Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  I spent the day in and out of consciousness and that night we were on the move again, but this time without my Chinese escorts, who were leaving to go back, I imagined, to their battalion. They handed us over to a squad of North Korean guards. To my surprise I felt real regret at the departure of my Chinese captors. Apart from the chocolate incident, and their response to my rather stupid decision to reach for my rifle, they’d treated me exactly the same as their own wounded and shared their rations equally. It would have been much easier for them to put a bullet through my brain or simply leave me to die, but they’d carried me all night over very hilly and difficult terrain and never once complained. As they were leaving, each of them filed past me and touched me lightly on the shoulder. What else can I say, they were good blokes.

  As for the North Korean soldiers they’d left in charge, I was about to learn a lesson in contrasts. Only minutes after the Chinese had left, one of the Koreans approached me and yanked at the boot on my broken leg, twisting it from side to side until it was finally released from my foot. The pain this caused was indescribable but, surprisingly, I didn’t pass out. My screaming seemed to amuse them all and the soldier then pulled the boot from my good leg. Then, to the general hilarity of the others, he removed his own and forced them onto my feet. Thank God I was a little bloke and they fitted – without boots I would have had little chance of avoiding frostbite. He then pulled on my boots and commenced to stomp around the cave, swinging his arms in an exaggerated march and laughing at their weight.

  A North Korean officer then approached me. ‘Soldier take boots.’ He pointed at the soldier’s canvas boots now on my feet. ‘You soldier boot.’

  I couldn’t believe my luck. ‘You speak English?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘Please can you find a stick to splint my leg?’ I asked very slowly, demonstrating the action of tying a splint to my broken leg.

  He grinned, shaking his head. ‘Not allow,’ he said. ‘We go now.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘To be educated . . . to learn truth.’ He turned and walked away and said something to one of the soldiers, who immediately came over and removed the canvas boots and, at the same time, my socks. I knew I was history – without my boots my chances of survival were zilch.

  As the Koreans mustered to depart I realised that this large cave was a collection point and that we’d been joined by other prisoners, mostly South Koreans but among them Dave McCombe. Dave was also K Force, and while not in my company we’d heard of his capture several days ago. I’d also met him once in the pub at Puckapunyal.

  He walked up to me. ‘G’day! Jacko, isn’t it? Jacko McKenzie?’

  I was surprised that he remembered me – we couldn’t have shared more than a couple of beers together and that was more than a year ago. ‘Jesus, Dave, it’s good to see you,’ I answered. Later he’d tell me he’d been equally surprised that I’d remembered his name.

  He grinned down at me. ‘Mate, we’ll be seeing a fair bit of each other – I’m on one end of your stretcher.’

  We travelled for hours that night, all of it over mountain tracks, with Dave at the top end of my stretcher and two nogs at the other. While the two guards at my feet were changed on a regular basis, Dave was made to remain on the other end. He was a big raw-boned man not unlike Rick Stackman, maybe six foot and then a bit, but the task must have taxed him mightily, though he didn’t falter, even once. ‘Dave, I’m sorry,’ I said on several occasions during the night.

  ‘No worries, mate,’ he’d always reply, though the first time he added with a bit of a laugh, ‘Yiz only a little bloke, thank gawd.’

  Then an hour or so before dawn, with my bare feet exposed to below-zero night air, we stopped to rest. For the past couple of hours I’d felt the familiar signs of impending frostbite. Dave was leaning over me. ‘How ya goin’, Jacko?’ he asked as he did every rest.

  ‘Mate, it’s me feet. They’re stinging and aching a bit.’

  I didn’t have to say any more, Dave knew what I was saying and he knelt down beside me and unbuttoned his battledress jacket. Then, ever so gently, he lifted my broken leg and, along with the good one, tucked them under his armpits, pulling the jacket around them for additional warmth. After ten minutes or so the guards approached, indicating that it was time to move on.

  ‘How they feeling?’ Dave asked me. I hesitated. ‘Not good, eh?’ he suggested. I nodded. ‘Then we stay put,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Better get going,’ I said. ‘The bastards are likely to get cranky.’

  Dave laughed. ‘Fuck ’em, Jacko, they won’t harm me – it would mean two o’ them would have to take my end.’

