The Story of Danny Dunn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Okay, just once then,’ Sam said, her heart beating furiously.

  They made love and D.P. was right – the feeling transcended Sam’s wildest nocturnal fantasies. The rush had started in her head and moved down throughout her entire body. It stayed with her while they made passionate love. When Sam finally reached orgasm, it was more marvellous than anything she’d experienced in the entire eighteen years of her life. It was also the first big thing, she knew, that she could never share with her twin. Sam now felt completely euphoric and sober.

  Afterwards, propped up in bed against the big white pillows, she lay in D.P.’s arms with her head on his chest. ‘How long have you been . . . ah, tasting?’ Sam asked.

  ‘That’s easy,’ D.P. replied. ‘Ever since the Battle of Hamburger Hill.’

  Sam grinned. ‘The Americans do that so well!’

  ‘Do what? Battles?’

  ‘No, name them: The Battle of Wounded Knee, General Custer’s Last Stand – and now the Battle at Hamburger Hill.’

  ‘Of Hamburger Hill,’ D.P. corrected.

  ‘Will you tell me about it, or would you rather not?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Sure. Now we’ve had a little horse, I guess I can,’ D.P. said.

  ‘No, then don’t,’ Sam said gently. ‘I don’t want to bring back bad memories.’

  ‘No, Mademoiselle Sam, I’d like to . . . yer know, get it off my chest. I haven’t talked about it before.’

  Sam noted that D.P. seemed almost sober and wasn’t slurring his words.

  ‘When did it happen? Recently?’

  ‘No. I’d only just arrived in Vietnam – a greenhorn through and through. It was my first experience of the enemy – tenth to twentieth of May this year. You’re supposed to be excited about your first battle, about leading a platoon – the usual bullshit, no guts no glory – but instead I was pooping my fatigues. The gooks were dug in on an outcrop 937 metres high; we called it Hill 937 before it got its other name.’

  ‘Why Hamburger, though?’ Sam asked.

  ‘That comes later, honey. We got our ass whupped bad. Steep slopes covered in bamboo thickets and dense jungle, everything you don’t want to find yourself fighting in. The hill, on the Laotian border, rose out of the A Shau Valley, and our job was to clear the valley. The motherfuckers – er, excuse my language, the NVA – were sitting upstairs picking us off, easy as you like. The valley was booby-trapped with landmines, bamboo pits, pillboxes that cost us dear to take out, seemingly manned by gooks positively happy to die. We were green, me and mah platoon; we were unfamiliar with the ways and means and the jungle. I had some experienced men, but mostly grunts – southern boys like me, jes outa high school. They were drafted, then after basic training, sent straight to Nam. Their mamas were still washing their socks, ironing their shirts, kissing them goodnight before bed . . . We didn’t know our ass from our elbow, and with the other infantry we were tasked with destroying, that is, storming uphill through dense jungle and destroying three NVA battalions dug in real good. The enemy were good, seasoned fighters and they held the high ground. They also had a valley full of nasty surprises waiting for us below. Mademoiselle Sam,

  I was truly outta mah depth, I admit it, shaking like a leaf, expecting to die any moment. I was no brave officer, that’s for sure. Mah sergeant, James P. Corn – they called him Jimmy Popcorn – a Negro from New Orleans, he took me aside and said, “Lootenant, yoh ain’t gonna make it lessen I fix yoh some,” and there in the valley, beside a stand of high bamboo creaking and groaning, he cooked me up some horse and injected me a taste. “Not too much,” he said. “Jes a taste, mah good man, den you gonna fly up dat fuckin’ hill, man!”’

  ‘And it got you through the battle?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Honey, in Nam there ain’t no through; there ain’t no victory. We called it Hamburger Hill because they, the NVA, made mincemeat outta us – prime hamburger mince. Sure, we took the hill – seventy-two US dead and 372 wounded, over 600 NVA dead – that’s way beyond acceptable, considering they had rifles, a few rockets and machine guns, and we’d thrown the whole of World War Two at them and then some.’

  ‘NVA? You keep using the term.’

  ‘North Vietnamese Army; they’re gooks, but they’re regular soldiers. Not civilians by day and Vietcong at night – men in uniform,’ D.P. explained. ‘Yeah, we kinda won the Battle of Hamburger Hill, but I had three men left in my platoon, twelve dead, fifteen wounded.’

