War Baby by Colin Falconer Read Free Book Online Page B

ass.’ Ryan took a long swallow of gin and sighed. He fished out the piece of lemon and ate it whole. ‘You can always go back home, Spider.’
    ‘I don’t have the money for the ticket. Even if I did, I wouldn’t go.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘There’s nothing to go back to.’
    ‘So, what’s the problem?’
    He heard a woman laughing by the swimming pool, the silky splash of water. Impossible to imagine that a few miles away men were screaming and dying.
    ‘You thought it was going to be fun?’
    Webb lowered his voice. ‘I was scared.’
    ‘I remember the first time I got caught in a firelight. Scared shitless . Told myself if I got out of it, I was never going back again. But it’s like falling off a horse. You got to force yourself to get back in the saddle.’
    ‘I don’t think I can do it.’
    ‘You don’t have a choice.’ He studied Webb with frank, blue eyes, as if he were seeing him for the first time. ‘You’re a desperate little bastard. You’ll do anything to break out of the mold, won’t you?’
    Webb looked away, over the lawns.
    ‘You know how I know that? Because you’re like me.’
    ‘I don’t have your guts.’
    ‘That’s not what I heard. There was this nurse at Bien Hoa, told me how you ran back to the medevac when it caught fire and pulled out some lieutenant with a head wound. Now I couldn’t have done that. Not unless there was a picture in it.’ He finished his drink, massaged his injured shoulder. ‘It’s not a question of balls. Your trouble is, you want to be a journo and you want to be squeaky clean. You don’t want the grunts seeing you take snaps of dead bodies, them telling you how you’re a bloody parasite. But you know what, they’re happy enough to have you up there with them when they’re in a contact. If they die they feel like at least it’s not for some anonymous shitfight no one will ever see or hear about. Understand?’
    Webb was not sure he did understand.
    ‘Like you said, I promised myself I’d never go back out there.’
    ‘You can always go home. I’ll lend you the cash, if that’s the problem. It’s up to you, Spider. It’s up to you.’
     
    * * *
     
    The next day Ryan arrived at the orphanage with two cartons containing medicines, soap and tinned food. Soeur Marie , the old French nun, opened the gate. A few days later he went back, and the old nun was there once more.
    He asked for Soeur Odile and was told she was at her prayers.
    He had spent a week’s retainer on food and medicine and he was getting nowhere. He would have to try another way.

Chapter 6
     
    The morning after his conversation with Ryan at the Cercle Sportif , Webb hitched a ride on a Huey and went out with a Marine patrol in the Delta. The company made one light contact and Webb found, to his surprise, that this time he felt quite calm, and was even able to run off several frames of the action. He got the shakes again afterwards, but not as bad as the first time.
    When he got back to Saigon that afternoon he developed his film in the AP darkroom, but none of it was usable. But as he walked back down the Rue Pasteur, he felt a curious sense of accomplishment. Ryan was right, it was like falling off a horse. You just had to get back in the saddle.
    He spent the next few weeks slogging through bone-sore days filled with adrenalin, sweat and ochre dirt, building a folio of stark film and sweat-crinkled notebooks crammed with unreadable notes and impressions. He surfed on a cocktail of pills and cigarettes, bennies to wake you up, Seconal to help you sleep, opium to let you unwind.
    He hitched choppers to the Delta, slogging through paddy fields and leech-infested streams with the 25th, or rose before dawn to catch the first flight out to Danang. He slept overnight at the Press Centre, with its unmade single beds, dirty sheets, beer cans and cigarette butts littering the floor; out to Dong Ha next morning and then a Marines supply chopper to one of the field units.
    He