  The guards continued shouting, becoming very agitated, but they never laid a finger on him. Finally the circulation returned to my feet and we set off again. Without Dave McCombe I could have lost both my feet to frostbite.

  After another difficult night made bearable for me by Dave’s quiet and reassuring voice, we arrived at a transit camp of several well-constructed huts. Here I was carried into a room and put into a cage roughly ten feet square, its roof no more than three feet above the ground. Dave was pushed in after me. ‘Bit snug, eh?’ was all he said, sitting with his knees up near his chin.

  The cage had been designed so that its occupants would be unable to stand or walk around, which didn’t concern me, as I could do neither. Three South Korean prisoners already occupied the premises and they didn’t look too pleased to see us. The remnants of their uniforms hung in tatters from their emaciated bodies and it appeared they’d been there for some time. Now, with five people occupying the cage, Dave taking up almost the space required for two, and with me forced to lie down, movement of any kind was restricted. The nog next to me would scratch frantically at his hair and a shower of lice would fall onto my body so that I was soon to share his condition and learn to live with lice as with everything else. Curiously, while the louse-ridden nog had bitten most of his nails to the quick, he had allowed the nails on the two longest fingers of his right hand to grow to at least an inch and a half, each curved into a bow shape, and in the process creating the perfect vermin-scratching instrument.

  Pretty soon we were approached by two English-speaking North Koreans who began asking me questions, ignoring Dave, perhaps thinking that in my wounded state I’d offer less resistance.

  ‘My leg is broken. Please, I need a splint,’ I pleaded.

  ‘First you answer question, then we fix,’ came the reply.

  In the fifteen minutes or so that followed came a barrage of questions, some relevant, some not. For instance they wanted information about our patrol objective, its strength and duration, while other questions appeared to be totally pointless. While I didn’t know it at the time, it was the silly questions that mattered to them. They would return later and repeat these irrelevant questions and if they found inconsistencies they’d know my answers to the relevant ones were not to be trusted. It was a curious way of going about an interrogation – rather than first seeking to establish the truth they began by probing for lies.

  But this was early times and in answer to each question I would simply repeat the prisoner’s mantra: my number, rank and name. This displeased them mightily. ‘No medical treatments!’ they’d shout. ‘You answer questions, you have!’

  Then the process would begin all over again. ‘What your unit?’ ‘Why your patrol go to village?’ ‘Where else you go patrol?’ ‘Where you go holiday?’ ‘Where you live before come to Korea?’ ‘What your mother maidens name?’ ‘How old you are?’ ‘Where you go school?’ ‘Your wife name before marry?’

  ‘I can only give you my number, rank and name,’ I’d insist. They’d finally leave, only to return the following day to repeat the procedure. We’d nicknamed them Bib and Bub because they had the habit of each asking the same questions but taking it in turns to be first. ‘Where you go school?’ Bib would ask, whereupon in a much more strident tone Bub would say, ‘WHERE YOU GO SCHOOL?’ Then they’d reverse
the order and the tonal roles for the next question.

  Each morning a small bucket of rice swill, not sufficient to give any of us even half a decent feed, was placed in the cage. The ragged South Koreans, yabbering like monkeys, would grab at the bucket, the three of them too much for even Dave to handle. He’d struggle to shoulder them out of the way in order to get just a handful of rice for himself and then another to feed me.

  ‘Open yer mouth wide, Jacko,’ he’d shout above the yabbering. Then he’d lunge at the nogs, knocking one out of the way sufficiently to get his hand into the dish and scoop up a handful of rice swill, swing it up and slap it directly into my open mouth, holding his hand across my mouth so that I got as much as possible. Then he’d do the same for himself. I can’t remember the contents of the dish ever lasting long enough for a second go.

  Soon enough interrogation by the North Koreans was directed at Dave as well as me, and the nogs found another way to get to me: sleep deprivation. I was in a fair bit of pain, not only from my leg but also because of my mouth, where my broken teeth were giving me hell, but sheer exhaustion would finally take over and put me to sleep. The bastards soon observed this and a guard would shout out as soon as he noticed me nodding off and Bib and Bub would come running, pad and pen in hand, and prod me through the bars with a length of bamboo, whereupon they’d commence questioning me again.

