Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Shit, yer was right about this fuckin’ pit,’ Lazy chuckled, reaching for his water bottle.

  The Kiwi artillery were never given the accolades due to them in the Korean War. Putting it mildly, they were remarkable and saved a great many Australian lives. I know we were proud to think of them as our brothers. Like close family, we knew they’d always be there if they possibly could. However, it was not just the big guns saving the day. Bob Roland kept the section together, coordinating our defences even though wounded. Blood was streaming down the side of his face and he kept wiping it out of his eyes using his sleeve. Ken Carter was still firing, the barrel of his Bren red hot. He too was wounded, the back of his khaki shirt dark from wet blood. Chunky Dunbar and his off-sider, Harry Robertson, were ignoring the bee-swarm of bullets to get to the wounded. Ivan the Terrible, reluctant as I am to admit, was everywhere at once, dragging a box of ammunition and resupplying anyone running short. It seemed such a pity a great team like this was almost certainly going to die.

  The Chinese attacks seemed never-ending. We’d repulse one and no sooner had we evacuated our casualties and refilled our magazines than they’d be back again. Maybe they couldn’t quite get their heads around the fact that a handful of blokes with only small arms and grenades with some artillery support could withstand their most determined attacks and repulse limitless manpower. After all, they’d just sent a whole South Korean division fleeing before them in terror.

  We somehow held them off for six terrifying, exhausting hours, then there was a lull. It seemed unlikely that they’d run out of men and I could only conclude that they’d temporarily withdrawn and were in the act of devising new tactics. The enemy was now familiar with our battleground, and with the casualties we’d suffered we wondered how much longer we could hold out. The word was that the boss was worried too, especially about how we might fare in a night attack, and he pulled us back closer to the rest of the company on Hill 504. We started to dig in and this time I was thankful that our platoon wasn’t the first in line to meet the enemy.

  Ten Platoon was situated adjacent to the summit and we were not far below them, and as we dug our weapon pits two American Corsair ground-attack aircraft appeared in the distance.

  ‘You bloody beauty! It’s the Yanks!’ Lazy called out.

  We all stopped digging to look. Their timing was perfect – they’d catch the Chinese below and out in the open and give them heaps, knock the living daylights out of them. I could see several blokes up ahead of me looking up and waving encouragement. Then the spotter plane dived and fired a yellow smoke marker spigot into the heart of 10 Platoon’s position.

  What happened next was too bizarre for words. One of the Corsair fighters came in low and fast and released a napalm canister from under its wing. It smashed into the ground near the yellow smoke marker and broke open to release the flaming jellied petrol over a good part of the 10 Platoon position. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The iridescent pink-and-yellow marker panels that identified us, situated as they were at the very summit, must have been easy to see from the air. The spotter plane would have needed to be blind not to identify them as ours. Later, the most charitable excuse was that the Yanks concluded the Chinese had captured us and left the identification up to deceive attacking aircraft. But that’s not how we saw it then – or ever after, for that matter.

  The second Corsair made its run just as one of our blokes grabbed the identification panel and waved it at the spotter plane. At the last second it pulled out and roared away. I was running as hard as I could to get to 10 Platoon. The sight that met me when I arrived still sometimes wakes me in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Lazy headed for one bloke who was burning and I went towards another one in flames. Wherever I looked there were horribly burned diggers scattered around with their mates trying to kill the flames that simply wouldn’t go out. Napalm sticks, then penetrates and burns from the inside of the flesh outwards. The victims were screaming in pain and terror while fires raged through the scrub, setting off boxes of ammunition. Near me was the redoubtable Chunky Dunbar, our stretcher bearer, who came running as well. We were both heading for a bloke who was enveloped in flames, but as Chunky got close, a grenade lined up on the edge of the weapon pit the burning bloke was in went off in the heat and blew Chunky down the hill. I dropped, expecting another grenade to pop. Bluey Walsh of 10 Platoon crossed my path and dropped in a flaming heap next to me. I started to empty my water bottle onto his burns. Suddenly he raised his head and in a surprised voice said, ‘Oh shit!’ and died. I ran over to the original bloke sitting in his weapon pit. His body was as black as tar and the flesh hung from his face and arms. Then I saw Chunky approaching, limping badly, his trouser leg torn to the knee, and there was a lot of blood and gore. ‘Better get back, Jacko, the chinks are coming again,’ he said calmly. ‘Leave this one to me.’ The poor bastard dying in front of me recognised Chunky and saw the bloody mess his leg was in and amazingly said, ‘Jesus, Chunky, you’re having a rough day, ain’t ya.’

  The Chinese attack was finally repulsed by 11 Platoon. But, disconcertingly, this time the chinks approached from our unprotected right flank. This meant it wouldn’t be too long before they worked their way to our rear and cut us off. I continued helping with the wounded even during the attack as our platoon wasn’t involved. Now on my way back to my weapon pit I passed Ian Ferrier, as usual with his ear glued to the radio. I tapped him on the shoulder and he paused and removed the headphone and greeted me.

  ‘Why are we still here, Ian? The bloody chinks are close to surrounding us!’ I shouted.

