Smoky Joe's Cafe Read online

  Shorty hops down from his chair and leaves the cafe and we start to get into the piss and argue about the merits of his surprising proposition. After a few minutes I stand up and bring the room to silence by shouting louder than the rest of the mob. I’m a bit pissed but I know what I’m saying. ‘Look, it’s not on, fellas. What Shorty’s proposed is serious.’ I stop and look about me. ‘We’re not the men we used to be and we’re not up against the provosts, the real cops will be onto us faster than you can wipe your arse one up, one down and one to polish. We have trouble enough keeping our own shit together, I for one, if the truth be known, couldn’t get a fuck in a brothel. I don’t want you blokes risking your freedom for me.’ I pause, ‘Wendy and me will manage somehow, but what Shorty’s proposing, well, it’s just not on, no way, Jose.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Killer Kowolski shouts. He’s ridden all the way from Sydney on his Harley and belongs to a bikie gang called ‘Vets from Hell’, which is painted on the back of his leather jacket. The gang is made up mostly of blokes who fought in Vietnam. ‘We gunna do it, Thommo, bugger yiz!’

  ‘Yeah, shit yes!’ everyone shouts and then Bong-face jumps on the table. He’s a skinny little runt but you wouldn’t want to pick him or have a blue with him. Before he joined the regular army he fought in Jimmy Sharman’s boxing troupe as a bantamweight, doing all the country shows. He’s accustomed to going into the ring with big bastards off the land who are being egged on by their mates to have a go at the little Abo. He don’t take no crap, no matter how big ‘n’ ugly his opponent is. Most Aborigines are more white-coloured than black these days, but Bongface looks like he’s almost a pure blood and, I know, he’s dead proud of the fact. When he smiles, his big white teeth take over his entire face and it makes you want to laugh, even if you’re on patrol in the jungle quietly shitting yourself.

  Most of his tribe are supposed to be able to track real good but Bongface grew up in Redfern and couldn’t find an elephant’s track in the snow. Maybe that’s exaggerating a bit ‘cause he’s a bloody good scout, but he ain’t exactly your didgeridoo-totin’ tribesman. Abos weren’t conscripted for Vietnam in the beginning, but like I said he’d volunteered and was a regular like Shorty. He has this sort of peripheral vision, something his kind is supposed to have and we don’t. Like almost being able to see out the back of your head. He was the scout in our platoon and more than once he got us out of serious trouble, seen some movement in his flank we wouldn’t have picked up, hit the deck and started firing. Being a scout is the shit job, you’re the first to die if anything goes wrong. A mine, a booby trap, sniper, ambush, he is the first to cop the lot. Bongface would smile, ‘I reckon the thing I’m most scared of is some dopey grunt from another battalion comin’ across me in the jungle, blasting me off the flamin’ planet thinking I’m a Nog.’

  I’m a section leader, that’s a corporal in the old army, and I gotta tell ya, I always felt a damn sight safer with the old Bongface up front having a gander before signalling us on.

  His nickname come from this Chinese bong he bought from a Yank who got it in Hong Kong on R and R. It became like his signature. He don’t drink so he took to dope. We’d cover for him when the provosts come snooping ‘n’ sniffin’. We’d be having a quiet grog or seven and he’d sit and pull contentedly on the mouthpiece of his bong. I remember how it had this red-enamel dragon decoration on the side and would be goin’ gurgle-gurgle as he pulled the smoke through it and along the rubber tube. You could see him relaxing, getting the shit out of his system. Sometimes he’d giggle to himself like he knew something we didn’t. Hence his name, ‘Bongface Andrews’.

  Well, he’s on the table and he’s holding a can of Coke up and says, ‘I’m the only bloke here that’s not pissed so I got the right to speak. Matter o’ fact, I ain’t even stoned.’ We all shut up right off. It ain’t like him to come forward, he’s normally real quiet and don’t say much at the best of times.

  It’s only now, with him holding the Coke, that I remember he’d never get on the piss. I mean he’d go along on a leave pass, but he’d drink Coke all night. Once, when I asked him why, he said, ‘Yeah, well, blackfellas can’t take the piss, Thommo, not like white-fellas, we ain’t built right for it.’

  ‘It’s just beer, mate. Yank piss, Noggies Noggin, couldn’t make a schoolgirl uncross her legs.’

