Concert

I was reminiscing with my brother and I recalled the first concert he ever took me to.
There was Copperwine, the La Di Das (who would later play in the assembly hall at my high school, around the same time as the unknown outfit AC/DC), Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Johnny Farnham, Spectrum (or the Indelible Murcteps as they were then known, I think), and Johnny Farnham among others. My brother doesn't remember any of it but I distinctly recall someone pegging a bottle of beer at Johnny Farnham halfway through his version of Glen Campbell's Visions of Sugarplums and young Johnny F, ever the polite one, stopped only to gently chide, "That's not very nice!" before continuing.
Who knows. Maybe after all these years it was wishful thinking on my part (although looking back, I'd never consider Johnny Farnham to be high on my list of remembrances, nice though he's known to be) but I remember that damned missile and I remember the afternoon light and the noise. St Leonards Park 1971, maybe? Or possibly one of those bigger freeby gigs further west. Or maybe, as previously stated, I've been bullshitting so long, I can no longer sort truth from fantasy.

Sugarplums

Darker.

You stare and stare.
And the page gets no darker and you think back on the week, a brother who had a touch and go experience, a friend traumatised by a breakup, other friends battling cancer. And you try to be there or at least be around as a brother, as a friend, and you're somehow haunted by the possibility that you were never particularly skilled at either.
You think on remembrance. On eleventh hours of eleventh days of eleventh months
and the page gets no darker
and in particular you recall the interview with a 3 RAR soldier who spoke of the terror of the Battle of the Apple Orchard in late 1950. He described with pride how it is now cited as a classical tactical fallback in military manuals across the world. He described adventures that swung wildly between visceral horror and insane hilarity and how he never wanted to hear another chime or whistle or bell again because that was how the northern armies (foolishly) announced every major assault so even in the dark, all you had to do was point and shoot at the clamour, with devastating and senseless effect.
He goes on to describe a successful counterattack on a ridge because the Chinese and North Korean troops had overrun their position in the caves the UN Allies had settled into. The counterattack was not part of any grand strategy, it was simply because the RAR troops were royally fucked off as they'd spent so long setting up their still to make the shit Core 10 (as the Yanks liked to call it because they seemed to have trouble pronouncing the name Corio, where this horror with a whiskey label had been churned out to poison the masses for decades) somehow potable.
And we laughed then as I looked into the man's eyes and he was there in a happy moment in hell.
And I foolishly asked, "So it wasn't all bad then?"
And the laughter vanished in the blink of an eye
and he said, "It was worse."
And for the only time in my life I understood in my own shallow and savage and stupid way how people never come back.

Masters of war.