Dead and Kicking

Melbourne-born photographer Geoffrey McGeachin has had a varied career shooting pictures for advertising, travel, theatre and feature films. His work has taken him all over the world, including stints living in New York and Hong Kong. He is now based in Sydney, where he teaches photography and writes. His first novel,
Fat, Fifty & F***ed!
, won the inaugural Australian Popular Fiction competition. His other novels,
D-E-D Dead!
and
Sensitive New Age Spy
, are also published by Penguin.

For Wilma, as always — with much love, as ever

GEOFF
M
C
GEACHIN

MICHAEL JOSEPH
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

MICHAEL JOSEPH

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2009

Copyright © Geoff McGeachin 2009

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

penguin.com.au

ISBN: 9780857966421

I was hunkered down in a shallow depression off to one side of the trail, my position concealed by a thick layer of branches and bamboo. While the camouflage protected me from being spotted, it also sealed in the heat and humidity, and the cramped space was like an oven. My neck was aching, I was tired and soaked in sweat, and something nasty had crawled up the leg of my combat fatigues and was busily biting me on the bum. I’d have given a million bucks to be anywhere else but I knew I was probably only going to get this one chance and I needed to make every shot count.

The soldier resting on his haunches on the trail in front of me could smell the approaching patrol before he could see it. A sort of meaty fug was pushing ahead of the men, spreading lazily on the late-afternoon breeze. It was an acrid co-mingling of mouthwash, bug spray, cheap aftershave and the sweet-sour aroma of mildewed army fatigues left wet too long. There was also the smell of cigarettes and sweat, and the unmistakable scent of fear.

Then the noise came: talking, forced laughter, the clanking of equipment and ammunition knocking against weapons, and the sound of a tinny PX transistor radio tuned to Armed Forces Radio Vietnam. Glen Campbell was mournfully wishing he was back in Galveston when the patrol’s point man ambled around the kink in the trail and stopped suddenly.

The whole idea of the point man is that he should be far enough out in front of his unit to spot any trouble before it happens. In this case, however, he’d been standing still for barely ten seconds before the rest of the patrol bumped into him. There were about a dozen men in the group, bunched up, walking close together on the trail. Most of them looked like they should still have been in high school and they started griping and cursing until they saw what the point man was staring at, and then they shut up.

A dozen yards further along the trail, the soldier stood up slowly and faced the patrol. He smiled, showing them his empty hands, palms outward. Someone switched the radio off, truncating Glen Campbell just as he watched ‘the cannons flashing’. The song was about the long-past Spanish-American War but that particular summer there’d been a lot of songs about other wars that were really about this one.

The point man looked around at the lieutenant, who looked back at the sergeant, who shrugged.

‘He ain’t shootin’, Lieutenant,’ the sergeant said, ‘and he’s smilin’ and ain’t no gook so I guess that makes him a friendly.’

The sergeant had the kind of aged, weather-beaten face that said he knew what he was talking about. The tone in his voice indicated that what he’d just said should have been pretty bloody obvious to his superior officer.

The lieutenant nodded and walked slowly towards the soldier. The sergeant followed, keeping the muzzle of his M16 down but pointing forward, his index finger resting on the trigger guard. The soldier casually studied the rest of the patrol as the two men approached. Most of the grunts had their flak jackets gaping open, understandable given the fierce heat of the afternoon, but potentially deadly in a mortar attack. They were still standing grouped together, an easy target for any Vietcong in the area who might want to take them on.

The biggest man in the patrol was carrying the M60, the unit’s heaviest weapon. It rested over his shoulder on a folded towel, while his right hand held one of the bipod legs near the muzzle to steady it. In an ambush Charlie would aim to cut him down first in a withering hail of bullets from AK-47s on full auto. With its hundred-round assault pouch, the M60 general-purpose machine gun would be a good thing to have out of the way.

Next, the VC would take out the man with the long, slender antenna of the PRC-10 radio, or Prick 10, waving above his helmet. No radio meant no calls for artillery support from the nearest firebase, no air support from Skyhawks or Phantoms dropping their shiny canisters of napalm, no helicopter gunships swooping in to strafe and rocket the tree line, and no dust-off choppers to medevac out the wounded. The man standing closest to the radioman – the officer – would be the next target.

The officer was studying the soldier. The uniform was different from his, and the man wore a soft bush hat rather than a steel helmet. The weapon slung around his neck and resting across his belly looked like a skinny metal pipe with two wooden handgrips and a skeleton stock. A straight magazine poked out the top and the whole damn thing looked almost homemade. The sergeant saw his lieutenant staring at the weapon.

