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

her skirt.
    I don’t remember all that much about it to tell you the truth, I was too bloody tired most of the time, but a good few recruits got sent home because they didn’t cut the mustard.
    There’s a poem written by a bloke named Bruce Dawe that sums up the instructors at Kapooka to a T. I’ve learned it off by heart and I hope he don’t mind me using it now.

Weapons Training
    And when I say eyes right I want to hear
    those eyeballs click and the gentle pitter-patter
    of falling dandruff    you there what’s the matter
    why are you looking at me    are you a queer?
    look to your front    if you had one more brain
    it’d be lonely    what are you laughing at
    you in the back row with the unsightly fat
    between your elephant ears    open that drain
    you call a mind and listen    remember first
    the cockpit drill when you go down    be sure
    the old crown-jewels are safely tucked away
    Â Â Â Â what could be more
    distressing than to hold off with a burst
    from your trusty weapon a mob of the little yellows
    only to find back home because of your position
    your chances of turning the key in the ignition
    considerably reduced?    allright now suppose
    for the sake of argument you’ve got
    a number-one blockage and a brand-new pack
    of Charlies are coming at you
    Â Â Â Â you can smell their rotten
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â fish-sauce breath hot on the back
    of your stupid neck allright now what

    are you going to do about it?    that’s right grab and check
    the magazine man it’s not a woman’s tit
    worse luck or you’d be set    too late you nit
    they’re on you and your tripes are round your neck
    you’ve copped the bloody lot just like I said
    and you know what you are?    you’re dead dead dead
    Then it was on to the School of Infantrymen at Ingle-burn, near Sydney. There we learned our contact drills, section attacks, platoon attacks, patrolling, digging weapon pits, firing M60s, Owen guns and throwing grenades, and so on until we dropped with exhaustion.
    I know we thought we were pretty ridgy-didge when we come out of Ingleburn. We could march in a straight line, fire a rifle, stop on command with a single sound as our boots hit the deck. We’d lost most of our puppy fat and we could run a mile with a full pack and rifle and we could do all the things a warrior has to know to stay alive. Ha bloody ha, if only we’d known what lay ahead!
    A mob of us were sent to join 6 RAR at Enoggera Barracks in Queensland. That was when Shorty got hold of us. Christ! He made our training at the School of Infantrymen seem like a sheila’s knitting class. We ran miles with full gear, we practised mounting and dismounting drills for armoured personnel carriers and
jumping on and off bloody choppers ‘til our legs went to jelly. We practised ambushes, we dug holes, built barbed-wire obstacles, practised clearing mines and booby traps, we fired our weapons and endlessly practised patrolling. We worked sixteen hours a day in the bush and sometimes Shorty kept us going for days without sleep.
    We thought that what Shorty was putting us through was tough, but really it was just a warm-up for Canungra, the jungle training centre in south-east Queensland. They must have searched the whole flamin’ country to find this particular shithole. That’s what it was, a big hole with hills called yamas surrounding it, filled with muddy water that might as well have been shit. It felt like shit. Tasted like shit and smelled like shit when you fell into it. And it stuck to you like shit sticks to a blanket.
    We’d go out on patrol among the yamas, where they’d set up all sorts of so-called nasty surprises, shooting galleries and sneaker ranges. With the shooting galleries, cut-out targets would suddenly appear