Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in 1944 in very small town called Rendelsham, which is in the south east of South Australia. Went to primary school there and

then the next closest school with a high school was Millicent which was about 8 miles away so I had a bit of a chequered high school career. I was asked to leave I think when I was 14 or something. And through fair means or foul I ended up in the forces. I was given a choice by a rather friendly policeman down there who gave me some good advice. He said go and join for three years and I ended up staying for 21 or thereabouts.

Went overseas to Malaysia in 1963 and stayed there until 1966. And it was during that time that I met and married my wife in the early part of 1966. Came back to Australia in June ’66, had our first child the following year in ’67 and went back to Malaysia again in 1967 for another couple of years. Back home

from there in ’69 did the usual military type things, got posted here there and everywhere. Ah, was reasonably successful I think. And was discharged from the army in 1983 and then served with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs for another 11 years. And finally retired and packed it in and stopped working in about 1994. Three children, all married

all successful in their own way. Four and a half grandchildren and my wife and I just enjoy life. We got back to Malaysia quite frequently and see her family ‘cause she has still got some members there. And that’s basically what we do and we enjoy it until the time comes when we can’t’ do it anymore. And I guess that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

I, the earliest memories are from primary school, we had an old an ex air force bloke who served in the war and he was a school teacher at the primary school. And some of the things that stick in my mind, and maybe had an influence on me later on too. He used to make us line up out on the black every morning

and we’d say this to the flag and we’d march around like little tin, this is true. And then we’d go into the classrooms and he had somebody learn the drum and we would do all that. We would raise the flag which they don’t do anymore, maybe they should. Spent my primary school years there, but there was some interesting things that happened. We had some quite severe bushfires back then and we were lucky to survive one of those. I think we were

going up the road about 100 yards in front of the fire but we managed to survive. My mother was divorced from my father when I was only 2 years old so if wasn’t an easy life. In fact I had the reputation of being the best chicken thief in the south east I think, because we had to survive. But it turned out later that the old farmer knew what was going on, he didn’t really care. Because he knew why we were doing it and so forth. Had some minor

compared to today’s you know things they get up to today, young people, some fairly minor trouble, nothing too terrible. And as a result of that as I mentioned before I ended up the forces. So that’s an uneventful education up until the time of joining the army.

Yeah it was, I mean she ended up, she married again and ended up with 11 children and

trying to survive on what was eventually a widow’s pension, or a divorce woman’s pension. It was not easy, it wasn’t’ enough. So we supplemented that in ways that I’ve already told you about. And but she did the best she could we didn’t complain too much, couldn’t have all the things you would like but that’s life, that’s the way it is. And I’m sure there are families today that are in exactly the same boat. So we were no better no worse than some families today.

Yep, and I’m the eldest. I don’t know whether that was good, I used to threaten to beat them up I suppose. But they didn’t take a lot of notice. Along with that came the responsibility of where she couldn’t provide, then I used to provide in my own way, and we’ve done that. So that was pretty much it.

Yeah, exactly. Yep, that’s it.

Yeah it was. Though after a little while some went to live with aunties some went to live with just friends. By choice I think, or whatever but they did and that lightened the load considerably and I think she was able to manage fairly well towards

the end. So that was not too bad. It probably sounds a little bit worse than it actually was, so that’s the way it was.

No, no I wasn’t a good student, let me be perfectly honest. It was probably me own fault because I was lazy. When it comes to education I just really didn’t want to know. And living in the country

there are other things that a I would rather do than go to school. And it was quite common for kids back then to have their own small rifle. I’d rather go rabbit shooting than go to school and quite often did that, so school wasn’t a good time for me. It was not something that I enjoyed when I could be out running around in the scrub having a good time. So that’s its. That’s the way it is, was.

Yes, in fact

it is interesting that you mention that there was a young fellow that I went to school with and we were the poorer families in the town so we used to cop a little bit. But we’d only take so much before we retaliated and its interesting that in the last 4 or 5 years I have rediscovered him and his wife. So we’ve become friends again so that was one of good parts about school days. But it was good it was a lot of fun.

I wonder, yeah, but then when it came to military type things I was nothing special. I suppose I could shoot alright but I was nothing special. So perhaps that had something to do with it. I don’t know. Shooting rabbit and shooting other things is probably a bit different.

yeah I actually lived with my aunty in a town called, in Millicent. I used to walk to high school it was not far, a couple of miles or something. It, I didn’t have that freedom at high school that I had at primary school, where I could go rabbit shooting, Millicent is a reasonably sized town, and if I didn’t want to go to high school which I frequently didn’t want to do, I would spend my time walking around the streets,

around the back roads, and of course, the local policeman would come up in those days and say, “Well why aren’t you at school?” And I just didn’t it just wasn’t my thing, school just wasn’t for me. By fair means or foul I used to avoid it as much as I possibly could. So that’s it.

Yeah, I used to enjoy the hell out of the athletics days and was a reasonable athlete. And I used to enjoy, it was interesting

that you mention woodwork because I used to enjoy that. And was quite good at it, I used to get good marks and do pretty well because it was something that I enjoyed doing.

Back then you didn’t really have the choice of the subjects that you could study. It was you do this and that was the correct one. That was the way the high school had it set down

and you didn’t have a choice. So yeah perhaps if we’d have had more choice it would have been a little more successful in some other ways, but never mind that’s the way it was.

Actually he lived there and they’d recently moved, they went to Victoria, but the friendship was still there, we just recently came back from holiday with them so things have turned out pretty well.

He didn’t go to high school

I don’t think he did his time at primary school, I’m not sure how he managed it, I think he went to work, and doing what ever he did, I'm not sure.

You had to stay at school, if my memory’s correct, until you were 14. After that, yes, after 14 you could leave if you wish. And I guess that was what he did, got to 14 and said I’ve had enough. And went and did his

own thing.

I don’t really know, I never had a lot to do with people who were actually on farms. Although they were at the school, his parents were pretty much the same as mine; Dad was in the war and all sorts of things like that. So I think that’s probably why we struck up the friendship because we had lots of things in common.

But he didn’t have to go to work on the farm, no.

My best memories were probably woodwork, definitely athletics and at that stage, being 14 or 15 thereabouts, obviously the girls were a hell of a lot more attractive to look at

than siting there staring at the black board, so yeah, I made some good friends there. But memories of high school, nothing to rave about I just did it because I had to and I got out as soon as I could.

I was scraping through that’s all. I remember we used to sit there and do a thing called double entry book keeping, and it bamboozled me from day one, so the teacher and I had an agreement, she said, “You sit there and do what ever you like, and don’t disrupt the class,”

during the book keeping, so I used to do me homework, and that was it I was free for the rest of the day. That’s the way it was, so that was okay.

Yeah I suppose by country standards it was quite large, and still is. I go back there quite regularly. I don’t know how many kids were there, maybe 300 thereabouts, I suppose.

So it was reasonably.

I just used to go and hide in the scrub. Millicent, because we lived on the fringes of town, I could spend my day just walking through the scrub and doing all sorts of things. I used to take my lunch bag, because I needed to have me lunch, and I would plant it somewhere and I’d go and have a little walk around, and then come back when I got hungry and I, they soon found out what I was doing and I had to go and find another place to hide

but that’s fine it was fun.

Freedom I think, I didn’t have to be anywhere at any time or do anything with anyone if I didn’t want to. And being a country kid, you know, that’s the way it is. I think most of them would be the same, I just think they love the freedom. Of being able to, most of them were taught to drive, illegally I suppose, when they were on the farm and that’s the sort of things that we could do that the city kids couldn’t’ do. If that make sense.

He’s actually, he’s retired here, I won’t mention his name for you know personal reasons. But I got in a little bit of strife and it was quite minor and you know to get in a bit of a fight and swing at somebody and probably clean miss, but I did that a few times. So he gave me a bit of a slap on the wrist. And his advice was pretty sound.

he said to me, “This is the third time you’ve been in trouble for doing this sort of stuff, when you get a bad name in a small town, people remember you for a long long time, the best advice I can give you is to go and join one of the forces and get out of here for a while so people forget.” So I went away for three years and ended up staying 21 odd years. So it was good advice let me tell you. Because I think had I stayed in that town I would

have probably got in a lot more trouble. Good luck to him and good luck to me too for taking his advice.

Yeah, he wasn’t the sort of guy I know you hear stories about policemen who were pretty stern old fellows, but this fellow wasn’t. He, at the end of the day was quite a nice fellow, and I agree with you it was fatherly advice because I didn’t have one at the time. Now whether he knew that and took it into account, but it worked let me tell you it worked very well.

He was still in the air force, he and my mother divorced when I was only 2 years old, and he continued on his career in the air force and that’s all he ever did, he was a career air force officer. so he was doing his own thing, making his own carer.

No, he for his own reasons didn’t, and I’m not sure what the terms of the divorce, that doesn’t interest me

and there is no bitterness but he just did his own thing. And I wrote to him a few times and he never replied, but having said that, now we communicate, in fact we have become quite good friends over the last 10 15 years. So there is no animosity there, he just did what he had to do.

I found out, and he’s actually done one of these, he did it for the air force

he’s quite famous if I can put it that way without overdoing it, in the air force he is well known for his ability, through the war, he did a couple of things that got him a DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] and a bar and all sorts of things so he was pretty good at his job. And I suppose from that point of view I respected him as sort of one professional soldier to another. And that’s the basis I think that we established our friendship on later on.

He, offered actually to take me into his home, and educate me and I suppose, become a father, son, if you like, but I wasn’t into this school thing, he wanted me to go to university and do all those sorts of things, and I’d already had enough of school so I declined. So it’s not that he didn’t try to help me at least once because he did.

But I, nah, I wasn’t’ having a bar of that education stuff, I wasn’t into that at all.

Yep.

No I was actually going on, I would have been about 16-17 then, I think you had to be 17 to join, yes you did, to join, so I was getting up to that sort of age and

I originally was going to go and join the air force and then I thought no I won’t, and my logic for not joining the air force was if I joined the air force and I am successful, and my father is still in the air force it will be because he pulled some strings. That was the mentality but I’m glad I joined the army because I don’t regret it in any way shape or form. There are some other things that will come out but the army is the oldest of the

three services and I actually ended up in artillery which was the oldest of all the corps in the army. So ended up from my point of view, I ended up on the top of the heap. And that was great as far as I was concerned.

No, no, but having said that, my brother later on, who was my second brother and father when they divorced, he actually joined the navy. Now I don’t know what that did

to the old man, I joined the army and he joined the navy, and he was in the air force, so. I reckon his blood pressure went up a few points, but that’s just too bad.

Sure, you have to go through a fairly rigid medical examination, and I actually failed the first one. And I’m not sure why I think it was something to do with blood sugar or something like that. That doesn’t matter, but 12 months later, they asked me to come back, and 12 months later I

was successful and said that’s fine. And I enlisted in Adelaide at Keswick Barracks. Spent a few days there just waiting until they had a group big enough to send on the train over to a place called Wagga, which I’m sure you know about, that where they recruit training still is. So of we went in the middle of winter to, my god was it cold. And we did I think

about three months there, and they completely change your culture, they strip you down, they take everything away and they turn you into what they want you to be, and that is a soldier to do what they want you to do, when they want you to do it. And that’s what it was, well, I mean I had a bit of a mouth back in those days, I think they call you a two bob lair. And I got punched in the mouth about 4 or 5 times, and they said, you better learn to shut up otherwise its going to be a rough 2 or 3 years for you. And I did and you learn

and it was pretty , I wasn’t very physically endowed but I had a lot of endurance, and I got through that quite easily, and I enjoyed it. You know you got to be here at a certain time and do this that and the other. But one of the old fellows that influenced me the most was an old artillery sergeant, and he was one of our instructors there, and it’s because of him that I ended up in artillery. I used to listen to his stories and all that

sort of business. So it was a good three months, very demanding, you learn how to dress and do this and do all sorts of things. And I mean we turned out pretty smart, even in civilian life there was always some sort, even now there is some sort of military, you know, I won’t go out now unless I look reasonable or what I think is reasonably, so yeah, it didn’t hurt me at all.

Yeah,

Absolutely, yeah it’s a bit strange isn’t it. I’m not sure why that would be, probably because the discipline in the army was a very, strong. I mean they just didn’t play games in those days, It was either right or it was wrong or it was black or it was white. It worked for me, as I said, you better learn to shut up otherwise its going to be a rough couple of years, so I did. And I just went on from there.

Absolutely yeah I still do, it irks me to this day when I see people make fun, on TV shows for example, of service personnel, they might do it in the comedy shows and that, but that gets up my nose. It did them and it still does. I don’t’ think that is something that should be made fun of. Oh I took it seriously then, and I look back on it and I still do, it still do.

