Don't Cry For the Brave Read online

  “She said her dress was torn off,” I said.

  “She couldn’t say she’d taken it off, could she? And she nearly didn’t get her bucks. That’s what I said to her afterwards, when I was rescuing my jacket. She hadn’t got any organisation. Let me handle it, I said. We’ll have a clean, well-run establishment. We talked it over. She and a couple of others were willing to turn a trick or two.”

  “You’re pimping for them?”

  “Ugly word, Bob. The girls have rooms, somebody to arrange customers, and somebody to keep an eye on them in case anybody gets rough. It’s a public service. Nobody’s worrying about lights out tonight. It’s time to be happy. Tomorrow is hell.”

  I had the hot impact of whiskey in my guts, smoking up through my lungs and throat. I wished the pair goodnight and decided to go to the mess bar.

  A few officers were left haunting the bar. Vaughan had returned unusually, brooding over a cognac. The General had retired. The Medical Officer was discussing the wounded man. “These wounds are never so bad when you clean them up. Stitched up like an old boot. Disfigurement? Nasty scars but nothing compared with the work of fragments of a landmine or a grenade, eh?”

  The MO surveyed the plump fingers that had so nimbly stitched the old boot, and then picked up his glass and tossed it off. “You can’t imagine the advances surgery can make in a war zone. Cut and stitch. Lateral thinking. Save a life. Back home there’s a sodding lawyer with a writ for negligence leaning over your shoulder.”

  Those who were listening stared, unamused. Peter Weston, the Adjutant, came in and spoke to Vaughan. Vaughan said loudly, “Good work. Gentlemen, we’ve got the sonofabitch who committed the assault tonight. He’s under lock and key. I’ll deal with him tomorrow.” Vaughan fanned his wall-eyed grimace across the assembly. “Now, who’s for a game of cards?”

  *

  The four or five who agreed to play began to arrange seats around a table. Two decks of cards appeared. A green felt cloth was placed over the table. The players took seats, removing their stakes from their pockets and placing them on the table. The bartender placed chosen drinks at their elbows. The game began, that eminently private and unsocial circle of grunts, nods, sly eye movements and terms of art that is the game of poker. I remained on a bar stool, whiskey in hand, bored but still unnaturally alert, watching. It was nearly two o’clock when they declared the last hand.

  There were thirty dollars in the pot, which Vaughan opened with a bet of a hundred dollars. Everybody except Blake threw their cards in. Blake had to decide whether to pay a hundred dollars to see Vaughan’s cards, or even raise the bet.

  “See you,” Blake said, dropping a hundred dollar IOU on the pile. He spread his own cards without waiting: two pairs, aces and twos.

  The others whistled, but Vaughan looked exultant, a line of sweat shining on his upper lip. “Full house. A pair of jacks and three threes,” he said, throwing his cards face down into the discards.

  “Show,” the Medical Officer said, reaching over to grab the cards before they were shuffled into the pack.

  Vaughan was raking in his winnings with one hand, and reaching for the discards with the other. “What’s the matter with you?” he snarled. “You never played the hand!”

  There was a silence at the table. I could hear the bar steward gently arranging bottles behind the bar. The MO growled drunkenly, and reached out for Vaughan’s cards again. Blake’s hand came down on the MO’s wrist. Blake quickly drew all the cards together, face down, shuffled them briefly and laid them in the card box.

  14

  I walked down the road from the officers’ mess with Blake. The moon was high, chased by a few clouds. The stars had gone. Machinery was grinding in the foreground while the jungle breathed in the background. There were few lights on in the camp.

  “You didn’t press to look at Vaughan’s cards?” I asked.

  “He probably had the cards, Bob. Have you thought what would have happened if he didn’t have them? Our commander unmasked as a cheat. What would that do for morale?”

  I looked at him. Blake thought like that. The integrity of his commander was worth more than a hundred and thirty dollars.

  We were approaching the Quartermaster’s Store, which was still lit. A soldier came out and disappeared into the darkness.

  “Boyd’s still in business,” Blake said.

