Brother Fish (12 page)

As I recall, while we regarded ourselves as veterans and showed a fair degree of apathy for what we thought of as the same old senseless routines, like all recruits, we never stopped complaining. We saw ourselves as grown men and scorned the pedantic procedures, bellicose language and spit and polish so dear to the hearts of non-commissioned officers. As a consequence, both sides, the instructors and their whingeing charges, ended up with a fair amount of indifference towards each other.

We told ourselves we were anxious to be shipped to Japan where drafts of K Force were progressively joining up with 3RAR to make up a complete battalion to fight the communist noggies. We regarded much of the training as the usual army bullshit we could well do without.

While we were anxious to get going, the government wasn't holding back either. Prime Minister Bob Menzies had volunteered Australia to be the first nation, after America, to make a commitment to the UN forces. He was an avowed ‘commie hater' and was always going on about the evils of world communism and was determined we would be early starters in the stoush against the reds.

As a result of this enthusiasm to see us at war again our training was only just sufficient to bring us back to, at best, an average World War II competency. We probably needed more training but told ourselves we'd done it all before and were battle-trained and experienced.

Time and history tend to bring with them respectability, but in truth the initial unit known as K Force was a bit of a mixed blessing – a place for misfits, malcontents and even petty criminals to hide, as well as some very competent and committed soldiers. This was hardly surprising – veterans who'd returned and had more or less adjusted to civilian life were unlikely to volunteer for a second helping of war. Every K Force volunteer had his own reason for returning to the army, we all had a personal agenda. Why else would a veteran so recently on active service, in some cases even a prisoner under the Japanese or Germans, volunteer to fight another war?

Traditionally, young lads volunteer to go to war believing they are bulletproof. Government propaganda relies on them responding to a combination of testosterone-driven madness, the promise of adventure and peer-group pressure. On the other hand, those of us who volunteered for K Force would have known better. We knew the proverbial bullet with your number on it when your time was up was fatalistic nonsense. Every soldier knows that every bullet, mortar or shell fired by the enemy is intended for you. By volunteering to go to war you deliberately put yourself in its path and are manipulating the odds in favour of being killed.

Many of the K Force volunteers had experienced mates dying in World War II and should have known the army for what it was – long stretches of boredom and short and infrequent periods of intense terror that pass for excitement after they are over. Having escaped unscathed the first time round, volunteering for a second helping seemed too big a price to pay for an occasional gratuitous rush of adrenaline. There had to be a reason, other than the early onset of dementia, for signing up for this further opportunity to prematurely end one's life.

The army wasn't into psychological profiling at the time, and K Force recruits were conveniently described in the newspapers as ‘men who find it difficult to settle down in the aftermath of war'. This sounded respectable, almost heroic, and was preferable to the notion that anyone volunteering for K Force must, by reason of his actions, be in urgent need of psychiatric help.

I guess I was no different from the rest of the volunteers. I arrived in New Guinea a day after Japan surrendered. There I was, as useless as a hard-on in a bishop's trousers, a qualified master marksman destined never to fire a shot in anger. The only Jap I ever saw, dead or alive, was in a newsreel. When Korea came along with a request for volunteers I scratched around for a plausible excuse to volunteer and settled on the premise that I had a personal duty to uphold democracy in the Free World. The fact that Korea had never been in the Free World and had seen precious little democracy never occurred to me. The Cold War between Russia and America was hotting up and Uncle Sam and Australia were friends and, everyone knows, you don't let your mates down etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. Bob Menzies-type rhetoric was an ideal medium to conceal my real motives.

So that I would appear plausible I'd read somewhat on the two ideologies, communism versus capitalism. By the time I got to Puckapunyal I considered myself a bit of an expert on the subject. Compared with the men in my hut, my knowledge of the politics behind the conflict in Korea was positively encyclopedic. When we first arrived I'd rabbit on about the cornerstones of democracy, mankind's inalienable right to free speech and to make choices of our own. At first the blokes would listen more or less politely. But soon enough they lost patience with me. ‘Ferchrissake, Jacko, put a sock in it, will ya!' someone would yell out. ‘If yer gunna be a fuckin' blow-hard then do it on yer mouth organ and not through yer arse!' That's the trouble with being a little guy, everyone feels free to have a go at you.

