Smoky Joe's Cafe (21 page)

Bongface shakes his head, ‘Can't say, might be,
might not, who knows?' He flicks the butt end of the fag onto the sand below us. ‘All I know is, I took her in to see Marlene in the Anna-mobile to take a test. Marlene says it's the best yet, a damn good match, though, of course, she can't be positive until the blood sample goes to Sydney for further analysis.'

I grab him by the shoulders and shake him, ‘Mate, what are you saying?'

Bongface smiles the Bongface smile, ‘I think maybe we've got her. We've got the bastard!'

I
t is Anzac Day and I'm at the dawn service at the Cenotaph in Martin Place, Sydney, and I'm crying. It's a good place to cry because there are others doing the same, older women and old-timers from earlier wars. I'm just the latest crying recruit, one of the younger ones crying for Vietnam. Crying for what it's done to our lives. I'm clutching the little Vietnamese doll and wearing the medals Thommo never wore.

I can't say our life with Dad was easy, far from it, Vietnam saw to that. But what I can say is that Mum and I were loved every day of our lives. No matter what happened, we knew that big old cranky bear loved us.

Sometimes during my childhood Thommo would lock himself up in the bedroom and I'd ask Mum why. ‘He's fighting the ghosts of the past,' she'd say. Once when I put my ear to the door I could hear him crying. The only time
I actually saw him weep was when I was seven, not that long after I'd had the bone-marrow transplant, when he heard that Shorty had incurable cancer. ‘He knew all along! He knew all along!' he kept saying over and over.

Five months ago, at the ripe old age of fifty-four, Thommo was also diagnosed with cancer of the bowel. The Ghost of Vietnam had come to claim another good man.

During the last few weeks of his life Mum and I would visit Thommo in Concord Hospital every day. Then one day, when he seemed a bit better than usual, he said to me, ‘Baby, get one o' them tape recorders, bring it with you next time you come. I've got one more thing to do before I die. Bring lots of tapes, you hear? A man wouldn't want to run out in the middle of his tale now, would he?'

Almost every day he'd give me a completed tape, though some days he was too weak to talk. ‘Sorry, love,' he'd whisper, ‘I'm too crook to talk into that thing, I must be getting old.' The nurses said the tapes kept him alive weeks after his time was well and truly up. ‘It's your story I'm telling, darling, I want you to know what happened, what a clever mum you've got,' he told me on one occasion.

Then on the fifth of September he gave me the last
tape. ‘The bastard's done!' he whispered, typical Thommo. He was terribly ill and only just able to talk, my big old dad, so thin you could see the veins and the shape of his bones through his almost translucent skin.

On his arm was a tattoo of a gun. ‘What's “Mo” mean?' I'd ask as a child, seeing the writing on the butt. He would always give me the same answer, ‘It's just one of those stupid things young blokes do.' Then, when he handed me the tape, he held my hand a long while. My big, beautiful dad was so frail I could barely feel his grip. His words, when they came, were painfully slow, ‘Anna, on Anzac Day I want you to go to the War Memorial in Hyde Park and find Mo's name on the wall, tell him you're Thommo's daughter, introduce yourself.'

My father died in the early hours of the following morning with Mum holding his hand. I've transcribed his story just the way he told it on the tape.

The sun has just risen on a lovely early autumn day, shining down on us through the long, cold grey canyon made by the tall buildings on either side of Martin Place. A lone bugler is playing the Last Post. It's for Thommo and Mo and all the other brave warriors of Vietnam, telling them we remember.

Anna Thompson, Anzac Day, 2000

The Australian experience in the Vietnam war was very different to that of the American one and so this book has been a very personal journey for me, an intellectual fact-finding tour that leaves me extremely proud of the way our boys accomplished a difficult and controversial job in Vietnam.

Vietnam was a very different kind of war and one we probably shouldn't have been involved in. Be that as it may, our nation's reluctant acceptance as worthy warriors of the young men who returned from Vietnam simply wasn't justified. A revision of our negative attitude towards their Vietnam experience is long overdue.