  ‘Never fear, Jacko, a Yank regiment is . . .’ he corrected himself, ‘was supposed to arrive this arvo.’

  I didn’t like the two words ‘was’ and ‘supposed’. ‘And?’ I asked trenchantly.

  ‘And they’re not.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s the bad news.’

  ‘And the good?’

  He smiled. ‘Message just came through, the battalion has permission to withdraw.’

  ‘Mate, we’ve waited too long!’ I protested. I was playing the little general again, although it wasn’t a difficult conclusion. We’d outstayed our welcome on the mountain and even the chinks knew it was only a matter of time before we were completely encircled.

  ‘I know – let’s just hope, eh?’ Ian, ever the optimist, replied. He was the perfect radio operator, hearing all the good and the bad news and taking both in his stride. His job was both to gather information and to convey it, and he did so calmly without getting emotionally involved.

  But, because he was an inveterate knob twiddler, he always seemed to know more than anyone else. The boss was lucky to have him, because he had the benefit of Ian’s ability to gather scraps of seemingly irrelevant information from various sources and then to draw them together into a proper conclusion.

  At the time I was having this conversation with Ian I didn’t know that when the napalm struck the fire had swept through company headquarters, and Ian had dived through the flames in the nick of time to save the company radio set. It didn’t bear thinking what might have happened if we hadn’t been able to maintain radio contact.

  Later, as we withdrew while under heavy attack, Ian played a key part in communicating fire orders to the Kiwis during the final phase of the thinning-out process. Without this artillery support, we almost certainly would have been overwhelmed by the Chinese. Ian remained behind to the last and I’m delighted to say he was mentioned in despatches for the Battle of Kapyong.

  The Chinese, while retired from a direct onslaught, were still harassing us with mortars and machine guns, so Lieutenant Hamill couldn’t gather us around for one of his famous stick-and-sand talks. Instead he briefed the section commanders and they hopped into the various weapon pits and gave us the salient points. What it boiled down to was simple enough – there weren’t too many options, in fact, none. The Chinese were in charge of the main road to the South so the only possible way for the whole battalion to withdraw was thr
ough our position on Hill 504. From there, it was down a two-and-a-half mile long wooded spur line descending gradually to finally come to a ford across the Kapyong River not far from where the Middlesex Battalion was dug in waiting for us to arrive.

  At four p.m. a great barrage of high explosives and smoke was laid down to cover the withdrawal of the companies from the frontline. From our position higher up we could see them approaching us, snaking along with a cloud of thick smoke behind them. Our biggest concern was that the Chinese would cotton on to the fact that we were getting out and would move to intercept them. There was a palpable sense of relief as each company made it safely up to our position on the hill and then to the rear down the spur line to the ford. This left D Company, that is, us, the last to withdraw. I confess I was really packing it – the chinks had to wake up to what was happening.

  As the last company passed through our position the Chinese twigged. Determined not to be robbed of a victory, they came at us with even greater ferocity than we’d hitherto witnessed. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan’s warning of celestial revenge on the British Empire was about to manifest itself and, what’s more, her star pupil, Jack McKenzie, was going to cop the lot. This time the chinks wouldn’t be thwarted. Lazy and I were flat out trying to keep our end up when I heard Ian Ferrier’s voice behind me. Christ, what’s he doing here? I thought. We were at the very front of the action – company headquarters was supposed to be well back from us.

  Then I heard the boss’s voice. ‘Drop 100, two rounds gunfire, over!’ he shouted into the radio handset.

  Moments later the Kiwi shells came over our heads with their peculiar paper-tearing sound and landed fifty yards to our front, the shells exploding right in amongst the advancing chinks. Dust and smoke billowed upwards and body parts flew everywhere. A foot, sliced through above the ankle with its canvas boot still attached, landed no more than five yards from where we were, tumbled a few feet backwards and came to rest against a small outcrop of rock directly in front of me.

  ‘Repeat, over,’ the boss barked down the receiver.

  Despite the carnage in front of us the Chinese kept coming, while the artillery continued mowing them down with a little help from our rifles and machine guns. I confess I have never seen men as brave. Or, in our terms, as bloody foolhardy. They seemed to have no regard for their own lives and it was obvious they expected to die. Muslims believe that when they die in battle they will be immediately transported to paradise, and we’ve got some sort of idea about going to heaven. For these blokes there was no special redemption or reward for the warrior after death. One couldn’t help wondering how they could meet it so calmly, becoming utterly heedless of risks, palpably discounting their own lives and, as a result, becoming a ferocious and almost unstoppable force.

  At last a lull occurred in the fighting and we received the immediate order to withdraw and head down the spur line. The Chinese were soon enough at us again and the only way I can find to describe the way the battalion withdrew, D Company in particular, is to say that this was no bug out. Sure we were back-pedalling fit to bust, but with our fists flailing. It was ten p.m. when we crossed the river and joined the waiting Middlesex troops. I was too tired to feel anything, much less elation. We’d been fighting for fifteen hours, I’d had little or no sleep the night before and I was completely buggered.

