Chapter 1

Have you ever entered a pub or a bar for simply a cold beer to quench your thirst and down the other end of the bar was a small group of people, all huddled around one man who was telling a story? The words he used were mesmerising, even though all there knew there wasn't a truthful word being spoken. It was the rhythm and narration technique being used which drew you in. He'd swear on his honour that every word he uttered was true, may God strike him down if they weren't.

The following story, I swear on my honour, is true, may God strike me down if it isn't.

Greg White and I met in Viet Nam the day after we climbed out of identical flying dog boxes, in which the arseholes carried us up there. There is nothing like squatting over a freshly dug hole in the ground due to the effects of dysentery, whilst dealing a hand of cards to your mate, to cement a friendship!

As part of an Australian Special Forces black insertions operations team, we didn't spend more than five minutes apart every day we were there. Then, six months later, they plonked us together back into another identical flying dog box, and sent us back home again. On the way home we were lucky, because they gave us a bed each to use. That beats an uncushioned steel bench seat any day!

By the time I arrived back home, I already knew that Mum and Dad were dead. Dad died of prostate cancer, and Mum of a broken heart. They said it was a heart attack, but without him the old girl just gave up. I had let the solicitors know to store all the contents and sell the house. I couldn't face going back into that house again. At the time they died, the CO had wanted to send me home. I rejected the idea, as I would be letting my mates down, and it wouldn't bring my folks back.

They finally had to send us home when Greg lost his lower right arm. I lost my left leg below the knee, my left eye, and all the fingers on my left hand. All this from the same damned grenade. All I was trying to do with the thing was make sure the rest of the blokes didn't cop it. At least I was successful in that, except for Greg, who had been trying to stop me from throwing myself down on it. At least he would still have had his arm. Besides, I had no one left to go home to.

The quacks cleaned us up, but there was not a lot they could do. Once bits are gone, they're not coming back. To my mind, the scar on my face was almost an improvement on the original. Funny, we missed the battle of Long Tan by a month in '66. Being black ops, they would have had me somewhere otherwise just as safe. 'Down the Ho Chi Minh Trail with Greg and a few mates'-type safe.

They gave me a new fake leg to hop around on. Nothing but the best quality hardwood, which felt like they had left the splinters in. The glass eye wasn't much chop, either. It was something you could live with, but not for long, so I didn't bother. Head honcho quack said he'd have a more realistic prosthetic leg made for me. Again I said, don't bother. They gave Greg a fake arm that looked like a fake arm. There wasn't a lot they could do about my fingers. The yobbos back home will just have to take me as that idiot war made me.

The psycho bloke asked me why I didn't want to reinsert myself back into my old life. What old life? A month after getting out of repat hospital, I saw Brenda, my 'fiancée', in my old suburb of Miranda. She was the one who would 'be ever faithful' to me until I returned. She even kept the ring that I had worked a year to buy. She was pushing a pram. Mum wrote she was walking out with the first bloke two days after I left on the air transport for Nam. Mom also said that her mother was telling everyone that she was pregnant a month later.

I think I got out of it well, as she's had three kids, in three years, from three different blokes. She was my old life. Besides, a few too many blokes have 'reinserted' themselves into her, already. The first kid was the only one who she knew for certain who the father was. It sure wasn't me, as I was quite conversant with condoms. Yep, I was lucky all right.

I only had one family member left alive, a cousin, a female, with red hair and freckles, plus a lot of attitude. Her name was Doris, and we loathed each other.

Greg and I were invited to a small welcome-home do by mates of both his and mine (paid for by a pass of the hat around). One of them brought my cousin along, thinking it was the right thing to do by me. That's when she and Greg met each other.

He asked me... I told him okay (a bloke would never take a mate's cousin out without asking first, it's protocol), but I didn't give my opinion of her. The stupid bastard married her three months later. They bought a house in Hurstville. I used the money from my parent's estate to buy a block of land two streets away. On it was an ex-WW II, twenty year old plus, two-bedroom fibro 'Returned Services' house. It was identical in basic design to the original houses for many streets around being an ex-Housing Commission slum residence.

Cousin said good value, but to pull the degraded shed down and build something respectable. Greg and I spent two months renovating the place. I had every intention of living in it, alone, for the rest of my life.

Cousin said, "You can't bring a woman to live in that thing!"