I hope you enjoy the story, which, of course, is a work of fiction. My eleven platoon characters are also wholly fictional and do not in any way portray any of the infantrymen who fought at Long Tan and who remain alive. However, the effort undertaken to portray the Vietnam experience is as close to the truth as, I believe, diligent research could make it.

A great many people need to be thanked for their help in getting the hard facts right and in sharing their experiences for my benefit. First among these is Celia Jarvis, who accomplished a remarkable amount of research in a short time and did so with admirable patience and good humour. My special thanks to Graham Walker, a Vietnam veteran himself, for his counsel and guidance throughout.

Others, in alphabetical order, who were generous with
information and who gave their permission to use their own Vietnam experiences, written or otherwise, are Bob Buick MM, Wayne Cowan, Rod Cozins, Owen Denmeade, Peter James, Terry Loftus, Tim McCoomb, Mike McDermitt, Gary McMahon, Ross Mangano, Ern Marshall, Stanley Morrie MBE, Harry Smith MC, Keith White, Tony White, Barry Wright and Admiral E.R. Zumwalt Jnr.

I especially thank the Granville office in Sydney of the Vietnam Veterans Federation who were enormously helpful in organising for me to interview a number of veterans, all of whom I thank for speaking so candidly about their post-Vietnam experience. Also, the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia for making available various papers and submissions to the government on the effects of Agent Orange and other veteran health issues.

For the marijuana/cannabis information, my thanks go to Robert Long of the Nimbin Hemp Embassy and to the authors of various websites on the Internet. For the information on bone-marrow transplants, I am grateful to the Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, Sydney.

I also thank those authors who have gone before me and who have written so well on the Vietnam war. Bob Buick and Gary McKay,
All Guts and No Glory
; Terry Burstall,
The Soldier's Story
; Lex McAulay,
The Battle of Long Tan
; Ian McNeill,
To Long Tan, The Australian Army and the Vietnam
War 1950–1966
; and Captain Nick Welsh,
A History of the Sixth Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment 1965–85
.

All that remains is to thank Robert Sessions, my publisher at Penguin Books, and my editor, Kay Ronai, who, realising this was a difficult story for me to write, helped more than I can say.

AK47
  automatic assault rifle used by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army

APC
  armoured personnel carrier

B52
  high-altitude bomber

Charlie
  Vietnamese soldier, derived from Victor Charlie or VC; used to denote the enemy

deep j
  deep jungle

DLP
  Democratic Labor Party

dustoff
  helicopter used to evacuate the wounded and dead from the battlefield

Geographicals
  veterans who cannot reside in one place for long

grunt
  popular nickname for infantryman, adopted from American army usage

H & I
  harassment and interdiction – artillery fire at irregular intervals targeting suspected enemy supply
routes and assembly areas

hutchie
  one-man shelter, tent

M16
  automatic rifle used by Australians and Americans

MO
  Medical Officer

nasho
  National Serviceman called up for compulsory National Military Service

Noggies, Nogs
  name for all Vietnamese, used mostly for the enemy

NVA
  North Vietnamese Army

OC
  Officer commanding a company of soldiers

Owen gun, Owen machine gun
  sub-machine gun used by Australians, largely replaced by the M16 by 1968

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
  psychological problems caused by major traumatic incidents, in this case the Vietnam war

provost
  military police

R and R
  rest and recreation, leave in another country

RAR
  Royal Australian Regiment

R in C
  rest within the combat country

RSL
  Returned Services League, established in Australia in 1916 to provide assistance to those who served in the armed forces and their dependants

SLR
  self-loading rifle used by Australians

VC
  Viet Cong

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First published by Penguin Books Australia, 2001

This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2006

An earlier shorter version of this story was first published electronically as
Meeting at the Smoke Joe Cafe
, 2000

Copyright © Bryce Courtenay 2001

Copyright © Christine Courtenay 2013

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.

www.penguin.com.au

ISBN: 978-1-74-228070-7

‘Weapons Training' by Bruce Dawe on pages
68–69
, from
Condolences of the Season
, is reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Australia.

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