  We looked inside and Boyd saw us. “Guys, you’ve got time for a bit before you go home. Last customers, only seventy-five bucks. Blonde or brunette, take your pick.”

  “I’d like to make it a perfect day,” Blake said. “A fight, a drink and a fuck. Blonde for me.”

  “Come on, Bob,” Boyd said.

  “Not me. I’ll have a nightcap,” I said, sitting down and grabbing the whiskey bottle on the table. I had the stench of Kam Sung in my nostrils. What I wanted was oblivion; I would sort out my head tomorrow.

  Blake and Boyd went further into the hut and in a few minutes, when Boyd returned, he attempted persuasion again. I refused the offer but went on taking shots from Boyd’s bottle, talking stupidly, sitting with the chair propped up against the wall… until I passed out.

  *

  I drifted into consciousness slowly. At the end of the store, past the piles of shirts and jackets, tins of paint and the smell of rope, was a small sleeping compartment. An electric cord ran from the ceiling to a shaded bulb near the head of the narrow bunk bed. It threw harsh wedges of brightness into the room, leaving the rest in shadow. A head of dark hair shone under the light.

  “You’re the Loot who talked to me before the show,” the girl said with a grating laugh. Girl was the wrong word. In the light, she was a woman of thirty.

  “How did I get here,” I croaked.

  “Your friends dumped you.”

  She stood over me wearing a black bra and a red thong. Her eyelids were lowered, hiding the eyes; there was an odd touch of gentility in the inert face, but she was actually an abrasive, high-mileage whore. She bent over me. One breast slid out of the thin bra.

  “What’s your name, feller?” she asked.

  Without answering I sat up slowly, swung my legs to the floor, and fumbled for my trousers and boots, which had been dumped there.

  “You’re going? It’s all paid for. But put that on,” she said indicating the condom on the ammunition box by the bed. She pulled off her pants, slipped out of the bra and lay on the bed confidently. She put her hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me over towards her. I continued dressing and struggling for sobriety.

  “What did you say?” she asked tiredly, after a minute.

  “Nursing. The patients were too much for you?”

  “Did I tell you that?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “The things I say. Shit, it wasn’t the patients. It was me. Caught in bed with one.”

  “Did the guy mean anything to you?”

  “It was a woman.”

  Her arm had fallen away. She was on her back, in the past. “I hate bedroom confidences,” she declared.

  “Tonight at the hall didn’t worry you?”

  “Naah, I’m used to it.”

  “That’s rough company.”

  “I can look after myself. I don’t want a fuss, see? This job’s worth plenty to me. If AE knew I was making bucks on the side I’d be back in Hawaii so quick it wouldn’t be funny.”

  “We’ve arrested a guy.”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t want to know.”

  “You know the guy?”

  “I haven’t a clue. Look, I don’t want trouble. I don’t think we want this either.” She snapped the overhead light off. “Have we finished for the evening?” she giggled.

  “Let’s say you’ve earned your money, if that’s what you mean,” I said, pulling my boots on in the half-light.

  “No more work tonight,” she said sleepily.

  The reservoir of lust beneath my skin was low. Her body was hot, greasy with sweat, and stank of the men who had had her. I tr
ied to trace my way back to the morning, to yesterday, where I had lost the trail… A nerve vibrated in the back of my neck, causing a sharp pain. In the darkness, the eyes of the prisoners caught the light, terror-white…

  15

  I was awake, steaming, bell chimes dying inside my head. The sky, through the small window, a vat of molten lead; the air choked with whiskey, decaying vegetation. Capes and jackets hung on the walls, cramping the space.

  Blake and Boyd lay on the other two beds as naked as I was. Boyd was on his back, snoring, cast like a fat sheep, gut trembling. Blake’s face was hidden in the pillow; only his fair hair showed.

  I sat up, retrieved a pair of crumpled denims from the floor and wriggled into them. I put my bare feet into my boots, picked up a bowl, a towel and my toilet bag and went out the door. I yawned, stretched in the heat haze, and walked towards the showers. A few keen men were about. Two sergeants passed me, shaven and slick. I went into the empty washhouse. As the warm water from the shower streamed over my skin I could see the broken woman.

