Smoky Joe's Cafe by Bryce Courtenay Page B

get drunk and have sex until it all became a blur, a bottle of Ba Mui Ba beer down one hole and your cock in another. Drinking piss and fucking, the combat soldier’s eternal antidote to stop the fear in his gut and kill the poison in his soul.
    Then back to Nui Dat with the tension still in your entrails. The terror still there, knowing you’d soon be out in the jungle again with the Noggies finding a hundred
ways to kill you, the weird
crackle-pop
of their AK47s burned into your memory forever.
    We didn’t wear underpants in the jungle because they chafed and made the prickly heat rash in your crotch worse. But when we put on civvies we’d put on undergear as well. Then when you returned and it was time to go into the jungle again, you’d give away the Y-fronts. That was it, the real deep fear of dying returned when you put on your fresh greens and let your balls dangle free.
    In less than an hour your greens would be soaked through from the humidity you could never escape. The first of the razor-sharp grass seeds had worked through your trousers and you knew there’d be a hundred more and you’d have to wait ‘til nightfall to pluck the bastards out. Your pack bit into your shoulders and rubbed them raw and your webbing belt pushed down on the bones of your hips with the weight of water bottles, a dozen magazines, grenades and all the other soldiering crap you carried in the pouches hanging off it, not to count yer crossover ammo belt. You weren’t in the jungle ten minutes and you knew it was gunna be a bloody long day, and the fear was back and the fear was you.
    Righto then, let’s begin at the beginning. And the beginning is a brown envelope in the post box to tell
you the good news that your number just come up and you are one of the chosen ones. So here’s the next misconception. We didn’t whinge and tell ourselves, ‘Why me? Why not some other joker?’ Most of us were stoked. We were going to war like our fathers and our grandfathers, we were going to be warriors, the lucky bastards, true to the flag.
    On the day I reported at the recruitment centre there were a bunch a protesters with banners outside, well, not exactly a bunch, four women, fat and ugly. Their banner said, ‘Say “No!” to Vietnam! Save our Sons!’ They were chanting, ‘Don’t spill our blood in Vietnam!’ over and over. One of the fat sheilas was shouting and wagging her finger at me and I remember thinking, ‘You stupid old cow, you’ve probably never had a good root in your life!’ Twenty-year-old warriors-to-be don’t want to be saved, they know they’re personally bulletproof anyway and this stupid bitch was trying to stop me having my own war adventure.
    I reckon the people thought it was the right thing to do, to support our American mates. Blokes bought you a beer in the pub. ‘You’re doin’ your bit, son,’ some of the old-timers would say, ‘Good on ya, mate.’
    There was some stuff in the papers about how we shouldn’t be going, but public opinion or, anyway, the
stuff I heard on the box and goin’ on around me and on the radio, like, was pretty encouraging.
    We were sent to Kapooka near Wagga Wagga in central New South Wales, that was July 1965, I think. Kapooka was okay, a lot of shouting and drill, rifle practice, fitness, lectures, route marches, inspection, latrine duty and whatever else the RDI (Regimental Duties Instructor), a regular army platoon sergeant, thought would successfully beat the crap out of us.
    Kapooka was all the usual bullshit the army carries on to turn a raw recruit into a totally responsive, rigidly starched uniform with boot caps endlessly polished and brought to mirror gloss. There used to be a joke, you polished your boot caps ‘til you could see your face in them, that’s so when you were standing close to a bird you could look down into your boot caps and see up