  Thank God the Chinese hadn’t followed us across the ford. Instead, they’d turned on the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, on the opposite side of the valley. Frustrated at allowing us to escape, they attacked them as fiercely as at any time against us. The Princess Patricias fought all night until dawn in a heroic encounter where they lost many of their men but managed to hold on until the enemy finally ran out of steam and melted into the early-morning landscape.

  The following day the brigadier came around to congratulate us. You don’t see too many blokes with red bands around their caps turning up at the company level. He told us our thin, isolated line had almost certainly prevented the taking of Seoul by the Chinese and therefore the capture of thousands of United Nations support troops stationed there. But it wasn’t without a price, the ultimate one for many of our mates – 3RAR had lost thirty-two killed and fifty-nine wounded with three of our number missing in action.

  I guess we’d done our bit and, for the next few months anyway, we were covered in glory. In June it was announced that 3RAR had been awarded the US Presidential Citation for our stand at Kapyong. No higher foreign compliment exists for an Allied unit. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry got one as well, as did the American Company A, 72nd Heavy Tank Battalion.

  We were all pretty stoked at the announcement, but there was one big omission. If ever a unit deserved this same honour it was the Kiwi artillery, and they’d missed out. The citation concerning 3RAR reads in part: ‘. . . displayed such gallantry, determination and esprit de corps as to set them apart and above the other units participating in the campaign’. Furthermore, our section didn’t go unrecognised. Bob Roland was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, Chunky Dunbar got the Military Medal and a bloke named Snowy Tyler, who had fought with a bullet in his shoulder, also got one. Finally, Harry Robertson, who was killed while evacuating the wounded, was mentioned, posthumously, in dispatches.

  I guess we’d been vindicated. The rag-tag K Force volunteers, with their mostly piss-poor excuses for joining up when the real reason was that they’d failed at civilian life after World War II, had redeemed themselves. We were soldiers of whom it could be said were ‘Set apart

  and above other units’, which was something a man could take pride in and hold onto.

  Several months went by, through a hot dusty summer and into the autumn with the air a little sharper on the nostrils each morning. The war was changing – now we stayed in one place for longer stretches and built more substantial defences as we learnt how to effectively fight the Chinese. But mostly we patrolled in dangerous territory, which kept our wits about us.

  In October we slogged our way into the Maryang San complex of mountains where D Company, that’s us, fought fiercely in a protracted battle with the Chinese to take a series of fortified knolls leading to the heavily defended Hill 317. This time we got a taste of what it was like to fight against a well-dug-in and determined enemy, and it wasn’t a very nice experience even though the battalion finally managed to get them off the hill. After this it was more foot-slogging, more patrolling, more boring bloody war.

  I had only three weeks to go before returning to Australia, to Queen Island. This time, though, I would be returning with a few more ribbons on my chest, including the citation from the American president. I was no longer a virgin soldier and had fired many – too many – shots I had seen hit my enemy. So much so that killing men had caused in me a deepening sadness that I hoped would go away in time. If the Chinese didn’t seem to care if they lived or died then I found I was beginning to care on their behalf. It was time to go home – this sort of warfare was at too close quarters. I kept seeing the foot with the dirty canvas boot attached to it landing near me, tumbling end over end and then settling, wedged between two small sharp rocks, the bloody stump still oozing blood. Man is a notoriously superficial animal and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the best thing of all was that I would escape another Korean winter. I would be returning to late spring on the island, always a wonderful time to be home.

  In the meantime my platoon was setting out on yet another of our bloody endless patrols. We were to see if there were any enemy on a hill called 258 on the map, and on the way check out a deserted Korean village. More boot leather used, more muscle fatigue at the end of another thoroughly nerve-racking day. Ian Ferrier, listening to the weather report, called out to me that some early snow was expected and I decided, despite its additional weight, to take one of my American parkas along. It was to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Milk Chocolate Initiative

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nbsp; A bright, near-full moon, with a ring of haze surrounding it, gave the village and the surrounding landscape the look of a monochrome negative held up to the light. We could see patches of early snow clinging precariously to the thatch of the wattle-and-daub huts. While the village appeared to be deserted, we approached slowly. Even in the winter, when natural sounds close down, you can usually hear the odd squawk of a chicken or the peremptory grunt of a sow. But there was nothing here – the villagers had long since joined the crowds of refugees heading south. There is a sense of melancholy about an abandoned village in an old and crowded country. This simple place must have existed for a hundred harvest seasons and then, for reasons its small community didn’t understand and in the name of causes meaningless to them, the village had become the detritus of war.

  We moved through the perimeter of the village, the bright moonlight casting strong shadows ahead of us. Despite the quietness, I began to feel jittery. They say the moon affects the psyche and that people in the loony bin go right off their scones during full moon. There must be something to this – Gloria would cluck her tongue as she watched Alf trot off to the pub on a big-moon Saturday night, and she’d say, ‘Lookit the moon. Bad night comin’ up.’ She was seldom wrong. On the occasions Saturday coincided with a full moon, or a day or two on either side of it, the pub would be strangely aggro and Alf would come home even more battered than usual.