We did, I went to Melbourne, with some friends there, just a stupid country kid who didn’t know anything, and I think I had a bout 2 or 3 beers and I fell over or something. And we were only there for a few days and I don’t really remember much about it. We just stayed with his family; we didn’t do anything special, probably went to the movies and thought we were god’s gift to all the pretty girls

around the place. So nothing exciting in Melbourne.

Back to Wagga to finish it off. I think probably the leave was about midway through, and then we went back and completed our recruit training, and then off to, god help us, we went off to corps training. And if I thought recruit training was bad I had a big shock coming, I can tell you. So we…

The discipline required in the corps was fair and away worse than what was required at Wagga. The artillery had the reputation for being the discipline corps and I , I began to find out what it was in a hurry I tell you. We, some of things they used to make you do there.

Sure, I certainly can

When I got to the school of artillery we arrived in the middle of the night, in a, there’s a thing called a vestibule which is a sort of entry way and then it branches out and goes to other parts of the barracks. The RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] at the school at the time had a ferocious reputation and I happened to be the first poor silly bugger off the bus. And he used to stand in the dark in this vestibule which would echo at the best of times, and he would let you have it as soon

as you walked, oh my god what’s happened here, I nearly died. And he just got stuck into everybody, he’d let you know as soon as we got there that this wasn’t fun this was going to be pretty stern few weeks. I think I spent a little bit longer there, because once again we were waiting for enough people to start your training. So I spent a bit longer there that probably some of the others, but the discipline in the artillery was amazing, absolutely.

The things that they used to make us do. Do you know what basic webbing is? You know the things, the pouches that you wear and you put bits and pieces, what we had, we had to get pieces of wood and make these things perfectly square. They weren’t allowed to collapse and you had to make them hang in a certain way. We had to polish to in soles of your boots; they had to be all this sort of stuff. The islets in your boots, they had to be polished of them and they were brass. And they

used to make you polish like, I thought, what have I done. And your rooms and that, we had no floor polish we used to have to do them with a boot brush. And you’d have to do that as you come out so you didn’t leave any foot marks on the floor when you went out, and on and on and on it went. And I remember something that happened, to this day I don’t know how it happened but it did. We were getting ready to go and do the morning parade and me army socks were dirty so I put a pair of civilian socks on

and I’m standing out on the parade, and I was, honestly I was quite smart, I was enjoying all this, and I would take great pains to make sure all my uniform was better or at least as good as anybody else’s, and the fellow that was inspecting, he come up and said, “You’ve got your own socks on,” I nearly died. How the hell did he find out, and the only thing that , conclusion that I can come to, was that he must have walked past my window as I was getting dressed and saw me put them on.

‘cause nobody else would have told him it’s not possible. But he knew that I didn’t have, well, I didn’t go out that weekend, I stayed in camp to do all sort of things. That’s they way it was.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean

there were big mouths and there were lairs and whatever, but at the end of the day when you were all told to do something you all did something and if you didn’t do it. Some were to more or less better standard but that was it. It was just one big team and everybody did what was necessary to make the team work. And I enjoyed that because all of a sudden I wasn’t the dope from across the road anymore, I was part of a team and maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much. Because even today, I can perform in a team better than I can

as an individual. I’m sure it’s because you don’t like to let other people down, and the army would foster that because you needed to be part of a team. And I like to think I was quite good at it.

No, because at the end of the day, during your early training, you were that buggered that all you wanted to do was go to sleep, you know ‘cause you get everything ready for the next day so by about 9 or 10 o'clock

you could go to the canteen and have a beer if you wanted to, but I wasn’t much of a drunker which is a bit surprising I suppose, for army people, for service personnel. They had a bit of a reputation for enjoying a beer, but I wasn’t’ a big drinker, did stupid things from time to time, but I wasn’t;’ one to go to the canteen and have a beer and do it, no, not me.

I was assigned but I’m glad, what they would do was look at who needed what, which part of the army needed soldiers and I was very, very lucky that I got the artillery. I originally put in to go the armoured corps and I’m glad that I never got it because confined spaces don’t do a lot for me. So I’m really pleased that I got the artillery, that something that turned out really well for me.

They looked at, they give you an indication of who needs what. And I thought the armoured corps a bit short maybe I’ll do the right thing and go to them, but I didn’t have any final say. Maybe they didn’t think I was suitable for the armoured corps so they put me in artillery, so no argument, no problems at all, that’s turned out really good for me.

At that time? Before we get to your core training the only thing we did was artillery, small arms training, various types of rifles and machine guns and pistols. And then when you get to your corps depending on what corps you go to, in my particular case you then train on artillery, on guns. So that becomes the focus rather than so much the small arms, although you still have to maintain a certain

degree of proficiency with small arms but the emphasis was on artillery. And that’s the way it went for the rest of my army career.

The artillery? Hard work, damn hard work, I mean some of those things weigh 2 tonne, and you have to pick them up and move then and push them and shove them and do what needs to be done. But did I enjoy it? Without question, without question. As

things went along and I become promoted I knew, and this is just, I’m allowed to be a bit big headed, I knew I was good at it, and I used to take a lot of pride in that. So that’s, I enjoyed it.

Making something, yeah. That’s it, perhaps that was a motivator, I don’t know, yeah, but perhaps.

Accommodation at recruit training when we first arrived was fairly gruesome. It was some of the huts had been around since they, I think they had been there they said the Second World War, but I think they had been there since the First World War. And they were cold. When we got to the school of artillery they were old barracks, they are still there, even to this day, I think they are heritage listed,

but they were good, they were very comfortable, modern by their standards. But even today if you went there you would still feel comfortable, except you don’t have to polish all the brass bits and pieces around the place. No complaints, none at all. I always remember at recruit training you would get what they used to call a picket, which meant that you were on a shift at night time. And part of your job was to make sure that the water was hot so that

everyone could have a shower the next morning. And they had chip heaters and the chip heaters were terrible things because they would get clogged up with ashes and they would go out. And if you didn’t have hot water for people, I tell you, and there was quite a few you might me talking about a hundred odd blokes, and if you had the last shift, say from four till six in the morning, it was your job to make sure that the heaters were going and the water was hot. I never got one of those because I was terrified I would let the thing go out and they would kill me.

So I did alright I managed not to get that shift.

No, not really, we had a fairly ordinary relationship, it was quite strange and we didn’t communicate a lot because we were not close. We were never close even until the day she passed away, we were never really close, that’s all I can say.

Certainly off me own back and if looked at it now, yes for me. And later on for my wife and family, for retirement purposes and so on. So that’s a true statement I was doing it I think because I liked it and I didn’t know at the time, when I joined the army they said sign here, so this and do that, oh yeah I’ll do anything. And some years later I saw this entry in my pay book,

and I couldn’t work out what it was. Now this is some six years later, so I went to the pay officer and I said to the bloke, “What’s this?” and he looked at me like I was a bit sparse and he said, “Don’t you know?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “That’s your superannuation fund, you’ve been paying that ever since you joined,” and I’m glad I did. Because I am still getting money from that superannuation fund now, and I’ll get that until the day I die. So it was just one of those dumb things that I did, that’s turned out wonderfully well for me.

Yes, indeed, you didn’t have to do it, but I didn’t want to upset anybody. I’ll sign anything you like just put it here and I’d sign it. And that was the mentality. And it turned out, as I said, it turned out great.

You get sent to a regular army unit. And I originally started out as air defence.

anti aircraft, what did they used to call them? Bird gunners. And I went to this particular unit and I was only there six months, and then they asked for people to join a particular unit which was another branch of the artillery, which was air defence and the one that this one was what they called field artillery. And they were going to Malaya, and I’ve got no idea where Malaya is, but it sounds good to me, and I’m in so I put me name down. And I joined

the field artillery and had to relearn all the, everything again, all the guns were different, but that didn’t matter. And away I went. So it was just one of those things.

How long? Before we went we were at it flat out for about 12 months. Really hard slog, and well it was necessary, as you’ll discover later, we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into at that time. But we were going to

join a British Army unit, and I guess we wanted to prove to them that we at least as good as they were, and we did some very, very hard training.

The pay was okay considering that I could get paid and I could go out tonight and spend the whole lot and its all gone, but

I always had a bed to sleep in, a shower, and three meals a day and medical. So I had nothing to lose I was still going to get fed, I was still going to eat, I didn’t have to rely on putting a bit aside. I could just blow it and that’s usually what I did, along with everybody else. You just go and have a good time, knowing that you were taken full care of.

It was then, I thin kit has changed now, but to me yeah it was a luxury.

To not have to put money aside to feed yourself, the only thing is, because I was a smoker in those days was basically to have a good time and the devil take the rest, who cares, we’re dog all right, I promise you.

Yeah, where is it, I’ll have a go. That was the attitude; I’ll have a go at that,

that doesn’t bother me too much. And away we went. And there are funny things that stick in your mind. We were at Holsworthy, which is in Sydney. And about 4 or 5 days before we were due to go overseas, I went into one of the local department stores and I got myself on credit, I got myself some really nice clothes, nothing but the best, and I shot through 4 days later and never paid them a cracker.

And I wasn’t the only one, a lot of people did that. But we went over there with the best clothes you have ever seen in your life. So that was a bit of skulduggery but what the hell it was harmless.

You end up on a particular gun, there is about 7 people, and you become quite close with them. You eat with them sleep with them, you probably drink with them

socialise with them, probably take a swing at them every now and again because they are getting gup your nose. But yeah, for three, three and a half years you are with the same group of people.

Yeah I do, I can almost remember everyone of them because I still communicate with some of them now. One or two of them I have lost track of I thin one or two of them have probably died, or were killed, but here is still, some of the rally good blokes that I became friendly with I still keep in touch with now. And if I

happen to be going through the town, in Queensland or New South Wales, I’ll give them a ring and stay a day or two and then away we go.

Field artillery pieces, they are actually there is a particular one we used was a pack howitzer and it could

be stripped down into small pieces, it could be carried around by a couple of blokes, or by mules. so they were quite ingenious. Terrible little things as far as knocking the skin off you, I’ve seen people lose fingers ‘cause when you are putting them back together and all this sort of business, they were quite ingenious the way there were design, but not very robust, to sort of stand up to the hard firing very much.

Yes, we used to call them Meccano set, ‘cause you could pull them.

You were never supposed to pull them apart as often as we did, but we did, for whatever reason that’s what we did.

You actually start off as the bottom man, just as an ammunition…just load the thing, prepare the ammunition and load it, that’s what you do. Then as you become better qualified or better at your job, or the sergeant in charge thinks that you’ve got a

couple of bob worth. He will train you to do other jobs on the gun. You become proficient with one, but if something happens you can go and do any other jobs, with a minimum of training you can go and take over another job. With probably with about 10 or 15 minutes training. And that was the basis of the Australian army then, I don’t know whether it is now, but you had to be proficient in one job and capable in at least one other.

I became what they call, I sort of worked myself up to the number three on the gun, which is the guy that sets all the sights and does all that sort of business and makes sure that it points where its supposed to. And you’ve always got somebody checking on you of course, and then eventually as the years went by I got promoted became the 2 IC of the attachment and became the boss, and as it evolved later on.

Ah, yes I was in fact I still am

with some of them, they are spread to the four winds now, they are from Kangaroo Island up to Cooktown up in the gulf. But if any of them were to walk in and knock on the door then there is always that relationship, whether they are a brother or sister. Those that are still here, the one in Victor Harbour we are quite close, we socialise fairly regularly and in most cases, yeah. Some of them are a little bit, I suppose in a large family you are going to

find one or two that don’t socialise or communicate, but I think generally, yeah, they’re okay.

Yeah, I suppose I look back on it now I did without realising it because I did what I did. We were talking about stealing chickens and all sort of things like that. That was just something I did, and I have to admit to you it was probably fun as much as anything else, so yeah.

But to no great extent because it wasn’t so long after that that I left and went into Millicent and went into high school and people just drifted where they went.

Nine more, yeah

Yeah, yeah.

Ah, no not really

but that doesn’t mean that he was an ogre either, he was, he provided well, I cant’; ever remember him saying, sure you hear stories about stepfathers and stepsons, there was none of that he just provided well, but unfortunately he was drowned some years later in a fishing accident. But there was no it wasn’t a bad childhood from a parent point of view. It was a bad childhood; let me make it quite clear because I made it that way because I got myself

in some strife.

Well you have to I don’t know whether I did that early on, I was a bit of a lair which almost brought me undone. but I hope I learnt early and then made a success our of the army. I think I needed somebody to kick me up the backside and point me in the right direction, and I'm glad that policeman did.

