to the radioman – the officer – would be the next target.

  The officer was studying the soldier. The uniform was different from his, and the man wore a soft bush hat rather than a steel helmet. The weapon slung around his neck and resting across his belly looked like a skinny metal pipe with two wooden handgrips and a skeleton stock. A straight magazine poked out the top and the whole damn thing looked almost homemade. The sergeant saw his lieutenant staring at the weapon.

  ‘Owen gun,’ the sergeant said. ‘Am I right?’

  The soldier nodded.

  ‘I seen ’em in Korea,’ the sergeant continued. ‘Guess that kind of weapon would make you an Aussie.’ He pronounced it ‘Ossie’.

  The soldier grinned. ‘Got it in one, Sergeant. Good memory you got there.’

  ‘I watched one of your boys pull one of them things out of two feet of mud, give it a splash in a puddle and fire off a whole damn magazine easy as you please.’

  ‘Good little gun, the Owen,’ the soldier agreed. ‘Helped stop the Japs in New Guinea. Bit of a museum piece now but they tend not to jam in a tight spot.’

  ‘If you’re Australian, aren’t you a little outside your area of operations?’ the lieutenant interrupted.

  ‘Yo, El-Tee,’ one of the soldiers in the patrol yelled, ‘can we take a load off?’

  The lieutenant’s face reddened at the familiarity. He glanced at the sergeant. ‘Give them
ten minutes.’

  Before the sergeant could speak, the men were shaking off their packs and moving towards the shade of a clump of bamboo. The Australian soldier gave a whistle and when the patrol looked back at him he slowly shook his head. One of the grunts parted the undergrowth beside the track with the muzzle of his rifle and swore.

  ‘Hot damn! Motherfucking punji stakes.’

  Dozens of sharpened bamboo stakes smeared with human excrement lined the shaded ditch. The men looked warily at the soldier and one of them pointed to the rice field on the opposite side of the trail. The soldier nodded and the grunts moved slowly into the lush field of rice, still cautiously prodding the vegetation with their rifles.

  The sergeant, the gunner and a couple of the grunts wore faded, stained and torn fatigues. They carried their load of grenades, ammo, flares, Claymore mines, C-rations and canteens with an ease born of long practice. The once-black leather of their combat boots was worn down to a dull, dusty grey. In contrast, the lieutenant and the rest of the men still had some shine to their boots and an olive green newness left in their fatigues, and they handled their cumbersome packs with an awkward clumsiness. FNGs was the older grunts’ term for them – Fucking New Guys.

  The lieutenant took a long swallow from his canteen and offered it to the Australian, who took a swig and grimaced.

  ‘Kool-Aid,’ the lieutenant explained. ‘It kills the taste of the sterilising tablets.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ the Australian said with a smile, handing back the canteen.

  ‘What are you doing out here all by yourself anyway?’ the lieutenant asked. ‘You’re a few clicks outside Phuoc Tuy Province.’

  The soldier smiled. ‘Actually, you’re about three clicks inside our territory.’

  The lieutenant stiffened. ‘I can’t see any badges of rank but if you think I’m –’

  ‘Sorry,’ the Australian said. ‘Should have introduced myself earlier. I’m Peter Cartwright. Major Peter Cartwright.’

  The lieutenant’s face flushed bright red and he straightened up. Cartwright’s left hand shot out and stopped the young soldier’s right hand as it started moving upwards in the general direction of a salute.

  ‘We don’t need any of that parade-ground bullshit out here, do we, Lieutenant? You never know who’s watching.’

  He pronounced it ‘left tenant’ and some of the soldiers lying closest in the rice field sniggered. The sergeant wheeled on them.

  ‘Maybe you assholes might want to spend a little time cleaning them weapons so’s I don’t have to write no letters home to your mommas saying how you got your nuts shot off by Charlie Kong ’cos you was too friggin’ lazy to follow procedure.’

  The lieutenant looked at the major. ‘Sorry, sir, but we usually don’t get too many officers on the ground way out here in the boonies. Are you sure we’re in your area?’

  Cartwright nodded. ‘Where are you supposed to be, son?’

  The sergeant unfolded a map and pointed to a grid. He smiled and shrugged.

  ‘You and the sergeant there have a disagreement about which way to march earlier today?’ Cartwright asked.

  ‘I guess you could say that,’ the lieutenant mumbled glumly.

  ‘Take my advice: if in doubt, always listen to your sergeant.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ snapped the lieutenant, and Cartwright grabbed his saluting hand just in time.

  There was a whop whop whop noise overhead and the shadow of a helicopter passed over the patrol. No-one even looked up. Hueys coming and going were just part of daily life in Vietnam, like yellow cabs on New York’s Fifth Avenue, only sometimes with a hell of a lot more blood on the back seats.

  Cartwright glanced across the rice fields towards the tree line. ‘Maybe you’d better get your men back to a good place to lie up for the night. It’s getting late.’

  ‘What about you, major? Are you okay on your own out here?’

  Cartwright smiled. ‘I’ll be just fine. No need for you to worry about me.’

  The sergeant got his griping and grumbling charges back on their feet and into some semblance of a military formation and they moved off slowly in the direction they’d come from. The area where the Americans had been resting looked like a rubbish tip. Empty C-ration boxes and discarded cans littered the flattened rice stalks.

