How Not to Lose Your Virginity in Australia (Vol. 2)

Being in a hospital is already like being in a zoo. You’re locked in one place. You only get out for exercise. You only get fed a fixed diet at a fixed time. The people who come by to gawk at you come in bunches on a schedule. Shit, they even have a little plaque at the foot of your enclosure that tells folks where you’re from and why you’re there. It is significantly worse when you’re a foreigner, especially in a small military hospital where most of the staff don’t have much to do.

I don’t remember how long I spent in the 6th Royal Australian Regiment hospital. Like so many of these stories I can remember little snippets, glimpses. It was surprisingly dark for a hospital. Lots of wood paneling for some reason. They put me in a room with three other beds. For a day I shared it with what had to be the last Australian soldier hospitalized with a bayonet injury. Poor guy was standing in the front rank for a formal parade welcoming us Americans when his mate behind him passed out. They were at fixed bayonets, and he caught one in the calf. Sliced him open good. Once he was patched up and released I was mostly alone.

It seemed they brought me tea and Vegemite at every meal. Tea I like, though after a while hot tea got for every meal got old. I made the mistake of asking for a cup of ice on the side one evening. The staff honored my request, but I should’ve known they found it suspicious because there were extra staff hanging around when they delivered that evenings meal complete with hot tea and a cup of ice on the side. The nurses, I assume they were nurses, they wore a 1970s style nurses uniform, watched as I stirred in two sugars then gasped in horror as I poured good hot tea over ice. You’d have thought I had committed a sex crime the way some of them reacted.

Vegemite is horrifying. You should try it if you get a chance, just so you can experience the vile paste for yourself. If you turn your nose up at this yeast based abomination, the Aussies will kindly explain to you that the horrid brown goo is good actually when it’s lightly smeared on toast and topped with a pound of fresh butter. Problem is the hospital staff never brought me any butter. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did. I’d taken a big bite on a dare not fifteen minutes after we arrived and I will never eat that trash again. When an American talks about how disgusting Vegemite is with an Aussie the Australians will immediately bring up peanut butter. I don’t understand it, but they view Jiff with the same abject horror we Americans view Vegemite. Mixing peanut butter with jelly to make a good old fashion PB&J confounds the Aussies as much as adding a pound of butter to a dab of Vegemite confounded me.

It surprised me to learn that a large part of the hospital staff’s interest in me was because I was clearly southern. Hawaii had been my first time traveling out of “The South” but it was still, technically, in the United States and I spent most of my time on or near military installations where southerners are common. I’d never quite realized how the rest of the world viewed the U.S. especially the Southern U.S. until I landed in that Australian hospital. Suddenly I had an audience, and people had questions, mostly about plantations. I’d spent most of my life blue collar. My grandparents were depression era people from the piney woods of North Louisiana who lived in tents and share cropper shacks and worked mule teams, but in Australia my accent brought to mind “Gone With the Wind.” To them I didn’t sound like Jethro Bodine I sounded like Rhett Butler. A nurse asked if I lived in a plantation home like “Tara.” She wasn’t joking. She seriously thought most southerners lived in live oak shaded mansions with white columns.

My buddies visited me in the hospital the day before they left for Townsville and brought me some magazines to read. Soldiers being soldiers it was a copy of Australian Penthouse and Guns and Ammo. I learned a lot from both. First, female grooming standards in Australia were different than in the U.S. and young Private Hammett finally learned what they meant by “does the carpet match the drapes.” Second, Australia had a wildly different stance on firearms than the U.S. After their first mass shooting the country banned most firearms ownership. All semi-auto weapons and most handguns were expressly illegal. In the U.S. the cover of Guns and Ammo would’ve been a sleek new Ar15. In Australia it was a genuinely gorgeous, hand crafted, over/under sporting shotgun. Even that was too much for at least one of the nurses who was so horrified to find me reading a gun magazine that she never spoke to me again.

At this point you must be asking yourself, why bring this up? I mean sure, they’re cute little anecdotes but where is this going? Well if you think back to volume one you’ll remember that there was another girl.

“Vivian” was nineteen and originally from New Zealand. She had some indigenous background, maybe Maori(?), I don’t know. Eighteen year old Private Hammett didn’t think to ask, but she was clearly different than the other medics. Most of the staff had fair skin, light eyes, sandy blond or red hair. Vivian had olive skin, long dark hair and big black eyes. Her accent was softer and somehow easier for me to understand. The nurses uniform the Australian Army required their hospital staff were borderline inappropriate, like costume pieces from an 80s porno. Like “Naughty Night Nurses”. I’m not a bad guy. I try not to be a perv but in 1997 I was a horny eighteen year old kid and I couldn’t help but notice her soft curves in the tight fitting uniform. I would’ve with the sandy haired girl in my barracks room. I fucking wanted to with Vivian. Sick, in bed, burning up with fever I still wanted to know what her hair smelled like. I wanted to know what her curves felt like.

