The barmaid leaned toward me. “Are you married?”
    I noticed her for the first time. She was a sweet young thing with tizzy hair and a rather bumpy nose. I denied it as if she had offered poison.
    “Don’t you like girls?” she asked, in a tone that suggested possibilities that I could not at the time have imagined.
    “No. I’m just not very good… at… girls.”
    “It’s easy,” she breathed lightly. “Just treat them like normal human beings.”
    That idea seemed incomprehensible.
    “So now I’m going off to Vietnam and I’m going to die a virgin,” I blurted, to my complete horror. You’re not going to believe it touched her soul, are you? Even I don’t and I was there at the time.
    Soon she completed her shift, called goodnight to the bar manager, took my hand, and lead me out into the depths of Royal Park. She seemed to know the exact spot she was looking for, a nice grassy patch equi-distant from the surrounding roadways and where the shadows of the trees cast by the streetlights intersected and were darkest. She hitched up her dress and pulled her panties off and then set about unbuttoning my fly. Trying to get to the pace of the event, I tried to kiss her and she laughed and sat down, dragging me after her.
    “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “Just enjoy yourself.”
    I believe I did.
    “I see so many of you soldiers,” she said as we walked back. “I feel so sorry for them. Now I feel I’ve done my bit for the cause.”
    They ought to give out medals for it.
    Over the following weeks, I returned to the Sarah Sands several times but she was gone. Her name was Sue, they told me, and she’d pissed off, no one knew where. I’ll love her until I die.

Standing ten feet away, just outside the doorway, facing me with rifle on ready was a Jerry. He was hard and fit. His grey-ish green smock was almost new. There was not a flicker of surprise on his dark handsome face when he saw me. I fumbled for my carbine as he fired. I felt the bullet pull my jump jacket, rake my flesh like a sharp piece of ice. In the instant that it took, I knew I wasn’t hit solidly.
    I fell to one knee, still fumbling with my carbine. I saw every quick movement he made with frightening clarity, the veins in his muscular wrists, the dirt under his fingernails. The barrel of his rifle lowered to cover my chest. I braced myself, winced as I heard the shot. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel anything. He staggered and there was a look of almost ludicrous amazement on his face. He looked down at his chest, made a grimace and fell heavily.
    I looked at him in astonishment. It was several seconds before I realised Britt was standing above me and it was his shot that I had heard.
    There it is—the most clichéd of all clichés in any bad war story. But notice too that, as usual, the enemy just grazes the hero from point blank range while the good guy hits him first shot. Even in those days, it was perfectly plain to me that the Germans and Japanese lost the war because they were such terrible shots. It was true too of the bad guys in westerns—when they bushwhacked the hero, they always missed.
    This nonsense continues to be perpetrated to this day in American films—even in the late nineties in Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line—supposedly quality efforts— the enemy could blaze away from short range at the heroes and hardly manage a hit whereas the heroes could throw off some wild shots and bring down four running enemy.
    At Moorabbin Tech, I read a lot of war stories, mostly those cheap paperbacks, almost always 112 pages long, as were Cleveland Westerns and Larry Kent and Carter Brown type crime novels and Aussie war yarns by the likes of Owen Gibson. One or two are memorable but I’ve never found copies of them. Kings Go Forth by Joe David Brown is a more serious US war novel but of no higher standard, nor any different from the Owen Gibson types. Whenever I come upon a heap of these publications, I always search through them, hunting for those few cover images or titles I can remember. But there are thousands of cheap detective works, many more westerns, and hundreds of similar war efforts and I’ve never found one yet. The search goes on.