Don't Cry For the Brave

by Gil Hogg

  Don't Cry For The Brave

  Gil Hogg

  Copyright © 2014 Gil Hogg

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

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  publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with

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  ISBN 978 1784627 263

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  Contents

  Cover

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  A Smell of Fraud

  The Predators

  Caring for Cathy

  Blue Lantern

  Present Tense

  The Cruel Peak

  Codename Wolf

  NON-FICTION

  Teaching Yourself Tranquillity

  The Happy Humanist

  1

  I was flown from Hoi An to Saigon for the court martial in a Lockheed C-130 Hercules jammed with military supplies, tired, sleepless, my head full of sparks. The journey to gaol was completed by military police Jeep. I had a minder with me, a military police sergeant, but at this time I was only nominally in custody.

  As the Jeep jolted through the outskirts of the city, I could see legions of shabby terraced houses with orange tiled roofs and barred windows, rows of shuttered shops and the wood and tar-paper hovels of the very poor. The driver of the Jeep avoided main roads, choosing narrow streets, lurching over cobblestones worn by the traffic of decades. Open drains full of still water mirrored the low pearl sky; the air smelt of sewage and the fetid sweat of hidden human life. Red good luck papers fluttered over a few ill-fitting doors.

  It was a humid mid-afternoon in July and few civilians were about: a bare-footed labourer pushing a bicycle with a sack of vegetables on the handlebars, some black-clad women in straw hats with loaded carrying poles across their shoulders.

  I saw a patrol of troops of the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. Occasionally, armoured cars crept over the intersections leaving swirling bushes of blue smoke.

  ARVN sentries with sandbagged defences were stationed at intervals on the sidewalks. I had a sudden glimpse from the Jeep up one side street: a teeming food market beneath a tattered grey canvas. The pulse of the city was still beating.

  I was driven to a spacious suburb where the South Vietnamese forces and their allies had occupied a large number of elegant Franco-Vietnamese houses with high sea-wave gables and tall, shuttered windows. The houses were painted in fading primrose and terracotta, the homes of the comfortable classes before Dien Bien Phu.

  The perimeter of the area was cordoned with barbed wire, patrolled and guarded like an army camp; but once inside it was an enclave of old colonial mansions, lavishly set in their own lawns and gardens with fountains and pools. The gardens were overgrown, the fountains dead and the pools drained, leaving puddles full of fallen leaves, paper cartons, plastic bags and old newspapers.

  The Jeep halted outside one of the mansions. I climbed out, hefted my kitbag and the MP sergeant marched me to the office of the US Commandant of the area. The Duty Sergeant riffled through his in-tray and identified me like a postal package without seeming to look at me.

  “Lootenant Robert McDade,” he pronounced, his head down, concentrating on the papers. He spoke in a tired monotone. “You are to remain in your quarters unless under escort. Any unauthorised journey will make you a fugitive. Clear, mister?”

  I was to be housed in one of the outbuildings, small windowed, low and of heavy stone construction, with peeling whitewash, formerly a store or stable for one of the mansions. I had a sudden gripe at being held in a cell, but I found to my surprise that the interior had been rebuilt to provide self-contained sleeping quarters, a bed-sitting room, a shower room and a kitchen alcove. The small windows kept out the harsh light. The place was not only adequate, it was clean and even luxurious compared to the billets I had become used to in C Company of the 33rd Regiment, 21st Infantry Division. And there was a walled area outside with a view of the rear of the surrounding buildings.

  On the evening of my arrival and all the next day I was left alone. A mute Vietnamese orderly brought a tray of food at mealtimes. I didn’t feel like eating or reading, although I had brought a few books. I was too exhausted to do any exercises. Instead, I walked up and down in the yard, eight paces long and half as wide, between showers of rain, until the weeds soaked my boots. I stripped off and lay on the bed, sweating and smoking, wishing childishly that I could shrink to nothing, be forgotten.

  I drew from an envelope the letter which had arrived by US Forces special delivery, uncensored, just before I left Hoi An, addressed from the 7th Army General Medical Centre, Saigon.

  Dearest, what has happened? I had a note from Jim saying you were in trouble. He says it is pathetic and trivial, but he seemed to think you might be court martialled. He doesn’t explain. He says he was in action with you recently and that you were very brave. I’m proud of you for that. But it scares me. Things are awful here, as usual. I’m missing you terribly. Let me hear from you soon. All my love, Gail.

