The Little Digger

The Little Digger

‘Incoming, incoming! Geddown yuh muthafuckas!’

Nah, scrub that. Aussies may have aped the Yanks in most things, but we never used that sort of slang.

‘Aped’. That’s good, man.

Try ‘Incoming, incoming, watch y’heads!’

Still wrong.

Why? Because ‘Incoming!’ was about all you could get out before they hit and anyway no one needed to be told what to do. And that’s only for the mortars. Rockets gave you no time. Inaccurate but terrifying. Or not terrifying, if you like, because it all happened before you could take any evasive action (read jump into the nearest hole.)

Nobody on patrol shouted warnings about the AK-47s, either. Hours of nothing, then a noise like, well, like the first scene in Saving Private Ryan. Forward scout goes down followed by the guy next to you and you’re eating dirt before the front part of your brain even starts to consider the best option. Because the reptilian part, the bit we’ve had since we crawled out of the swamps, the bit that saves us more times a day than our ego likes to admit, has already sized up the situation and proceeded to take the action most likely to save our precious genes.

Digger? Don’t make me laugh. Trained together maybe, but we dug to stay alive, not to be ‘mates’. We were just doing a job. Or thought we were. Underpaid, under-motivated and preferably underground. A lot of us ended up permanently underground.

OK, OK, so we only lost five hundred or so and the Yanks wasted 58,000 of their guys. But, Christ, you should have seen them crashing through the bush noisy as fuck looking for a battle. Under orders to keep the body count up and their President in office. ‘Westie’s Warriors’ we called the poor bastards. We were attached to a Yank outfit when we first got to ’Nam but it wasn’t long before we did our own patrolling, thank you very much.

Peaceful penetration was our motto, in the boonies and downtown. The idea was to do your bit very quietly and try to avoid any contact with Charlie then get choppered back to base and, well, try your luck down in Vungers, upstairs over Mama’s Place or the Blue Saturday. What’s the point of killing other twenty-year olds? You could fuck up their country quite efficiently merely by making Vietnam a giant black market and smack warehouse, thus compounding the corruption of their own government.

And all those bastards.

Oh, I know you only read about American-Vietnamese children, but believe me, there are plenty of half Aussie kids out there. Well no longer kids, more like displaced persons. Disowned by Oz and sneered at by the locals. Probably with kids of their own by now, freckle-faced, I wouldn’t wonder. Viets are quite good at wrestling. Perhaps one of them could get on the Australian Olympic team. Flyweight, of course. God knows they qualify by birth.

And it really did happen. Back a bit Joe used to come for a chat every now and then. He told me that our old colonel went over to ’Nam a few years ago and returned with this eighteen year old breed who he then proceeded to introduce to his wife as ‘our new son’.

From a real lady, too. Educated. A bit higher class than you, my dear.

Didn’t mention that bit, of course, or the fact that he’d deserted the pregnant beauty when he scuttled back to Oz well ahead of his troops (important staff consultations, don’t you know). The opposition had fixed her good when they took over. Dunno how the kid survived—must have taken a lot of old money. Obviously played on his mind but.

Our C.O.

Always was a fuckwit.

Joe said the wife took all of two days to get out and organise the legals. The boy pissed off quick smart and now runs a slope gang in endless turf wars out west Sydney way where the housing developments are infested by other ethnics—Wops, Lebs, Afghans, Croats, Chinese. And now, I suppose, ragheads. Well, some sort of Allah-lover or other.

The colonel (rtd) lives alone on the coast in what you might call genteel poverty.

But whores don’t get pregnant, you reckon? Bullshit! They did usually get fixed up though. That’s not what I’m talking about. It was the country girls, in the city for what they could get, who would come to the party for a fifteen cent pack of smokes. Christ, out in the villages they’d go down on you if you merely threatened their old granny. And old granny or even mama would offer you their twelve-year-old just so you wouldn’t cause trouble. No menfolk there; when they knew you were around, and they always did, they’d piss off into the bush to join their VC mates. Believe me, if you haven’t had a kid—boy or girl—you haven’t lived. Jesus, we were kids ourselves, weren’t we, it was just a bit of fun and anyway we were thousands of miles from home, protecting the slopes from their own people.

They owed us.