Oh, dear,

I have no idea, I'm going to take a wild guess and say it was probably about 2 or 3 years, I might have been about 5 I suppose and then she remarried, and then when I was about 12 he was drowned and then she remarried some years later. But I'm not sure of that, I’d sort of gone and lived elsewhere and become pretty

disjointed with the whole thing, I was too busy being a smart aleck and doing my own thing to worry about other people.

Yeah, he was, he was a fisherman down the south east. On the Cray fishing boats, it was probably a bit of a shock I can remember feeling quite sad about it. And went to the funeral and probably shed a few tears I think because he was pretty decent sort of a fellow. But that’s about all.

No, I was in the army, long gone, and that didn’t last very long, only about 6 or 7 years. And although I did meet him, nothing special he just sort of, he seemed okay, he provided well and did what he did.

Only one, she was 40 , just probably just able to have one more child and not long after that, maybe about 7 or 8 maybe the whole thing dissolved and I was long gone anyway and too busy with my own children and whatever.

I was, having had a small break from recruit training and went to Melbourne, you know I’m standing in Melbourne like this going, what the devil is going on here, coming from the country and then, Sydney initially was exactly the same. But it doesn’t take long for you to acclimatise because it’s…you soon find the places where you are going to have a bit

of fun and so forth, so yeah, I enjoyed Sydney but I didn’t like it, I still don’t, its, you hear what its like, once you are from the country you will always go back , and that’s true. If I had my way I’d be out of Adelaide like a shot, but not to be, not yet.

We just used to go to, the school of artillery was in one of the exclusive suburbs, Manly, on the north shore and we used to go down to Manly and hobnob it with all the best you know, especially in the summer time. You can imagine all the people coming

over to the beach and you can draw your own conclusion from what the girls were wearing and how nice it all was>

It was nice, I mean the girls wearing bikinis, you know boys will look at pretty girls in bikinis and vice versa, so that was it was. But it was a good place. They are not there anymore, but it was nice.

No, not necessarily, there was a bit of a thing about army people, and it was it happened in Wagga as well because there were some nasty incidents that happened with soldiers during the war, with the local population. It can be that way until they want you, and I’ll use an example here. When I was in Townsville very briefly a cyclone went through there, and up to that point in time the army were just

people that provided money and just nobody special. Alright they had been to Vietnam and so forth but when they wanted people to clean up the city they call on the forces and you are heroes for about 4 weeks until the works done, and then after that, get lost. Don’t wan tot know you, that to some extent, is what happened in Manly, it wasn’t that bad, because we were pretty tightly controlled there, even if you were down in the street and got into trouble with the local police, they would ring

up the artillery the camp and they would deal with you. So you had to be careful. We didn’t cause any trouble in Manly, we probably got drunk, wen tot the movies, go back to camp and I never got any strife when I was there.

I don’t know exactly, we are going back now to the Second World War people, and I believe there was perhaps a murder or something like that which they found out later was committed by one of the people out in the either the air force base or the army base, ‘cause they were all there.

So the feelings and relationships weren’t too good, but I don’t know the facts of that so perhaps we don’t’ say too much about that, we need to talk about what we know about.

About ’62 or ’63.

I wonder, Vietnam had already started then, but Australia’s involvement was only quite small. I can’t give you any reason for that other to say that I never got in any trouble. In fact I met a couple of girls that were there and got invited home and you know they were quite happy that their daughter was involved with a serviceman, if you like. So to me personally

it wasn’t anything, but here was some sort of , I don’t know, not ill feeling but it was a bit sandpapery if you like.

No, I don’t think so, we were all serviceman. Some had worst reputations, I know, you are probably aware that sailors had a reputation of having a girl in every port, whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. no probably no one

was worse than the other.

Absolutely, terrible. Not ribbing but outright animosity. I mean I would not have a bar of anybody that was from the navy or the air force. And I tell you right now I still feel the same way they are inferior to the army, for our own reasons, because whether they like it or not we are the oldest

of the three services, yet they class the navy as a senior service, and we are second in line, that doesn’t sit too well with the army blokes, let me tell you. Because although it was all put on paper at the same time, they didn’t have any flaming ships they had nothing, and now you see why. And if we got together on a sporting field, playing a game of rugby, good god almighty, it was all in, and anything illegal that you could get away with you would, or Aussie Rules

or anything, inter service sport was then and is now, its huge. ‘Cause we want to do them in by fair means or foul, so it still exists I can promise you that.

‘Cause they’re no good. Not as good as us. I said it then and I’ll say it now, we used to say to the navy blokes, they would whinge and complain they could go back into their ship and the worst thing that they’d have to, oh have I

got enough hot water for a shower? Oh, I can’t have a shower for two or three days, oh it’s too rough I’m not going to get tea, oh its too rough I can’t sleep. And yet the army blokes are out there carrying everything they need on their back, living in the mud. No showers, I’ve, we’ve gone for 5 or 6 weeks without ever seeing a shower, there are ways you can keep yourself clean, and these blokes are winging. The air force, they go back to their base camp every night and sit in the mess. So now you see, it was that way then, and its that way now I can promise you.

I don’t know, I really have no idea. I suppose they would have a system similar to the army, when you become proficient you get an increase in pay, so I suppose it would be similar, I don’t know.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely, yeah. Not the navy, not for me. I never really had anything to do with the navy as far as saving my backside if you like. But we were extremely grateful to the air force for their timing, and I use Vietnam, although this is not about that, just draw the comparison, and the respect we had for them, even though we’d give them hell. The respect that we had for their medevac [medical evacuation]

helicopters and so on and so on, ‘cause they were brilliant, they really were and you know you earn professional respect, you get it you earn it. That’s, they were wonderful, really very, very good.

Absolutely, yep. They do their job and then you go and have a few beers and then after that it is all forgotten. Into them again

yep, get stuck into them again.

Yeah, oh yeah. Yep, we were well trained; I'm not suggesting they’re not now. But we were very well trained and we were quite ready to go and do what ever needed to be done, fit and ready. In fact I remember before we were going to Malaya, we couldn’t wait

we wanted to get over there and find out what this place was all about, you know, so it was great.

Nothing, I knew that it was somewhere in Southeast Asia. I knew that prior to us going there, there had been a thing called ‘The Emergency’ which is part of this. But that’s about all, I didn’t know what the emergency was, I didn’t know why.

No, we knew why. We were going over there to become a part of the Commonwealth Corps which included New Zealand and Britain, because Malaya at the time was developing and we knew they had trouble with communists there and that was largely why this group of Commonwealth Forces existed and was maintained. so we were going to become part of that, but we didn’t know what was going to evolve in the future.

Yes, they were, 1962 so we had a double commitment.

We were taken over first class, no not first class; we were taken over in a [Boeing] 707. None of this military transport stuff. They took us

over in economy class on a Qantas 707, so that was pretty good, all paid for all free.

That was because they really didn’t want to antagonise anybody by taking military craft here all the time and people would say, they are building up here to do something. So it was all part of the disguise I think. They thought yes they’ve got troops there but not a lot, so

we just taken across in an aircraft. We weren’t even in uniform we travelled in civilian clothes.

Yeah it was, it was, it was pretty, I think for those reasons. I think other people might be interesting they might have other views on it, I think so for something like that.

Yeah, we were told we weren’t going to advertise our presence about what we were

going to do, it wasn’t until we got there on the ground that we found out that things were slightly more intense than what we were lead to believe but basically that.

Initially they were yeah, they took them over on the old Hercules transport, I was one of the lucky ones, I went over on a Qantas 707 I was one of the lucky people.

But even so, during some of the trips, we stopped I’m not sure exactly where. Coming home we pulled into Manila, but we had white shirts on and army polyester trousers, you’ve never seen anything more stupid in your life. They were trying to hide the fact that, no we are not serviceman, but look at your boots, look at your trousers, so you got a white shirt on. The mentality was absolutely stupid, and I’m not the only one

that’s experienced that, there were thousands of them.

We arrived in Singapore, and we walked out of the airplane, and man this place stinks. And it did, it was hot the humidity is always about 80 percent or something, and as soon as you walked out it was like somebody turned a shower on because we weren’t acclimatised, and the smell would knock you down, I thought, go am I going to spend two years here?

But you get used to it, you accept that that is a part of life, if you go to Singapore now its not like that, it doesn’t smell at all. Its spotlessly clean as opposed to what it was then. If Singapore had the reputation of being one of the sin cities of the world, and I can tell you that it was probably true. But now its almost sterile its so clean

and then we had to get on a transport plane, a double decker thing, and go from Singapore and fly up to Malacca which is were the military base was, and it absolutely astounded me, the stupidity of some of the British transport people were making pregnant women climb the top of the stairs to get to this transport

aircraft. They were that rigid, oh Mrs so and so you will sit here, we have not investigated whether you are, we don’t care get up the stairs and shut up. And that’s they was it was. But a couple of them objected and of course that threw the Poms into chaos they didn’t know what was going on. So instead of saying to me, you get out of your seat you go up there and let that lady sit there, it was as simple as that, no they had to change all their load lists and oh god almighty, you’ve got no idea. So I thought to myself

is this the British forces, oh this will be nice. But they turned out to be very, very good. They were so good but they were a bit too rigid, they wouldn’t sort of change, but they were very good.

As far as the city itself? We used to go there on leave, and it didn’t change much, we go to a street which is still there today, it’s called Bugis Street

and it is rumoured, that you could get anything you wanted in Bugis Street, anything. You could buy a car, you could buy an elephant, you could get a gun, anything you could get in Bugis Street, in particular, and I need to be honest here, because the sex trade was absolutely rife in Bugis Street and that’s one of the main reasons it existed. If you go there now the street is still there

the windows and that where the girls used to show their wares or whatever you like, its still there but its completely changed, and you get some of the best food in Singapore. So they have totally cleaned it up.

About venereal disease? Yes, it was drummed into us, they accepted that where there was a group of soldiers there will be prostitutes and so on. If you are going to go there, then you need to do this that and the other,

If you don’t there is every likelihood that you will get venereal disease or even worse. And they made no bones about the fact that the treatments were pretty ugly back then, but you would also be in a bit of strife if you continued to do that, but still you were well educated about what was going on and treated if you need to be.

Almost everyone I know would head it while they were sober, but of course the danger was when you got trashed, it didn’t matter. All the precautions go out the window, and I suppose in most cases that’s when the worst happened

I suppose so like somebody said, we are soldiers it has been this way for years there will always be

prostitution, not soldiers but servicemen. It still happens now so nothing’s changed.

Just a barren airfield in the middle of, what had been cleared out from some rubber trees basically, but Malacca itself, we discovered as we spent time there

that’s where I met my wife, Malacca is the oldest town, or city, in Malaya and it has occupied or colonised or whatever you like by that many different people. And they’ve all left their influences on the place and it is absolutely historically, it is absolutely superb. And the food you can get there because of these various influences is just out of this world. That’s one of the reasons I love going back there, you can live high on the hog in Malacca.

for about 10 bucks day, food wise.

There is a large Dutch influence there because the Dutch were part of that, and as you probably know they were in New Guinea and so forth. And there is an area there, the Dutch area and it is petty much the colour of there, that’s the buildings that orange colour there

although the Dutch have now gone, they’ve still got the buildings there and they’ve still got the names of course. And they have left their influence there, they were quiet arrogant people by all accounts, and treated them quite badly. You had the Arabs, the Portuguese were there because my wife, her ancestry is Portuguese, and then you’ve got a small settlement of Eurasian people, a large population right throughout Malaysia is the Chinese and the Indian

and its just so diverse its just a wonderful place to go and have a look.

Its hard to describe

yes, it is, and some bell towers there, it was the Dutch influence and I think they were quite religious people, I'm not sure what it was, and then

the Portuguese come along and they built even more churches. And was interesting and it dawned on me when my wife and I were back there earlier this year, and I looked at he church that we were married in and it is older than Australia, the church was built in 1710. And I looked at it and it just sort of shocked me, and you being, now when you are not having a good time as an 18 or 20 years old, and you haven’t got time to smell the roses, but every time I go back now

I always find something interesting each time that I go back that I never noticed before. So that is a good reason to go back.

Yeah, not into the nightclubs and booze and all the rest of it anymore, so you have a look and see the place or what it really is.