  I had to reply. I propped myself up against the head of the bed with a ball-point pen poised over the pad of notepaper I found by the bed. One event had followed another in an unplanned, unexpected way. Starting with the underground tunnel at Kam Sung and the woman who complained about an unjust war… My motives had been a little confused. I hadn’t acted at times when I should have, that was sure. But I hadn’t actually done anything. I hadn’t courted trouble or disruption. Events had swept me along. When I had raised my arm it was only a reaction, never a planned and intended motion. It all seemed random and accidental and therefore impossible to explain to Gail in a way in which one event followed another logically…

  I crumpled the blank writing paper and sagged into sleep. I dreamed I was in Saratoga Springs in the lounge of Gail’s parents’ lavish home, in my filthy flak jacket with my boots oozing mud, trying to explain myself to Gail’s father. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Mr Blake was becoming more sus
picious and inaccessible as I hesitated. I awoke, eyes burning, head drumming. I had never met Gail’s father or been inside their family home.

  I watched and listened to the Vietnamese clerks who occupied the ground floor rear of the mansion over the wall. They worked with the shutters and windows wide open. The clerks seemed sleepy and not too busy; they sometimes joked loudly, chittering like birds in an aviary, and then fell silent quickly as though somebody of importance might overhear them.

  The sound of artillery and the crackle of jets were intermittent, the whoom-boom-brrrrr of the 150mm guns like a distant storm. Periods of silence followed when I could hear the moisture dripping from the trees on the other side of the wall, and the quiet chuckling of the clerks. The complex of buildings in my sight was the rear of the Commandant’s headquarters. Once, when I was outside, I saw a senior officer walking on the second-floor terrace above the clerks’ room, in conversation with a Vietnamese officer. The senior officer saw me watching and moved away from the rail, out of the line of sight.

  I listened and waited.

  On the second evening after eating I was dozing on the bed. The door was simultaneously rapped and thrown open. A tall staff sergeant stepped into the room without invitation, a reminder that I was in custody. He gave a derisory salute, hardly raising his fingers above chin level.

  “Mr McDade? Staff Rostock, sir. Making arrangements for the court.”

  I looked up at a shaven head and a face wrinkled like a tobacco leaf. I eased up from the bed, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts and slipped into the towel robe which came with the quarters. Staff Rostock held out a piece of paper with four names on it.

  “Choose your defending officer, sir. Unless you want to nominate somebody yourself.”

  I read the names. “I don’t know anybody to appoint. I don’t really want a defending officer.”

  “Court will insist. Your interests. Want me to tell you anything about them, the names?”

  “Never heard of any of them. I’ll take the first one if I have to.”

  “Amherst? He’s OK. They’re all OK. Rest are older. Fraser the best. Lot of wins in Guam and Hawaii. Talks like an old uncle.”

  “Does it matter who does the job?”

  “Nah. Judge Advocate General’s Corps, sir. All been to college.”

  “Any more about Amherst?”

  “Very quiet man. Take Fraser, sir. He’ll keep everybody sweet.”

  “I’ll stick with Amherst.”

  Staff Rostock’s jaw jerked a fraction as though he’d been rebuked. “I’ll tell Mr Amherst, sir. He’ll get back to you,” he snapped, turning on his heel. He marched out, banging the door behind him.

  My flash of perversity had made me disregard good advice. Rostock, a twenty year man for sure, would know best. For a moment, I considered calling Rostock back and then hesitated; that would have exposed me, again, to the staff sergeant’s contempt.

  *

  The next morning at ten o’clock, Amherst arrived at the quarters. His washed-out summer drill uniform bore what appeared to be the newly acquired insignia of a major. He entered the room slightly stooped, his figure bulky around the middle, a large head and small, ineffectual-looking hands. He passed one hand over his thin, dry hair self-consciously and averted his glance, seeming to look curiously at me out of the corners of his eyes. “Geoffrey Amherst.”

  We shook hands. I pointed to the chair by the bed. Amherst took the chair. I sat on the end of the bed. In the first few moments we scarcely spoke, but instinctively shuffled while we looked each other over.

  “Rostock spares no feelings, so I know you chose me off the top of the list,” Amherst said.

  “So what?”

  “The Army is rigidly alphabetical so I usually score where there’s a list.”

  “Is that demeaning?”

  “No, but it’s common. People do it out of ignorance, or desperation, or bravado.”

  “I plead guilty to all three. And ignoring advice.”

