What Uncle Tim did in the Vietnam war http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/05/vietnam-war-uncle
As a child, Evie Wyld adored visiting her vibrant, fun-loving uncle in Australia. Then when she was 12, she found out about a much darker time in her beloved uncle's life Evie Wyld 5 September 2009 My childhood in London was spent counting the days until it was time to go back to Australia. The feel of the old wood of the veranda under bare feet, the sound of the banana tree sweeping its leaves over the roof of the tractor shed, the smell of sugarcane heating up in the sun were all things that stayed alive in my memory when I was away from that place. One of the main reasons I loved going there was the time I spent with my uncle Tim, my mother's brother, who guided me and my elder brother through this strange and wild place. He was a hero, with a thick moustache and a cowboy hat, his skin a dark pottery brown, and when he smiled the whole of his face pleated into lines. When we all went camping together, he'd get exasperated by my aunt and me sitting on the beach and reading. He'd say, "You're in the most exciting, beautiful place on earth and you want to pretend to be somewhere else?" and he'd go off exploring, on his own if neither of us would go with him. He was unlike the men I knew in England, who seemed delicate in comparison and thought that children were delicate too. It was my uncle who let us stand on the back of his pick-up truck with the dogs as he drove fast along the beach, who showed us how to dig with our toes in the sand by the shoreline to find clams. He was the one to poke a piece of dry grass into a trapdoor spider's hatch, and who barely flinched when she came out fangs bared. He brought home all kinds of animals: a joey that ended up living on my grandparent's farm with him like a dog for 16 years, two orphaned goat kids, endless baby birds. Anything that looked like it was in trouble he would bring home. His son, my cousin Ben, was a tough little sod, and my uncle used to enjoy winding him up about it. I remember seeing my uncle give him a dead arm when he was a surly 11-year-old. When he complained, my uncle put a finger to his lips. "It's only pain, mate," he said. I went into the room I shared with my parents and brother to think about that with a mixture of horror and awe my cousin had absorbed the thump, just giving a foul look to my uncle who was chuckling away. My father would never hit my brother, even as a joke. Could a thump be a joke? My cousin was given his first gun the Christmas he was seven, an air rifle that fired copper balls. He cut his teeth on sparrows and starlings, and secretly downed the odd chook that had been out of the pen long enough to call it feral. He used to enjoy scaring me with stories of the red-bellied black snake that lived under the house, and the things that lurked in the sugarcane. My cousin dressed in army fatigues and took his swag and his gun and spent nights alone out the back with only his dog for company, being tough. It's what the men of the family did. When I was 12, this cousin showed me an album with photographs of dead men in it. They were young and barefoot, bronze streaks of blood at their mouths. The photographs were neatly spaced, pressed down carefully. "It happened in Vietnam," he said and I nodded as if I knew what that meant. I didn't make any connection between my hero uncle and the pictures. They did not belong in the same universe as the man who won the local prawn-eating competition by half a kilo. It wasn't until my late teens when I was about the age he was when he went to fight in Vietnam that I really started thinking about the photographs and how someone I loved had done those things, and had thought to take a photograph of them. I knew very little about the Vietnam war only that, like all wars, it was a bad thing. Until the day three years ago, when I spoke to my uncle about it, I don't think I had ever really connected him with the album. I was in the middle of writing my first novel and knew I wanted to touch on the Australian experience in the Vietnam war, and so I brought my tape recorder and we sat for a day drinking beer in the rock pools that face the headland at the beach shack where he and my mother spent time as children. It was the headland that my uncle and my mother saw as young children. The same one as the first time my mother brought my father and he caught flu and there was a plague of fleas. The same one as when I first remember it, when the deer were so tame they'd put their heads in through the window and ask for bacon rind. Listening back to the tapes I recorded that day, I notice how my uncle stops every now and then to comment on something around us a sea eagle, a shoal of salmon or a shift in the direction of the wind. Often these observations meander into stories about times gone by, when there was still abalone (edible sea snails) on the rocks and before the national park started to bulldoze the shacks when the person whose name was on the lease died. These stories come when he talks about the really bad things, the things that he can't say without a smile because they don't sound real when you're sitting down by the sea