“I say and maintain [says Gargantua] that there is no ass-wipe like a good downy gosling, provided you hold his head between your legs.”
    Now just exactly how a copy of Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel managed to turn up at Nui Dat is hard to say—more likely that an ignorant soul bought it hoping for the sex and filth it promised rather than some literary scholar with a taste of ribald French masterpieces was in our midst.
    We read it, well, searched it really, for its alleged erotica but our exposure to the real  crudalities and cruelties of men, not to mention the bawdy life in the Saigon brothels, meant that we were rather less shocked than 16th Century French scholars might have been, since they, after all, were all monks. As was the author.
    Truth is, the book is immensely hard to read and even harder to understand, and most of it is bloody tedious. But there are the dirty bits to sustain it. Consider the quote above, culminating the complete long chapter in which Gargantua searches far and wide for the best material with which to wipe his dirty arse. Shocking? And funny? Five hundred years ago maybe, but not anymore. Indeed, the modern rendition of this stuff is the Carry On Gang movies.
    Curiously, the book was and still is published with its books in the wrong order, the right sequence being 2, 1, 3, 4; and 5 shouldn’t be read at all since it is apparently an add-on by someone else and is certainly inferior to the rest. Why no one has bothered to correct this appears to be a mystery. Being faithful to the way it was originally published rather than the way the author wrote it seems to be a case of translators getting their priorities seriously wrong, but who I am to complain?
    Truth is, I don’t give a stuff what they do, because it did not work for me. I found it difficult (because it is almost illegible at times) and painful, because it seemed like a heavyweight task of wading through pages of crap to get to the one or two sentences containing the bawdy or violent stuff. If that’s your bag, go for it. But it is rather like watching a porno movie where you have to sit through an hour of bad acting before the characters get their gear off.
    Now, they tell me that this is a fine document on the way the Renaissance man’s mind worked, and maybe it is. But it’s hard to believe that such men could have changed the world if that was the case. If you’re smart, you just buy a good illustrated edition like mine and look only at the marvellous pictures by someone named Broadhurst.
    There is nothing quite so disgusting as a bunch of soldiers. All efforts by literature, like Rabelais and The Arabian Nights don’t even begin to get near it. Groups of labourers are comparatively mild. Modern grouse-out movies are tame. Soldiers, because they have guns and can do what they like and have no social rules governing them at any time, fart and burp with great pride as frequently as they can, strive constantly to out-do each other with the vulgarity of their statements, and it is just simply a disgrace to speak a phrase at any time without the word fuck or cunt in it, and preferably both—even when they talk in their sleep.
    However, it isn’t the quality that is unique—bunches of bikies or navies on a remote site or footballers on a trip away can match them in their best moments, the difference is quantitative—the soldiers are at the peak of vulgarity every minute of every day and every day of every year, unceasingly and without fail. It really comes as quite a shock if any five words in a row are spoken and fuck isn’t one of them. A great word, which can be used as noun, verb, adjective, adverb or many other ungrammatical forms.  Cunt, limited by its noun usage only, is confined to a rate of every dozen words, although some people did manage to adjectivise it—as in “you fucking cunting cunt.”
    Farting could be most spectacular—the best eruptions would have us ducking for cover, and our favourite moments were when someone put a little too much into the effort and shat themselves, which happened about once a week. Vomiting was less popular, although always to be followed by a vivid description that was pure bragging.
    Perhaps the most joyous moment came one day in the bush when the corporal was overdue for a crap and hurried the men digging the shit-pit. When it hit the regulation five feet, he screamed “That’ll do,” dropped his pants and straddled the hole and offered us the spectacle of a turd that stretched unbroken all the way from his anus to the bottom of the hole. The longest turd in history, it was declared and we can prove it—someone took a picture. And yes, it has been sent to Guinness and acknowledged, but for some reason I can’t understand, they didn’t publish it. Life is eternal disappointment.