  ‘You answer question we give morphine.’ This was the carrot always dangled in front of me, pronounced ‘morfin’.

  In desperation I decided to answer all their questions with lies. Unbeknownst to me this too was pretty routine and meant I’d reached the second stage of interrogation. They appeared quite elated at my lies and when they came forward with a little morphine I was convinced I’d tricked them and felt pretty pleased with myself. As their captive I had won very few rounds, and Dave’s quiet congratulation, ‘Giddonya, Jacko’, when the first syringe of morphine arrived, boosted my ego no end.

  Of course, several days later they’d ask the same questions and check them against the meticulous notes they’d made of my previous answers. When they didn’t match they were infuriated, even though they were probably expecting this to occur. They’d jump up and down with their dark eyes bulging and in duplicate yell, ‘No medicine! No morfin! You lie me!’

  But after two weeks, one morning I’d had enough. I was in the kind of pain where I didn’t much care if I died, just so I didn’t have to put up with this shit any longer. I turned to Dave. ‘Mate, I’ve had enough, I ain’t gunna answer any more Bib and Bub questions.’

  Dave nodded his head, ‘Suits me, Jacko. Righto then, let’s give the bastards a serve. We might as well go out telling the buggers what we think of them, their wives, their kin, their ancestors and their fuckin’ noggie nation.’

  This we commenced to do, calling them every combination of name and adjective we could think of, including several deeply offensive though imaginative monologues involving their offspring, wives, mothers and their poxy nation.

  At first this infuriated them. But then they grew accustomed to our outbursts and seemed to be genuinely perplexed at our behaviour. They must have finally decided we’d gone round the twist, because one morning they came to fetch me and placed me in a nearby cave, disastrously separating me from Dave McCombe, whom I was never to see again. I recall his last words, called out to me as they carried me away, ‘Jacko, don’t die, don’t let the fuckers win!’

  The cave was in permanent twilight – at its entrance they’d built a crude wooden stockade that blocked most of the light – and towards the back it was almost totally dark. Even by the standards of the previous caves and the cage we’d been in for two weeks, the stink of rotting gangrenous flesh and human faeces was overwhelming. At night rats brazenly attacked the open wounds of the cave’s twenty or so prisoners. Thank God it was so cold that our nostrils were all but anaesthetised, making the fetid air slightly more bearable. All about me men lay moaning, lying in their own excrement. Stink and shit notwithstanding, the only way we could prevent freezing to death was by lying huddled against each other. A few rice sacks had been thrown into the cave and those wounded men strong enough to fight quarrelled like mongrel dogs over them, pulling hair, biting, kicking and punching to secure one. I saw one prisoner with his hands around another’s throat throttling him until he released his grip on a sack.

  On my first morning one of the inmates crawled towards me, a bearded American with a dirty bandage around his forehead from which a crop of dark matted hair protruded straight up to a height of about twelve inches. What remained of his uniform was crusted with filth and one of his eyes was closed or missing – pus oozed from the corner suppurating wetly down his jowl and into his beard. He crawled past me to the prisoner who lay beside me asleep and stole his portion of rice swill. I looked at him and he returned the look. ‘He’s dead meat, buddy,’ he said with a slight shrug.

  I was too spent to react, to feel indignation, in fact to feel anything, anger or pity. Constant pain and hunger and the separation from my mate Dave McCombe had turned me inwards, all my energy absorbed in my own self-pity. The shock of losing Dave had been enormous and I realised that he had been the real factor in keeping me alive. Now I was alone in this living hell. I was among wild animals and knew I wasn’t up to the task required to survive.

  The bearded Yank sat on his haunches, about to eat the swill he’d stolen, when suddenly a dark hand reached over the sleeping soldier beside me and grabbed his wrist. The American gave a cry of anguish as the grip tightened. ‘Put it back, soldier!’ a deep voice demanded. I followed the arm and saw it was attached to a very large man lying one body over and parallel to me. Whimpering in fright, the bearded American put the sleeping man’s portion back and the large hand released its grip, allowing him to slink away into the darker interior of the cave.