  ‘Nah, Thommo, that stuff don’t work for us, it’s what’s destroying my people.’ Which, when you think about it, is a pretty amazing admission to make on his part.

  Now I look down at where he’s been sitting and see he has brought a dozen cans of Coke along. I feel ashamed, I should’ve remembered, there’s all the Coke he can drink and then some in the fridge. I should’ve told him to help himself, loaded him up for the duration. He can have a smoke too. I’ve got some top weed, though he’s probably got his own but is too shy to roll himself a joint now we’ve been parted a while. I can see he hasn’t brought his bong along. Typical of the little bugger, probably thought the party might go on a bit and the local gendarmes could poke a face in and we’d all be compromised.

  Funny that, hey, a bloke can get pissed as a newt, throw up on the pavement, go home and beat the shit out of his wife, so the neighbours have to call the cops. They turn up and put him to bed and persuade his missus not to lay charges, because basically he’s a good bloke and is on the committee of the RSL. Then everybody goes home and the cops write it all down as just another Saturday night domestic. On the other hand, smoke a little weed quietly in a corner, minding your own business, and it’s a drug arrest, a federal offence, you’re in the slammer with the key thrown away. I’m buggered if I can see how that works. Shorty says it’s because the government can’t get any tax from dope smoking.

  ‘Thommo, yiz full a shit,’ Bongface begins real polite. ‘Shorty’s right, we gotta do something.’ He brings on his big smile, ‘Maybe we’re no good at doing nothing much else, but we’re all experts on covering our arses. We know how to look out for each other. Being aware like of the unexpected and knowing what to do when the shit hits the fan.’

  ‘Dead right,’ Flow offers again. ‘Right on, mate.’

  Bongface goes on. ‘The government spent a lot of bread training us and we learned it all in Vietnam. If we can’t run somethin’ like this we couldn’t run a chook raffle in a pub full a drunks. Me personally, I’ve smoked every kind of weed you can name. I know where to get it, how to hide it, what’s the going rate, how to talk to the customer.’

  He shrugs his shoulders, ‘Now all we’ve got to learn is how to grow it.’ He turns to Spags Belgiovani, ‘Spags here and Shorty know how to do that, so we’ve got no problem there neither.’

  He gives us all his humungous smile, ‘If it were anything else, I agree, we’d be history, but this thing we can do. We can do this like we done contact drill. Plan everythin’ properly, react correctly in a crisis and take no chances.’

  Killer Kowolski butts in, ‘Shit yes, we can. We ain’t gunna break down and ‘fess up if a cop charges one of us with possession.’

  I can’t help meself and I think immediately of Flow, how he’d go with a big cop’s hairy fist around his throat. But everyone cheers as Bongface steps down from the table and I keep this thought to myself. I’m beginning to get a funny feeling in me gut and I’m worried the whole thing is rapidly getting out of hand.

  Then Shorty walks back into the cafe and he’s got this Nog in tow. Little bloke wearing a black suit and tie, like he works in a funeral parlour or something, white shirt, shiny shoes, snakeskin belt, hair lacquered down like a beetle’s back and one ear missing. Shaved right off at the skull like it’s been took for a trophy.

  ‘Jesus, look what the cat brought in,’ I hear Ocker whisper beside me.

  ‘Holy shit!’ It’s Macca t’other side a me. Then we’re all too gobsmacked to say anything more.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Shorty announces, ‘this is Nam Tran, he’s a Vietnamese migrant and ex-Nog. Er, I mean, NVA Area Commander.’ H
e grins, putting his hand on the man’s shoulder like they’re buddies. Standing like that, Shorty’s nearly twice the width but no taller than this little Asian.

  ‘Nam Tran here sort of slipped through the immigration when no one was looking,’ Shorty adds. ‘Him, and several of his mates and their families, live in Cabramatta, in Sydney. Now him and his mob also feel a tad aggro about Agent Orange, them being the unwilling victims thereof as well. Nam Tran here wants in. Wants to come on side. His people in Vietnam are still copping the shit from AO and all the herbicides we sprayed on them. Most of the Vietnamese migrants here are having trouble just like us. Back home one in three births has a bad deformity. They’ve got kids in glass jars in the hospitals with two heads.’ He looks around, fixing his eyes on each of us in turn. ‘Whaddaya say, fellas?’