But you had to be careful. If you picked the wrong side the little darling might well have a grenade under her pillow. They hated us that much. It happened once in my platoon and, in as much as I had a mate, well, he was the one that got fragged. Yeah, it was a fragmentation grenade, underneath the little bitch’s bedroll at waist level. So no more fun for Blue. In fact, no more Blue—not much at all left between his knees and his chest. Came and went with a big bang, did old Blue.

We had to do a bit of a My Lai there with our zippos, surreptitious like, to hide the evidence. The lewie, for his own protection, wrote Blue up as a hero and sure enough he got a posthumous gong. I’ll bet his old Mum and Dad have it framed, probably hanging up over the TV. Every picture tells a story—but not always the right one.

Me? Well, let me tell you about it. Australia’s single real battle—Long Tan—is the one they like to talk about here, the beer bellies in the RSL bars, whingeing and moaning, throwing down their schooners of beer before they go home to do the same to the missus. But there were plenty of little Long Tans. They’re the ones you don’t get to read about in the Australian papers on every August 18th. These were where either we got done over or we terminated with extreme prejudice a few—sometimes a fair few—black pyjamas. Their side or ours. Hell, they all looked like the enemy anyway.

We lived by one motto, ‘a live slope will kill you, an injured slope can kill you; only the dead ones are safe’. And that meant men, women, kids and babies. And only if you actually witnessed the killing. Get too near a dead VC found on the track and chances were that some cunt had wired a couple of kilos of explosive under the body. Mick went that way. We shrugged. If you go cutting off fingers to get at the gold you got to accept that one day you’ll fuck up. Stands to reason.

Sgt Phillips retrieved the necklace with fifty or so rings on it (Mick’d taken the precaution of using steel wire) but we didn’t find much of the corporal himself. Unless you include intestines hanging ten feet up in the tree and his head, giggle hat still on, a few yards down the track. We buried the head and left the guts. They wouldn’t last more than an hour. Tree-rats or snakes, you see. Another one gone, courtesy a claymore. Or at least, that’s what our report said.

The rings? Booty, mate.

The medical supervisor doing the introductions gazed thoughtfully into the cot. His new intern, young, swallowed hard and clenched his fists in the pockets of his pristine white ward coat.

Dear God! It’s a papoose!

The supervisor slipped into his lecture mode.

‘This is Johnno. He wasn’t very big to begin with. They’d sent him out to be a tunnel rat. You know, ferret out the VC in the complexes they’d dug underground. Had to be small, you see, because the tunnels were built for Viet sized soldiers, not your average Aussie. But Johnno here is a bit smaller still now.

‘He lies awake for twelve hours then sleeps the other twelve. No word out of him since he arrived here in 1970, or any indication that he hears you. We had a fiftieth birthday party for him a couple of years or so back. Wasn’t much fun, though. His people used to visit with him but they gave up a long time ago. Perhaps they died.

‘That’s why we’re an annex of The Royal, well away from the hospital proper and not all that publicised. People really don’t want to see the Johnnos of this world. And don’t forget there are annexes like this all over the place. They house the frightfulness, and I use the term deliberately, that comes from war. Not everyone gets away with a skin wound or even the loss of only one limb.

‘We have the half-headed ones, the mangled ones, those with no—and I mean no—stomach or even sometimes intestines. They’re just about robots, of course. And they all seem to live such a long time, too long for their relatives usually. Eventually even Mum and Dad simply stop visiting.’

The new doctor looked down at the truncated body in its child’s cot. He saw two very blue eyes looking at him, then through him, with rather less intelligence than that displayed by his red setter at home.

‘I wonder,’ mused the supervisor, ‘what he thinks about. I doubt he thinks at all.’ He raised his voice. ‘Nurse! I think Johnno needs changing, he stinks.’

Two tours I did, mate. Christ knows why. Well, that’s not really true, is it? Twenty and a half I was when we walked off the aircraft in  ’68. Twenty and a half. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, never screwed around. Could say I was a virgin.

Well, it didn’t take long to change all that. Only the Yanks went on patrol armed with guns and joints? Bullshit! OK, so we kept our celebrations until we were safely inbound to base, but the choppers and the APCs must have smelled pretty strong by the time we got back. Hell, they stank of maryjane before you even got in and it was a standing joke amongst the pilots and drivers that the ambient atmosphere was degrading their level of competence.

