Miscarriages Chapter 12. Things we dare not tell

12. Things we dare not tell 

James lay on his mother’s old bed, waiting. It was now several weeks since he signed up. Each day he got up around lunch time, showered, sat at the kitchen table and ate the eggs and bacon auntie Connie had cooked for him at nine o’clock. Each day he would stare at the cold eggs and bacon and the cold cup of tea. And each time he would get up, switch on the electric kettle, put the plate of eggs and bacon under the grill to warm them up, singeing them just how he liked them, then warm up his cup of tea, mostly milk anyway, with boiling water from the kettle.

Barely a word was spoken, Auntie Connie stayed in the front room, staring through the lace curtains, and reading her E.V. Timms novels. She didn’t know what to talk to him about, and he didn’t care to make it easy for her. After the eggs, he would shower, gather up a few of his books and set out pretending he was going to the university, mumbling “bye aunty,” as he quickly slipped out the door. They had nothing to say to each other, thought James, indulging in self-deception that had become a habit of mind. The fact was he did not want to talk to her in case he let it slip out that he had signed up for military service and would be most likely going off to Vietnam. If she knew, she would immediately tell Mr. Counter who would then see to it that it all got reversed. Mr. Counter was an antiwar type, he knew, just like his old Dad.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they were only antiwar in their own lives, or for their mates who didn’t want to go. Of course, they were glad we won World War 2, but those blokes—remember Bomber, the bloke whose arm I broke? And his brothers, a nasty bunch, but they were right, weren’t they? Dad and dad—not sure which is which—were just selfish, that’s what they were. Let the other blokes, blokes like me now, go out and risk their lives while they stayed at home having a good time, working in so-called essential services. What a joke.

A cool breeze wafted in through the open window, always open, always ready for Iris. James could hear the scotch thistles scraping against each other as they bent in the breeze. “One day, she’ll show, but she’d better hurry up. I mightn’t make it back from Vietnam,” he grinned to himself.

And as he grinned, he rolled over in his bed, buried his head in his pillow, lay on his belly, stretching, wriggling, hoping for Iris.

And then she came.

*

When young men, boys really, get together, so James knew, but came to find out even more so, they are capable of anything, most of all unmitigated destruction, accompanied by constant laughter. Jungle training proved to be a taxing, strength draining experience,but it did what it was supposed to do for the army: hardened these young men. “You come in as boys and you leave as men,” their drill sergeant said when he welcomed them. And when they left, the sergeant said it again, but added, “and thank goodness, because the Vietcong eat boys for dessert.” At Kokoda barracks, somewhere in north Queensland,, James learned all the necessary skills for surviving and killing, hand to hand combat, shooting with several different kinds of weapons, and the special skills of jungle warfare. And what the recruitment corporal had said turned out to be true. James’s small, stocky size and his agility made him a prime candidate for leading small parties into the jungle around the Mekong Delta.

James felt confident, even ebullient, when they boarded the cargo plane, and sat in the sparse seats on their way to Saigon. He had excelled at training, even though it was hell at first being ordered around by a bully. But he was good at just about every­thing they made him do, and best of all, he wasn’t making a fool of himself like he did at the uni. Here, all the other blokes were just like him. They were all equals, all looking out for a good time, adventure, and, of course what the recruitment corporal had promised him, looking forward to beautiful Asian women who would care for all their needs.

Except that they never got to Saigon. They landed at the base of operations in Nui Dat, near the Mekong Delta and some distance from Saigon, as he found out later. The base was only half built when he got there, and found that his job was to help clear out the people from the surrounding villages so the base could be secured. They were going to move the villagers— “relocate” them—the commander said, for their own safety. None of them wanted to go, leave their homes and houses they had inhabited for many generations.

*

We were all about the same age. We yearned for two things, sex and violence, which I discovered amounted to the same thing. We were so fit, had so much energy, there was no stopping us. The platoon commanders, most of them from private schools and university types, they knew that’s what we wanted, and they played on it. Kept lecturing us about respecting the local villagers, they were “on our side,” but we never believed them. We knew from what other blokes had told us that you couldn’t trust anyone, kids included. The Vietcong were all over the place and they’d kill you as quick as look at you. That’s what. So, our section, eight of us in all, would move into a village, go from house to house, herd the poor buggers out and march them away to another place that had these temporary prefab houses in a jungle clearing. We did this every day for a month or more, I suppose. But me and my mates had a deal. Each day one of us would take it in turns of hanging back in the village as we herded its people out. We’d look over the women, and depending on our predilections, the bloke who hung back would select who he wanted. There were no rules. You could choose whoever you wanted. I always went for the young ones, the ones that looked like Iris. But you’d be surprised about thepredilections of some of my mates. It wasn’t long before I got tired of it, mainly because you felt you could not take your time, enjoy the pleasures, not like it was with Iris. It was a quick job most of the time, you had to slap them around a bit, try to shut them up,