I was fascinated by it. I don’t believe that you should go to somebody’s country and

dump on them, you don’t sort of go there and say I’m the white master and you will do as I bloody well tell you, I’m not like hat at all. Some people are, let me tell you, and Australians. But I went to enjoy it to have a look, and say what are these people all about, all these little Malay people around and so forth. The others all they wanted to do was get to the nearest bar and get smashed, that sort of thing. I wasn’t much of a drinker, and fortunately I found a good friend

and we, if we got a bit of time off, like an Easter weekend, we would leave Malacca, but we wouldn’t go to Kuala Lumpur either because that was a major city, or Singapore because it was full of soldiers and servicemen. We used to go to little villages out in the middle of nowhere where they may or may not be a local hotel, there might be just a little restaurant we had to go and eat what the local people were eating, and you sleep the same way they did, they call it a hotel, but it had no air conditioning, you were lucky if it had mosquito nets, but that’s the way we liked it, just to

get away, we were fed up with seeing soldiers, no, lets get away.

Yeah, that’s when you find out really what the people are, get away from the cities, into the villages and that’s where you find what the true people are really like.

They spoke obviously Malay, Chinese and Indian, they were three main, and English of course. But they were mainly

because of the Chinese and the Indians and they were then and they still are the main business influence in the whole country.

Yeah, I think so we used to do a lot of exercises and you were always driving through villages and of course kids love chocolate and they love lollies and all sorts of things, but I never had any trouble early on with the local people, in fact I went there to try to find out what made them

tick, and join with them, and I got invited to some of the houses and I ate what ever they ate, and I didn’t ask what it was, but I loved it, and I’d still go back and eat it. Now I know what it was and it wasn’t any thing, it wasn’t lizards or snakes or anything like that, so. That’s what you do, that’s what I do to find out what they are all about.

yes, they were, yes they were, because

they had just got over from the trouble with the communists terrorists, with the communist emergency. So they still looked on that as their security blanket I think. Where they knew as long as their was commonwealth troops there they were going to be safe.

Well communists, that was the big thing, communism was what they were all scared about. And as long as we were there they were safe.

I don’t think it really got chance to flourish in Malaysia, so what it meant to them I don’t know. It was sort of knocked on the head pretty severely before it even got going although during the emergency it was pretty nasty.

Yes, it was, this was before my time, but because of the trouble they had with the communist terrorists, and this was what influenced old Menzies, you know the domino theory, they were coming down through south east Asia and so forth, and that is the reason we’re supposed to have ended up in Vietnam as well

because there was a communist threat right throughout south east Asia and that was why the British troops were maintained there to get rid of the communists. I think they did it pretty well. It’s now one of the most stable countries in Southeast Asia.

The Emergency? Well the

essentially the communists were trying to destabilise the government, stop Malaysia going towards its independence which was coming through being granted from Britain, and they wanted to disrupt all that and probably their long term aim was to put in a communist government.

These were just communists, probably some Malays, Chinese and so on; they were coming down from further up in south east Asia, exactly what their primary race was I don’t know.

But that was, that’s they way I see it and that was the way we were understood.

Once we got settled in and it takes about 3 or 4 weeks to get acclimatised. So you start off fairly gently. And then it becomes just another day at the office. You get up and you do your training, or you go to bed or you go and have a beer, and you get up and you go on exercise, and so on and so on

until old what’s is name, Doctor Sukarno decided he wanted to stir up a bit of trouble because Malaysia was a young nation and he wanted to, Malaysia and Indonesia have owned joint parts of the island of Borneo and I think that old Suharto was going to test them to see if he could get the whole lot or find out whether they were going to be any good as a nation maybe, but he started mischief making. And that’s when

we still had the good times, but it took the edge off it got pretty nasty for a while.

We, the British forces were deployed along the border; the part that is owned by Indonesia is called

Kalimantan, that the bottom half of Borneo and the rest of it broadly speaking was owned by Malaysia. And that’s called Sarawak and he kept old Sukarno kept sending people across the border stirring up trouble in the village or whatever, so the British government I suppose certainly with the approval of the Malaysian government maybe even at their request, we set up troops along the border to kick

their bum if they came over the border, and he got pretty nasty let me tell you, I men a lot of people don’t know what went on there.

That’s right and I suppose that’s why we are talking, but it only really lasted for about 6 months in the physical context but it went for 3 or 4 years, but let me tell you, if you look at it on a world scale, the First World War, the Second World War, Vietnam, just using those as examples, it was a very small

war. In actual terms of physical contact I think it lasted about 6 months, but if you are in a small war and it gets nasty, the small war can be just as bad as a big war. That’s the way people have mentioned it, and its true, at the time its happening you don’t know that the war is only going to last 6 months. That’s just has the same affect as one that last 4 or 11 years.

That’s the way it probably is.

It certainly was, not only did he have a shot at them in Borneo but he sent some ashore in the mainland in Malaysia as well. At that particular time we were up on the Malay-Thailand border and once again there was still a little bit of weapons smuggling still going on from the emergency the communist terror. So we were up there patrolling the borders

we became infantry soldiers, we were taken away from the guns, so we went and did that for about 6 weeks.

Up on the Malay-Thai border and the government even denied we were there which they have done in other cases, it didn’t come as any surprise.

Yep, absolutely they even denied originally that they had troops in Borneo, for whatever reason I don’t know maybe they didn’t want to seem to be antagonising

anyone or whatever, but why are you there in the first place. And then the old Indonesians sent a party of 50 ashore at a place not far from Malacca, it was the Kusang River I think, well we were brought back from the border, picked up our guns and went out there and did all sort of stuff, actually fired some rounds at them and scared the hell out of them and they all came out and give up. So they are just a couple of the little things that happened during what was termed the Confrontation.

If the information I’ve got is correct, it was called an emergency because in a war situation you don’t have any claims on insurance, so they called it an emergency so that the British planters if anything happened to their plantations could claim against their insurance company. See if I’m right see if some other people make the same comment, and I would venture to say that the confrontation was called that for similar reasons. It will be interesting to see what other people you interview to see what their thoughts are on that.

Oh, yeah, Malaysia was colonised by the Poms, amongst others, but they had the most significant, they were there for the most significant time and then set them on the road to their independence and gave them a pretty stable form of government and so on. Taking what they could out of the country along the way mind you, but they’ve set them on the road.

Of the Emergency, yes, in fact some of them were actually shot and murdered by these communists terrorists, so the land owners were at much as risk and the servicemen, ‘cause they were murdered. I’m not too sure, some of the people you talk to about the emergency will give you that detail and you will I'm sure.

Rubber

I think it was big money in those days, now I don’t think

if you see Malaysia then, it was mostly rubber and tin. Now it is palm oil and outside industry, National Panasonic, all the big companies go there because they get cheap labour but at least they provide employment for the people who are quite happy, they can get a reasonable wage. So now its all gone, rubber is now very very small compared to what it sued to be.

yeah, some of those, the plantation owners I think were a bit of a tyrant. The rubber tappers which is the people and they do what they do to a tree to get the sap out of it, were getting miserable, miserable wages. Something in my mind tells me that in Malaysian money they were getting about $30 a month,

if you take that by today’s standards to use comparison, if you halve that that’s $15 that’s what they would have got in Australian money for a months wages. So it was pretty terrible.

I wonder, I really wonder why they were coming in and some of the people thought, well we couldn’t’ be any worse off, yeah I take your point, maybe it was that, maybe

they were getting some support from disgruntled people who thought, well we are not doing so good here, we can’t do any worse under these people. Maybe it was a nice alternative.

Yes, of course and that would be silly to say otherwise, because you can please some of the people some of the time, so for hat reason I’m sure there were people there

who would have liked to see the back end of us.

No, I never did, I never had anybody show any animosity towards me at all. Not during those years from ’63 to ’66.

Yeah, that’s a fair comment

we were just going there we were going to be a part of the British Army, the Commonwealth security forces, and we would just do what we do from day to day, and pretty much that was what we did until the Indonesian thing started to come up.

It became a little bit more serious, now in terms of war this was a small one, but we

started to get the feeling that things were probably a bit more serious, and to such an extent that my wife and child lived outside the camp. But I know there were contingency plans that if things got really bad, to bring everyone inside the camp, because the camp was huge, and it could be self contained, it had its own water supply and hospital and sewerage and so on. And there were plans

that if it should get to that stage then that would occur. And where all of a sudden we might be sitting there on a Sunday afternoon have a beer, they would say don’t this weekend you can expect something unusual perhaps and they would have what they called a mobilisation exercise, where if things got nasty they would have to call everyone in at short notice, that’s what they would do they would come around, and you had to be ready to go

all the time.

Well they had obviously enough military vehicles and

a certain amount of vehicles would go to that area and collect all the families and bring them in and so forth. Typical military type thing, you go down there that street and pick them up and somebody probably would have gone ahead and warned everybody that this was going to happen, take your bare essentials and go. Something along those lines.

No it was actually was in Borneo

that was the first bit I saw, we wont’ go into the details but just let me tell you that I’ve seen the damage that a hand grenade can do to a human being. And its not a hell of a lot of fun, I suppose that’s probably enough, because you have heard it all anyway and I t doesn’t really change, some people dress it up and make it sound worse than it is, basically that was my, during Malaysia in Borneo that was my worst experience.

I was there in 1965 along with a lot of other people, when did we go? May I think, I did right it down somewhere, April to August in 1965. And like we said small wars big war when it’s a war its all the same, although they just called it a confrontation for whatever reason we spoke about, when somebody’s shooting back at you with military uniforms on, to my mind

that’s probably a war.

A rifle as in trying to shoot at somebody? No I can’t say that we did, we were predominantly artillery and we would use those for our own defence wherever possible but of course the small arm defence ones, I never actually had to fire a small arms

rifle at anyone to try to kill them, never. And I'm pretty pleased about that.

We were in a really unusual situation, an artillery unit consists of 6 guns and they are normally put on the ground together within about 120 metres so they were all there. In Borneo they were spread out over about 60 miles so you had

a single gun every so often along he border which is very unusual, not so that they were out of range so that one gun could turn around and help the other one, but that’s the way it was and it was a bit of an unusual situation.

Absolutely, we were actually the gun that I was with was helping out a British parachute battalion they just happened to be the

people we were allocated to, if they got in trouble when they were out walking around doing their patrol through the jungle then they would call for this gun to help them out. And that’s the way it was, a bit unusual but that’s the way it was.

Yes we were, I don’t recall the specifics of exactly what or why but we were and we fired a number of rounds and its all recorded somewhere, not too bothered with all that sort of stuff, but yes we were called on/

We were using the one I spoke about before, the pack howitzer the meccano one that you could pull to pieces

It was okay there because we weren’t during that 6 months in Borneo were never called upon to fire for long periods of time and I mean maybe 2, 3, 4 hours at a time

it would last maybe an hour but it could be a bit spasmodic you maybe do a couple of rounds then rest then make some adjustments and away you go again. So the gun was alright for that but when they took it to Vietnam it was useless because it required for them to fire huge amounts of ammunition for long periods of time, it literally fell to pieces it wasn’t strong enough.

I was

a number 3, which was responsible for putting the sighting information in and all that sort of business, and when I was told to do so you fired it.

Radio, some primitive old things but they seemed to work. They’d stick the antennas up in trees and all sort so things and make it work, I suppose that’s all that matters.

yes we did, actually on that although we only had one gun I think there was 10 people there, bearing in mind that you have to do that for 24 hours a day so you need people to rest and 10 or 12 people, I don’t recall the exact number.

Ah that interesting, I knew you would get around to that sooner or later. We were sent to a place where there was absolutely nothing and when we put the gun on the ground;

we had to clear it all so you could get the thing to fire where it needed to and we were sleeping above the ground so what we’d do we become rabbits, and started digging like hell, and we dug our own sleeping bunkers and one of the bunkers we slept in was probably about twice the size of this area here.

There was four in there and of course you didn’t have everybody in one room in case something happened you lose the lot.

So we had some there, some over here and some over there so we were split up into various groups. But unlike the American they had everything you asked for it and you get it. The British weren’t, they were a bit stingy, we actually had to go out into the jungle and cut down big trees and bring them back to build the roof before we put the sandbags on, so that was the difference. Borneo in physical hard work was exactly that, extremely hard physical work

Your number one priority was the gun so we had to get that into a pit. So we had to dig that down and do all that, and get the gun into position first, you had to protect that that was your priority. Of course while you are doing this you are filling sand bags and doing all that sort of brick work if you like

then it was the personnel, personnel or ammunition I’m not sure, those two came next and I don’t’ remember which on, so you had to dig you an ammunition bunker which was quite huge and places for people to sleep and the gun and all that sort of business so it took a while we probably only just got it completely finished in about 5-6 months before it was time for us to go, and we didn’t even have time to sit back and admire our handiwork and some of the Poms came in and took our place and we came home.