So what. Another day not dead.

No, I volunteered to go back for the ancillary comforts. Don’t like one little sweetie? Get another, Christ knows it was easy enough. Me and Mick—you know, the one with the necklace—ran this tiny bit of a black market. We had a flat downtown and we sure put a few shows on there. My best night was when I fucked Li An, her mother and her daughter in sequence and in full view. Of course, they were mainlining by then and would eat your shit for a fix. You could have cut the pot smoke with a knife and a great time was had by one and all, though I must say that if at thirteen the pussy is tight and juicy, then mama-san’s at fifty-odd was just that bit ripe. But what the hell, they loved it and anyway we were saving them, weren’t we?

If I had a knife right now I’d cut my throat, if I had hands.

If they didn’t make me eat I’d starve myself to death.

If I were a Nip I’d probably swallow my tongue. They do that, don’t they?

Oh, the horror, the horror!

Let’s face it, I’m a bastard, a derelict, child-killing, gang-banging bastard of a grunt, whose cock rules his life. Ruled, I should say, because I suppose I should tell you how I ended up here.

Got caught on the job, didn’t I? Chris, Bardo and me had got separated from the rest of the patrol. That wasn’t difficult. The bush was thick and so were we. But we did stumble across a few hoochies with the usual cowering females. The men, as usual, had all buggered off long before. Bardo wasn’t one to miss an opportunity, so he made the womenfolk a proposition that they couldn’t really refuse.

One at a time we did it. After all, someone has to stand guard. I was just easing myself into this little darling—her squeals and the fact I needed to give her a couple of slaps told me it had to be the first time—when I heard just two shots.

Next thing I knew the black pyjama brigade were in the hoochie and I was history.

About the only thing they didn’t do, and it was only because the dust-off was already thrashing overhead in response to the patrol’s "Mayday", was cut off me old feller.

‘You will live’ was all they said but before they disappeared into the bush four swings with an axe fixed me good.

They tell me the chopper, Gatling whining, touched down in seconds. Me, I was out of it. They never found me arms and legs. Next thing I know I’m lying in an air-conditioned room looking at a white ceiling. I’ve been here ever since.

And to tell the honest truth, in all that time I’ve never felt like talking to no one, family or no.

The two doctors lingered at the foot of the cot.

‘One gets used to them.’ The supervisor’s sigh was beautifully and professionally sculptured. ‘Johnno here will probably be with us for a long time yet. We have these, our colleagues have the loonies—different wounds, same problem. The powers that be decided on balance Johnno was a physical not a mental, so here he is.’ He leaned over into the unfocused gaze. ‘We both arrived here on the same day didn’t we, Johnno, so we’re old friends, right?’

‘Story is he stepped on a chicom jumper on his very first patrol straight out of camp. Only been in Vietnam for about ten days and never even set eyes on the opposition. Explosives are funny things. Legs gone, arms gone, everything else OK. Except for his brain, that is. That is, I think that is.  EEGs are normal, but he certainly ain’t.’ He permitted himself a slight, tight smile at the vulgarism.  ‘He’s gone downhill recently, if that’s possible. Ever since his mate in the next bed died. He was an old sweat, a two-tour infantryman who took part of a mortar round and lost most of his intestines.

‘He would talk and talk to Johnno. Didn’t care that there was no reply. OK for us—live in psychotherapist, so to speak. Didn’t do much good, though. I doubt that Johnno’s moved on from what he was, a twenty-year-old conscript. Innocent, I should think, and not over-endowed with street smarts.’

With another small and humourless smile the supervisor turned away. For him it was nearly over. Soon he would retire. God knows it couldn’t come soon enough; he was tired, tired of it all and it took all his willpower to drag himself through each depressing day. The object of their discussion would remain in the cot until it drew its last breath, years from now.

But there were plenty of other Johnnos to see and he’d long ago found out that a brutal introduction was the most efficient way to identify those doctors who might make valuable members of staff. That is, stay on. After all, there’s always a war somewhere and he dreaded the arrival of Australian casualties out of Iraq or Afghanistan. Pollies never learn.

‘You have to understand we don’t get too many successes here..,’ he paused, weighing his words,’…unless ‘success’ is merely longevity and living with the what might have been.’

Right on, doc! And my name’s Henry bloody Kissinger.