My mates gradually got the same way, and it was then that we did unspeakable things that I dare not put on paper. We were, after all, a pretty close bunch of blokes. We saw each other shit and piss, we showered in the same showers, we slept in the same dingy hut, so it wasn’t long before we started ganging up on the best of the girls, and the ones that resisted the most, we held down for each other. We’d have been court-martialled if our commanders found out, but there was no way they could find out. If some villager tried to run on to the base to rat us out, they would be shot before they got through the checkpoint. Besides, we often justified what we did by accusing the girls of working for the Viet­cong. They were the enemy after all and as far as we were concerned we could do anything we liked to them. Of course, none of us had ever heard of the Geneva convention. I know, I know. They weren’t supposed to be the enemy, we were in South Vietnam after all, they were supposed to be on our side. But none of us believed it.

It wasn’t long before we got sick of the gang rapes too. The time floated by, the routine bullying of the villagers became just that, routine, no feeling for them at all. Just getting the job done. It seemed like years, but was only months, and the villages had been cleared out and the perimeter around our base was pro­nounced secure. More new recruits started to arrive, and we seasoned jungle men showed them the ropes, but by then, there weren’t many young girls left. And we had heard that the Am­ericans were trying a new strategy against the Vietcong, securing each village systematically, going through each village, rooting out any Vietcong suspects, and isolating the villages from Viet­cong intrusion. Nobody believed it would work, and it was obvious why it wouldn’t. All villagers looked the same to us, they were all Vietcong as far as we were concerned. So, when we were given the job to move into a village to round up suspects, we mostly just picked out the men who were about the same ages as ourselves and assumed that they would be in the Vietcong. And that’s where a lot more unspeakable things happened. We devised various tortures that I still have nightmares about. And we all agreed, being really close mates, that each of us would take it in turns of doing it, because it soon became clear that a couple of us were much more into torture than the rest of us, and we thought that the best way to keep the lid on things so we didn’t end up in a court-martial, was to spread the torture around.

*

As their commanders lecture them, young men, when they are carousing together, must be constantly reminded in war that it is dangerous and they could be killed at any time. It seems such an obvious thing, but was especially true for those whose mission it was to secure the villages of Vietcong. There were mine fields in many places, the constant threat of booby traps, many ingen­iously constructed. And given their camaraderie it was a wonder that none of James’s tight little group had been wounded, let alone killed. That is, until now.

James lay on his cot, the heat rising from the concrete floor of the infirmary, the canvas tent above sagging from the tropical rain, the humid air too thick to breathe. He coughed and choked, felt a terrible pain in his leg, no it was a numbness, not pain, of maybe both. As he had noticed in those he had tortured, the pain seemed to lose its effects. But not with James. He had given up trying to remember what had happened. The medics had stoked him full of drugs anyway. The drugs, he supposed them to be morphine, are way better than the booze, he mused. If only he could breathe. The suffocation brought him close to delirium, He drifted off, back somewhere, back where he was safe and secure. Talking to his Dad again. His Dad who was dying, no, dead.

Do you remember Dad? I’m feeling really close to you right now. Maybe I’m dying too? I look up from collecting glasses and there she is, right beside me. She’s got this hair that looks like it was rinsed in mud from the Barwon river. Her face is all red and wrinkled up. You’d reckon it’d slipped down into her neck, that’s how awful it was. Her left eye was all red and runny, and her right eye was hidden behind a swollen lump of blue flesh. And she’s standing there, a blood-orange ribbon tied round her head, and she’s got this dirty yellow dress that looks like a North wind blew it on her like a piece of newspaper slapped against a tree. What was her name again, dad? That’s right, Bella.

“Two beers quick,” she says.

Dad, you remember her, don’t you? She picked blokes up in the bar, blokes she reckoned had some dough. You must remember her. She was the only woman I ever saw come into the old bar.

“There you are Bella. Now what the hell happened?” says Mr. Counter, dad, I mean. Oh shit. Dad, did you know?

James groans and stirs in his cot. A medic comes by, “you all right, son?”

“I’m not your son.”

“Soldier, that’s no way to talk to your dope source,” jokes the medic.

Bella takes a few long sips of beer, licks her lips, and says, “shit, I picked a good one this time!”

