Chapter 2
The first time I saw her I was on guard duty. A sort of guard duty. We also called it garbage duty because we had to escort a local garbage truck through the camp grounds and watch that the men on the truck didn’t take anything they weren’t supposed to. We only got to do it once or twice during our one year tour and it was when my only garbage duty was nearly completed that I saw her. I had to maintain some sort of watch on the men, or the appearance of it, so that when I looked again she was gone. And she was a rare sight then in that part of the world.
I waited and watched, distracted for a moment from my present duty. It was not the first time I had been distracted from my duty, nor would it be the last. Looking back now, remembering my stint in the military, I see myself, a soldier short on commitment, easily distracted. A young man at war with little interest in it beyond self-preservation, the company of a mate or two, and the odd recreational enjoyment, usually alcohol induced. Physically, tall, some athleticism, but with something lacking, a solidness. The face promised no more than average intelligence, with some firmness of purpose missing there too, despite a hint of youthful arrogance.
Like thousands of others during the years of the Vietnam War, I was a conscript, called up to serve at twenty years old. Some three years before that I had started a university degree, and dropped out soon after. At the time of my call-up I had not re-enrolled. And now, at twenty-two, graduating was still years away. It required maturity, and that was not me. Looking back, so I see myself.
I told the garbage men it was time to go. They looked at me in an innocent and surprised way as though I was cutting short a vitally important assignment and I noticed a newly painted desk and a filing cabinet disappearing onto the back of the truck.
“Heh!” I said. “No! No more! Fini! Get those off.”
The boss of the gang offered me money again. I adopted the pose of the morally outraged, wished I’d never taken any in the first place. He explained that they were late and would drop me at the Signals hill near the camp’s front entrance, some distance from my unit.
I wasn’t having it. “Back to transport compound.” I stepped up onto the running-board. The breeze in my face was a relief but the truck stank, the job stank and I couldn’t wait to be out of it. And out, as much as was possible, of the heat and humidity which sat like a heavy coat on a hot day, building to afternoon rainfall.
We swung out of the compound and I watched the low, flat building from which the girl had emerged until it was out of sight. But she was gone.
A grey powdered road divided the dirtied sandhills of the Australian Logistic Support base near the coastal town of Vung Tau where some five or six years earlier, army command had selected the flatter sections, between the sand-hills and on top of the bigger ones, for sandbag-reinforced huts where men and equipment were housed. The hilly terrain offered some variation to the usual flat monotony of military camps the world over, but if any tropical appeal once graced that part of the country’s southern shoreline it was lost now to the business of war, although that far south, in those later stages, we felt relatively safe. Army-green ambulance vans, red cross on white patch on their sides, lined up alongside the hospital, and heavy earth-moving equipment in the engineers’ compound, all spoke of the camp’s support role. Most of the fighting units were camped at Nui Dat amongst the rubber tree plantations some thirty kilometres to the north.
The garbage truck, a rusted relic of World War 2 parts and cast-offs, lurched in the hot dust, gears crunching, seemed to groan of man’s treatment of his beasts of burden. With one hand firmly gripping the passenger side door, I checked the button on my hip pocket with the other, and the thick bundle of notes inside. It was all piastre, the local currency, and the equivalent of about sixteen US dollars, enough to get you drunk every night for a week at the ORs’ canteen. There wasn’t much else for us to spend our money on. If you liked to live more dangerously it could get you several drinks in town, and the company of a bargirl.
But my new wealth sat uneasily. Perhaps the sight of that girl, western, pale-faced in her olive-green overalls, reminded me of a world where corruption wasn’t so commonplace, or at least not so obvious; a place where I had nothing to do with local garbage collectors desperate to make a few American dollars.
But they had practically stuffed those soiled piastre into my pockets. So I told myself. And I’d been pretty good, considering. I saved a few pairs of boots left in hut doorways, washing drying on makeshift lines, a bundle of tarpaulins, crates of Coca Cola. A crate of beer at the back of the Transport Sergeants’ Mess had them all looking at me hopefully until I went and stood beside it.