‘Owen gun,’ the sergeant said. ‘Am I right?’

The soldier nodded.

‘I seen ’em in Korea,’ the sergeant continued. ‘Guess that kind of weapon would make you an Aussie.’ He pronounced it ‘Ossie’.

The soldier grinned. ‘Got it in one, Sergeant. Good memory you got there.’

‘I watched one of your boys pull one of them things out of two feet of mud, give it a splash in a puddle and fire off a whole damn magazine easy as you please.’

‘Good little gun, the Owen,’ the soldier agreed. ‘Helped stop the Japs in New Guinea. Bit of a museum piece now but they tend not to jam in a tight spot.’

‘If you’re Australian, aren’t you a little outside your area of operations?’ the lieutenant interrupted.

‘Yo, El-Tee,’ one of the soldiers in the patrol yelled, ‘can we take a load off?’

The lieutenant’s face reddened at the familiarity. He glanced at the sergeant. ‘Give them ten minutes.’

Before the sergeant could speak, the men were shaking off their packs and moving towards the shade of a clump of bamboo. The Australian soldier gave a whistle and when the patrol looked back at him he slowly shook his head. One of the grunts parted the undergrowth beside the track with the muzzle of his rifle and swore.

‘Hot damn! Motherfucking punji stakes.’

Dozens of sharpened bamboo stakes smeared with human excrement lined the shaded ditch. The men looked warily at the soldier and one of them pointed to the rice field on the opposite side of the trail. The soldier nodded and the grunts moved slowly into the lush field of rice, still cautiously prodding the vegetation with their rifles.

The sergeant, the gunner and a couple of the grunts wore faded, stained and torn fatigues. They carried their load of grenades, ammo, flares, Claymore mines, C-rations and canteens with an ease born of long practice. The once-black leather of their combat boots was worn down to a dull, dusty grey. In contrast, the lieutenant and the rest of the men still had some shine to their boots and an olive green newness left in their fatigues, and they handled their cumbersome packs with an awkward clumsiness. FNGs was the older grunts’ term for them – Fucking New Guys.

The lieutenant took a long swallow from his canteen and offered it to the Australian, who took a swig and grimaced.

‘Kool-Aid,’ the lieutenant explained. ‘It kills the taste of the sterilising tablets.’

‘You can say that again,’ the Australian said with a smile, handing back the canteen.

‘What are you doing out here all by yourself anyway?’ the lieutenant asked. ‘You’re a few clicks outside Phuoc Tuy Province.’

The soldier smiled. ‘Actually,
you’re
about three clicks inside our territory.’

The lieutenant stiffened. ‘I can’t see any badges of rank but if you think I’m –’

‘Sorry,’ the Australian said. ‘Should have introduced myself earlier. I’m Peter Cartwright. Major Peter Cartwright.’

The lieutenant’s face flushed bright red and he straightened up. Cartwright’s left hand shot out and stopped the young soldier’s right hand as it started moving upwards in the general direction of a salute.

‘We don’t need any of that parade-ground bullshit out here, do we, Lieutenant? You never know who’s watching.’

He pronounced it ‘left tenant’ and some of the soldiers lying closest in the rice field sniggered. The sergeant wheeled on them.

‘Maybe you assholes might want to spend a little time cleaning them weapons so’s I don’t have to write no letters home to your mommas saying how you got your nuts shot off by Charlie Kong ’cos you was too friggin’ lazy to follow procedure.’

The lieutenant looked at the major. ‘Sorry, sir, but we usually don’t get too many officers on the ground way out here in the boonies. Are you sure we’re in your area?’

Cartwright nodded. ‘Where are you supposed to be, son?’

The sergeant unfolded a map and pointed to a grid. He smiled and shrugged.

‘You and the sergeant there have a disagreement about which way to march earlier today?’ Cartwright asked.

‘I guess you could say that,’ the lieutenant mumbled glumly.

‘Take my advice: if in doubt, always listen to your sergeant.’

‘Yes, sir,’ snapped the lieutenant, and Cartwright grabbed his saluting hand just in time.

There was a
whop whop whop
noise overhead and the shadow of a helicopter passed over the patrol. No-one even looked up. Hueys coming and going were just part of daily life in Vietnam, like yellow cabs on New York’s Fifth Avenue, only sometimes with a hell of a lot more blood on the back seats.