Johnny Gordon, the Aboriginal cove, once asked me directly, ‘Jacko, why did you join up?'

‘International communism is a real threat to our way of life, Gordie, and I feel it is my duty as an able-bodied young man with military experience to stand up and be counted.'

‘Yeah, sure, but what's the real reason?'

My throat suddenly tightened and my mouth went dry. ‘That's about it,' I lied.

‘Bullshit,' he said, losing respect and walking away.

He was right, of course. Watching him walking away I grew up a whole heap. Nobody joins the army to exercise their right to free speech, and you never get to make choices of your own. Moreover, just quietly, from what I'd read, communism seemed an okay idea to me and I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Democracy hadn't done me any special favours and its offshoot, capitalism, had demonstrably eluded me.

So as well as being a smart-arse, I was also being a bit of a hypocrite. Of course, I was too chicken to say any of this. The Australian Government was running a campaign in an attempt to outlaw the Australian Communist Party, so it wasn't an altogether good idea to suggest that communism didn't seem such a bad system or to question why it was necessary to go to war to eliminate it. To my hut mates this would immediately turn me into a red-hot commo and I'd be equated with trade-union leaders and dockside workers who were always striking or downing tools and walking off the job. Everyone knew the commos were solely responsible for the nation's post-war industrial strife.

In truth, my volunteering had nothing to do with ideology. Like most Australians I was politically lukewarm and probably wouldn't have voted if it hadn't been compulsory. Like all the others at Puckapunyal, I was running away from something. As a matter of fact, in my case, a whole heap of things. From the island. From aimless, boring and mindless manual work. From becoming a professional fisherman. Perhaps, most of all, from the dreaded clutches of Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan and the likelihood that if I remained on the island she'd eventually succeed in prolonging my sentence by making me take up an apprenticeship as a compositor on her crummy newspaper. There was also something else. I'd been a soldier but had never been to war. Arriving in New Guinea too late meant that all I'd done was help clean up the mess. I guess, with my pathetic ‘every-bugger's' medal I felt excluded from the club, and this only served to add to my abject sense of failure.

Korea was essentially my way of not facing up to my own inadequacy. I was supposed to be the first clever McKenzie and I was failing hand over fist. I'd convinced myself that when Alf died, forcing me to abandon my education, life had struck me a dastardly blow. I was the McKenzie who was destined to reach for the skies, yet even before taking to the air I'd nose-dived into the runway.

I assured myself it would have been better if Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan hadn't taught me to read in order to think. Which I now saw as a curse and not as the generous gift it truly was. I told myself I was a blue-singlet bloke with a white-collar mindset. I recall rather grandly conjuring up a picture in my mind of a deep chasm dividing two metaphorical landscapes, one in shadow and the other in sunlight. The dark side was where we McKenzies belonged, the pick-and-shovel side, using what we had from the neck down. The light side, the from-the-neck-up side, was the Lenoir-Jourdan landscape, where your hands stayed clean and your greatest asset was your head. In between the two sides was a gap too wide to jump and, through no fault of my own, I lacked the knowledge to build a bridge to cross over into the Elysian glades that lay beyond.

So I decided she, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, was largely to blame for my inadequacy. After all, if she hadn't trapped me in the library and blatantly interfered with my life I would never have aspired to becoming something more than the trawler man my father had been. She'd kidnapped my intelligence and put these high-falutin' ideas into my head. I hadn't asked for them, I wasn't a kid going around, intellectual cap in hand, seeking truth and knowledge. At the age of eight, like a prize butterfly specimen, I'd been pinned down to the library floor by the formidable and irresistible combination of justice of the peace, librarian and music teacher.

It was also partially Alf's fault for dying at the wrong time, though I'd try to cancel this thought whenever it surfaced – the poor bastard wasn't to know he was going to cark it early from smoking fags. I allowed that Gloria wasn't entirely innocent, either. She'd persistently told us we were ‘the proverbial'. If you tell a child often enough that he's a heap of shit he eventually comes to believe it. Or so I justified my self-pity.