No that was spread around because you weren’t allowed to keep different types of ammunition together you had to have different bunkers or at least a big bunker with a dividing wall in it so you kept different types of ammunition separate from the others. For safety reasons also if you needed to go and get

a certain type of ammunition you knew where it was.

No, everybody slept around the gun and I mean if you look at my house for example, the gun and all its sleeping quarters wouldn’t cover very much more than my house. Not the block but the house. So we all had little wings off the gun pit and that’s where you dug and slept in there, so you were adjacent to the gun

you had to be so you could get out and get onto the thing in the shortest possible time

We had stretchers yeah, we were living in luxury we were sleeping in stretchers for a change as opposed to the blow up mattresses which didn’t work too well. The ants used to love them; they used to chew holes in them. so that was a little luxury that we had

We dug them we had to dig them ourselves, and I’m sure you’ve got some idea what torrential rain, monsoon rain is like, well it had to be able to withstand that. So when we dug them out we got sheets of tin and we put them up against the wall with iron stakes to stop the thing from collapsing on top of you, it almost worked, if one starts to come in the middle of the night when you cant’ see your hand in from of your face and the walls are falling in

I can tell you what

Oh, did we ever, it didn’t completely collapse fortunately but it was in the early stage of construction and we didn’t quite get it right, and the walls were starting to fall in and we could hear it in the middle of the night, and we are out of here quick.

Yeah, they teach you, the army in its infinite wisdom it tells you how to lay sandbags so you get the best strength out of them

and the best protection and you put your wood down this, yeah all that sort of stuff. Nothing, not a stone was left unturned.

We did actually because we built them and fortunately the fellows we believe in overkill. If they said it needed to be a foot think we’d probably make it 2 foot thick, you know and a bit of overkill but that was alright it gave us something to do

We didn’t have

a clue. Because we were not out patrolling around the jungle we didn’t really know exactly where the Indonesians were and I suppose in honesty nor did the other people until they run into them. Because the maps that were available back then were terrible, not very good at all. So we didn’t know we just knew that if somebody needed us we were there and it was up to them to tell us where to put the thing and tell us

where to fire it and hope to go they got it right. Well they usually did nine and a half times out of ten they managed to get it right.

We did actually, a bit later on I show you some of the attempts at humour but they were great guys, the parachute battalion we used to get our ammunition dropped in by aircraft and of course some of it would get damaged, well if it gets damaged you can’t use it and it has to be destroyed.

And I particularly remember one of the parachute fellows saying we were going out on patrol and they were looking for the bad guys if you like. And he said, “Have you got any unused bombs?” and we said, “Yeah, we did,” well this thing weighed 33 pound, well he’s already got enough on his back to keep him alive for 4 or 5 days and he wanted this thing as well and I said, “What are you going to do with that?” and he said, "I’m going to set up a booby trap with it,” it would have made a hell of a booby trap I can tell you

but that’s what they were quite prepared to do.

No, no we just there do your job, this is what you’ve got to do, we got very little tactical information about who’d down what and so on and so on. Which changed alter on now whether they learnt a lesson from Borneo I don’t know, but we weren’t particularly told what was going on, how many was out there, where they were

nothing like that.

Yes, yes, they were. They were supposed to be very good but I won’t say anything like that because they weren’t very good. They were ill trained and ill equipped and not very good, I don’t think. And a lot of other people feel the same way

No, no and I say that with absolute confidence because of the British army and the amount of people and equipment they had on the ground. The difference between the British Army and the Americans is that if the Poms say something they mean it. I’ll use an example here that I know occurred somewhere not where I was. If they say there is a curfew at 6 o'clock that mean everybody in that particular area or town or village

needs to be inside their home or inside a barricade or something before 6 o'clock. If you are outside after 6 o'clock we will shoot you and they did, but they only had to do it once because them people found out, people were quite serious. The difference between the Americans, they dither around, oh we might shoot him we might not, so that’s the difference.

The British are a lot more professional and that’s why I preferred to work with them, in my opinion they were much better.

Yeah, we’ve got a wicked sense of humour and so have the Poms I mean we originally came from there so, it is not the British don’t come across as being, if it’s not the British way its no good. You know the Americans think if they can’t do it nobody can do it. The Poms are not like that and we’ve shown the Yanks a few things that they were absolutely amazed,

no that can’t be done, well it can be done. But unless they invented it or can do it ti can’t be done, that’s the difference.

yes we did. Just down, our gun position was on a hill and about probably only a kilometre or two away there was a little village

and when we were over in Borneo, Myself and one of the other fellows did a first aid course, which was required for promotion so in amongst all this digging and whatever we go and do this first aid course and we got a chance to go down to the village and do some practical first aid. I thought what the devil is going on here. Well we went down to the village and there was an old lady there

and she had a tooth ache. And they said, “Go on pull her tooth out,” and I said, “What?” pull her tooth out. So id didn’t do it but we gave her an injection we deadened the thing and the fellow that I was, well he pulled her tooth out and oh it must have been that long it was huge. And the grin on her face afterwards, ‘cause all the pain was gone and she reckoned this fellow was god ‘cause he had taken this tooth out and got rid of all the pain. That was our attitude toward the local people

we, if they needed help you give it to them. Whereas perhaps the American might not, you draw your own conclusions from what you see and hear. But we were quite prepared even if they were the other side, even if they were the enemy for example, so if the wounded needed treatment we would give it to them and that’s still the case now in Iraq. The Australians if they meet wounded people and they need help well they’ll give it to them

No

no none at all, none at our position, they did get some but non that I ever saw.

No, none at all, not a single day off. You were on that hill for 6 or 5 and half months or whatever it was and that’s it.

yes, they had because it was a static position for us it also had the headquarters of the British parachute people had their headquarters there as well. And they set up a basic kitchen it was a thatched roof and they built a few benches and things out of the local timber and we’d go up there, and they did the same thing with the showers. So what you had to do though if you wanted to have a shower, I think they employed some of the locals from the village

to bring water up from the creek and fill up a tank so we could use that to have a shower. Before that happened you had to go down and get your own water. And that was a hell of job trying to get back up the hill. So it got fairly modern, it was more than acceptable, we even had our own barber, it was just one of the locals, one of the local parachute blokes who was handy with a pair of clippers. It was put it on number two and take it all off, basically, but yeah

we were alright.

Do them yourself, just get the water and do them yourself. There is nothing new about that.

Not one day off, no.

How did we keep sane? I think we were kept sane because we kept working

and that stops the boredom. You get edgy and bad tempered but if you keep working and you’ve always got something, whether it needs to be done or not, you’ll do it because A, if you don’t your in trouble, but it does keep you occupied. And if you are bored that’s even worse, doing nothing is worse than doing something even if it is a bit mundane. So

it was we could walk to one end of that place to the other, it was probably about 200 yards long, the whole hill that we were on and we cold walk from one end to the other with only your head sticking our above ground. Which is great until it rains and then it all filled up with water. So there you go, that was done for occupational therapy, just to keep you busy. I’m absolutely convinced of that there is no other reason to do it than

perhaps for that, but it worked.

A beer? No, what we used to get was an issue of rum. Now can you believe this in the tropics where it stinking hot and they used to give you rum which makes you even hotter and it was like syrup. It was actually called SRD rum it was actually a British army issue. And they worked out that each

man was allowed so much per day, well we used to end up with about maybe a pint or a bit less, and nobody would touch the stuff. But without naming names there were a couple of people that used to do a job on themselves pretty regular on this rum, so we won’t name any names, but you know who you are.

No, not at all

Probably

only a few days before we went, everything happened quite quickly, you know alright you’ve got 4 days to go an whatever, maybe tomorrow. You were packed up nobody had anything but their basic military stuff which you could put in your pack and be gone in an hour. I don’t really remember exactly how long we were given but we were gone, basically just pack up and go, a helicopter came in and lifted everything out and away it went.

In my turn, yeah, whatever they

decide d was the priority of things to come out, you take your turn and line up and get in this thing an hope its not going to fall out of the sky, ‘cause I didn’t like flying. But it was okay

We went back to Malacca, no when we came out of the jungle originally we came to a place called Kuching which is in Borneo absolutely beautiful place. It was then and its still now, that’s where all the army headquarters was

at Kuching, ‘cause the officers don’t’ want to go out in the scrub the old generals they are sitting back there having a good time. So we went back there for a little while just a few days and they took us back by sea on one of those ships that land all the, I forget what they call it, that’s a navy thing

Something, whatever it was. And that took a few days but it was a nice change, have some sea air and no grog. And we got back to Malacca

and they gave us I think we ended up with a couple of weeks off. And of course everyone had 6 months worth of pay that they never collected because there was no where to spend it. And they couldn’t pay you really I suppose because we were spread out over such a long distance and we all went, and one of the very few times I actually went to Singapore and stayed in the top hotel there, me and a friend and we had 1600 Australian

dollars, now if you multiply that by 4, that was the local exchange rate, that’s what you got 4 Malaysian dollars for one Australian dollar. So we were there and I was back in camp about 6 days later and I didn’t have enough to buy a packet of cigarettes, I spent the lot. But what I did do was go to one of the tailors in Singapore and it was the same fellow who made the clothes for William Holden, you know the movie star, Bridge on the River Kwai, well this tailor advertised

that he’d done all this stuff. So I went and got 600 dollars worth of the best clothes you have ever seen, I was the smartest looking thing, I looked like a rat with a gold tooth I tell you, these clothes and I kept them for years; they were good quality. That was about he only significant thing I did, I wasted the rest.

Booze, movies, more booze, of course you had to feed yourself, the hotel, that probably wasn’t cheap even though

we had a heap of money, and that’s about all. Not any of the favours that the girls used to offer I wasn’t into that sort of business, that didn’t appeal to me very much, I was a bit scared about what other things you might get as well.

Oh, personal choice, they got drunk and did what they did.

What else did I get up to? We actually saw most of Singapore there is a huge thing there called the tiger balm gardens we went through that, was a bit of a cultural thing. There was an island there that we went across to I can’t remember the name of it, just a bit of a touristy thing. And generally just eat and drink and have a good time, that’s basically what Singapore, and spent a lot of money on taxis I suppose getting from one place to another. What do they call those things? Trishaws you know where you jump in the side and the bloke pedals along, that

sort of thing.

Yeah, it was. Mind you a couple of real good hangovers and you start to slow down a bit because I’m never been areal heavy drinker and one or two of them and I won’t touch it again for 6 months. So but the others were quite regular drinkers so they just got stuck into it

the local beer in Malaysia was tiger beer and they used to make it back then, and I believe without any facts here that they brought some back to Australia and had it tested by the CSIRO and it was unfit for human consumption, so I don’t’ know whether that is true or not but we used to laugh about that. They still drank it it never killed anybody that I know.

I don’t know whether it was poorly made

or not hygienic, I don’t know, I have no idea why and I'm not even sure about the facts of that, but it’s a statement that a lot of people make. And I’ll bet you if you interview some of the other people they will say the same thing, so you see if I'm right.

We went back to Malacca and we continued on with what they call beach

patrols and sentry posts along the beach because Indonesians were still being buggers. So we used to have to do these, what did they call them? Look out posts, strategic pints along the beach and you would spend, what ever your shift was, a weekend I think you spend, usually about a 24 hour shift and you would just sit there like a

stunned mullet with a pair of binoculars looking out to sea and see if there was any bad guys, this was in the middle of the day and the binoculars we useless at night but that’s what we did. It was just a requirement and we did it.

Let me see, I never left Malacca until 1966 I think those beach patrols and sentry posts started

to dwindle down towards the end of 1965 because it had all gone quiet so they didn’t see the reason, there was no more threat from Indonesia I think, they just sort of played these silly little games and didn’t come off too well so it all dwindled out. And then we settled into basically a more military type day, get up do your training and go to bed. In the mean time I met this beautiful little girl in one of the restaurants and went in and

ordered some fried rice from her which I was going to have for my evening meal, and I didn’t come back and pick it up, and she abused me but I married her anyway. Its just one of those things.

She was working in the restaurant and I went in with another girl to be quite honest with, but nothing just a, and then as I said, I ordered and didn’t pay and she didn’t like it but I married her anyway.

I went back

to see her time and time again. It took a little bit of convincing she wasn’t real, she didn’t reckon it was real good, people didn’t do things like that. But it all worked out for the best. We’ve been married 38 years so it couldn’t have been all bad.

Yes, as I said I was married in that church which is older than Australia and it was a, it was really nice, the tradition over there is that the elder laddies in

my wife’s village or amongst her friends, they do a lot of help as far as the reception and we provide the money and that, make beautiful food, and I’d never tasted anything like it, so it turned out pretty well. I think the whole thing from start to finish and we had a very substantial wedding and a reception with a live band probably cost me about by today’s notes

probably about 600 dollars. So that was the difference.

