The Odd Angry Shot Page 3

‘Soon as you like. You’re scouting for us, you know.’

  ‘Who’s the forward scout?’

  I indicate Shaw.

  ‘OK. Let’s go.’ I push myself into a standing position.

  SHAW is on the point. Slowly. Watch where you’re walking. Don’t want to blow our balls off with one of those jumping jacks do we?

  Check the map, almost there.

  Thumbs down. We’ve arrived. My lips are dry.

  Christ I’m thirsty.

  Shaw turns, holds up five fingers, closes his fist, then five more again.

  Shit, only ten. Something’s wrong.

  CRASH…What? Shaw starts to scream, bent double. Gutshot.

  Down flat onto the mud. Raise your eyes and peer ahead into the foliage.

  ‘Contact front,’ screams Harry.

  The world bursts open right in front of your face.

  Shaw is still screaming—a long open-mouthed scream and his legs are moving as though he is trying to run away. Leaves, branches fall around you.

  ‘Is it a contact or an ambush?’ screams Golonka.

  Rounds crack over our heads from the left hand side of the track. More wood chips fly into the air. One hits your hand, takes off a layer of skin.

  ‘Ambush,’ screams Golonka.

  ‘See if you can get Shaw,’ yells Harry.

  ‘Cover me and don’t shoot me in the arse.’

  Rogers moves towards Shaw, grabs him by the collar. He’s still screaming.

  I can taste the sweat as it drips from my nose. Salty.

  I think I’m going to be sick. My stomach contracts.

  ‘Shit. Please God, don’t let me be killed.’

  ‘Medic! Medic!’ comes from behind me. Someone else has been hit.

  I turn the safety catch on my rifle to full automatic and let the whole twenty-eight rounds go into the shrubs on the side of the track, golden cartridge cases fly into the air. The jerking in my hand stops suddenly. Panic. Oh Jesus. Another magazine. No time, there he goes. I catch a glimpse of black, not more than ten feet from me. New magazine. Jesus, hurry, hurry.

  Click…home it goes…cock; the bolt springs forward like a dog on a leash.

  Where is the bastard?

  There he goes. The foresight and the black shape meet. Three round burst. He screams…got him. No, he’s gone. Wounded him anyway. I can still hear him screaming.

  Shaw’s intestines have started to ooze out onto the track as he writhes in the mud. I am fascinated by the blue-coloured bowel, so that’s what it looks like. Rogers and the medic are lying beside him. The medic’s hands are covered in blood. He’s trying to shovel the smashed intestines back inside with a shell dressing. I wonder how they’ll get the mud out of his stomach.

  We’ve broken contact.

  ‘How many casualties?’ yells Golonka.

  ‘One wounded here,’ yells Rogers.

  Shaw is still screaming. For Christ’s sake, shut up!

  ‘Two killed, five wounded,’ comes from somewhere behind me.

  ‘Dustoff’s on its way,’ the radio’s op says, almost inaudibly.

  ‘Another one’s snuffed it down here,’ comes the voice again.

  ‘What happened?’ yells Golonka.

  Hell, I wish he wouldn’t keep yelling.

  ‘Lung shot, shock killed him,’ someone replies.

  And at lunch on the five thousandth day of play the score is Home team eight, Visitors one.

  ‘SHIT, that was the worst chopper ride I’ve ever had,’ said Harry, rubbing his behind and dumping his pack on the floor.

  Remember how it felt to be back in base? Safe.

  Back into the tent and out of this stinking camouflage suit. Clean clothes.

  ‘How’s Shaw?’

  ‘What happened? Gutshot eh?’

  ‘Feel OK? Debrief in an hour.’

  ‘You blokes like a beer?’ Heads appear, asking questions.

  STANDING under the shower.

  ‘This fucking soap is making my hair fall out,’ says Rogers, his face covered in lather.

  ‘Who makes the shit anyway?’

  The water feels good. It’ll rain soon. The afternoon sun has taken the chill out of the water.

  ‘I think it’s a leftover lot from Belsen.’

  ‘Who’s Belsen?’

  ‘Where’s Isaacs? Hey, Isaacs. Do you realise you’re probably washing with your grandmother.’