  ‘Jimmy Popcorn?’

  ‘Dead. When we got back, the colonel called me in to HQ. “Lootenant Montgomery, why are you not dead, son?” he asked. “You’re a fuckin’ disgrace – the worst platoon fatalities on Hill 937. Next time you come back dead and bring me more live men, and that’s an order, you son of a bitch!” He picked up mah papers. “I see you were at the Olympics,” he said.

  ‘“Yessir!” I replied.

  ‘“Pentathlon?”

  ‘“Yessir,” I said again.

  ‘“Collapsed in the 3000-metres?”

  ‘“Stomach cramps . . . severe diarrhoea, sir!”

  ‘“Fucking coward, you mean. No guts. You let down America, son! You’re doing it again! A fucking disgrace! A second lootenant is supposed to die! You are expendable, not your sergeant! Get the hell outta my sight, son!”’

  ‘D.P., how awful! You poor, poor darling,’ Sam said, kissing him.

  ‘That ain’t all, Mademoiselle Sam. Two weeks later we just up and abandoned Hamburger Hill. Gave it and the A Shau Valley right back to the gooks. “There you go, we’ve decided we don’t want it after all; we’ve eaten all the hamburger we need.”’

  ‘But why?’ Sam cried.

  D.P. shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me, honey. There was no official explanation. We were just left to wonder why all our buddies had to die.’ He turned and looked directly at Sam. ‘There, that’s another damn good reason for tasting horse.’

  Sam got home just as dawn was breaking over the harbour. She’d been drunk, sobered up, tasted once again and then tasted D.P. again. Then, she’d been secretly shocked out of her socks when he’d said, after the second teaspoon boil-up, ‘Mademoiselle Sam, I wanna lick you real bad.’ But she was high as a kite and this wasn’t a night to be prudish. Besides, her inhibitions had long since deserted her. Later, she’d been delighted by the orgasm that followed, and more so when D.P. said, ‘Ah, I’ve dreamed about having you, going down on you, babe. I jes knew you’d taste real good, the finest pussy, honey.’

  Sam didn’t know why, but D.P. saying that put her in mind of Gabby’s hit song, ‘Wild Bush Honey’, now number five on the hit parade. She had added two more ‘actuals’ to what had hitherto been purely bedtime fantasies, but she couldn’t remember being quite so bone weary since collapsing after the Olympic 100-metres final. Following the second heroin rush she seemed to be floating, a balloon slowly coming down to earth, not sure if she was going to hit something sharp and pop when she landed, but by the time she arrived home she was experiencing a raw, edgy, unfamiliar feeling she didn’t like.

  Danny was waiting for her. Sam knew that look on his face. He’d never beaten her, but she knew the fury about to explode within him would be far worse. Sam was spent, her usual inner resources gone. The years of learning to deal with his anger, cop it sweet, allow it to do the minimum damage, had dwindled to nothing. She waited, trembling, feeling close to collapse, as though she wanted him to beat her so she could crawl into a corner and die. ‘Get your swimmers on and meet me at the skiff in five minutes,’ Danny snapped. ‘Go!’

  Sam took the centre oars. She was cold in the spring dawn but soon warmed up as they rowed for an hour and a half until they reached South Head, at the entrance to Sydney Harbour. Apart from a few grunts, Danny hadn’t spoken a word. Now he simply pointed to the water. ‘Jump in. Swim home,’ he commanded. It was 6.30 a.m.

  Sam almost gave up on several occasions, too
exhausted to continue. ‘Swim, you little whore!’ Danny demanded each time. At one stage when she tried to regain the side of the boat, he pushed her away with the end of an oar. Somehow Sam managed to get home. She tried to stand on the shelving pebbled beach next to the boathouse, but collapsed face down in the shallow water. Danny jumped from the skiff and grabbed her arm, pulling her roughly onto the beach, and left her there. Gabby came running from the house towards her unconscious twin, yelling. Danny stopped dragging the skiff up the ramp and pointed back at the house. ‘Git!’ he barked, with a flick of his head. ‘Leave the trollop alone!’