We talked a lot. I don’t remember about what. There was something weirdly equalizing, being in the bed as a patient. I dunno, maybe it’s because we were both a captive audience. She had to come to my bedside to do her job and I had to speak with her to get what I needed. Maybe being sick and unable to act on any urges eliminated some stressor from the equation. At eighteen I was an awkward dork prone to putting my foot in my mouth but in the hospital that just wasn’t a problem. Vivian was easy to talk to. I looked forward to when she made her rounds and she would linger longer than the other staff, sometimes staying and talking until one of the older woman tracked her down and reminded her she had other business elsewhere in the hospital.

We talked about the U.S. and I told her about Louisiana. We talked about the shows we watched on TV, the movies we had seen, and the music we listened to. We talked about the clubs I’d visited and she told me of a few I should try before I left. She tried to explain cricket and failed. She told me I should check out rugby, specifically the New Zealand All Blacks, and Australian Rules Football. (As an aside, she was right on both accounts, I prefer both Rugby and Australian Rules Football to the NFL.) We even discussed maybe going to a game, after…

Except there was no after.

The Army, American or Australian is still the Army. Hospitals are bureaucracies. Decisions are made and executed without care for the burgeoning romance between teenage privates. When the fever didn’t break and the swelling in my lymph glands didn’t go down and the biopsy revealed absolutely nothing the Australian Army doctors washed their hands of me. I was transfered to a civilian hospital in Brisbane while Vivian was off duty. My care was taken over by a group of nuns and surly Filipino women, none of whom were as attractive or as interested in me as Vivian had been.

I was released from the hospital a week later when the fever broke and the swelling in my lymph glands went away on it’s own. As I said in volume one, my company was in Townsville and I found myself mostly alone, working rear detachment, waiting to answer a phone that never rang and playing Risk on an ancient desktop computer. I still thought of Vivian but I had no way of finding her. This was the age before cell phones. The internet and Google were still largely unheard of. There were pay phones, but I didn’t have her number or any way to find it. I couldn’t even remember where the hospital was on post, so even showing up at her work was out of the question. Though, in retrospect, I could’ve asked the Aussies. “Hey, can you show me how to get back to the hospital? There’s this nurse I think is cute…”

Honestly…might’ve worked. I think the Aussies would understand. They would’ve at least gotten a big kick out of watching my dumbass try to talk my way back inside the hospital. That might’ve made a better story.

Instead I went out on the town every night when I got off of “work” because I was eighteen and alone in Brisbane. I drank way too much Four X beer. I learned to love kebab from a late night, street corner, shop. In fact I was sitting on a curb eating a kebab late one night when some Aussie girls invited me to go with them to a club called City Rowers. It was off limits, but I was drunk, and they were cute so of course I went along. The club’s off limits status proved to be a non-issue. The bouncer wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have a belt. Those cute Aussie girls left me standing in the street and I never saw them again. I met a male medic from the hospital in a pub. We drank a few pints and made plans to go to an Australian Rules Football game. He told me he’d invite Vivian. I don’t remember why the plans fell through but they did and I never saw that game. In retrospect, I should’ve just gone to a game by myself. It would’ve been fun.

Eventually my company came back from the field and they gave us a week’s pass. We went to museums and zoos in the daylight. We went to casinos and clubs at night. Things got wild. There’s other stories, other things I witnessed, but I can’t share those stories in public because some folks could still get in trouble. We tried to go to a strip club and somehow stumbled into one of those all male Australian Chippendales type shows where they make balloon animals with their dicks. Some of our guys got sideways with a New Zealand rugby team and we had a brief war in the streets of Brisbane that we lost handily. I learned I wasn’t cut out for casino gambling but slot machines were fun as long as it was low stakes. I learned I really liked beer. I learned to never try to keep up with an Australian, even a girl, when you’re drinking. I went with my buddies to a tattoo parlor intent on getting ink but it was closed, saving me from having to pay later to cover up some tribal monstrosity or vet bro barbed wire and dog tags bullshit.

I ducked into every club that Vivian and I had talked about in the hopes of finding her again but I never did.

Our vacation got extended because the Air Force couldn’t find a plane that would make it all the way to Brisbane without breaking down. Five days became ten. We were getting unruly, drinking in the pub at the enlisted mess before heading downtown and drinking at the clubs and then passing out in a cab on the way back to the barracks for curfew. We hacked and puked our way through slow, three mile, PT runs every morning then proceeded to drink our way through the rest of the day. I searched every inch of Brisbane in the drunken hope of seeing Vivian’s smiling face. I wondered what she would look like in civilian clothes, with her long black hair down. I never got to find out.