Yep, one of them was by best man. Prior to getting married I didn’t have any religion I was nothing, I don’t know what you call that. So I had to convert to the Roman Catholic religion, so I did that

but through fair means or foul, I had an ulterior motive, religion didn’t bother me at all let me be quite honest, and my godfather turned out to be a little aboriginal friend of mine from the unit I was with, and people sort of looked at me and said, he’s aboriginal?’, and I said, “What difference does it make” unfortunately he is not with us any more he was killed in Vietnam but he was a great little fellow one of the nicest fellows you will ever meet in your whole life. And he just used to laugh, he knew what I was up to but he was quite prepared

to do it. I think I was older than him, but it didn’t matter apparently. That’s the way it turned out.

Very, to get permission to get married was like bashing your head against a brick wall. And I need to explain that a little bit if I can. Some of the local girls were prostitutes, let me put it that way, were looking for

a meal ticket to Australia and some of them got it. So to tightened things up the army made it quite difficult and I agree with exactly why they did it. And they used to make it, she used to have medical examinations, she had to talk to people to see if she was socially acceptable and so and so on, and they delay things. No it hasn’t been done yet, and on and on it goes.

Made it very difficult but we persevered and we were e going to play their game and we did, and we one. So, but I guess they have to have those sort of standards.

yep.

By a doctor, you can draw your own conclusions from that; probably venereal disease I would suggest was one of the reasons. Whether she had any physical disabilities and so on

but without a doubt I'm sure venereal disease would be the prime things that they were looking for. Military system, that’s the way it is, way it was, I don’t know what it is now.

Yep, I am

I suppose originally it was, originally it was a bit of a novelty was a lot of fun and so on. But it all comes to a grinding halt when you suddenly realise, we’ve got a child here, you can’t afford to go and have beer anymore, you’ve got to pull your head in because you’ve got other people that depend on you not just yourself. And there is going to be other commitments further down the road.

I didn’t do it very well at first, I still was having a bit of a good time, but we managed to work our way through it. And I guess that’s the main thing.

Our first child was born, we came back in May 1966 and our child was born in June ’67, I think it was the 20th of June ’67. The second one was born in ‘68

and our son was born in 1973 after I came home from Vietnam.

Yeah, it’s a culture shock I thin, well I know. Like I said you have to make some changes in your life, I didn’t do them as quick as I should have, let me be quite honest with you, but

you do and I did, and I suppose the fact that they got done later rather than sooner is probably okay.

yes she did back to Australia we came back in June 1966 and I took my wife back down to my mother’s place at Rendelsham and I had to leave her there for a bout three months while I went back to Sydney. And

shopped around and got a little flat and a place for us to live because it wasn’t very easy to get a place in those days. And then I came back about 3 months later and took her back to Sydney. You imagine this, she comes to Australia gets dumped somewhere after two or three weeks, her husband’s gone, I took her back to Sydney today and tomorrow I went to New Zealand for 6 weeks, ‘cause the army said so. So she did it pretty rough for a while

But she did it well, she did it really well.

Let me be, I think for me it was easy, in fact I know for me it was easy because I was never there when the children were sick, I never had to find a doctor in a new

place and so on and in anew country, I was just away because the army said go, and then I’d be back for a short period of time, and probably take some of the responsibility, but all of a sudden you are gone again, and she’s left to do all those things that mothers do with children. In a strange country that’s a hell of a thing to do, but she did it and she did it extremely well. I remember going away somewhere for 6 weeks prior to going to Vietnam of course and we came back

and here’s my wife and a couple of kids, they met me at the camp, and I said, “What are you doing?” and she said, “I’ve come to pick you up” and I said, “What do you mean you come to pick me up?” and she said, “ I got my licence while you were away.” But she couldn’t read English she could handle her own language, but she managed verbally to go to the driving instructor and go through this thing and she come to pick me up in the car. And I was absolutely astounded, and I said yeah there

is something pretty special going on here, when you can do that and still not being in country very long. So that was amazing stuff.

That I think her life probably revolved around the kids, and some good friends, we had some friends that we still see quite regularly now. An they helped

wherever but they had their own small children as well. So it wasn’t easy for her, not easy at all.

I went over there when I was 18 so that was 3, 4, 5 I would have been about 21 or 22, depending on when I got back, my maths aren’t’ that good, I never went to school.

Well you look at it this way

so lets say that I was 21. My wife with her first child was 16, so you can imagine what she had to deal with. And everybody said, oh it wont’ last because she is too young or whatever, but we’re still here, but for 16 year old to do that, I quite often sit back there and shake my head, and how did she manage that. But she did.

No, she came obviously because we married, but she wasn’t happy about it initially, because she had her grandmother their who was actually more like a mother and raised her up because her Mum passed away. So she wasn’t happy to come at all, she knew that she had to but she wasn’t’; happy about it, and originally sort of settled in and through fair means or foul

I made the old lady a promise that I would bring her back, and I was able to do that through sheer dumb luck. Where I was in Sydney the next unit was going back to Malaysia so I raced in there and put me name down and told them why and I was able to take her back 12 months later for 2 years. So that worked out pretty well. the old girl didn’t hate me as much then she thought I was alright ‘cause I brought her daughter back, as she called her. So yeah, but that was a good time the second lot of two years was absolutely brilliant.

Marvellous.

Just getting ready with this next unit to go back to Malaysia and then the whole training cycle starts all over again. Work you backside off, get yourself in physical condition to go back to Malaysia for the second time which I swear to you without any doubt was a two year holiday. It was paid for by the army and I loved every minute

of it and so did my wife and we bloody deserved it.

They have an exchange exercise with the New Zealand army where we go across there and they send someone across to us. I think it still goes to this day, and we just went across and did some work with the Kiwis

Training. No we just went there to train with them, not to train them, to train with them, and work under a different environment

with snow and all that sort of stuff, so it was a real eye opener.

16.

No, not really, because Catholicism is basically the same worldwide, with some slight differences and being Christian of course, then you don’t have the same problems as a Christian with a Muslim for example. Nothing, no really cultural – in fact I love the way they live. I lived in her house, for

about three weeks, and just lived the way that they lived and like it, as I said before, I loved to get away and see how the local people live and Maria is what’s referred to as Eurasian that means that her heritage is Portuguese and of course they colonised Malaysia to some extent some years ago and there is a little enclave of them in Malacca when that when that’s actually called the Portuguese village and that’s – we go there all the time. And it’s

just wonderful, the food is just – you have no idea. So no - we didn’t have any problems.

They live not unlike us, I mean their food is obviously a lot more spicy, it’s prepared in the most magnificent way that, you know, European, Australian type meals are nothing in preparation compared with what they have to do.

Because they had to prepare all their own spices and grind it all and do all this sort of stuff, and they have a very interesting habit that they still do today, they eat with their fingers. And it is not, well so do the Malaysian people, the Malays, you try it and see how you go. I tried it and I ended up like an absolute pig, because it isn’t as easy as you think it is. But I reckon I’ve just about got it, next time I’m going to try it because I’ve been watching. It’s only taken me 37 years. So I’m going to have a go at it next time.

The normal way for them to live was then to have a sleeping mat, and sleep on the floor, although we didn’t, her family had beds, but some of them wouldn’t they would just sleep on the floor on the concrete, or the wooden floor with a mat and a pillow and but that’s the way it is.

All lived under – yeah. Have some in different rooms of course, but all under the one roof.

No, in Maria’s case her grandparents

had their own little place at the back, so they used to live out there. But it’s not uncommon for everyone to live in the same house.

Her aunty, who she lived with, her husband worked for the British I think, it was a shell oil company, so he had some superannuation income. Plus, when Maria was working, she was expected to contribute to the family. Pay board if you like, but contribute so that’s what she did.

They lived okay, they were never going to be rich, but they didn’t starve either. So it wasn’t too bad.

I often wonder, nobody said much. I know the old lady didn’t like it too much, but she came around after a while. I think the aunty was probably acceptable because she had two daughters, who were involved with servicemen, I don’t think they were married at that stage, but they were being courted if you like,

by servicemen, so they probably didn’t think it was too bad.

No, never, it never even entered my mind, then and it doesn’t now. I suppose even less now because we – she’s lived in Australia longer than she lived

in Malaysia. So she’s – she’ll just say to me quite often, I’m more Australian than I am Malaysian and it’s true, she is. So and we do what Australian husbands and wives do, we have a barney now and again, do all that sort of stuff, so nothing changes.

No I can’t. Because I’m not a good Roman Catholic. It was just a requirement that you had to be baptised, you had to be confirmed and I don’t know whether I ever was but during a baptism, I think that’s when you have a godfather. Now that’s still the same today. I understand that a godfather is something that can assist the parents

to bring that child up. Well could you imagine this fella who was the same age as me, that’s why I often have a bit of a chuckle about it. But nowadays, if my grandchildren are baptised for example, and they have a godparent, or parents, they can assist the parents and if the parents are, die or whatever then they can become the founding figure in their life. If you like. So I often chuckle about that

because this little guy was probably even more evil that what I was, so. We just used to laugh about that.

I don’t know, I think because I knew that he was Catholic and I asked him and he said, “Yes.” Well then I went and checked out with the priest and he said, “Yeah,” he said, “He can.” And I distinctly remember when I was going through my religious instruction and we’re sitting there one day and the padre was a hell of a nice fella. And he said to me, in the army way, he said, “Hey listen,

what do you think about this Holy Trinity bit, this father, son and holy ghost?” And I said, “You want the truth?” And he said, “Oh that would be best.” I said, “I haven’t got a clue.” And he said, “Neither have I,” he said, “We just accept it.” So I wasn’t as a big an idiot as I thought.

We had three or four. Obviously there was this fella and, yeah

about three or four others that I know of. Look they were just Australian. They weren’t indigenous they weren’t Aboriginal they were just, “You going for a beer?” “Yeah.” And all that. Just, they were just Australian. They were just mates.

In the army? No. No. I cannot remember, we would say it in banter, in a friendly way. And we won’t say what you say, because you don’t have to, but there was never any animosity

there was never any nastiness and they were just the same as us. No better, no worse. Oh, some of them were better because they were better soldiers, I guess. But never existed, I never saw any of it. Because they were part of the team.

Yes, I do. I’ve actually – he married Maria’s cousin. Now, I think we were responsible for that.

And they had a beautiful little girl and she now lives in Perth and we’ve been in touch with her and spoken about her father and the circumstances regarding his death. And we’re good friends. And she’s got five kids of her own and so on and so the world goes round, you know it’s wonderful.

He was from – I think it was Katanning. A place up north, a little town and I believe they’ve got a small, in the council chambers there,

because it’s just a – and you miss it and you’re gone. But the council chambers have erected something in his memory there or in his honour in this little town and I’ve never been there to see it, but I will do, I will one day, I’ll go and have a look.

Well we used to call him, Harry, but his name was Ronald Harris and nice fella, really nice.

He was with us, with artillery and then he went to SAS [Special Air Service], which is

now you’re talking probably the elite, some of the – probably some of the best soldiers in the world and he was out with his particular group in Vietnam somewhere, something happened and he came back in the wrong way, you’re supposed to – they have a series of – you go this way and you come in a different way. Well it got wrong; somehow, I don’t know how. I’ve heard all sorts of theories and stories and one of his own soldiers shot him in the throat. That’s just one of the sad things

that happens. So it’s a bit of a tragedy. So sad.

No we were with the British Parachute Regiment. We had our own SAS was there, in fact I think that is probably one of the very first times that our own Australian SAS was involved in anything to do with war. That might have been their grounding or their birthplace if you like.

But I’m not getting mixed up in that there, SAS blokes’ll kill me if I get this wrong. But let’s see, yeah the British Paratroop Battalion was the people that we were with.

None at all. Yeah. I don’t even know who supported them. I’ve no idea.

Yeah, if you imagine the darkest night that you can imagine, you cannot see your hand in front of your face. And the – you know, the monsoons are regular and down it came. And we were in there and I don’t know, for whatever reason, whatever we were concerned that we were under the ground and we knew that the amount of water that could come around and all of sudden we could hear this noise and it was

“Plop. Plop.” And we hadn’t quite finished this thing and the stretchers were up on logs, so that we weren’t in the mud. And we could hear this, “Plop.” And I thought, “Oh my god.” You know so we got a torch and there you could see the bits of water and coming down. And you put two and two together and there was four of us in there and in the most expletive terms, we’re out of here. So - and we got out.