  Moments later, as Gabby hesitated, her hands to her face in shock and confusion, Helen raced across the front lawn, her face contorted with rage. She fell to her knees on the beach beside Sam. ‘You bastard!’ she screamed at Danny. ‘You sick fucking bastard!’ she howled, pulling Sam’s head onto her lap.

  Sam wasn’t allowed to see D.P. again. She’d written him a letter explaining that she wasn’t permitted to leave home, not even to attend university. Gabby had delivered it to the Chevron-Hilton. Sam was committed into Brenda’s care, accompanying her as she visited clubs and checked the Willy duB pokies, Danny insisting that she was not to be left alone for a moment. During the course of the week, Brenda quietly asked Sam when her boyfriend was returning to Vietnam. Then, on the last day of his R&R, she indicated the telephone. ‘I’ll be in the garden for half an hour, darling,’ she said.

  Sam managed to get through to D.P. just before he was due to take the MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) flight back to his base in Vietnam, what he called ‘in country’, because he was not permitted to reveal the landing field. They talked until the last minute. His final words to her were, ‘Mademoiselle Sam, I love you. I’m coming to fetch you when I get back home, you hear, honey? Only two months to go, then my tour of Nam is over. Will you wait for me, lovely Sam?’

  Sobbing, Sam agreed.

  Six weeks later, when her last two letters had received no reply, she received a notification from the American Embassy in Canberra saying that Second Lieutenant Gregory Beauregard Montgomery of the Third Louisiana Light Infantry Unit had been killed in action in Vietnam. He had died in an enemy ambush of small-arms fire while on patrol in Thua Thien Province. He had left a request that she was to be notified in the event of his death.

  Gabby, while still a serious student of the violin, was also still a rising folk star. Her hit song, known as ‘Wild Bush Honey’ rather than by its full title, had risen to the top of the local charts, and her pretty face, topped by a battered Stetson with a yellow rose in the hatband, was familiar to a generation, even though folk had a smaller following than rock. Johnny O’Keefe towered above the rest of the rock singers, and Little Pattie, beloved of the Australian forces in Vietnam, was a much bigger star, but Gabby had a growing following that she made no effort to cultivate. She thought of herself as a serious musician and a reluctant folk star, and refused the approaches of the big agents, leaving the contracts and recording deals to Half Dunn and Helen. It wasn’t such a silly idea either – Half Dunn had long ago proved that he was an excellent negotiator, perhaps from all those years spent sitting at the main bar of the Hero, and since Brenda’s retirement and during Helen’s reign, he had really come into his own. Together they were a formidable combination: the old man who could talk up a deal better than almost anyone, and Helen, his brilliant, formidable and analytical partner, who could close a deal to their advantage faster than you could say ‘Snap!’, and spot a shonky one at a hundred yards.

  Sam, on the other hand, had hit the wall. She’d scraped through her first year at Sydney University, but the old ebullient Sam was gone. Danny put it down to the inevitable disappointment of the Olympics, because, although she had a drawer full of medals from state and national titles, no Olympic gold snuggled among the gold-plated local ones.

  Sam’s personality allowed no compromise. From infancy she’d seen herself as a winner; Danny had told her she was a winner, and she’d suffered his demonic temper, obsessive personality and dictatorial manner because she believed him. He was her sun and her moon; he couldn’t possibly be wrong and she must never let him down. If he screamed at her, his tongue cutting into her like a barber’s razor, then it was her fault. It meant she wasn’t trying hard enough. Sam had never swum for herself. Her mantra, Three gold for Sammy, was just another way of saying, ‘Three gold for Danny’. Hester Landsman had once said to Helen in Sam’s hearing, ‘Darling, there is for us Jews a saying: “Pray that you may never have to endure all that you can learn to bear”.’ Sam had learned to endure what she had to bear, and now that she had nothing to show for the years of sacrifice, she was beginning to unravel. She had few friends save those she had made through swimming – casual relationships based on their mutual interests. Where Gabby had amassed friends at the Con, Sam had no such emotional reservoir. Her school life at Balmain High had been about lessons; she’d never had the time for parties and the like.