  I heard the tread of official boots and Peter Weston’s modulated tones. “Not ready yet, Bob? You may have to charge your man, Trask. There are two other suspects too. We’ll work out who’s responsible. The Colonel will hear the charges at ten-thirty.”

  “Vaughan’s being unreasonable. He’s got a lot of command problems. He wants somebody to vent his fury on.”

  Peter Weston said, “Look, we’ve always turned a blind eye to a bit of drinking in barracks, but if there’s going to be fighting and criminal violence we’ve got to show the men where they stand.”

  Weston was stiff, unremitting, neat as a cadet at military academy. I grunted a tardy approval into my towel. I saw my face in the shaving mirror. A road map. I rubbed the lines with my forefinger: laughter lines, sun lines, stress lines – not age, surely.

  “You look bloody awful, Bob. What were you drinking last night, kerosene?”

  I wondered why Weston was hanging around. I lathered my cheeks, heard the crash of the sea on a Maine beach and then smelt the rotten smell of the tunnel. Weston stamped around and came closer.

  “There’s something I want to see you about, Bob. It concerns this man Trask. He’s handed in a written report to Colonel Vaughan about an incident on patrol. Gone over your head. Killing of villagers. Murder.”

  I could glimpse Weston’s incredulous and worried face in the mirror. “Yeah?”

  “He names Blake as in charge, Nguyen the liaison officer, Blake’s sergeant Mills, who was killed, and two corporals. What do you know?”

  I continued shaving. What I should do had been turning uncomfortably inside me like a lump of indigestible meat. “I read the report.”

  “What are you or were you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened, Bob? Is this a smartass move by Trask to get involved in something which will take him outside the line of normal duty? You were there, for chrissake!”

  I continued scraping and avoided Weston’s urgent glance in the mirror.

  Weston waited a few moments. “Yeah, maybe you ought to keep quiet. We’ll take it a step at a time. Report to Vaughan’s office in an hour. I’ll see you there.”

  Weston marched into the light and I could hear him unleashing his frustration on two unlucky privates slouching on the road. He could be at his desk until 3am and yet prowling the lines at dawn to see that the men were smart and moving to schedule.

  *

  The others were awake when I returned to the hut. Blake, sitting cross-legged on his bunk, was using an electric shaver. Boyd was sitting up, his hands clasped around his temples. Both of them fixed me with red eyes.

  “Have a tasty piece of pussy last night?” Blake asked.

  “Thanks for picking up the tab,” I said, “but you could have saved yourself. I was juiced. She went to sleep. I staggered back here when I came to.”

  Boyd stiffened up, unbelieving. “You’re a wanker! We’ll get a refund.”

  “My girl had the hottest ass in Christendom,” Blake said. “What a great end to the day.” He shook his head, reliving the pleasure.

  I completed dressing; short-sleeved shirt, lightweight trousers, webbing belt. “I’ll get over to the lines to see how the liquor search is going.”

  “Pouring it out, that’s the heart-rending part,” Boyd said.

  “Vaughan comes up with some diabolical ideas,” I said.

  The men were on parade outside the huts when I arrived. They had been ordered to form three ranks outside as they were. One wit was naked. Dazed and groaning they stood in untidy ranks of T-shirts and underpants. The search details worked through the soldiers’ possessions in every hut, but as they became bored with the task, the tempo increased. Instead of being felt, kitbags were emptied on the floor, mattresses rooted up, clothes strewn about. Unsympathetic fingers plunged into every packet and pocket. Nests of bottles were dislodged from their caches and carried clinking into the daylight. The men watched wistfully as the pile of bottles increased: gin, whiskey, rum, vodka, cognac.

  “The liquor is forfeit,” the captain in charge announced, “and will be poured out now. If you had liquor in your possession we have a note of it and you will be charged.”

  With perverse grins the corporals began to open the bottles and pour the contents on the ground.