  ‘My grandmother is in Melbourne driving a big Chevy and she wouldn’t piss on you,’ replies Isaacs and raises two fingers. Everyone laughs.

  ‘I still can’t do anything with my tinea,’ remarks Rogers.

  ‘Neither can I.’

  ‘Hey Isaacs, do you know how we can cure our tinea?’ I ask.

  ‘Why don’t you piss on it?’

  ‘It seems that I’ve heard that somewhere before,’ laughs Harry.

  We all laugh. Christ, this shower’s good. The mud runs off my body and disappears down the concrete drain.

  Clean clothes and socks. Sit on your bed and pull your socks on. Remember when you never took any notice of changing your socks.

  ‘How’s your bird?’ asks Harry.

  ‘I think I’ve been given the arse,’ I reply.

  ‘That’s life, mate.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘How’s your wife?’ I ask.

  ‘Haven’t seen her for five years,’ replies Harry.

  Remember how you had it all planned. What you’d do when you got home again. You’d get yourself a new bird, a real one, no Catholic girls’ school bullshit and pretence about her. You wouldn’t mind if she was as poor as a church mouse. She’d have to be presentable, sure, but you’d had your fill of private school girls and upper-middle-class mothers.

  No, this one would be different. You’d go to the pub with her old man now and then—hail fellow well met—and you’d sleep with her because you felt that you had done your bit and you deserved a good woman. Shit yes, you’d look after her and make sure no one ever hurt her. You’d changed. You were a man now, all grown up. Still nineteen.

  Yes indeed, it’d be nice to go home. She’s home, waiting there somewhere right now. Just bide your time pal, it’ll happen.

  Yessir, that’s what we’re fighting for. It’s an excuse anyway.

  ‘THE medics are running a blue-movie show tonight at ten o’clock,’ comes through the tent flap, ‘two bucks a head and bring your own grog.’

  ‘Thanks mate.’

  ‘Don’t mind a bit of porno now and again,’ says Harry.

  ‘Now and again and again and again,’ says Rogers.

  ‘You are fast becoming an old perve, Harry.’

  ‘Got a smoke anyone?’

  And Harry lapses into one of his spellbinding discourses on sexual experience.

  ‘When I was an R and R in Singapore, I ran into this pommie marine in a bar,’ says Harry getting up and moving onto the sandbags, as though to take position of official storyteller.

  ‘Anyway, this pom starts to tell me all about this knock shop that he’d been to the night before. He says that it was a room about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, behind some pub. Five Malay dollars to get in to see the show…anyone got a smoke?’

  Red and white packet sails through the air.

  ‘Ta.’ Draws the smoke in.

  ‘Well, he said he was half-pissed anyway. So when he gets there he pays his five bucks to get in and the place is crammed full of poms and yanks and a few pogo Australians.

  ‘Now the place has got a curtain at one end, and he thinks it’s going to be the usual bird and the dog show or two lesbians or whatever. Well, out of the end of the room, from behind the curtain, comes this enormous-looking bird and she’s wearing, wait for it, a top hat and stockings and suspender belt and carrying a chair. So she bows, would you believe it, bows and takes off the top hat and puts it down on the floor about ten feet away from the chair. Now get this. She takes about half a dozen eggs out of the hat and goes and sits down on the cha
ir. What do you reckon happened then?’

  ‘Another bird came out with half a pound of bacon and a pot of tea,’ says Rogers.

  ‘Smart shit. Well, as I said, she drops down on the chair and shoves one of the googies up her fundamental orifice, takes a deep breath, goes red, lets out a yell and guess what?’

  ‘A rooster came in and asked her to marry him,’ Rogers again.

  ‘Are you going to listen or not?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Well,’ continues Harry, ‘out pops the egg and flies straight as a die into the top hat.’

  I collapse and shriek with laughter. So does Rogers.

  ‘Are you on the level?’ I ask with tears in my eyes.

  ‘Too bloody right I am. This bloke wanted to take me to see it.’

  ‘Did you go and have a look?’ asks Rogers.