  She began to realise that her notoriety as a young swimmer, one Balmain folk saw as possibly their next Dawn Fraser, had replaced the need for friends to help her define herself and create her own identity. She was public property, the next Balmain Girl, national heroine, stepping into the large shoes once occupied by her father and left empty since the war. When she’d disappointed them, they wanted nothing further to do with her, and the older people muttered about her being the second Dunn to let them down. Even her modelling for Brokendown created less of an impression on fashion-conscious kids, who now simply remarked on the astonishing resemblance to her twin. When she appeared wearing her Stetson, people would ask, ‘Hey, what happened to the yellow rose?’

  Then, after silently trying to become reconciled to her new life as a law student and a nobody, D.P. had arrived back in her life – only for one night, but one that had changed everything. He had shown her how to lose herself, how to bear the pain. Then, as if that particular night was meant to be her metamorphosis, came that killing swim Danny had forced on her.

  Helen had put her to bed and called the doctor, who’d given her a sedative. Danny had gone to work and when he returned that evening, Helen met him at the door, grim-faced. He’d attempted to kiss her, but she’d pulled away. ‘Not this time. No way, Danny. We need to talk.’ She’d turned and walked upstairs onto the verandah where she pointed to a wicker chair. ‘Sit down, please,’ she commanded coldly.

  ‘Okay, so I was angry,’ Danny said, sitting. ‘The little whore was out all night.’

  ‘The little whore! The little whore! Are you talking about my daughter?’ Helen shouted.

  ‘What else do you think they were doing? They were fucking!’ Danny said, feeling his temper rising.

  ‘And you know that?’

  ‘What else? She spent the night in D.P.’s hotel room.’

  ‘You hypocrite!’ Even as she spoke, Helen knew there was no purpose in continuing. Besides, it wasn’t why she wanted to confront him. ‘What you did this morning was unforgiveable, it was pure insanity. You could have killed her!’

  ‘She had to be taught a lesson. Her curfew was 1 a.m.! She disobeyed me. I simply won’t have it!’

  ‘Listen to me carefully, Danny. Since they were seven years old you’ve treated the twins as if they are your personal property.’

  ‘Well, they are. Yours and mine.’

  Helen shook her head vehemently. ‘They are our children, not our slaves. Can’t you see they’re terrified of you? I managed to rescue Gabrielle, but you’ve destroyed Samantha. When she didn’t achieve what you wanted, her life, as she saw it, was effectively over. She’s been trying to pick up the pieces this year, trying to make some sense out of her life – out of the destruction your obsession has brought down on her head.’

  ‘She’s been okay, until D.P. called her – until last night,’ Danny said.

  ‘And you haven’t noticed?’

 
‘Noticed what?’

  ‘That she is suffering from a loss of identity. You, of all people!’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Danny Dunn – the beautiful young man, sporting hero, worshipped by the locals, certain to play rugby league for his country – goes off to war, returns broken, his former career expectations shattered, his mind not the same, filled with demons. It may not seem quite as dramatic, but a lot of that stuff is happening to Samantha. And last night, you, my friend, were Colonel Mori.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s not fair, Helen!’ Danny shouted.

  ‘Not fair! What you did last night can never be forgiven. I, for one, won’t ever forgive you. You are damaged, but I always knew that, accepted that. God knows, it’s not been easy standing by watching the demons within you destroying my child. When she didn’t win gold at the Olympics, you know what? I was secretly glad. I thought that at last she’d be free of your influence. That she was still young enough to recover. I’ve watched her trying to cope, trying to heal. But last night was the end for me. It was sheer bastardry! You wanted your little slave back! It was – it is – sick! I want you to see Craig Woon. You’ve got to get help. If you don’t you’ll lose us all. We don’t need you when you’re like this!’ Helen leaned forward until her face was inches from Danny’s. ‘Do you understand, Danny? Do you understand what I am saying? We don’t need you!’

  Danny rose from his chair and went downstairs, still in his business suit and Glossy Denmeade boots. He brought the skiff out of the boatshed and, jumping in, started to row into the darkened harbour.

  In the early hours of the morning, Helen heard him coming up the stairs – she’d been awake all night – and switched on the bedside light. Danny entered the bedroom looking thoroughly dishevelled: he’d lost his eye patch, discarded his jacket and tie, and had a cut along the side of his face and a patch of blood on his white shirt.