Vietnam War revisited in Mark Dapin’s murder mystery R&R

Mark Dapin’s new novel combines outrageous humour with a murder mystery set against a backdrop of the Vietnam War.

R&R by Mark Dapin is a full glossary of offensive terms, thanks to one villain.

Mark Dapin is a seasoned traveller in the realms of Boy’s Own. He’s upfront about this, noting in his promotional material he was once editor of lads mag Ralph. He claims this was “in another life” but he’s kidding. His new novel, R&R, would go down well with Ralph readers — and with a much larger readership as well.

R&R is set in 1967 in Vung Tau, in South Vietnam, the area where Australian troops enjoyed R&C (rest and convalescence) and Americans R&R (rest and recreation). So the title is a giveaway that this is primarily a book about Americans, and perhaps America. Last year Dapin published The Nashos’ War, a fine non-fiction account of the experience of Australian National Servicemen in the Vietnam War. It’s a mark of his imaginative independence that R&R can’t simply be cast as a spin-off.

Apart from one brief ambush incident, this is not a war novel as such; the action takes place far from the periphery of any battlefield and the book is primarily a whodunit.

What’s more, the action tends to be outlandish rather than grim or tragic. It opens with a Vietnamese peasant, shallowly buried, exhumed by a flood, landing outside a bar-brothel, having his limbs broken by a couple of GIs so they can prop him up as a drinking buddy, and finally being shot by a rampaging, hallucinating Military Police sergeant who promptly goes AWOL. Why did he do it? Where has he gone?

Enter the MP corporal who’s put on his trail. Nashville (because he comes from Tennessee) is the novel’s protagonist, even hero. His real name is John Ulysses Grant. His father is Robert Lee Grant. This is the all-American family. It also is, or was, a fairly dysfunctional one.

Nashville’s job is to keep order in Vung Tau, but he’s half-hearted and ineffective, with the saving graces that his heart is in the right place, he’s worldly wise and something of a wit. He gets a new partner, Shorty Long from Bendigo, who of course is 195cm tall. Shorty has the wish and the potential to be more efficient than Nashville, but he’s tongue-tied, naive and innocent. For good measure he’s a cherry boy (that peculiarly Vietnam War term for a virgin.)

So the novel offers the great Pacific Partnership in miniature. The principals are abetted and frustrated by a circus cast list that includes a bevy of patriotic Vietnamese whores, a Jewish entertainment entrepreneur from Kings Cross, an amoral former member of the French Foreign Legion, an intellectually disabled croissant vendor, a Viet Cong commander called Ginger Meggs, and even a troupe of Ku Klux Klanners busy with some away from home mischief.

R&R is not exactly a farce, but even the occasional death or mutilation allows a sombre note only to bounce in and then out again. Otherwise the action is a sequence of fights, sex and stuff-ups, threaded by mysteries (whose solution this reader never quite managed to unravel) and enlivened by interchanges (never real conversations) that are not for polite society or even the politically sensitive.

“A spirit rose from the open drains, a ghost of sea salt and fish sauce, piss and beer. ‘Smells like pussy,’ said Nashville, ‘don’t it?’ Shorty didn’t know.”

Shorty’s advancement becomes one of Nashville’s primary missions. Shorty has an Australian fiancee working as a nurse in Vung Tau, and therefore a lieutenant. Nashville goes about trying to bring them together.

“ ‘You even got a suit?’ asked Nashville. ‘Your girle’s a lewie, ain’t she? If you want officer pussy, you need a suit.’ ‘She’s not pussy,’ said Shorty. ‘Not without a suit, she ain’t,’ said Nashville. ‘She’s just two closed curtains and one locked door.’ ”

Yes, the humour is outrageous. Sergeant TJ Caution, the villain of the piece, has a scheme to import Australian prostitutes. Caution hates slopes, wops, niggers, hymies and retards so thoroughly that the book is a full glossary of offensive terms.

Between the late 60s and the mid-80s there was a slew of Australian novels about Vietnam. The underlying ideological position was a thumbs-down that ranged from condemnation of the war to anger and sympathy on behalf of those who fought it. Fiction in praise of the war or simply as adventure yarns never appeared. R&R is, and is not, a new era Vietnam novel.

For all its setting and impressive familiarity with the territory, it’s less a story of the war and more a murder mystery like Dapin’s first novel King of the Cross (and characters from that book reappear here). Second, the opposition is not between the good and the bad, the people of Vietnam and the forces of the Free World, but between the badly flawed and the complete bastard. Rights, wrongs and thought-out sympathies are not the characters’, nor the author’s, business. Private campaigns on behalf of lust, dosh, payback and occasionally loyalty are more immediate concerns.

Robert Drewe’s cover blurb describes R&R as “explosive”. The most obvious meaning of this is the novel lifts the lid on the true nature of R&R in Vung Tau. Given that almost all the characters are freewheeling loose cannons, and any real military discipline is a distant memory, Vung Tau must have been unbridled chaos. Somehow I doubt it. But the veterans would know. Meanwhile Dapin has already published his good history. R&R is his good fiction.

Gerard Windsor is the author of All Day Long the Noise of Battle: An Australian Attack in Vietnam.

R&R: A Novel

By Mark Dapin

Viking, 304pp, $32.99