Eyewitness (33 page)

The bleeding won’t stop. You keep talking to him – treat for shock – take the dressing off his shoulder and start again. The blood and fluid keeps welling up and deep down you can see frayed ends like shredded pieces of turnip. You yell for another dressing and someone throws one to you. There is still fighting and yelling all round.

Terry Loftus, the other corporal, Dave’s mate, crawls over. He looks at Errol and you know from the look on his face that he doesn’t believe you can save him. But you know you can, if only you can staunch the blood. Terry Loftus is 17 stone, a former merchant seaman. At 27, he is, with you, the old man of the platoon.

Terry stands up and goes down the track and drags up the faceless Cong. He drops him in front of Wetherell and you, a barrier. The bulky muddied outline in black is now no more than an uneven outcrop on the jungle floor, to be used for shelter like a log or ridge. Loftus crouches over you and Wetherell. You can see he thinks you are wasting your time, you don’t have a chance. Errol keeps losing consciousness and you’re glad. But then he comes to again and begins drawing up his knees and pushing his heels down hard in the mud from the pain.

Terry goes back down the track and comes back with the Viet Cong’s weapon. He lies it across the figure in black and says, ‘It’s a Russian 7.62. It’s yours; there’s one in the spout.’ You make up your mind they can stuff the Geneva Convention. It is the last time a Digger is going to go down a track under fire to get you a weapon.

The platoon commander, Peter Sibree, crawls across and tells you to hang in there, he’s radioed for a dust-off, but the choppers won’t come in just yet because of the groundfire and because they’re flat out with the American 173
^rd
Airborne who are into it, too, and taking heavy casualties.

You need more dressings, not for the jaw or throat, they have eased, but for the shoulder. The blood is still welling up from the bottom of the hole. You decide to plug the back as well, where the round has gone through. Round his middle the Viet Cong has a bright flash of blue. It is the same ceremonial scarf of the Phu Loi Battalion that the soldier had whose pack you ratted. The scarf is of cotton. Surprisingly it is clean. He also has in a pocket what looks like a headband or a sausage bag for carrying rice. That’s clean, too. You take them both and tamp them down hard above the sodden shell dressings. You hurt Errol and he moans. You tell him you’re sorry and that the chopper’s on the way.

Loftus is having a one-way conversation with the enemy telling him what he is going to do when it gets dark.

Dave isn’t dead at all. They lie him down in a deep shell hole. You crawl over. They’ve splinted the two legs together, the one that is just hanging to the good one. But his shoulder is almost severed, too. He opens his eyes and nods his head at you. Dave is trying to grin. Now, he is trying to tell you something. Something about the old ammo tin, under his bunk back at Bien Hoa. He wants you to look after it. Something about some bread he has been saving for other blokes in the platoon. You nod and tell him to keep quiet, you’ll be back with him in a minute. You go back to Errol who is kicking his feet again.

A chopper comes low over the trees and Sibree tells you to throw smoke. But there’s tracer coming up from the far side of the clearing. You can see the red cross clearly on the brown side of the Huey. Davey Haines and Roscoe and some other Diggers run out and begin pulling away the stumps to make a clearing, to encourage the pilot. He banks and comes in again, fast. Sibree says, ‘Go with them, please.’

The side-gunner fires a burst into the treetops as the chopper comes in. You are shocked by the side-gunner’s face. It is pock-marked by old acne scars. Now it is as grey as Dave Munday’s. He is a zombie. He doesn’t see a thing, just stares out through his goggles.

They load in Dave and Wetherell and you clamber in after them. You remember to kick out your full water bottles. Where you’re going there’ll be water. The rice bag and the battalion scarf are sodden. There are fresh dressings taped to the chopper seats. You rip those open and tear off the scarf and rice bag.

The alloy floor of the chopper is slippery as ice. Now you know why the side-gunner stares straight ahead. From the floor it isn’t his first dust-off by a long way. He’s probably been doing it all afternoon, with the Airborne. The floor of the chopper is slippery not only with blood but with shit and a yellow substance and on the seats there are thick slicks of new blood, some of it dark, some brilliant red.

There’s tracer rising, lazy red and yellow beads, arcing up, looking so harmless. The gunner, still blank-faced, fires another burst. No-one pays any attention to you, not the pilot or the co-pilot, or either of the side-gunners. They all do what they have to do, yes, like zombies.

