Brother Fish (18 page)

‘It's not shit, skipper, it's mud . . . I slipped in the paddy field,' I protest gratuitously.

Now they're all laughing. ‘That's what they all say,' John Lazarou says to further laughter. Needless to say I wasn't allowed to live it down, and henceforth the platoon's term for a visit to the latrines became ‘Goin' for a slip in the paddy'.

Later we hear that Charlie Green had deployed three other companies as well as us and effectively blocked the North Korean retreat. One hundred and fifty of the enemy are dead and 239 captured. In turn, we've got seven men wounded, no dead and so, you can imagine, we feel pretty damned pleased with ourselves.

The only down side is that now our platoon will have to hear the never-ending saga of John Lazarou's successful bayonet charge ‘Jab! Jab! Left then right! You should've heard them noggy bastards squealin'!' He's working up to the full Audie Murphy scenario where, after the first day's retelling he's already forgotten that Jason Matthews was at his side taking out three nogs to the two he managed to kill. Lazy didn't shut up about his warrior status till weeks later when it was announced that Private ‘Gunner' Angus McGregor had been awarded the Military Medal. I obtained a copy of the citation which I read out to Lazy to the joy of the rest of the platoon who'd gathered around to watch him squirm.

Yongu, 22 October 1950

Private McGregor was under heavy fire for two hours and displayed utter disregard for his personal safety. During the assault by his platoon he moved forward bayoneting and shooting a number of the enemy. Throughout the engagement his courage and determination were an inspiration to the younger, inexperienced men in his platoon.

By the way, we finally made contact with the lost 187th Airborne Regiment who, while not far away, had played no part in the battle we'd just won in the bid to rescue them. Which was probably a good thing – they'd had a torrid time and compared to us seemed like sixteen-year-old kids, though I imagine they'd done a fair bit of growing up over the past forty-eight hours and deserved to sit this one out. When it came to growing up, I guess I'd done a bit myself in the final three hours of the six years it had taken me to finally fire my rifle at a bona fide enemy and so earn my membership of the club.

CHAPTER FOUR

The First Winter

The day following the Battle of the Apple Orchard the skipper told us – that is, the four deserters – that we were going back to D Company. ‘They've copped a fair whack from the flu and are short of men, with no reinforcements coming through,' he explained. ‘I'll miss you – you were good for the young blokes, a steadying element.'

When we arrived back at our old company our reception this time was different. It seemed they'd heard about our deeds at Apple Orchard, which in translation had become somewhat exaggerated, Angus McGregor's glory having rubbed off on us as well. Unfortunately, so had the story of me shitting in my pants and blaming it on a slip in the rice paddy. It was hopeless trying to deny it, as the expression ‘Going for a slip in the paddy' had already been adopted, and I copped a fair bit of teasing. Still, with it came a new respect – the four of us had been in a big stoush and we'd covered ourselves in glory. Not quite mentioned in dispatches, but nevertheless pretty good and getting better with each telling.

I'm told that an adrenaline high settles down pretty quickly and your metabolism goes back to normal as soon as the stimulus is exhausted. All I can say is, it took two days for me to truly come down from the Battle of the Apple Orchard. One of the abnormal indications was that I was ravenous all the time, whereas, being a little bloke, my appetite has never been large. As a kid, Gloria would often comment that I ate like a bird. Unfortunately this craving for food coincided with a tucker crisis brought about, or so the skipper said, by our rapid advance towards the North Korea/China border where poor roads meant the supply system couldn't cope. This meant we were stuck with American B rations – tins of food designed to be cooked centrally and served hot to the troops. Which would have been okay if we'd been in one place long enough for the cooks to set up field kitchens. As it was, we had to eat our rations on the move.