At central admin a soldier came running after the truck to retrieve a pair of stereo speakers and I had to yell at the driver to stop. I managed to rescue a few copies of Playboy, which they all found very amusing, but they were fast and when their boss offered me 400 piastre for a ‘mistake’ with a pile of used tyres, and I accepted, they knew they had me. Their guard was corrupt.
As the truck moved away from where I stepped off near the Transport compound, feeling like I’d been more or less in control, I saw the crate of beer sitting on top of the load. The two younger ones who rode in the back waved, all smiles and ‘see you later, mate.’
In the shower then I used lots of soap. The stench of corruption, like the stench of garbage, clings and lingers. I would get rid of the money as soon as possible. There were risks in leaving camp alone to go into town but the convoy wouldn’t be back for hours and I had my ill-gotten booty to unload.
Blowfly was the only other driver in the hut as I got dressed. His job was to take the ‘wet’ garbage from our company mess to a dump across town, every day. Everybody else preferred convoy work, even though it took us outside the camp and beyond the town. But Blowfly never complained, and he did work a short day. I told him about my sighting inside the American compound. I wanted to tell someone. Our taciturn garbo glanced at me expressionlessly. “Yeh, I know. I see her sometimes when I go down that way. She’s better from a distance.”
Blowfly had no fear of town. He saw the same bargirl nearly every evening, spending the night and then turning up at the camp each day to work. He didn’t mix much, didn’t seem to need us, and I have no idea where he came from but I had heard him say that he wasn’t really looking forward to going home. The rest of us were counting the days, literally. Accused once of ‘turning nog’, Blowfly had shrugged casually, indulged in a proud smile. And on the subject of the American girl he was just as phlegmatic. “Everyone thinks she’s great, just because she’s a round-eye.”
I left it at that. There was no point. The man was prejudiced.
I went to town. Vung Tau. Fishing port and formerly a local beach retreat. That was pre-war, before the Americans came. Now, at its centre at least, a market place for the soldier on leave, catering to those of his needs he was less likely to write home about. Old women squatted on dirty sidewalks with baskets of pornographic photos and trinkets, including multi-coloured peace beads, peace signs and little metal cards engraved withfuck the army, born to kill, Vietnam sucks and the like, attached to leather necklaces.
The peace movement had reached the war zone, in glittering piles of these anti-war messages and flower-power paraphernalia. All in jest of course, the self-mocking curse of the ordinary soldier, but it didn’t say much for morale. Put your life on the line, soldier, so the toothless mama san squatting in the dust can go on selling messages that make a mockery of your service. Henry ‘Moll’ Mollineau, a driver from my hut, had one of the little slogan cards attached to his bush-hat withFuck it. Just fuck itinscribed on it, declaring his attitude wherever he went. Americans in particular liked to wear them around their necks with their peace beads and dog tags.
There must have been ordinary soldiers somewhere, with a belief in the cause, and ordinary locals with a genuine welcome in their hearts for visiting soldiers, and whatever they stood for. You just didn’t see any on t
he streets of downtown Vung Tau.
Girls spilled out of narrow, smoke-filled bars onto the hot, crowded streets, their western hairstyles, heavy make-up and tight mini-skirts accentuating their Asianness. “Heh, Uc dai loi. You want girl? Wanna good time, big boy? Ha, ha, ha.”
The Red Cherry Bar was bigger than most with a fully-charged, hard-core porno movie working away on the wall. The mama san had attempted to dress the place up with hot pink paint and mirrors, which only added to the cheapness but also achieved a kind of innocence. Anything done up that badly was screaming out for help.
“You wanna buy me Saigon tea, honey?” the girl on my lap whispered in my ear as she put my hand on her leg. We talked about nothing and she laughed at my stupid jokes as she squirmed around on my lap until I had bought enough Saigon tea to keep her popular with the mama san. “You want boom-boom now, honey?”
