Smoky Joe's Cafe by Bryce Courtenay Read Free Book Online

didn’t want a bar of them or the parade.
    Shorty’s not quite finished yet, despite the applause that tells him we know the rest. He looks at Gazza and Bongface. ‘Yeah, you’re dead right. They were telling us that what we done and what we’d been through meant bugger all. “Go home, little fella, have a good night’s sleep and forget you ever went to Vietnam and fought with our good friends, the Yanks. Mind you, they’re still our good friends, ‘All the way with LBJ’ but just don’t talk about it. Okay? Now bugger off, soldier.”
    â€˜I know we weren’t alone in this. The big brush-off. The brothers in America copped the same treatment as us and they’re suffering from all the same problems
Vietnam caused. They’ve got the same kind of shit-for-brains leaders. What pisses me off is the politicians who started it all and then ran for cover and Veterans Affairs and the RSL who treated us like we’d disgraced the colours, that we’d let the fighting tradition of Australia down.’
    â€˜Yeah, remember when some bastard reporter writes in the
Sydney Morning Herald
,’ Ocker now says, ‘how we were issued with American rations and served hot three-course meals delivered by chopper when we were out on patrol? Gordon flamin’ Blow, or whatever that Frog who does French cooking is called. Turkey and jello, canned fruit, chocolate, cookies and Coke. How we was livin’ in the lap of luxury, about the soft war for dolly birds that we’re fighting in! I’d like to have found that bastard and taken him and his typewriter into the jungle for a couple of weeks! Make the bloody idjit eat his words!’
    â€˜Jesus, yes! Them Yank ration packs,’ Animal shouts, missing the whole point, ‘They was bloody good!’
    Animal was the only one who would carry the Yank rations intact, the rest of us would get rid of at least half the stuff in them. They weighed a bloody ton, about three times as much as our own rations. One Yank
ration meal was more than our own rations for the entire day. When you went out on patrol your pack and gear weighed 80 pounds, we’d even cut off the handle of our toothbrushes, squeeze half the toothpaste out the tube, anything to keep the weight down. You carried nothing you didn’t have to, in the heat it was much better to eat less than carry more.
    Animal’s got his name because he’ll eat and drink anything and throw up and start all over again and, as well, make a serious attempt to screw every bar girl in Vietnam.
    Here’s an Animal joke he tells everyone he meets: ‘Vietnam is a place where a Nog in black pyjamas carries two buckets of shit across his shoulders using one stick and then uses two sticks to eat a bowl of shit.’ See what I mean?
    Macca now comes in. ‘Christ, yes, I remember I once got one o’ them Chinese fortune cookies in my Yank rations and I break it open and feed the crumbs to the chomper ants and read me fortune on this slip of paper inside. “Your ship of life will always sail in calm, contented waters, romance will come your way by the next full moon.” We’re in the second day of a three-week operation in the jungle, it’s full moon in two nights and just after sunset on the night of the full
moon, we walk into a group of Viet Cong strolling along the river and I reckon I’ve got a choice; I can fuck Charlie and find true romance under the light of the moon or sink the ship of contentment and shoot the bastard who’s shooting at me and get some real satisfaction.’
    Rations, yes, it’s true, we sometimes used American rations and they were better than our own, which wouldn’t have been too hard. But here’s the first thing most people don’t understand about us and the Americans. Though we fought in the same war, we didn’t fight in the same areas. We had our own area of operation to fight in, us