Smoky Joe's Cafe by Bryce Courtenay Page A

sunrises and sunsets to your credit. Nobody talks about Long Tan.
    It’s hard to describe coming out of the jungle, out of combat, getting back behind the wire. You’ve made it one more time, but there was always a next time, the hole in your guts never gets filled, the fear never stops. When you’ve been out on patrol for maybe ten days or three weeks or more you never seem to come out of it.
    Every step you make every day, right down to finding a place to have a crap. Wiping your arse real slow
so the movement won’t disturb the foliage, give your position away. In the field we were issued with three pieces of shit paper per day, one up, one down and one to polish. When you got back to the safety of Nui Dat with all the crap paper in the world, you find yourself breaking off just three pieces, the habit, the fear, still with you even when you’re polishing your arsehole in safety.
    I’ve just said how it was coming out of the deep j. But what I’m talking about is the anticipation. The days of nothing happening but knowing something could any moment. Know what I mean? In fact, while in the boonies it was almost a relief to be up against some real combat. Charlie firing at you, sending over his mortars, returning fire, havin’ a go, working out his range. That was tolerable, you could take that. Warriors havin’ a go at each other.
    It was the silent war that broke you down. Every step of every day, watching Bongface ahead, expecting him to be blown to kingdom come every next step he took, or have him spring a booby trap or dive for cover and yell, ‘Contact Front!’ Then behind him the machine gun moves forward to the higher ground or to the right and opens fire in support of the scout. Now you’re in action, your rifle group moves around you and, as
section commander, you can give them orders, maybe a quick flank attack on the enemy. All this is expected, you’ve been trained for it, you’re a warrior doing your job, best you can.
    Then out you’d come, your patrol or operation over. If you were unlucky, minus a couple of your mates wrapped in their hutchies sent ahead. The worst was seeing your flying dead leave you in the jungle as the dustoff came in and carted them off above the treetops to the morgue, and you having to stay behind. Sounds weird, don’t it? Thinking the dead are better off than you. Or some bloke still alive, holding his guts in his hands, seen as a lucky bastard. Shit, shit, shit.
    The last thing I saw of my mate Mo were the soles of his boots sticking out from his waterproof hutchie, which I’d used to cover him. A single yellow bamboo leaf, shaped like the head of a Zulu spear, was stuck to the heel of his left boot. I rushed forward as the dustoff lifted him up from the ground, the chopper blades above my head a wind-rush of cool air in the humidity, and grabbed the leaf off of his heel and shoved it into the pocket of my greens.
    I’ve still got it, stuck onto a picture of him and me in a whorehouse in Vung Tau. We’re holding a bottle of beer up to the camera with two pretty little
whores. Wendy says they look like porcelain dolls. They’re sitting on our laps, we were both big bastards, and the girls look like schoolkids. Probably should have been at another time and in a better world than this one.
    You’d come off patrol or some operation and have your first real wash for five weeks. There was always the moment when you took off your greens, which stank of sweat and mud and dirty humans. You’d shower, hoping that by some miracle the hot water would clean not only the outside but what was dirty on the inside as well.
    You’d get into civvies and if you were real lucky be granted a seventy-two-hour leave pass to Vung Tau. You’d be so pumped up you’d laugh at anything, any small prank played on a mate no matter how stupid, and then you’d get drunk and have sex and get drunk and have sex and