You put your feet on either side of Dave’s head as he lies among the mess on the floor and put your arm around Errol. The cold is hitting you all now. Dave loses consciousness again but Errol is shivering. So you try to talk to him about Katherine, and The Alice, and Darwin – treat for shock. He makes a big sigh and buries his head on your shoulder. But the cold is making him stiffen and you are scared you’ll lose them both.

The chopper barely touches at the Aid tent and takes off again. Other Hueys are dropping out of the sky pushing out their wounded, and dead in ponchos, and taking off again. A shuttle service. Willing hands take Dave and Errol.

‘Morphine?’ the American medic asks you, and you shake your head. Then you remember someone had crawled up with a glass phial of Panadols. You’d given Dave and Errol four each, pushing them down Errol’s throat. ‘Panadol,’ you tell him, ‘four each.’ He laughs. Panadol! You know it is going to be alright because the American laughs.

After they’ve carried Dave and Errol into the tent he comes back to you and says, ‘We’re cleaning them up and sending them, one of them, the one with the leg, into Three Field. You know what that is?’

You say, ‘Sure, at Tan Son Nhut.’

He says, ‘Right. You can stick around if you like and try to hitch a ride with your buddy if you want but the way things are I reckon all the choppers will be loaded up.’ He is small and very dark like a Mexican. He smiles and says, ‘Take care’ and moves across to where another dust-off is coming in with Airborne wounded.

Some of the transport company are there and one of them takes the Russian 7.62 that Loftus has pushed into the chopper after you. And Gerry Cudmore, the Catholic padre, is there and Aub the Salvation Army bloke goes away and comes back with a pannikin of lime juice for you.

Ever since 1 Battalion RAR began operations the Diggers have talked about ‘getting into it’. They’d been mortared and sniped at but that wasn’t ‘getting into it’. It was 26 May 1965. Now, it was joined. Australia, whatever they said back home, was at war. For the first time in Vietnam the Australian Battalion had come face to face with the enemy.

I had chosen my platoon well. I had gone to the 1 Battalion camp without telling the authorities. I was apprehensive they would put difficulties in my way. And they would have. I had an airline bag over my shoulder when I walked up to the guard on the gate. I waved to him and said, ‘How you going?’ I loafed around all that day. No-one challenged me. I was almost sure I had found my platoon. Mangano stood out and Sibree and Davey Haines and Terry Loftus and Dave Munday. Other platoons called them ‘The Scungees’.

It wasn’t until I got to know them on HMAS
Sydney
that I found out why. They’d been trained by Sergeant Kevin Wheatley, known throughout 1 Battalion as ‘The Dasher’. He’d told 6 Platoon, ‘Someday you’re going to have to do it real hard and real dirty.’ So they trained and ran and exercised twice as hard as any other platoon. They ate with their hands from the one dixie and they didn’t wash in the field. Just to get used to it.

I’d been lucky, too. 6 Platoon had the first face-to-face combat of the war; they suffered the first close fighting casualties; Dave Munday was to win the first Military Medal. Wheatley, himself, ‘The Dasher’, had gone ahead as a warrant officer with the Australian Army Training Team. He was to die later that year and win the first Victoria Cross.

But my plan to chronicle the 32 men of 6 Platoon, B Company, 1 Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment was to fail. After six months there was left less than half the originals – not only from wounds, but from illness like scrub typhus and pneumonia gained from lying all night in the scrub in a defensive position or night ambush.

And I found I had chosen the easy way. I was viewing the war through a sniper’s sight. It didn’t allow me to see the complexity of the war at all. Worst of all, as a correspondent, I had fallen into my own tender trap.

Back in Saigon I went straight to the Third Field Hospital at Tan Son Nhut. Dave was already in theatre. The wounded were queued up. Some still coming in were being put in beds where the sheets were still bloodied. The American nursing sister was calm, doing what had to be done, from bed to bed, from new intake to new intake. She was like the side-gunner on the chopper, automatically gliding, spaced out from the tiredness and constant bombardment of wounded arriving.

She said, ‘Sure, stay as long as you want. You want to fill in time you can talk to that boy over there.’ The boy over there could have come from an American billboard. He had close-cropped fair hair, blue eyes and a heavyweight’s chest, deep through. He didn’t seem wounded at all so I just sat and talked, like the battalion S.M.O. Mike Naughten and the Sick-Berth petty officers on the Sydney, said, ‘Treat for shock, that’s the most important after you stop the bleeding.’ The sheet was pulled back above the waist and there wasn’t a mark on him. But he was in some pain. Once he gripped my hand. He was still holding it when the sister came back. She smiled and nodded. I stayed with him until the painkillers took over and he closed his eyes.