Sue, my sister, had by now completed her training and was a fully-fledged nurse and loving her vocation. Steve and Cory, my younger brothers, were fishermen and seemingly without a worry in the world. I was the misfit who had been socially and intellectually corrupted, neither fish nor fowl, no good to myself or anyone else. I was scared and resentful, more than a little conscious of my ignorance and feeling thoroughly sorry for myself. For a deadset ordinary bloke like me I'd got my head into a fair sort of mess.

All this self-loathing lay buried and squirming, hidden beneath my quasi-intellectual defence of democracy, which I gave as a reason to anyone who'd listen for signing on to go to Korea. Although Steve and Cory, not being veterans, appeared to be envious as hell of my good fortune, it must have been obvious to Gloria and probably Sue as well that I was attempting to run away from my responsibilities. Blind Freddy could have seen that my high-minded rhetoric was simply concealing the fact that I was handing my life over to the Australian Army. What a pathetic joke I'd become.

The big day arrived when, such as it was, our training was complete and, after the weekend I'd spent with Jason Matthews in Melbourne, we were ready to be shipped out to Japan to join 3RAR to receive a little additional integration training before being shipped to send the communists scuttling back across the 38th parallel to lick their wounds.

The joining of the two forces, 3RAR and K Force, was to prove a peculiar marriage. Many of the soldiers in 3RAR had their wives and children with them and were well settled, familiar with the Japanese environment and had happily become more like useful civil servants teaching Western ways to the Japanese than military personnel. Despite the order not to fraternise with the recent enemy, a fair number of the single soldiers were shacked up with Japanese girls. These women, some of them war widows, were compliant and willing mistresses. The military rations their Australian lovers obtained were vastly superior to what was available to the public in a post-war Japan severely short of food. A de facto relationship with a serviceman would enable them to feed their families as well as themselves. As the occupation forces lived pretty high on the hog it was a comfortable and secure life. Now they were being joined by a load of misfits, loners and larrikins. In combination it was to make for a strange mixture to take into a battlefield.

The first big surprise was upon leaving Puckapunyal. On the previous occasion I'd embarked for a war zone, I'd flown, equipped with a packet of stale cheese-and-tomato sandwiches, strapped into a canvas seat in the near-freezing interior of an RAAF Dakota bound for New Guinea. Now we were flying to Japan on a Qantas Douglas DC4. Talk about posh – there we were, sitting back like Jacky, clutching our bags of duty-free grog, the air hostesses bringing us beers and meals on a tray like a bunch of carefree holiday-makers on their first overseas trip.

Japan proved to be a bit of an eye-opener, just five years after Victory over Japan Day the people were doing it tough still trying to come to terms with the occupation forces and the concept of democracy. They seemed to be tentative in everything they did, as if afraid to make a mistake or to offend in any way. Even those who spoke a bit of English bowed and spoke softly in what appeared to us to be a servile manner. Australians become uncomfortable around too much bowing and scraping and so we had difficulty understanding the Japanese culture. The only other foreigners I'd met were the people of New Guinea – simple, mostly bare-topped village folk who laughed a lot and who were exactly the opposite of these socially rigid, overpolite and always acquiescent nips. The only good thing I could personally see about Japan was that most of the males were shorter than me.

In their formality the Japanese were almost exactly opposite in culture to the laid-back and easygoing Australians, and so naturally we concluded they must dislike us intensely. We decided that all this obsequious carry-on was their way of quietly sending us up. ‘
Yes, sir! No, sir! Three bags full, sir!' ‘Nobody carries on like that, do they?
' we told ourselves by way of confirmation. Under such circumstances it was easy to behave badly, and we didn't need any further encouragement. We told ourselves that if the nips didn't like us, tough luck – it was our turn now and Rick Stackman was there to remind us what the bastards had done to us in their death camps. Just as well we only had a couple of weeks in Japan, most of it spent training, or we may have got ourselves into a lot more trouble than we did.