  A dispatch rider approached on a motorcycle. He followed the road rather than use the flat earth, which meant that he went two hundred yards past the parade, turned a right angle and came down our road like a child playing a game. Inaudible words with the captain followed.

  “Get on with it,” a sergeant said when the pouring slackened.

  “No,” the captain said, “the Colonel has decided that the rest of the liquor will be confiscated.”

  A muffled cheer broke out.

  “Silence! You’ll be charged just the same and you won’t get it back!” the captain shouted. “Dismiss!”

  “Fucking Army doesn’t know what it’s doing!” the captain said to me.

  16

  I strolled through the cookhouse supervising the C Company breakfast. I passed by black ovens with sausages swimming in vats of gravy, fried eggs by the hundred, the cooks in dirty white jackets tossing their pans, ignoring the intruder. As soon as I bent to look more closely at a platter of bacon or a tray of bread, the process required that it be snatched away. The mess room was an open-sided shed vibrating with the rattle of plates, curses and shouts. The lions were feeding and best left alone.

  A soldier poked a plate at me: a lonely half-sausage and a squirt of gravy.

  “A morning’s work on this, sir?”

  “Get another helping,” I replied, signalling the nearest steward.

  The steward dismissed the soldier with the gentle malice of authority. “No more. None left. Guys tucking into three and four.”

  “Get him something else. Fried eggs, bacon. Something.”

  “It’s not an à la carte restaurant, sir.”

  “Get it.”

  “He’s too late.”

  “Get it. That’s an order.”

  The steward slumped away to comply. The soldier remained looking at me with curious disbelief for a moment, and then resumed his seat with his cronies; they shared frowns, darting eyes, uncertain why the anticipated failure of their buddy’s request hadn’t happened.

  *

  I kept my appointment at Regimental HQ. Weston told me that Vaughan had not arrived that morning, and he assumed we were supposed to be at Vaughan’s quarters. We walked there. At the door we met a Vietnamese servant with a tray of tea; misunderstanding military protocol he gestured us to step inside. When we did, we realised that Vaughan was still in bed. The blinds were drawn; it was unusual. Vaughan was often about before reveille, although it had been a late and drunken night. The servant approached the bed, announced us and proffered the tea tray.

  “Whaaat?” Vaughan said, exploding upwards in the bedclothes and knocking th
e tray to the floor.

  The orderly scuffled on the floor picking up pieces of crockery. Vaughan watched with a screwed-up face and then shouted, “Get out!”

  “Reporting as ordered, sir,” Weston said.

  Vaughan never replied. He threw off the bedclothes and climbed out, hairy and spider-like in his pink pyjama pants. He pulled on a navy-blue spotted silk dressing gown, went over to the washstand and sluiced his face with water. He dried himself, puffing hoarsely, and turned his attention to the uniform laid out precisely on a chair.

  I looked around. Meticulous was the word. Hair brushes and bottles of lotion on the dresser, a clock in a leather case, books on a stool beside the bed, folded shirts and ties on a shelf, rows of shoes beneath. Though occupied scarcely twenty-four hours, it was the room of a finicky bachelor.

  Vaughan did not attempt to dress but combed the cropped grey hair on his head unnecessarily. At last he deigned to notice us. “Why are you here?”

  “I understood we were to meet and discuss this report about… an event in the field… on Mr Blake’s patrol,” Weston said, handing him a copy.

  Vaughan began to read without any reaction. “Trask says he handed you a copy, Mr McDade. What have you decided to do about it?”

  “I was still thinking about it when Peter told me you had a copy.”

  “Yes, you can leave it to me. You must realise, as I do, that this is a damned lie by a yellow commie sonofabitch who’d do anything to get out of the heat!” Vaughan’s eyes dulled as he appeared to contemplate the Regiment’s involvement in war-crime killings. “We’re not going to let this maggot even start a story like this, we’re going to squash him like a bug. My God, our lines overrun, a riot in front of the General, and now a fucking allegation of a massacre! The first thing the Army will say is, ‘Vaughan’s finished off the Third’.”

  Vaughan tore up the notes and dropped them in the trash can. “This isn’t going one inch further, gentlemen.”