  Well, there’s a bit of discussion, associating with the enemy and so on and so forth, but we’re all so completely took by surprise that soon enough everybody is nodding agreement. We all know Shorty doesn’t do things impulsively, he must have done his homework and checked the little Noggie out. Now he grins, ‘See, I told ya, Thommo, “The Dirty Dozen”.’ He looks around and says, ‘There’s a briefing tomorrow arvo, no more talk tonight. Tonight, gentlemen, we party . . . and if I may be permitted to say so, some of the brothers are missing, but it’s bloody nice to see all yer ugly mugs again.’

  ‘Christ, what am I going to tell Wendy,’ I think to myself. She ain’t gunna like this one little bit.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As the night moved on a bit and we’d each had a beer or ten, the grog eventually got the better of us and we started to talk about the war. How it was.

  Nam Tran’s pulled up a chair and soon enough has a tinnie in his hand. He speaks pretty good English for a Noggie and we kind of forget he isn’t one of us, that he’s the one who’d been trying to kill us not that long ago.

  Funny that, I don’t know how it works, but it’s like you’ve shared something no one else can understand, so when it’s all over, you and the enemy, you’re sort of, well, like brothers in arms?

  Once the blokes reckoned they were with mates who knew what they were talking about, all the stuff you couldn’t tell your family starts to come out. The point is, most vets find it bloody hard to make civilian friends, some never do. They develop what is known as the ‘thousand-yard stare’, looking into the distance with vacant eyes as though not wanting to engage. Which is true enough.

  First the conversation goes mostly for laughs, the funny stuff, then later, when the grog has taken a hold, some of the other stuff that is not so funny, the shit, starts to come out.

  ‘You know what really pisses me off?’ Killer Kowol-ski starts off, ‘The flamin’ movies. People think Vietnam was like the Yank movies.’

  ‘Hey yeah!’ several of us shout, ‘Right on!’

  Me too, but I’ve got a theory. Remember we didn’t actually fight with the Yanks and there is a reason why I reckon. They had a different kind of experience in Vietnam. We arrived trained as jungle fighters and they waged war with firepower, the more the better, and it seems it was the only way they knew how to fight. Shoot the crap out of everything, trees, mountains, buildings, tunnels, bridges, even rivers. I’m not saying they weren’t brave. In some ways they were a lot braver than us, they’d go into a fight and stay with it when we would withdraw from enemy contact, prepared to wait for better odds.

  Maybe it was the right way to fight in Eastern Europe, Russia and East Germany and places like that. But it was a shit of a way to fight in Vietnam, where you seldom came face to face with an enemy that would stand up and fight you front on, weapon for weapon, and so on. So, maybe their movies show some of that experience, the chaos and the firepower, not the long, hard slog in the deep j, hunting Noggie, which was our experience.

  I’ve given up trying to tell people to take no notice of the Yank movies when they’re talking about us. The problem with Vietnam was that it was a different kind of war, one that people wanted to forget. Then they learned this new Hollywood version all over again from going to The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and a bunch of other movies that nudged the truth aside for the sake of the box office.

  Lawsy, who’s about the smartest of us all, though maybe Shorty is up there with him, says, ‘Yeah, you know, scene one, open on a lot of spaced-out guys who come swooping down in choppers in a hot insertion to kill old men, women and children and waste their village, rock music blasting to the heavens. Then, on the way home, blow up an entire mountain and quickly dissolve to an underground shot as the contained therein start to collapse, Nogs inside dying in their hundreds. Then, if the movie director happens to remember, you might get an occasional scene in the next two hours when Charlie gets into a personal fight with the grunts on the ground, one of which always turns out to be a beautiful and defiant Nog chick, but not before the Ho Chi Minh trail has been completely eliminated.’ He gives a short laugh, ‘Beats the crap out of the truth.’

  ‘Or, the other way around,’ Gazza interrupts, ‘The women and kids kill the American warriors, who also occasionally die in a genuine ambush by Charlie.’

  This brings another laugh because it’s right on the money. Everyone agrees, what’s been shown on the movies is about 95 per cent pure bullshit. My theory is took no notice of, though I still reckon I’m halfway right.

  ‘Talk about birds,’ Spags now chips in, ‘I’m with this real good sort, a bit classy for me maybe, but I reckon I’m doing okay. I’ve bought her a couple of drinks, brandy alexanders, a few more of them and, no risk, she’ll be feeling no pain, the hem on her mini is creeping up near the promised land and I can see the V of her underpants.’