  ‘Well, no. You see one of the bar girls grabbed me on the business about two minutes after he’d told me and I didn’t get out of the bar for a day and a half.’

  A medic pokes his head through the tent flaps.

  ‘Yeah?’ asks Harry.

  ‘Your mate Shaw died in the chopper. Shock killed him.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ says Harry getting down and following the medic outside.

  I feel like I’m six hundred years old. Jesus, I think, this is like Russian roulette. It’s got to be me, sooner or later. Christ, I don’t want to get killed. Stuff their professionalism.

  Rogers starts to speak quietly. Remember.

  ‘One more statistic. One more ball for the uni students and all those other bastards to fire. You know, every time one of us gets brassed up all it does is give them another reason to get out and scream Peace, Peace, Love and Brotherhood. Try it when you haven’t got the arse in your pants and no money in your pocket. See how important you are to the bastards then, eh. They wouldn’t shit on you.’

  Up until that moment I’d always thought of them as being quite entitled to dissent. But within thirty seconds my attitude had changed to one of passionate loathing and I wished that I could have emptied every round of ammunition in the country into them. Up until then, I’d never experienced futile rage either. How’s your tinea now, Private Shaw?

  THE continuing saga of Harry and the Baitlayer.

  ‘What’s this shit?’

  ‘Sauerkraut, smart arse.’

  ‘Aw, be nice, cookie, or I’ll shove your head straight in it. No, come to think of it, it looks bad enough already.’

  Ten minutes later, ‘Not bad, cookie, that was almost edible.’

  ‘Get fucked.’

  ‘See you tomorrow, cookie.’

  THE small marquee is crowded with troops from almost every unit in the Task Force; muffled laughter, can tops cracking.

  ‘More smoke in here than at Joan of Arc’s funeral.’

  I sit between Harry and Rogers.

  ‘Got a smoke?’ asks Harry.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You got one?’ he asks Rogers.

  ‘Don’t you ever buy any of your own?’

  ‘Not much point when I can smoke yours.’

  ‘S’pose you’re right,’ says Rogers with resignation.

  An engineer taps me on the shoulder.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘When’s this bloody turn supposed to start?’

  ‘No idea, mate.’

  ‘The films haven’t arrived yet,’ says a tankie leaning forward.

  ‘They were being shown at a piss-up at the battalion. Want a can?’

  ‘Sure,’ I reply, ‘thanks mate.’

  The beer washes away some of the cigarette stickiness from my throat. A cheer goes up from the crowd as two infantrymen from the battalion come in carrying several cans of film and a sixteen-millimetre projector.

  The first film is about two lesbian sisters. The noise increases as the positions become more insane and there are also the ever present comments on the performances and prowess of the participants.

  ‘Shit, if she does that again, I’m going.’

  ‘Jesus, it’s me mother.’

  ‘You could drive an APC in there.’

  ‘It looks like six thousand coons singing Mammy.’

  We walked slowly back to the tent, remember, and no one said a thing.

  If there was one thing I would have traded a year of my life for that night, it would have been a woman. What we would have given for just the smell of one, to brush an erect nipple with your lips or to place your hand between a pair of female thighs or to have your eyes sting with sweat, just once.

  You were nineteen and you felt eighty, remember.

  There were moments when you were sure that you could hear the party, the voices, and you were still lying between the thighs of the girl in the backyard.

  Fuck their war, you thought, fuck everyone at home for not being here in your place, and you put the bottle to your lips and sucked.

  ‘FIGHT, fight, fight, fight, fight,’ comes the chorus.

  ‘Jesus, it must be a blue,’ says Rogers springing from the bed.

  ‘Come on Harry, worth a look.’ I grunt, getting up half-drunk from the bed and shakily placing the bourbon bottle on the sandbags.

  It is all but over when we get there. A medic has been spraying with an anti-insect fog machine and someone in one of the tents has complained. The medic has told the complainants to piss off and has collected a broken nose for his trouble. His fog machine lies on the ground and two figures in spotted clothing are helping the medic up and onto his feet.

  ‘Now be a nice bloke and shut up about all this or by Christ you’ll get more than a bloody broken nose, sonny.’