Each of the oversized tins contained a single item: braised steak in one, carrots in another, potatoes in a third, peas in yet another so that, in the hands of an army cook, they could be turned into a meat, potatoes and two-veg dinner. But that's not what happened. The tins arrived at company headquarters, and each contained maybe five servings of something or other, but for some unknown reason they'd all lost their labels. At company headquarters they'd divide these anonymous tins into platoon lots, where they were again divided into section lots and then split and distributed, two tins to each weapon pit. So every two blokes would end up with ten servings in combination of something contained in two unlabelled cans. ‘You'll just have to share what you get amongst the other blokes in your platoon,' our sergeant declared unhelpfully.

But hungry soldiers are selfish buggers and the tucker lucky dip didn't work quite like that. If you copped a tin of braised steak and another of potatoes you'd won the lottery and ate like a veritable prince, with blokes lining up to swap generous portions of whatever they had in return for a tiny serve of meat and spuds from your five-star weapon-pit restaurant. But should you end up with five servings of boiled carrots and five of pickled cucumber you faced potential starvation. Which is what happened to me. In my ravenous after-battle state when I could have eaten a horse, our weapon pit, John ‘Lazy' Lazarou and myself, received a tin of beetroot and one of stewed tomatoes, both guaranteed to be non-negotiable items at any swap meet.

There never was a truer saying than ‘An army marches on its stomach'. The two days after the battle were less than memorable and I became thoroughly miserable. Beetroot and stewed tomato is one of the less gratifying combinations in the lexicon of edible food. It was a good thing I'd drawn Lazy as my partner in the pit, as sensitivity wasn't one of his more noticeable characteristics – he didn't seem to notice my bad humour. Moreover, he relished the beetroot and tomato combination, piling his tin plate high and to the edges and often having a second helping. ‘Makes you piss pink and shit red,' was his only comment.

However, on the third day on our way north the rations caught up with us and we were issued twenty-four-hour ration packs – one man's rations for a day and a vast improvement, I can tell you. But if the food improved, so did the enemy. The deeper we pushed into North Korea the better prepared they were. At Apple Orchard the enemy had been on the run, hungry, demoralised and lacking the determination needed for a sustained resistance. But now we met an entirely different opposition. These enemy nogs were well prepared for us. They'd marshalled more tanks and artillery and, more importantly, were determined to hold their ground. A man protecting his home and hearth is a far more determined foe than one fighting over neutral or impersonal territory. We, that is the Commonwealth Brigade, were leading the Allied army to the north with 3RAR in the very front and so could expect to take the full brunt of the enemy forces.

This proved to be the situation with our next encounter at the Battle of the Broken Bridge, my first experience of night fighting. This battle was for the high ground overlooking a vital crossing point on the Taeryong River. My platoon's part in the battle was to protect American engineers building a ford not far upstream from the crossing. I was at battalion headquarters waiting to guide signallers laying telephone cable to D Company headquarters. Across the river the battle was raging and they needed reinforcements. A group of us were hastily bundled in with a reserve platoon and sent across the river.

Fighting in the dark is an entirely different experience. Apart from the celestial pyrotechnics, their artillery and ours competing against a blistered night sky, I seemed to be firing at nothing substantial, at muzzle flashes, noises made by movement, the estimated source of the lines of a tracer bullet and shadowy figures that I half-suspected were imagined. But I need not have been concerned – by morning's light, when their attack was spent, around one hundred enemy dead lay outside our perimeter, though how many had been killed by small arms and how many by mortars and artillery was anyone's guess. Nevertheless, the North Koreans proved comprehensively that they were no pushover and we began to realise that MacArthur's easy path to victory was not to be taken for granted. These soldiers were not afraid to fight.

Broken Bridge was followed three days later by a battle at Chongju, a town some sixty miles from the Chinese border. The North Koreans were desperate to stop us and they'd dug their trenches deep with overhead cover. They'd also dug their tanks into the side of the hill, a good indication that they didn't intend to retreat any further and experience the humiliation of being forced to flee into China.

