Smoky Joe's Cafe by Bryce Courtenay

wash and you shaved every morning using the sweat on your face for lubrication. At night, if you were lucky, you erected your hutchie. Often, though, we just wrapped the hutchie around us and threw ourselves on the ground to sleep. You suffered prickly heat, crotch rash and footrot. The dust in the dry season was filled with fleas and when the monsoon rains came they brought the leeches and the mozzies and the mud. You’d spend an hour every night under your hutchie, wet and miserable,
burning the leeches off every part of your body with the tip of a cigarette.
    That was just for openers and had nothing to do with the fact that Charlie was stalking you and you him. If you were an ordinary infantryman, a grunt, you knew nothing about the operation you were on and told bugger all. Fortunately, in our platoon we had Shorty. He had the ear of the platoon commander and, if the truth be known, probably the company commander as well. Most of the time he seemed to have some idea of what we were supposed to be doing and where we were supposed to end up and he’d tell us corporals who ran the platoons, so that, as section leaders, we’d know what was expected of us. But the grunts in many of the other platoons didn’t know if they were comin’ or goin’.
    We were the best-trained jungle fighters in Vietnam. Possibly the world. Our instructors at Canungra in Queensland had fought in Korea and in the Malayan Emergency and some had even fought in Vietnam with the training team. They knew what to expect, how to train us in the craft of jungle fighting for what they knew was to come.
    But, for your average grunt, it was still a bloody big mystery. We were against blokes in black pyjamas with
AK47s who were fighting and dying for their country, their wives and kids, and maybe even for something else they believed in. We were chasing them around their own jungle backyard shitting ourselves. And what for? Buggered if we knew. There was a saying: ’If I had a farm in Vietnam and a home in hell, I’d sell the farm and go home.’
    As the evening wore on and we got really pissed the blokes started to talk about the hard parts. I suggest some tucker before I get too pissed to make it. I’ve got meat pies in the oven but I warn them they’re best left unet, I explain that Willy McGregor makes them up the pub from scrag-ends. ‘They’re for the drunks.’ I’m about to go on and say we only sell them from the cafe to the boongs when I remember Bongface. ‘They’re rat-shit,’ I say instead.
    â€˜I’ll have a couple of them dog’s eyes,’ Animal calls out. I can see he’s fair dinkum. ‘Never tasted a meat pie I didn’t like with a drop of dead horse.’
    I start to put together a couple of dozen hamburgers and fry chips for the mob. I want them to be good and you can’t make a good burger ‘n’ chips if you’re pissed and, besides, I’m not the world’s best short-order cook, but a bloke’s got his pride.
    So I’m behind the counter making burgers and as
each bloke talks there’s increasingly long silences. I can’t remember what was said exact, not like I do the funny stuff, the humour. Now the brothers are slurring their speech a bit, digging down where they haven’t been for a while, searching for words that don’t come easy or don’t come at all. There are no correct ones, there are never gunna be the right words to kill the pain. We’re all feeling it. Sometimes what they don’t say is the worst pain of all.
    But it makes no difference, I was there with them and in between the sizzle of the onions on the hotplate, the deep fry and the feel of the raw mince in my hands, I can smell the fear returning. It’s always with you, just below the surface, always will be. Mostly the talk is stuff about the jungle, goin’ in scared and comin’ out a month later with a few more live