  ‘Knickers,’ Gazza says, ‘They’s knickers, mate.’

  ‘Not knickers! Jesus, that’s what yer mum wears,’ Flow, already half cut, says, ‘They’s panties, where you been all yer life?’

  ‘Lingerie,’ Lawsy says, ‘You said she was a classy bird.’

  ‘Leave off, will ya? Who’s telling this story?’ Spags protests. ‘I can see her pants, they’re red and made of shiny stuff and I’m in heaven. Could be the night. Buy her a bit of supper, bottle of good plonk. Never know what could happen in the big city.

  ‘Then some silly bastard in the pub shouts out, “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Spags?” He’s havin’ an argument with his mates.

  “Yeah,” I say, though I’m not real happy to be interrupted.

  “Did you blokes use Yank rifles?” he yells over at me.

  “SLRs and the Owen guns were made in Australia and the M16s were bought from the Yanks,” I tell him and turn back to this bird, so he’ll know I’m not that keen to be yesterday’s bloody hero.

  ‘She looks at me, pulls back on her stool and her neck jerks back like she’s just copped a straight left on the chin. “You were in Vietnam?” she asks, “Vietnam?” but she don’t wait for the answer. “You fought in Vietnam!” she says a third time, her baby blues stretched to the limit.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ! You should a seen her expression. Suddenly she’s gone off a me like a bucket of prawns left in the sun.

  “What about My Lai and that Lieutenant Calley?” she says. “You killed women and children! Little kids! Old women! Napalm!” She’s poking her finger into me chest.

  “Hey, wait on, that’s bullshit! We done no such thing! The Yanks done that one.”

  ‘She’s snarling at me now and she’s up off her seat and wiggles her bum so her mini comes down an inch or two and she’s tugging at it like she’s trying to cover her knees as she backs off.

  “Yes, you did, you bastard!” she snaps, then walks out the pub. I follow her, protesting, flappin’ me arms and shrugging me shoulders just like my old man. Blokes in the pub are turnin’ and looking at me, laughing, thinking I’m having a blue with me bird.

  ‘I get outside on the pavement and put my hand on her shoulder, “Wait on, Angela, you’re wrong, I ain’t ashamed of nothing I done
in Vietnam!”

  ‘She shakes my hand loose, then she does her block, “Piss off, you miserable bastard,” she says and walks away, leaving me standing there like a shag on a rock. All I can see is her beautiful arse as she clip-clops down the pavement in her high heels. I just blew ten bucks and I ain’t done nothing she’s said I done. Fuck, what was that about? I says to meself.’

  We laugh, but it’s not at Spags. We’ve all been through something like he’s just told. That certain look when you tell them you’re a Vietnam vet, one eyebrow slightly raised, chin forward, head to one side, then eyes looking downwards when you try to explain.

  I don’t know of any atrocities we committed. We didn’t waste villages to get a hard-on. I don’t know anyone who fought with me in Vietnam who knew of any incidents we ought to be ashamed of. Maybe they did things to captured prisoners at Nui Dat, but, if they did, I never heard about it.

  I do know Charlie had a few nice little habits he’d use on his own kind as well as on us. He’d bury village people alive if they didn’t pay their rice tax. He’d kill and torture when he thought information was being withheld.

  We saw the results so I know that much was true. You could never truly relax, they were always at it, acid in a bottle of Coke, snake venom injected into a mango, slivers of glass in ice cubes served in a drink, even bombs hidden on a baby’s body as a booby trap.

  Fair enough, I suppose. If our country was being invaded I expect we’d do the same. I heard of one time when the Yanks had gone into a village and inoculated the kids against smallpox and that night the Viet Cong came and chopped off the arms of every kid above the inoculation mark as a lesson to the villagers not to fraternise with the enemy.

  I didn’t see that, I admit, so it may be propaganda put out by our side. There were more rumours around than there were Vung Tau prostitutes and that’s rumour saturation. If you didn’t actually see something with your own eyes in Vietnam or hear it fair dinkum from one of your mates, you took no notice. If you heard it on the American Forces Radio, that was 100 per cent pure bullshit. But, as I said, atrocities are a part of war and practised by both sides and, far too often, the victims are women and kids. Vietnam was no different.