I think she got the hint when I told her that unless they invented another gender, that ain't going to happen. I bitterly exhorted her that if I wanted a bitch, I would buy me a dog! They at least know how to be faithful. There's not a lot of room to manoeuvre around a simple attitude like that.

Both Greg and I went back to school, Greg to Tech to get his trade certificates in carpentry, and me to teachers college. This seemed fairly logical to me, who'd only ever done his Intermediate Certificate exam in third year high school (later to become year nine), though I had done that easy and was tops in the school.

Both Greg and I used to joke with each other about our phantom limbs still feeling the pain in what was now air, but Greg began to get the pain where the arm still was. From somewhere, an infection had got in. A lot of strange bugs came back from Nam, and the current antibiotics couldn't combat them.

They tried cutting the rest of his arm off, but it had already invaded the rest of his body. He was dead within a month, all because he tried to stop me from killing myself! That was just one more reason for Doris to hate and resent me. To top things off, she was five months pregnant at the funeral. Military funerals give me the shits anyway, though this one was huge. Thousands were present though some were the ubiquitous anti-war demonstrators. It didn't help me with my opinion of me either, even if I agreed with the demonstrators; though I despised their lack of respect.

The day he died, Greg had asked me to look after Doris and the kid. He was always caught in the middle between Doris's caustic tongue and my refusal to have anything to do with the woman. I promised him to help her get some work (there are some quite good brothels around this town), but I'd make damned sure his unborn kid would have the best life it could possibly have!

Doris went to Tech to learn typing. Though she had trouble reaching the keys by then, she found she had a talent for it. Eventually she did the full secretarial thing: typing, shorthand, telephony, filing, etc. (I never said she was stupid, I said she was a bitch.) She finished the course a year after Kim was born. We shared caring for the kid, as they didn't have child care facilities in those days.

Doris found a job in a small, newly started up sheet metal shop that grew. I paid the lovely but elderly Mrs Allen next door to baby sit Kim during the day. Kim kept company with Mrs Allen's similarly-aged granddaughter, Marilyn. I looked after her all of the remaining times until her mother came home ... or not. I put in a crib (then later, a bed) in the spare room, and that forevermore became Kimbo's room. The only thing that ever changed was the size of the bed.

Doris had real issues with Kim, and never really bonded with her. I think Kim reminded Doris too much of a genetic mixture of Greg and me. Greg was whom she missed the imaginary memory of; not the real man warts and all. Me she detested, which just proved she had good taste, as I detested me most of the time. Doris spent more and more time at work, while Kimmy spent more and more time with me, especially when Doris didn't tell me she had arrived home from work. That was, of course, if she actually did come home.

We had a little problem on top of that. Greg was a big fella. He was one of the nicest men I've ever met, but even Doris admitted to me that she married him in spite of his looks. It was more because he treated her like a queen. Doris is a nice looking woman, in spite of the fly shit all over her and the ginger fuzz on her nut. You know how often it's said that a daughter inherits her mother's looks and everything else is Dad's? My girl Kimbo inherited her father's looks and build, and mother's attitude and colouration: ginger nut, fly shit face and all.

Doris had a need to learn that if you work as the secretary of an up and coming company, you had to use your public relations skills. She sure as hell never used them on her daughter. I heard the expression 'you're as ugly as a hat full of arseholes, brat' more than once, directly into the four-year-old's face. The second time she said it within my hearing I put the woman over my knee, and gave her the spanking my late uncle should have given her twenty years ago.

She called the cops to have me for assault. When the young constable asked us why, unfortunately for her she up and told him the truth.

You don't ask a newly returned soldier with very young precious children for sympathy after saying something like that. He told her next time he heard about her saying something like that to her little girl, he would spank her himself. He had served three tours and was a survivor of Long Tan and the Tet Offensive. I saluted him as a hero, and he back at me for that idiot medal. I had been the lucky one, yet still felt bad about leaving them in the lurch. Not another bastard cared in this country, those days, only leaving it to Brother to show respect for Brother. The future made us more acceptable.

We used to sing together, Kimbo and me. I liked the kind of American country and western that was being brought out in the sixties and seventies most of all. They called it Outlaw because it wasn't like the hillbilly stuff which had gone before. We use to laugh at the Yanks on the field; for the main part they were hopeless pedestrians, but singer/writers like Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and the like were my soul food - George Jones's He Stopped Loving Her Today. I cried almost daily into my turps. Eventually, I quit drinking to keep my sanity and Kimbo's respect, as that is good wrist-slashing music.