Of Australian witnesses to the Vietnam War there are few, considering that this was the longest, if hardly the most costly, overseas military venture in the history of this country: a handful of novels, a film, a few television mini-series. There are unit histories growing by the year, besides the fine volumes in the Official History by Ian McNeill (on combat) and Peter Edwards (the homefront). But women’s reckonings of the war are scant indeed. Susan Terry has written of her experiences as a nurse in Vietnam, Jane Ross of a fortuitous research trip in which she investigated the myth of the Digger (see Gerster and Pierce, On the Warpath). Georgia Savage’s accomplished novel Ceremony at Long Nao was, among other things, a benediction for those who fought on either side.
Now—long after her experiences there—Helen Nolan has written a novel, Between the Battles. To a degree autobiographically based, it is about Vietnam in the late 1960s. In common with her protagonist, the reckless Holly Gow, Nolan was recruited from Sydney for a secretarial job with the American armed forces. The novel that she has fashioned—decades after the events that she witnessed and of which she heard—is an account of a tour of duty from a point of view different in many obvious respects, but not in all, from
that of men who served in the military for the United States or Australia.
Nolan’s novel is ambiguous in its essence. At times her heroine disparages the corrupt conduct of the war by the South Vietnamese and the Americans. At others she jokes about and joins in the black market among the allies. Holly’s war seems to take place not so much in the office but in bars, beds, jet planes and helicopters. The incidents with which we are regaled may be based more in fantasy than careful reminiscence: the mile-high delights of sex in the cockpit of a fighter plane, nonchalant survival of the Tet offensive, commandeering army vehicles for joy rides, even the shooting of a black-shirted Viet Cong with a borrowed revolver. Indeed it appears to have been a lovely war for Holly and her girlfriends, with such cheerily titled chapters as ‘Red Dogs, Black Cats and White Mice’, ‘Billygoats, Hammers and Sharkbaits’ and ‘Oh Goodie—More Girls’.
The uncertain tone of Between the Battles attests not only to literary inexperience but to a moral confusion that the heroine does not resolve.