We had a torch and we knew where the door was, so we got up and up

the stairs and out of the thing. And then we realised that our first attempt at plumbing, wasn’t very good at all. So we had the – it did us a favour, it showed us where the lowest point in the room was. So then we had to dig a drainage point there, because it was going to happen again, there’s no doubt about that. So – terrifying at the time let me tell you. I thought, this things going to cave in on top of me. And I getting out of there quick smart.

No it didn’t. No, what we’d done, through fair

means or foul, or stupidity or ignorance, where the walls were, instead of sitting the logs just on the edge, we had them about three feet out. So once again, it was a case of overkill and it would need to wash in a lot of dirt before the roof actually came down, so we got lucky. We got lucky.

Well,

basically they were doing a patrol through the jungle. And we had the gun there that if they got in trouble they had first call on us. We would give them priority of fire from that gun. And it was as simple as that. That’s what we were there to do. Support them.

Walking. Or they would get dropped off by helicopter at a strategic point and they would have an area that they would patrol. And they would go looking for trouble. It was as simple as that. Allocated an area and

do that and they were pretty good at it, I think.

No, no gruesome stories.

Just, well I told you the one about the bomb. And next door to us, the parachuters had their own mortar platoon, they had their single, you know what a mortar is? That little thing. And we used to tell them, “Oh, that’s only good for piddling in.” You know. And they didn’t like that, ‘cos it was only a tiny little thing like this.

But we used to take the Mickey out of each other. We used to help each other, we used to play darts against each other, when we had a bit of spare time. And we’d hang it up on a tree or something or on the wall. And do that. But the interaction was the same as any other bunch of Australians talking to anybody else. It was good.

Yes, they were, yep. We can show you a photo later on, just out of idle curiosity for no other reason than that. And you’ll see what I

mean about the amount of hard work that went into the place.

It wasn’t quite that good, but it was, yeah, it took a lot to do.

Our intelligence reports that we used to get. Now, intelligence reports can be intelligent

to the people that read them because they want them to be that way. They will tell you things, that they need you to believe, not necessarily true. So with that in mind, do you believe them? And I suppose you have to, just to an extent. They – Indonesia’s biggest problem is that it’s – well there’s nearly 200 million people, but they are spread out over all these little islands, hundreds of islands, and there’s no cohesion amongst them. That’s their single biggest enemy. And probably the same applies to

their armed forces. You know, they had aircraft that we gave them but they had no spare parts. They probably fly the things two or three times, and then once they started to get tired and worn out, they’ve got no spare parts. That was then. I don’t know about now.

Because we gave them to ‘em. With no spare parts. So that was common knowledge that if you could last out a few days against them they were no good, because they didn’t have any logistics to replace what might be destroyed or broken.

Very little. Very little to replace it.

Face to face? Never. Not me, not personally. I would suggest that the SAS people did, they got right down and dirty with them because that was the nature of their job. But not me, no never.

We thought they were just a bit

rag tag, ill trained, ill disciplined and so on. And so on. Be it true or not, we were told that, we believed it and that’s – how

That’s how you brainwash soldiers, you tell them, they believe it. That’s what happened.

No, we had no proof. But when you’re 19 years old, and people are telling you these things, you’re like this, one of those noddy dogs on the back window of a Valiant. And you just believe it. Even through the Vietnam War of course.

These intelligence reports they came out with were so – “Oh, look at this.” You know, but after a while you think. “Rubbish.” But not then, not when you’re 19 years old. You just believe it.

Nothing. For us, we knew it was on, but I knew very little about it, I was too busy dealing with what we were doing,

and the second time around from ’67 to ’69 I was too busy having a good time with my wife and family. And I couldn’t care less, I knew where it was now, because it was part of South-East Asia, and we’ve had a look at it on the map and, well it’s not too far away. But it all came as a bit of a culture shock when we got home and the holiday ended I can tell you that.

What did they do? We were next to go. So the ’67, ’69, two year holiday became nine months out in the scrub

training you see your wife for three months out of that 12 months and then you’re gone for 12 months. So almost two years where you don’t see your wife and family. And that was a requirement. We were even better trained to go to Vietnam than we were to go to Malaysia. Because we had better equipment and so forth.

Wonderful. Absolutely

probably, we look back on that with a lot of fondness because it was, it was a two year holiday for us and other people that had served with me before, and went back again, with their wives and families, had just we were – the married quarters that we lived in were beautiful.

Yeah. Not unlike this, the floor would be coloured concrete, but not roughly. You know just beautifully smoothed off and stained green or red or brown

or something. Because, being in the tropics, there’s no point having carpets and all that sort of stuff, because it’s too hot. And the windows were able to be opened right up – you know, with screens on them so you could take advantage of the breeze and there were ceiling fans in every room. And they were as good as anything, even now. We were back there this year and I went had a look at the one we lived in and it was magnificent, even now it matches up to today’s standards. So that’s how good they were. And

you never swept the floor, you never – sorry you never mopped the floor, you washed it with a hose. Because strategically around the wall, were holes, where, once the water had – find its way to the holes and run to into the monsoon drains, the drainage outside and away it would go. So you didn’t have to do anything, it was easy. But your wife didn’t have to do that. She had a paid house servant. So you can imagine why I say we had a two year holiday.

They used to call them an amah. And life was good, for your wife. She could just – they had certain duties, that they had to perform anything outside that, you had to pay them. If you wanted a babysitter for example, it was considered good manners, I know some people didn’t – to pay them a sum of money for watching the kids, the same as you’d have to do here. And that’s what we used to do. If you wanted them to do extra things, you would negotiate

that. And so on and so on.

They were paid by the army. And they were paid extremely well.

They based – why were we getting a servant? I think it was to make up for living in the tropics, which can be difficult, you run the risk of tropical diseases, totally different diet, different standards of living but I’m not suggesting the house was – I’d live in it now. If I could move that house here I’d get rid of this one. That’s

my opinion of the houses we lived in. And so on, so that was a bit of a compensation for living in fairly – I suppose difficult conditions.

We were still part of the Commonwealth Security Forces, and we still trained pretty hard, mind you. The wives had it the best, and I don’t think Maria will jump on me for saying that. The

second time around, they had a good time. And we would – we were still doing fairly tough things. Still training quite hard, probably not as often because the threat was gone. And the Commonwealth forces were withdrawing anyway, we had news that we were the second last unit to be there. And it was all going to wind down and all those beautiful barracks and houses and that were given to the Malaysian people. So they should. ‘Cos the British took enough away from them, why not give them a piddling little bit back.

So for a – you imagine yourself as a wife over there and say, “I don’t even have to clean my house. What am I going to do today? I might go to town, I’ll catch the bus, and go into town and have lunch with some friends.” And of course that turns into a shopping spree because we got extra allowances when were over there. Being in Malaysia and the difficulties and the expense of running children and so on. So the wives had a damn good time. Second

time around. And so they should.

Second time? It was fairly much the same as what you’d be doing here in Australia. We’d get up. You’d start work at eight o'clock in the morning. Now, from a married man’s point of view, I had to catch the bus, all free, into the barracks and you had to be in there, well the bus got you in there on time. If it didn’t you weren’t in trouble anyway ‘cos it wasn’t your fault you had no control over it. Then you would stand out on the parade

in the morning. And they would call your name to make sure nobody had shot through, which was – where were they going to go? But they do that. This was all military stuff. And they used to give you this little anti- malaria tablet. Everybody got one, you’d stand there with your mouth open and they’d give you this, it was a bit like a priest handing out Holy Communion. But if you missed and didn’t get it down, you’d never tasted anything like it in your life. Bitter like you wouldn’t believe. And hangover or not, I’ve seen a few people swallow them and

couldn’t quite hold it. So they give another one. Because you have to have it. But they were quite considerate. One bloke had the pill another one had the thing full of water, so that was alright. Then you would do whatever the training program said for that day. It could be gun drill, it could be small arms drill, it could be out on the range firing whatever, it could be navigation, anything to do with military that was perceived that it was weak or we needed to improve on, that’s what they would do. And it went on

like that. And it went on like that and it went on like that and all of a – “Oh we’ve got an exercise planned, we’re going somewhere.” And we used to look forward to the exercise to get out of the barracks because that was a bit boring. And that – we’d come back and do it all over again.

I think we used to knock off at four o'clock. And then at quarter past – or half past four, you’d go down and get on the bus and they’d take you back home. And then you would do those family things that you do.

Usually the weekends were free, unless you were on duty and that’s still the same. Quite often you might get a guard duty or something like that where if it was a weekday, then you wouldn’t go home, you would be on duty that night. And you’d go to work the next day and so on but basically that sort of stuff.

Not barbecues, because we – you sort of didn’t. But we might get your house servant to cook up a nice meal or something and you’d get

people to come over. And they would do that, come over and have a meal, but the buggers never knew when to go home. It was quite common, if you invited a single man out to your married quarters, on a Friday night, he wouldn’t go home until Sunday. And you know, you’ve got two days of just alcoholic fog. We didn’t do that very often, I can promise you, but that’s just the way it was. They would bring out their booze and it was expected that they would stay there for the weekend. And they did. But it was fine.

Probably some of them frowned on it, but a lot of them said, “Well what else are they going to do? If they’re not here with us, they’ll be out with the ladies or doing something.” You know exactly what I mean. So they didn’t care, the majority of them. They welcomed them.

Oh absolutely first class. I went back there this year and actually managed to get into the barracks by telling lies. I said, “ I have a friend buried in the Christian cemetery at the back,

I want to go out and have a look.” To cut a long story short, they gave me permission after about an hour, with an escort. And we’d heard all sorts of dreadful stories about how the barracks had been let deteriorate and they have to a certain extent but they’re still very good, but most of the sporting fields are gone. They had soccer fields that you could play the Olympic Games on. Rugby fields, because the Kiwis were there. They had a magnificent swimming pool. And they had beach clubs for the officers, you know,

which were down on the beach with swimming pools and they had the best of everything, they really did.

Well, it was better than a holiday resort. It had its internal shopping, had its own internal sewerage farm and water supply and hospital if things got really bad, well the second year nobody cared, we were just having a great time. It was a bit sad that most of the fields were gone when we went back there this time, but it’s still pretty good.

No. No, it’s all Malaysian now; they gave it back to them when they pulled out in

1971, I think the last troops came out of Malaysia. There’s a very funny story that goes round. The road from the camp to Malacca town, was about 14 miles and it’s only about that wide. It’s sealed but it’s quite dangerous. So the rumour goes that the British government gave them the money to upgrade the road, to make it safer, wider, whatever. So to get into town. So the rumour has it that they took the money and built a golf course with it. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.

But it’s a magnificent golf course if they did. It’s still there today; I went and had a look at it. But I’m not sure from the facts about that.

Yes. Yeah. The big – two of the biggest things that happened because the Poms were big on soccer. They would have inter unit soccer competitions, all the time. Go all the time. They would have boxing, was big, they would have inter battery boxing and

all that. But the Kiwis ruled everybody when it come to Rugby, you know, obviously, until we got there the second time. And during the two years that we were there, the worst we ever suffered against the Kiwis was a 14 all draw. And they didn’t like it, cos they’d ruled the roost, nobody could get near them and all of a sudden a bunch of upstart Australians turned up who could play Rugby. And we had some really good Rugby players, some national servicemen with us. And we used to give it to the Kiwis and

love every minute of it. Because you see we get a bit of your own back in some small way. So that was good, it was great. And there was always a sporting activity of some sort. Swimming carnivals, cross country running, you name it, badminton was big, because that’s – the Malaysians are exceptional at badminton. Basketball. And so on.

No, they did the same thing, they had squash court, badminton, they could have all those. Exactly – except the Rugby and whatever, but golf courses

tennis, all the things that ladies would do except for the football clubs, they didn’t play.

Laid on, it was all laid on.

It was, it was the best, probably the best two years of our life, and money wasn’t short, we could eat, every day of the week we could go out if we wanted to.

But believe it or not you got sick of that after a while, you wanted a home cooked meal or something.

Yes, they were. Mine weren’t at school then so I don’t know if that – but there was schools. British Army had its own schools and so forth, so – but the medical centres were available, just across the road from there we had a medical centre if the kids got crook or anybody got crook, they could go in there.

We had, Kiwis, British, Australians

and the Gurkhas.

Little Gurkha soldiers. There were mixed in with those, some Singaporeans who would come up from time to time and obviously the Malaysian army as well. And that’s about all. No other nationalities that I can think of.

Ferocious.