  Cartwright waited until the patrol was out of sight and the last sounds of the unit’s radio had faded. The sun would be setting soon and he needed to prepare the night ambush position. After casually scanning the landscape one more time, he held his hands out at waist height and slowly raised them, palms up.

  Seven men wearing jungle greens and draped in camouflage netting laced with foliage slowly emerged from the rice field, 7.62mm Browning self-loading rifles at the ready. Three of the men had been lying motionless and unseen less than two metres from the resting GIs. Cartwright pointed towards the west and the patrol moved out silently, keeping well apart and well away from the trail.

  It was the moment I’d been waiting for. I took careful aim, framing the major in front, the seven men behind him, and the sun setting on the distant tree line. Timing is crucial in this sort of thing and I squeezed off a rapid-fire burst of eight shots just as the director yelled, ‘Cut! Print that take.’

  Without even checking the LCD display on the back of my Nikon D3x, I knew I had the perfect image for the movie poster. Then I climbed out from under my cover of greenery, turned, caught my foot on a tree root and fell flat on my arse in front of the whole film crew.

  TWO

  Falling flat on your arse in front of a film crew can be embarrassing, but everyone was too busy, too tired or just too over the whole damned business of movie-making to notice. On the plus side, landing on my butt crushed whatever had been biting me. I scrambled to my feet, casually checking my camera and trying to look cool and unconcerned while all around me the organised chaos that is filmmaking continued.

  A hair stylist and the make-up artist fussed over the actor playing the Australian major while assistant directors, both Aussie and Vietnamese, lined up the supporting actors and the gaggle of backpacker extras hired to play American soldiers, just in case we had to do one more take in the rapidly fading light.

  The scene of the meeting of the Aussie major and the yank patrol would take up about three minutes in the movie but we’d been on location in the heat and humidity of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta since just past dawn and it was now pushing sunset. Those three minutes of screen time would be made up of various wide shots, mid shots and close-ups, plus things called reverses to show people talking back and forth, and it all took time to reposition lights, change camera angles and rehearse the action. Back in Australia, film editors would cut all this footage together, and hopefully their talent and the skill of our cinematographer would disguise the fact that the sun was to the right of the soldiers when they rounded the bend and on their left when they marched away an apparent couple of minutes later.

  While I dusted myself off, the camera crew behind me were ‘checking the gate’ on the big Panavision movie camera, making sure there were no ‘hairs’ – minute slivers of film negative – or pieces of grit caught in front of the film that might ruin the image. When the focus puller called, ‘Gate clear,’ Damien Grant, the first assistant director, glanced over towards a balding, intense young man sitting under a big umbrella in a black canvas director’s chair with ‘Director’ stencilled in white paint on the back.

  This was our director, a talented veteran of four gruelling years of film school, three video clips and a TV commercial for pet food where he’d forced an actor with thirty years’ experience and three AFI awards to repeat the line ‘It’s Woof-A-Licious’ seventy-four times until he felt the poor bastard had the intonation and delivery just right.

  The director conferred intently with someone with a clipboard, nodded a couple of times, looked up at Damien and announced, ‘We’ll go with that take. I think I’m happy.’

  And about bloody time, I s
aid to myself.

  Damien glanced at his watch and announced, ‘The gate is clear, ladies and gentlemen. We have a print-take, finally, so that’s a wrap on location photography for Lost in Action.’

  There was scattered applause from the exhausted crew, along with a few whistles. We’d been at it for eight weeks now and everyone was totally knackered from early starts, late finishes and shooting six days a week.

  The scene we’d just finished was actually the opening of the film, but for logistical reasons movies are often shot out of sequence. It was also the wrap shot, meaning cast and crew could now take a much-needed break and then reassemble in Queensland for another few weeks of filming.

  ‘Crew call for interior photography is at Warner Bros. Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast in two weeks,’ Damien continued, ‘so enjoy the break. Wrap party tonight in the terrace bar of the Hotel Indochine Luxe Royale. Grips and gaffers will please wear pants. And if anyone missed our stills photographer, Mr Alby Murdoch, falling into that hole I’m sure he’ll be happy to do it one more time – with feeling.’

  The crew laughed and whistled some more and then set about the business of packing up the production. The lights were quickly loaded back into trucks by burly blokes wearing shorts, workboots and tool belts; rented electrical generators were shut down for the very last time; army uniforms and equipment were collected by the wardrobe department and prop guns by the armourer. In less than an hour there’d be no sign we’d ever been at that location, apart from crushed vegetation and the odd paper cup, cigarette butt and lolly wrapper.

  Shooting movie stills was generally a fun gig – taking photographs during production for use in PR and the advertising of the finished film six months or so down the track. The trick was to make sure I wasn’t seen by the movie camera and the click of my Nikon’s shutter wasn’t picked up by the sound recordist’s sensitive microphones. I’d sometimes shoot rehearsals, when the sound of my Nikon wouldn’t be intrusive, but on ‘takes’ or the actual filming of a scene I had to use a soundproofed camera housing or choose my moment carefully. If I got my timing wrong, and fired off a burst of shots at the wrong moment, a headphones-wearing sound recordist would look up from his Nagra digital recorder and glare at me.