MAMista by Len Deighton Page B

straight spine, keen blue eyes and that sort of square-ended moustache – also grey – that had enabled generations of British officers to be distinguished as such in mufti.
    Most of his native Australian vowels had been replaced by the hard classless articulation of men whose shouted orders have to be understood. His attitude to the world was derisive, like that of a conjuror welcoming to the stage some innocent from the audience.
    Ralph grew up in Brisbane, Queensland. He was a bright child who, together with his sister Serena, responded well to the coaching their ambitious mother provided. In 1945 his father had come home from the war a young staff sergeant. Confident and energetic, he’d found a job in the construction business. He’d done well from the post-war boom. But Ralph Lucas’ family did not grow up in one of the new houses that his father had built. They bought an old house with a view across the bay to Mud Island. From his bedroom, on a clear day; young Ralph could see SouthPassage out there between the islands, where sometimes he went sailing with his cousins. When Ralph scored high marks in his exams his mother went back to school-teaching and so provided enough money for Ralph to study and eventually become a physician. But if his parents thought they’d see their son married and settled, with a general practice in some prosperous suburb, they were to be disappointed. His years as a student had left him restless and frustrated. His admiration for his father was deeply rooted. As soon as his training ended, Ralph joined the Australian army in time to go to the Vietnam war with an infantry regiment.
    His mother felt betrayed. She’d given her husband to the army for five long years and then lost her son to it too. She was bitter about what that jungle war did to him. Her husband had remained comparatively untouched by whatever he experienced in the European campaign, but Vietnam was different. Her son suffered. She said a cheerful young man went to war and an old one returned on that first leave. She never said that to her son of course. Ralph’s mother believed in positive thinking.
    Ralph’s time in Vietnam was something he seldom spoke about. His parents knew only that he ended up as a front-line doctor with a special unit that fought through the tunnels. It was a dirty remorseless war but he was never injured. Neither did he ever suffer the psychological horrors that came to so many of the men who spent twelve or fifteen hours a day trying to patch and pull together the shattered bodies of young men. Major Ralph Lucas got a commendation and a US medal. A few weeks before his service was up, he was made a colonel. But anyone who expected this decorated warrior and physician to be a conventional supporter of the establishment was in for a shock.
    It was in the bars and officers’ clubs of Saigon that Lucas suffered the wounds from which he never recovered. He began to think that the vicious war that so appalled himwas no more than a slugging match to occupy the innocents, while crooks of every rank and colour wallowed in a multi-billion-dollar trough of profits and corruption. Asked to comment afterwards he liked to describe himself as ‘a political eunuch’. But within Lucas there remained a terrible anger and a cynical bitterness that could border on despair.
    His time in Vietnam was not without benefit to him and to others. While treating combat casualties he improvised his ‘Lucas bag’. A plastic ration container, ingeniously glued together, became a bag with which transfusions could be made without exposing blood to the open air, and thus to bacterial infection. It was cheap, unbreakable and expendable. Lucas was amazed that no one had thought of it before.
    After Vietnam he spent his discharge leave with his family. By that time his mother was dead, and his father was sick and being nursed by his sister Serena. Lucas felt bad about deserting them