I still had my field gear with me and I pitched a low ‘hutchie’, the half-tent shelter, over near the wire. There was a bar in the side street beside the hospital. I went there the next morning and ate
pho
, the breakfast soup, with the bar girls. None of them hustled or asked for drinks.

I did the same months later when Mangano was hit. One leg was off and most of the other. The same sister said he had more than 60 different small wounds, comparatively small wounds. But what hurt him most were the bruises and strained muscles in his shoulders and neck. When I kneaded these for him the sister said he used to purr like a cat.

The sister said my people had arranged for Dave to be flown to Singapore. Mike Naughten had been pulling strings. The R.A.A.F. was to fly Dave to Butterworth where British surgeons, unhurried, could operate.

‘Your other buddy,’ she said, ‘is gone. He died during the night, not long after you left. Just woke up and died.’ The American with the heavyweight’s deep chest had been tail-end Charlie in a company moving through a small village. They were almost through when a shotgun poked up out of a ‘spider-hole’, a fire position concealed among tree roots. Most of the blast missed him. But it scooped a slice out of the inside thigh and took his balls.

The sister explained what they had done to Dave and said, ‘When he comes round you can tell him. They’ll make a decision on the arm in Singapore. Here, we can’t take any risks because of infection. Here there isn’t any decision.’

When Dave gained consciousness he already knew his leg was gone but that he was hanging on to the arm. He mainly wanted to know about Errol Wetherell and Loftus and Sibree and Mangano and the rest of the platoon and whether they’d taken his leg off below or above the knee. He was also trustee for some of 6 Platoon’s savings. The money was in an ammo tin under his bunk, I was to tell Loftus.

Munday still has his arm though sometimes it tends to ‘leak’. When I did get back to the battalion to tell Loftus about the money they had the Phu Loi Battalion scarf, and the rice bag ready for me, and my bush-hat that I’d left in the shell hole and the water bottles I’d remembered to kick out of the chopper at the last minute. The bottles had been scrubbed up and the hat and scarf and rice bag were spotless and neatly folded. But Mangano and Sibree and Loftus were severe that I had given the Russian 7.62 with the swivel bayonet over to the battalion. ‘It was yours,’ they said, ‘now you’ll never see it again. It’ll end up on the wall of some reserve officers’ mess back in Australia, you idiot. What would Dasher say!’

But worst of all I had become stuck in my own honey pot. I felt as much of 6 Platoon as any Digger in it. But I wasn’t a Digger and soldiering was not my function.

Almost exactly 100 years earlier an Irish correspondent called Billy Russell had managed quite well to tell the British people that the charge of the Light Brigade had not been all ‘glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war’. Later he had written that ‘at thirty-five minutes past eleven not a British soldier, except the dead and the dying, was left in front of the Muscovite guns’.

And later again, ‘it is with surprise and anger that the public will learn that no sufficient medical preparations have been made for the care of the wounded … that there are not sufficient surgeons … no dressers or nurses … not even linen to make bandages for the wounded.’

Billy Russell, great as he was, probably watched the charge of the Light Brigade from a hill. If he had wanted to charge with the first troop he would not have been allowed and would probably not have been able. Just as well for the rest of us, just as well for those who came after the man who was said to be ‘the miserable parent of a luckless tribe’. If you watch from a hill you are at least spared the temptation to breach confidence, you are at least spared platoon loyalty. Vietnam was to change all that, was to be different.

I should have known of the tender trap from Ronald Monson and Jack Percival and Osmar White and Jack Colless and the great Australian correspondents whom I had known, or from C.E.W. Bean or Damien Parer whom I had read.

I was so close to 6 Platoon that I believed the man or woman who bought the Sydney
Sun
or the Melbourne
Herald
or the Brisbane
Courier
or the
West Australian
could not possibly understand as I understood. I felt that they were not yet ready for it, that it would serve no purpose just then because it simply was not possible to see things from a seat in Martin Place, Sydney, or under the trees in the Treasury Gardens, Melbourne, as they really were beside the shredded trees of Marquis D.