  “Ah, Rostock advises on choice does he? Fraser, yes? Well, Fraser’s good.”

  “I’m happy,” I said indifferently. I was in shit, and a little deeper didn’t seem to matter.

  “So am I,” Amherst said cheerfully. “This top of the list thing gives me a day in court, and gets me away from the desk work, the divorces, custody fights, debt foreclosures, and all the not-very-absorbing problems of our service people. After all, I joined to get trial experience. My contribution to the war.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so indifferent. Was this guy learning on the job? “I hope you’ve had plenty of experience.”

  “Enough,” he said confidently.

  I liked it that at least Amherst wasn’t talking himself up as Clarence Darrow II. I guessed he wasn’t much older than me. He didn’t have any of the marks of combat on him. Lucky man. I did have those marks. My wiry brown hair showed traces of premature grey. My expression was gaunt now; the forehead high, the face long and lined. I used to be six feet tall and a comfortable two hundred pounds; now I looked tall and bony. My teeth and fingers were stained by tobacco like a man careless of his appearance, which I had become. I had a frequent cough, a dry bark; my eyelids were red and weighty, and my complexion had the flush of a heavy drinker. I was a heavy drinker. I hardly recognised this man when I saw him in the mirror. Gail said that I had a ‘slightly frayed’ charm, which is kindly. Attractive to women? I’d stopped having those thoughts.

  Amherst produced a whiskey bottle, Jack Daniels. The gesture gave me a tingle of pleasure. I found two glasses in the kitchen, a bottle of cold, still water from the refrigerator and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Amherst ignored the beer and took the liquor neat, swishing it around in the bottom of his glass and watching the amber tide as we began to talk tentatively, feeling each other out about the progress of the war.

  “Giap’s Tet offensive, what do you think?” Amherst asked.

  “A failure. Yeah?”

  “Yep. The US Embassy still inviolate… if a little scarred,” Amherst added.

  We exchanged calculating looks, each man trying to determine how well grounded the other was, and where he stood politically.

  “Khe Sanh held,” Amherst asserted.

  “With six thousand marines. Hell, six thousand!”

  “We’ll win,” Amherst said, wearily.

  “At a cost,” I admitted. “Roll on 1969 and the day of victory!”

  “No way the most powerful nation on earth can be defeated by… ” Amherst began heavily.

  “By who, Geoff? Who are we fighting? North Vietnam? Communism? Hundreds of thousands of Charlies? Giap? I don’t know.”

  “I guess… we’re fighting a little-known eastern general in essence,” Amherst said lightly.

  A series of head movements and grunts and mm-mm sounds brought us to a shared conclusion without enthusiasm or patriotism, a depressing assessment of what we both thought of as the inevitable victory, but pyrrhic or not, a victory.

  Amherst changed the subject abruptly. He extracted a file from his leather case and balanced it on his knee. “I haven’t studied the case papers, Bob, just skimmed them. You’re supposed to have refused a command and assaulted your CO.”

  “Sure. That’s what happened,” I said candidly, exhaling a funnel of smoke from my cigarette.

  “I wouldn’t give up yet. They’re not hanging offences.”

  “Nothing can change what happened.” I picked threads of tobacco from my lips.

  “No need to. We’ll add a few comments. It’s all a matter of how it looks on your day in court. Presentation is everything.”

  I swung my head up and focused on the lawyer’s objective, slate-coloured eyes. “I don’t want to go into why this and that happened. Nobody really knows.”

  “Right, Bob, dead right. Nobody really knows. That’s why we have to tell it our way.”

  “I don’t want to tell it my way or any other way.”

  “You ha
ve no alternative. Tell your story or listen to the prosecutor putting across his story. You’ll mess your pants listening to it. That’s why you have to speak up. You know why you did it?”

  I gave a spurt of nervous laughter and moved my head, after a pause, in an uncertain ‘no’. “It all kinda happened around me. Like I was a dummy.”

  “Are you sick?”

  I made another uncertain negative head movement. “No sicker than anybody else around here.”

  “Yeah, we’re all crackers, but you remember what happened? All of it?”

  “Most.”

  “You have blackouts, headaches?”

  “Headaches. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “You’ll have to be examined by a medical board.”

  “OK. I want to plead guilty. Get it over.”

  “What about the consequences?” Amherst had a lopsided grimace which signified that it wasn’t very funny. “Discharge in disgrace. Or reduced to the ranks. Detention. The word’ll follow you into the high street.”