  ‘Giddonya, mate,’ I managed to say. Was it possible there was someone here who wasn’t reduced to an animal state? I was astonished at the effect this had on me.

  I heard a grunt of acknowledgement and then the single word, ‘Sonofabitch!’

  I lay quiet for a while then asked, ‘What’s your name, mate?’

  ‘Jimmy . . . Jimmy Oldcorn.’ He said the name slowly and it came out like organ music, real deep.

  ‘G’day, Jimmy. Jacko McKenzie. ’Ow ya goin’?’

  A fair silence followed, then, ‘Where yoh from, man, yoh talk funny.’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Aus-tray-lee-ah.’ He pronounced each syllable. ‘Man, dat da other side da fuckin’ world!’

  ‘Yeah, you’re not wrong,’ I replied. ‘They don’t call it Down-under for nothing.’

  ‘What yoh got, Jacko?’

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by this question. ‘What do you mean, Jimmy?’

  ‘Yoh sick? Wounded? Able-bodied?’

  ‘Broken leg, bullet, bone shattered.’

  ‘Me also – I got me a broken leg.’ He said it with a chuckle, as if it was an amazing coincidence. ‘Dis nigger ain’t gonna do no ’scapin’, dat for sure.’

  I was growing increasingly weary, the conversation taxing the little strength remaining in me, but I wanted him to continue if only for the comfort of his voice. ‘You did good stopping that bloke,’ I said.

  ‘Goddamn muth’fucker!’ he replied. ‘No-good sonofabitch!’

  Despite my need for him to continue I could no longer concentrate, and dropped into an exhausted sleep. When I woke, the bloke next to me whose food had been stolen then salvaged was no longer there. Now Jimmy Oldcorn lay next to me, the biggest goddamn black man I had ever seen in my life.

  ‘How yoh doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be better,’ I replied.

  ‘Or worse.’ He indicated the spot where he now lay. ‘Dis poor guy, he gone died on us, man.’ He seemed to be suggesting that I ought to feel fortunate to be alive.

  I felt slightly ashamed. ‘I just need a bit of a stick to make a splint,’ I said, trying to explai
n. ‘That’d help a fair bit to stop the pain.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see dat,’ he said sympathetically, and just the tone of his voice was remarkable. In this hellhole there was no room for sympathy, each of us totally preoccupied with our own misery, so the big black bloke’s apparent concern came as a surprise.

  I recalled a rather ponderous saying Gloria had when someone showed a callous disregard for the misfortune of another: ‘Sympathy was a stranger knocking on a firmly bolted door’. Jimmy had a crude splint down the lower part of his left leg and would have been in much the same sort of pain as me, yet he still found the strength to be concerned about someone else.

  Nevertheless, in a voice filled with sickening self-pity, I found myself saying, ‘You wouldn’t think it would be that bloody hard for the bastards to find a bit of wood.’

  ‘Dat a natural part of being da enemy – dey ain’t suppose to show no concern, man.’

  We talked for a while and it was obvious he’d been through much the same experience I’d endured, the only difference being his spirit remained dominant and unbroken while mine was just about spent. But all the time I was too preoccupied and sorry for myself, convinced that I was about to die, to benefit from his obvious courage.

  ‘I guess this is the end,’ I sighed.

  Jimmy Oldcorn didn’t reply at first, then he said quietly, ‘We cain’t make it on our own, Jacko.’

  ‘You can say that in spades!’ I replied.

  ‘We gotta work together, brother.’

  I fell silent, trying to think what we could possibly do that would make the slightest difference. Together or on our own, we were powerless. ‘Mate, we’re stuffed,’ I said at last. ‘Rooted.’

  ‘Rooted?’ he questioned.

  ‘It means we’re fucked, up shit creek . . . it’s Australian.’

  ‘Rooted! Hey, dat’s good, man! I’m rooted.’ Pronounced in his mellifluous voice it sounded round and substantial.

  ‘No, that’s not the same thing,’ I said. ‘When you say “I’m rooted” it means you’re tired. “We’re rooted” means we’re stuffed, finished, washed up.’ I laughed, continuing. ‘“Get rooted” means piss off, beat it, scram. “I’ve been rooted” means I’ve been cheated or badly done by. “I rooted her” means I had sex with a woman.’