with the mix of beer and salt on your tongue. At one point, as he's telling me about the death of his close friend Grub, he spots a deer over the ridge of the hill and points her out to me. "They don't come around any more, since the cull," he says. The cull happened years ago, when the keepers of the national park decided there were too many. But because the deer were so used to living with the shack people, the ones that got shot were the tame ones, those that let you pick leeches off of them in return for the skin of your fried fish. They all walked towards the people with the guns, came down to say hello. Since then, the deer that slunk back into the bush tend to stay there. His stories of Vietnam are about being conscripted and about the friends he made in training, the terrible night alone when he fell asleep and on waking thought he could feel someone's breath on his face. How the platoon all cried when someone shot the sniffer dog, even with men falling all around them; and about the forward scout, his close friend, who was shot through the neck when he leaned against a tree to eat tinned lima beans. The first boy he killed in close combat and the pictures in the kid's wallet. Here, he changes tack to tell me about the time he and four friends were swimming "just out beyond that point, after the breakers", when a large fin appeared right next to them. He tells me, laughing, that he and another bloke had read that to avoid a shark attack you should float, play dead. The other three all swam in as quickly as possible, leaving just the two of them for the shark to choose between, and the shark's circles were getting tighter. They swam in, puzzled that the shark hadn't behaved as it should. Now we know that sharks especially like to eat dead stuff. He tells me how coming back home from the war, he was picked up at the airport by his parents and they went to the nearest pub to celebrate his safe return. They were not served, because he was in uniform. My grandfather was turned away with his family and they all drove home without the celebratory drink. He talks about going to find a friend who had gone missing with his discharge payout, coming across him by the side of the road, half-dead with drink, having spent all of his money in a week on drink and on the horses. There is a long pause on the tape. "No bugger looked after us." We sat by the sea until the sand flies started to bite and then walked back up to the shack. That night, I thought about what it must have been like. My uncle, who worked in the family business all his life. The pie shop in Parramatta then the small supermarket. Growing up with his sister before she leaves for England. Then going to war. Coming home and then moving back in with his parents and all of them moving north to become farmers, with no clue about how farming worked, growing sugarcane by the seat of their pants. Tracing around his foot and using the cutout as writing paper to send to his sister in London. I wonder when he put the photographs into the album, if he chose between them, or just put in the whole film. I wonder if he talked about the war when he was younger. I think of the time my brother was small and he went to kiss my grandfather's cheek, and Grandpa looked at him. "Boys shake hands, they don't kiss." Back in London, there are still questions I want answered. How my uncle felt about his sister, my mother in London, going on antiwar rallies. Would he have stayed working with his family all his life if he hadn't gone to war? What he felt when I went travelling to Vietnam as a teenager. I find myself thinking back to that headland that doesn't change, how when I'm there I see what my grandparents would have seen. My mother as a child, and my uncle before he went to Vietnam and then later when he came back. Of course, the headland is not the same; there will have been erosion from rainwater, the face of the cliff smoothed by the winds that break against it. But it looks the same to me and when I'm there, I always sit for a moment and block out the rest of the landscape with my fingers, so that for a moment everything appears unchanged. I think of the stories told to me that day in the rock pools, stories told by a man who dressed up as a woman with cantaloupes for breasts, just for the joy of embarrassing his children when their friends came over. Who stole lobsters from lobster pots, who sang bawdy songs loud and forced you to join in, who was funny and kind and smart. Knowing him as I do, I find it hard to put the two together: the man he was and the things he has done and seen. I realise now that it must be impossible for him. This is one of the brutalities of war, this lost piece of yourself that you can't show other people. No matter how hard you try to grasp it, there will not be the words. I wonder if this is why the photographs needed to be kept, and perhaps why you would stay close by your family your whole life, why you would revisit the places that you went to as a child, to remember who you were before you had to take those photographs. -- After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld is out now published by Jonathan Cape, £16.99. 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