Eventually our plane arrived and we packed our bags to leave. The company commander gave us one last night in town, but a buddy talked me out of it. He pointed out, correctly, that it was going to be a long, uncomfortable flight from Brisbane to Honolulu crammed into a C141 and it would be torturous hungover. “Let’s stay in.” He suggested. “We can have a few beers at the mess and then catch a movie. Go to bed early.” It was the smart thing to do and for once I made the “right” decision. We stayed in. Had two beers in the mess, and were both asleep before the rest of guys had finished putting on their cologne and calling a cab for downtown. By then I’d partied harder than I’d ever partied before and honestly, I was exhausted.

The next day we got onto an Air Force C141 and flew from Brisbane to Honolulu crammed in like sardines with our rucksacks in our laps. It was just as miserable as my buddy had warned it would be and I was glad I wasn’t hungover. It was only then, as we were flying away, somewhere over the Pacific between Australia and American Samoa, that someone gave me the bad news.

“Hey you know an Aussie chick with black hair? Nurse from the hospital?” Someone asked.

“Yea. Why?”

“She showed up at the club looking for you…”

Not just one club, but three. She and a group of friends had gone to the bars and clubs I’d mentioned and she’d asked every American soldier they ran into about me by name. All the while I was back in the barracks, asleep in the same bed where that sandy hair girl found me shivering and sweating almost a month earlier.

I knew even then that last day was too late. One last night wouldn’t be enough. Maybe I could’ve stolen a kiss. Maybe I could’ve lost my virginity. I ain’t even ashamed to say it, I absolutely would have if given the opportunity, but that would’ve been it. All we would have had was one, too brief, night. I don’t know which ending is better, a whirlwind romance, or striking out once again, but I know both stories inevitably end in goodbye. The happiest of endings would have been one last kiss before we had to say goodbye, and the second I got on that plane we’d both begin slowly fading from each other’s memories. Every version of this story ends bittersweet at best. But I’m learning as I write these essays that I kinda like bittersweet endings. They just feel right to me.

So once again I find myself asking how many of these old memories are “true” and wondering if I even care. Once again I find myself wishing someone who probably doesn’t even remember me, well. Once again I mean it. I truly do. Deep in my heart I hope Vivian is happy and has everything she ever wanted. She was comfort in a scary time, and even if that was all she was, even if I misread everything and she was just a good nurse taking care of a patient, even if my buddies were fucking with me and she forgot my name the second I was discharged and never once came looking for me I don’t fucking care. She made me happy for a while and I got to walk away with a good tale to tell.

A couple of weeks after my company got back from Australia my platoon sent me to Combat Lifesavers School. It was my first time working with soldiers outside of my company and I kept noticing odd looks. During one of our first breaks, a guy from Alpha company approached me in the smoking area.

“Hey you’re the guy that got sick in Australia right?” he asked.

“Yea. Why?”

He gave me a vaguely disgusted look, like maybe I hadn't showered well enough that morning.

“I didn’t know you could really get gonorrhea in your eye.” He said.

“What the fuck…” I stammered. How else do you respond to that accusation?

“Didn’t you get gonorrhea in your eye from giving a stripper head?”

I had never…

But it didn’t matter. Not in an Infantry battalion. The rumor had spread before I was even out of the hospital. Guys in Charlie Company went apeshit in Australia bro. While we were here they were getting all fucked up and getting laid. I heard one of their dudes ended up in the hospital. Gonorrhea in the eye bro. Heard he caught it giving a stripper head. Somewhere, right now, there’s a guy I never met who doesn’t remember my name but every time he has a couple of beers and starts thinking about his Army days he tells the story of the kid in Charlie Company that got gonorrhea of the eye from going down on a stripper and I’ll tell you now, the one thing I know for an absolute certainty, the only thing on this page I can guarantee is the absolute truth, is that shit did not happen.

Y'all know I like to tack a little song on the end of these, not so much because I think the readers enjoy it, but because I do and I like the challenge of trying to find a song that fits with the theme of the essay. Australia has proved to be a bit of challenge. We spent our time in Brisbane in dance clubs and heard more Spice Girls than anything else. AC/DC felt too on the nose. I dug around a bit in Australian Country music and...meh...the older stuff didn't work and I've never been a Keith Urban guy. I thought about Kasey Chambers because she's the one Australian country singer I actually like, but I couldn't quite find the sound I wanted.

Then I remembered the Bee Gees are technically Australian, I genuinely like their stuff and they were the first to record this banger which sorta, kinda fits, if you squint and has at least two badass country covers from Hank Williams Jr. and Slobberbone.