Charlie Green was proving to be a very effective battalion commander. There were several blokes in the company who'd fought in battles under diverse commanders, some going all the way back to the early part of the siege of Tobruk and the battle of El Alamein in World War II. They'd seen most of the leadership the army throws up and reckoned Charlie Green had ‘the touch'. The general consensus was that Green was a rare bird indeed, a leader who thought his way through a battle, adapting to the conditions and unafraid to improvise. At Apple Orchard he'd quickly realised that speed was the way to win – quick, decisive action with bayonets to overwhelm an already demoralised enemy. At the Battle of the Broken Bridge he'd taken the initiative and risked sending two companies across the river during the night to grab the high ground overlooking the crossing, knowing that if the enemy got there first it would be twice the fight to get them down off the top. Now, at Chongju, Charlie Green realised that the nogs were going to make a stand and so he put in four hours of air strikes and a heavy barrage of artillery fire before sending us in with platoons of American tanks.

They say you grow up quickly in combat and you know you're a competent soldier when you finally realise that good leadership, air superiority and all the artillery cover you think you're going to need will not win a battle. The only element that finally counts is a line of infantry off their scones with a mixture of fear and the peculiar sustained excitement that comes with a natural injection of adrenaline pumping through your bloodstream.

In the end you're it. Muggins here has the job to dig the enemy out of their trenches with bullet and bayonet and you know that he's got cover and you haven't. You're out in the open coming towards him and he's tucked out of sight with his rifle or machine gun steadied and waiting. However clever the battle plan, and however well you're trained as a fighting unit, you know some of your mates are going to be killed or wounded and some are not going to be there in the end – and that you may be among the dead or casualties.

The veterans have a saying that has become a hoary old combat cliche, which nonetheless remains army lore: ‘If the bullet has your name on it there's nothing you can do about it.' You can be reckless in a battle but you can't be careful. You can throw away your life by trying to be a hero but you can't preserve it by exercising extreme caution.

For all our cleverness and skill in the advance to the north, the battalion had so far suffered nine blokes killed and sixty-nine wounded. Going into the Chongju battle, with the enemy determined to make a stand, we knew the number of dead and wounded was likely to increase significantly. This proved to be the case – we lost several more men and suffered a lot more wounded before driving the enemy further north. By normal combat standards our casualties were light and, as a consequence, Charlie Green had yet another feather in his cap. A message of congratulations arrived for the battalion from the divisional commander: ‘Congratulations on your sensational drive into enemy territory.' I guessed Green would soon add a second gong to his DSO.

Nice as this accolade was, we were battle-weary and happy enough to relinquish the lead to another battalion and grab a rest. Leading an advance is a pretty nerve-racking business. You're at the sharp end all the time and constantly concerned that, if things go wrong, you'll let down those that follow you. Nobody says it aloud, but it becomes a matter of pride – you don't want to be seen to have been caught with your pants down and be forced to radio for help. We told ourselves, perhaps foolishly, that Australians didn't do that sort of thing.

We may have lacked training at the beginning but there's nothing like a battle or two to knock the rust off and get down to the true mettle, if you'll pardon the pun. By now the Regular Army and K Force blokes were indistinguishable. Under Charlie Green we'd become combat-hardened and we were regarded by the other battalions as a crash-hot fighting unit. A battalion is formed of a group of disparate men, and Green had forged us into a bloody good team. A good commander gives a soldier a lot of confidence – he was definitely one of the best, and we loved him for it.

When you finally pull up for a rest and are no longer on high alert you realise for the first time how very weary you are. Putting it crudely, we were buggered. We dug in not far from Chongju, happy to put our feet up for a couple of days and let someone else take the responsibility.

But there's no rest for the wicked. Our new-found hero status soon disappeared, and we ‘deserters' were still copping all the extra jobs around the place. Once the army has your number there's nothing private about being a private, there's simply no letting up. ‘Private McKenzie, get up to headquarters and guide the sigs back to us,' our platoon sergeant, Ivan Freys, predictably known as ‘Ivan the Terrible', instructed.