  The medic protestingly shakes himself free from the two pairs of hands holding him.

  ‘Look pal.’ His eyes are watering. Blood is pouring from his nose and spreading as it hits his shirt front. ‘I’ve been ordered to spray this area by the MO.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck if Rima the Bird Girl told you to spray it. Grab your fucking contraption and piss off… NOW!’

  The medic picks up his fog machine and traipses away. Harry and I walk back inside the tent.

  ‘The rot’s set in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve seen it before. Got a smoke?’

  ‘Yeah, here,’ I throw the packet and it lands on the sandbags. Harry takes one and throws the packet back to me. He lights it with the communal Zippo that hangs from the roof.

  ‘Well, first of all, when they start to argue that’s bad enough. A few piss-offs and get-stuffeds and nobody really takes any notice of it. Then it gets to stage two, the camaraderie and all this esprit bullshit just goes. Then comes stage three when they start to fight with one another and the morale goes. And once the morale goes the casualties start to mount up, and the sick parades start to get larger, and all we want to do is to get the bloody job over and done with, so we don’t move unless we have to and we don’t take any more risks—because there’s no reason to.’

  ‘I think you’ve got something there. It’s been going on for quite a while.’

  ‘Right,’ says Harry. Remember when he said that.

  EARLY afternoon, enter one face with one worried expression. It’s our old buddy Bung Holey from twenty-one patrol.

  ‘Greetings, oh saviours of mankind and the free world,’ says Bung bowing almost double.

  ‘And much respects to you and your charming husband, your Godship, what can we do for you?’ says Harry, looking up from his book.

  ‘Ah,’ says Bung trying to achieve a look of mock tragedy. ‘As you are all no doubt aware, we have had occasion to use one another’s equipment from time to time and so, my sons, I was wondering if you had come into contact at all with the cunt who’s pinched my pack.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My pack.’

  ‘Where was it when you last saw it?’ asks Rogers.

  ‘Out the back on the wire fence.’

  ‘Now,’ says Harry rolling onto his feet from the side of the bed,
‘it may be Bung, that we can be of service in some small way. But as you know we are businessmen.’

  ‘Go on,’ says Bung, ‘there’s got to be a catch.’

  ‘I would say that it will cost you one dozen cans of the finest ale for we three to get off our arses and find your pack.’

  ‘It’s a deal. Are you sure you know where it is?’

  ‘We are about ninety per cent sure.’

  ‘OK. Where is it?’

  ‘Cans first, thank you.’

  Bung disappears and reappears in the space of about fifteen seconds carrying exactly one dozen cans.

  ‘Are they cold?’ asks Harry.

  ‘Aw, for fuck’s sake,’ snaps Bung, ‘yeah, freezing.’

  ‘Good man,’ says Harry.

  I am sitting on my stretcher and watching the proceedings with open-mouthed amazement.

  ‘Now, Bung old son, we too have been losing gear for some time and it wasn’t until a few days ago that I found one of our marker panels under that large tree at the back of the lines. Now come here.’ Harry and Bung walk to the back of the tent.

  ‘Now you see where my finger is pointing?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, in that tree is a great big fucking orang-outang and we are sure, that is I am sure, that not only is your pack there with him, but every other piece of gear that we’ve lost in the past week or so is there too.’

  ‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ mutters Bung, shaking his head.

  ‘Well spoken sir,’ says Rogers.

  ‘Get stuffed.’

  ‘Now,’ says Harry again, ‘we don’t quite know how we’re going to get our gear away from him because I’m fucking well sure that I’m not going near him, and I don’t suppose that anyone else is going to have a bash at him either.’

  ‘Why can’t we shoot him?’ asks Bung.

  ‘Can’t. The 2 IC knows about him and says that shooting is out of the question.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How in the Jesus would I know, maybe it’s something like the bloke who shot the albatross. He just said “NO, N, O”.’

  ‘And this cost me a dozen cans?’

  ‘We did our best, Bung. Here’s half a dozen of them back.’

  ‘Thanks, cunt.’

  ‘LEAVE allocations are on the notice board,’ says Rogers from the doorway of the tent.