“Yair?”

“He threw his leg at me. That’s what he did!”

“He what?”

“His wooden leg. He took it off and threw it at me! Got me fair in the fuckn eye, here. See it?”

We could see it all right, Dad, couldn’t we? You could hardly miss it. Then she tells us the story. She picked up this bloke with the wooden leg because she felt sorry for him, and as well, he had won a hundred quid on the races that day. Besides, she reckoned she could manage a bloke with a wooden leg and not get bashed up like the others did to her all the time. So she helped him spend his winnings on a bit of grog, then took him home for tea. They get home and they drink more booze and they go off to bed. And she says to him, “take off your leg, it’ll get in the way.”

And he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t take it off.

“The dirty bastard!” she says, “it was good enough for me to take me pants off, so it was good enough for him to take off his leg!”

He says no and Bella says she kept nagging away at him to take it off and then she kind of fell asleep. Next thing she knows, she’s half asleep, half awake and feels this tickling, burn on her ass. He’s trying to wake her up by burning her with his cigarette!

“I believe it but thousands wouldn’t,” says Mr. Counter, I mean Dad number two, or maybe it should be number one. I don’t know. What the fuck!

And next thing Bella says, “yair well, take a look! No panties!”

She turns around and lifts her dress over her head! And we all see the proof! The bloke had burnt his initials on her fat cheeks! So, she gets him to take his leg off and he does and throws it at her and it hits her in the eye. She grabs it and beats the shit out of him and then smashes it up. And without his leg he can’t do no­thing to her. She orders him out of the house, and the last she saw was him hopping down the street using the front fences to prop himself up.

And then she plonks the leg on the bar counter, all patched up with sticky tape, and tells Mr. Counter, Dad one, to give it to the poor bloke when he comes in next. And I bet the leg’s still there, hanging on the wall just below the picture of the Queen.

James heard the medic’s voice again. “I’m giving you another shot to calm your down. You’re tossing and turning all over the place, talking to your father, who’s not here of course. It’s PTSD. It will pass.”

“Doctor?” called James.

“What is it?”

“Have I lost my leg?”

“No, it’s mostly all there.”

“Fuck! Mostly?”

“There’s a big hole in your thigh, the tendons were smashed a bit. But we can stitch you up OK and when you get back home, they’ll make you good as new.”

“I’m going home?”

“That’s right. When the next flight shows up.”

“But I don’t have a home…”

“Sleep, rest. That’s what you need. Worry about other stuff later.”

The morphine kicked in once again. James mumbled and fell into his dream world again, or was it just another place where he could indulge his sickness and talk to his dads over and over?

*

Dad, you’re sitting on your stool in your corner of the old bar. I think we’re dying together, you know that? No, you don’t have to grab me like that, I know you’re there. Ouch! Don’t pull me. I know, you’re trying to protect me, but I’m old enough to take care of myself. What’s that Dad? I should stay out of the Snake Pit, stop pulling me. Who? Shotgun Sally Doolan?

Boy! What a great hunk of fat she was. She comes into the Snake Pit and says, “I’m sick of the three ins.” Remember? She was married to one of these two brothers and lived with them both. We all reckoned she might as well be married to them both. No one could figure out which one she was married to anyway. They were little blokes and she bossed them round, bashed them up at least once a week. One of them always had a black eye. I think they called her “Shotgun” because she had a shotgun wedding,

She always looks real sick and tired of everything. And she orders her usual, that awful yellow stuff, got egg in it, what was it called? That’s right Advocaat. No wonder she was so big. Drinking those horrible things. And the barmen. They hated mixing them. She orders it and says again, “I’m sick, I yam. I’m sick of the three ins.”

And Mr. Counter says to her, “and what might they be?”

And she says, “Sick of smoke-in, drink-in and root-in!”

Then she just quaffs down that yellow stuff and grabs one of her blokes by the ear and says, “we’re going home, you little bugger. And where’s your brother?”

They reckon she did them both at once. I was just a kid then, and I believed it, even though I had no idea what it entailed. But after my tour of duty here, I know it’s more than possible because me and my mates have done it and more. Unspeakable things I tell you, Dads, both of you. You’d be amazed. And jealous too, even if you wouldn’t admit it. Well, maybe not you, Mr. Counter, Dad number two now.

James felt strong hands grab him and lift his weight on to a stretcher. He heard the vague drum of the old DC9’s props. The medic yelled in his ear. “Home! You’re going home!”

Dad, the number one Dad, the one that’s dead, the only one I can talk to. I’ll tell you everything. All the unspeakable things. And only you will know.