She had a baby in a crib in the corner of her little room and I had to wait while she took it away. The shabby, unpainted room and listening to the baby cry while she spoke to an older woman outside unnerved me, but she gave me a big smile when she returned and closed the door. I watched while she slid her slip of a dress over her hips.
“You have condom, honey?”
I showed her. She came to me where I sat on the bed, still smiling, as though we were real lovers and she hadn’t a care in the world. And then she was straddling me, sighing on her downward movements, coaxing me into quicker action, to sate the lust, to please, always to please, to assuage whatever frustrations had brought the soldier to her. For she was my lover. Her final cry was expertly timed and accompanied, I realised, by another cry, the cry of a baby somewhere in the distance.
She knelt on the bed after, brushing her hair and watching me peel off a pile of piastre.
“You have US dollar?” I shook my head. I had some US military currency but wanted to unload the local stuff from the day’s business. “You be my boyfriend, honey?”
I took a proper look at her for the first time. She was pretty and friendly, a little older than most bargirls, and she might have been more anxious than others to introduce a little regularity, even security, into her life because of the baby. But I mumbled something meaningless and handed her the crumpled wad of piastre.
The air outside in the noisy street was thick with the threat of the evening’s downpour. I caught a Lambretta back to the camp before darkness arrived as suddenly as it would and had to share the noisy little three-wheeled cab with a group of five or six women and a brood of chickens cooped in a cage at one woman’s feet. They were smiling shyly but when one woman spoke they all laughed.
I arrived in camp as the convoy was entering the compound and hurried to the shower block to beat the rush. I was glad I did. A glance in the mirror showed that my left earlobe was red with lipstick. I managed to wash it off just as the first rowdy, dust-covered drivers entered the shower hut. Cleansed of my sins and red evidence thereof, I wandered back to the lines in thongs and a towel. My hut was a hubbub of disrobing drivers.
“Did you go into town?” Tony Carmody asked. He sat on his bunk pulling off his boots. Tony had been to town once only, and then just for a look. A school teacher from Melbourne, he had a fiancée and was living for the day of their wedding soon after he got back home. He wrote her a letter every day, at least a couple of pages. “And how much did you make on garbage duty? They reckon Daniels made twenty dollars. Slipped ‘em a crate of booze.”
I told him about my day, my attempts to keep grasping brown hands off army property and personal belongings, my struggle to refuse dirty money, my eventual capitulation.
At which he looked unmoved. Tony Carmody had this infuriating maturity and integrity about him. On the day he did his garbage duty he took none of their money, held to his principles, in the face of all those smiling exhortations from the foreman garbage collector, the man in charge, distinguishable from his barefoot crew by a tattered American army cap, plastic sandals and a pocket full of piastre.
Tony’s maturity sometimes left me feeling envious. A fully qualified professional at twenty-two, his life looked sorted, at least on course. He was a reminder to me that my life’s plans were not nearly as settled. It was comforting to know that an office job with an insurance company was waiting for me back home in Brisbane, to be taken up again when my national service was done, but the job itself held no great attraction.
I decided to change the subject. “How’s the Dat?”
“Wonderful.” He tossed a boot under his bunk. “Wonderful because it’s a good reminder of how lucky we are to be living down here in slack old Vungers.”
Outside there was a rumble of thunder and the sky was now quite dark. Tony lay back on his bunk. Thin lines of dirt had settled in the creases of his neck. He had his eyes closed. “Fancy a beer?” He asked. “When I’ve had a shower?”
“What an excellent idea. And I can tell you about my big discovery of the day.”
“What?”
“A girl of the round-eye variety.”
He looked at me. “Down in the American compound? I know. Blowfly reckons she’s better from a distance.”
By the time he got back from the showers the rain had started and we had to make a run for the canteen hut.