Every way. Probably the strongest little men that I’ve ever seen in my life. They are only

about – average about five foot, five. And when we were in Borneo, we had to go down, after the ammunition had been dropped off, a box of ammunition for the gun weighed 117 pound. And we would take one between two of us. And these little Gurkhas would pass you coming up the hill with one each. And when they start to get tired, they start to chant and carry on. They won’t give up. And I thought, “Oh, this is amazing.” They’re just –

when we were doing beach patrols we had to meet the Gurkhas in the middle of the night. Somewhere at a strategic point. And we’d be standing there and it was that dark you couldn’t see. And all of a sudden this little voice alongside you saying, “Hello Johnny.” And you nearly died, because you didn’t know he was there. The rumour has it that they used to feel for the laces in your boots to see if they were done up the right way. Because you had to – the army said, “You will do your boots up like this.” And they would feel your boot laces, to see whether – if they could identify who you were.

I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but that’s just one of the legends that come out of stories like that.

Very hard to describe actually. Obviously very short of stature and quite small overall. I don’t know how to describe them, a little bit like Pakistanis, I suppose. Smaller in size, but a bit smaller than the Pakistanis.

But generally that sort of – I was going to say, “Asian,” but there’s that many different Asian people. I could show you some photos later, but very hard to describe.

Their uniform was same as ours. They had a starched trousers and jacket; you imagine starched things in the tropics and what that does to your armpits and other bits and pieces. So everybody wore them. But they had this, you know what an Australian slouch hat looks like? Well they had one, similar but they never had the brim turned up, it was and it looked like an old Tom Mick

cowboy hat. The top was up there and then all they would do was just push the top up a little bit, that was it. With a chin strap on it. And they were the smartest little fellas you’ve ever seen in your life.

Yep. The knife that they commonly carried was called a kukri. Now that’s about that long. And it’s got a big curved blade on it like that. Rumour has it that when they take them out to sharpen them or do maintenance on them,

that they must draw blood with it before they put it back. Now I don’t know whether that’s true or not. So whether they just nick their finger or something, I have no idea, about the facts of that. Was just another legendary rumour type thing that got around, I suspect.

I think it’s been built up over the years. I mean, they have been known to do some quite incredible feats of endurance, like I was telling you about the ammunition.

The worst thing that you could do to a Gurkha soldier would be to take him off guard duty. Because he saw that – he was placed in a position of responsibility for so many men, it was his job to make sure they were all kept safe for the time that he was on, doing whatever that he was doing. For the Australians, they said, “You can shove it mate, I’ll get off this any time you like.” You know, we hated it. So that’s the difference, but they built up that legendary thing I think, even maybe it goes back to – certainly the

Emergency in Malaysia, where they’d been known to get stuck into the communist terrorists with this knife and do some terrible damage with it. But then I don’t know any of the facts of that. But that’s what they are, legendary little fellas.

No, only – we played basketball against them once or twice. And just because they were little doesn’t mean they couldn’t jump, I mean I’m six foot and I would be struggling to beat this little fella, five foot, five fella, ‘cos he had springs in his legs,

I’m sure and quick. They were like greased lightning, so that was a lot of fun on the sporting field.

No, no I don’t. No.

It was usually a British officer. Because they were – I suppose in the strict sense of the word, they were mercenaries. Because they were paid by the British government, they were Nepalese

but they were paid to join the British services and they were paid a wage and so on. Was British officers in command and that’s probably about the only – that’s probably what I know about them.

They are. Yeah. And they reckon it’s even more fascinating to go to Nepal and see the way the civilians live over there. So I don’t think I’ll go there, it’s too tough for me. Too old now.

’69. Came home in ’69.

We were warned before we came home, that we were the next to go. We’d been given that, so over the last six months of our training in Malaysia, which was the tropics which we were going to, we adapted that to train the way that we were

going to have to fight in Vietnam. In total, we just completely switched the way – in Vietnam, we didn’t dig holes. You were given a piece of steel and you put that- and slept under that because it was wet. And I believe the water table wasn’t very far under the ground in a lot of places. So you had to completely change and I thought it become, all of a sudden, become quite easy. If you didn’t have to dig these flamin’ holes any more. So that’s the way I

looked at it and I reckoned this was great. I used to chuckle me head off.

No, I came back to Townsville.

Yes, we’d seen it all.

It wasn’t too bad in Townsville, but you’d see it, obviously you’d see it on TV, every night.

Yeah, it was, it really was. And to – I suppose almost everybody else.

Those that had come home from over there, expected, certainly in the early part of the war, they expected to come home and get treated the same way their parents, their fathers maybe, when they came home from the Second World War. It wasn’t like that at all. They were spat on, I’ve been spat on. And they got abused and of course they weren’t going to take that so things got really heated in certain parts of the country. And on and on and on it went.

Yeah, we had.

A shock.

1969, nothing that stands out. But just seeing what you seen, good god. You know, but you do

what you have to do, because being a regular soldier, you do what you do. But it was – we did start to ask questions, I must say.

Oh yeah, we’d say, what – I mean, you’d see children on there that had been killed and they’d been used in ambushes by the North Vietnamese and you’d think, what’s going on here? Why are we going across there to do this against – you know, maybe against kids and all this sort of business. And then

that’s when the protesters started calling you ‘so and so baby killers’ and on it went from there, well then we got out of it and did it but when you’d come back and they’d bring you into the airport in the middle of the night and sneak you out the back doors, because, to keep you away from the protesters then you begin to realise. But then, when you’re confronted with it on a street, particularly in Townsville, where you would wear your uniform just to go, “Oh I’ve got to nick down at lunchtime,” and you know, you cop a few smart remarks

well, you couldn’t really do much about it because any judge at the time would respect the people and he’d shove you in jail or he’d sort of you know, and that got pretty nasty and then the results of that are, why the hell were we there in the first place? And the questions go on and on, endless questions.

I was questioning why these kids were involved. You know, why the North Vietnamese were using them.

I didn’t really question why we went over there, because we were led to believe that the domino theory was this, it was all starting again, the – oh the bad guys, the communists are coming and they’re going to do all this terrible bloody stuff. But now we know that it was lies. We were led to believe that we were pulled into the war by the Americans. It’s not true. Bob Menzies, volunteered to send Australian troops there before the Americans were even in there. He volunteered Australian troops to go there in 1965.

And the Yanks didn’t even have anybody there then. So you hear all that story about America dragging Australia in, it’s a load of crap. And this is historically a fact. It’s well documented over things that have been released a good whole 30 years after the incident type stuff, that they release all the information. Now you know.

Didn’t know that at the time. No, no we didn’t. We’d been called to go with the Americans and they’ve helped us out at the Second World War and all this

sort of patriotic bullshit. And we’ve just seen some more examples of that recently. The Yanks are good at pulling the wool over people’s eyes, I think. And I’m saying that to the camera because I believe it.

Be that as it may.

Where did you get that from. You’ve done your homework; you’ve been talking to somebody else. Yeah, actually what it was Australians can be weird to some people but not to themselves and we wanted a

place where we could have a beer amongst ourselves and pay for it of course, but make a little bit of profit, pay just a little bit extra and then that money would be given back to us later on and we would have an even bigger party, supposedly for nothing, but you paid for it in the first place. And the Commander at the time thought it was a great idea because he was about as Australian as you could get and about maybe 3 or 400 yards away from where the battery headquarters was, was a big heap of jungle.

Yeah, this is in the camp at Malacca

at Taranak. And we got permission to just chop a footpath into the jungle and then stop and then clear a big square. And that’s what we did and that’s how it became known as the jungle bar and up until the time that I had left there no females had entered the place, an they wouldn’t want to because some of the things that went on down there were men only type things. But we had our own bar we had dart boards we had quoits , we had all that sort of stuff

and there was even an SP bookie down there , but if anyone asks me that I will deny it, but we had one. And we used to listen to the ABC radio Australia and get all the race results and it just become the local pub. But its legend spread far and wide, the Kiwis used to come there on Anzac Day and the Poms couldn’t wait, the only way they could get in there was on an invite. And of course

they were white anting with everybody like buggery trying to get in there. so that’s what it was, it was just a place where we could go, drink beer, make an absolute animal if yourself if you wanted to and nobody would bother you, it was just the way it was.

Ah, I can but I'm not going to because you’ll have to record it on this thing and it will embarrass them, so we won’t go into that.

yeah, the other, see we were part of a British regiment, we were one battery with part of the British regiment and they loved to get in there because we just had a lot of fun. And that more than anything else.

Oh, yeah, we weren’t elitist it wasn’t mean to be anything like that,

it was just something we built and ‘cause we, the Poms can be a little uppity we thought well we’ve got this place in the scrub and we thought well if you want to get in there you can bloody well wait until you were invited it was simple as that. But it was good, it was a good place.

WE just got some bamboo and some scrap timber around the place and somebody was a bit handy, a carpenter and we built a bar and put a roof

over it , but if it rained that was the only place that had a roof so everyone else just sat out in the rain and why wouldn’t you , in the tropics you were never cold. And we used to do those things. It was an eduction on Anzac Day, we used to have trailers full of booze with a tarpaulin and ice you can imagine when the Kiwis and the Australians got together on Anzac Day, forget it, it was just, if you had to go to work the next day you were in a dreadful

state I can tell you but that’s what it was.

WE were allowed to buy it, all had to be done legal and above board, there was nothing shonky about it. It had the approval of the commander, the battery commander and as I say, all legal, no black market none of that stuff, we had to buy it I'm assuming that we bought it through the local British canteens

and we took it down and put a few cents on top of it and made a small profit.

any time you weren’t on duty. It was open 24 hours a day, no it wasn’t it was open 7 days a week and it was probably supposed to close at about 10 o'clock at night but it hardly ever did. But hey were the rules.

I wasn’t much of a boozer, I would go there quite often but you could get soft drink as well, you didn’t have to drink beer.

Yeah, just a good place to get together and booze just didn’t tolerate me well, for some reason I didn’t drink a lot of it.

I only went there once and they called it a change of air station because it’s up quite high. And the

temperature up there would be about 24 26 degrees but at night time you would need a jumper, this was in a tropical environment. And they called it a change of air station to get you away from all the humidity and all the constant, I’m sure you’ve heard people say, “Gone troppo,” well you can. You can do some strange things in the tropics so they used to take us up there just to cool off if you like. But we did a little bit of work up there we did some training

but generally just played sport, had fun, drank a few beers, and at about 5 o'clock in the after noon you could almost set your clock by the clouds, because in they’d come and within about 30 minutes you couldn’t see anymore than about 50 to 100 metres through the valley it would just close in. And you could see it coming it was just like a big rolling, that’s all it was just the clouds coming back late in the afternoon.

I actually went looking for it, I was up there this year, like I said we were in Malaysia and these Chinese friends of ours took us up the Cameron Highland because they’ve got a time share holiday thing up there so we spent a week up there for nothing and I went looking for the barracks that we stayed in and I don’t think it exists anymore, I couldn’t find it. We drove right through the highlands and looked and tried to recall where it might be but it doesn’t have any resemblance now to what it did back then. I mean that was 30 odd years ago, 25 years

or something

It was an army barracks of some sort, I guess the British built it but that’s about all I can remember, it just was very basic. If I'm not mistaken it was, the barracks were open they had no walls on them, they just had ends and a roof, you know the thatched roof, and if my memory’s correct that’s what they were and the shower blocks

and all that were exactly the same. But hey had a small gymnasium there because that’s where I learned to paly badminton up there. But that’s about all, just that one visit that was all.

Yes, we did. As I mentioned previously this friend, we used to like to get away and we’d go to the small villages. And one of the places that we loved to go to was a small place called Alor Star and its up on the northwest

coastline somewhere and we just, to get out of the road, nobody else seemed to know about it. and we got to be reasonably regular there any time we had a few days off we’d just knick up there and just stay in a local hotel for what ever it was and do that get to know the people and do what they did.

Loved it absolutely loved it but when I went back, Malaysia today bears no resemblance to

whatever it was in 1965, ’67

How so? Back there it was natural it was completely undeveloped it had a few sealed highways if you can call them that between the major towns and cities. If you go back there now it’s a 6 land freeway from one end to the other, completely. And the idea with that freeway is to eventually take it up to Thailand and through southeast Asia and possibly end up in Hanoi.

Well Malaysia has done their part. If you want to go to anywhere it all starts and finishes on the freeway which is a toll way and it costs you a fortune. So you drive up the freeway and say I want to go to Alor Star so up you go and you drive along and you’ll see the exit to Alor Star that’s how you get there. The other old road still exists but this is and it’s polluted like you wouldn’t believe, day and night there is just diesel engines belching smoke and stuff into the streets

24 hours a day, and I find it sad because I can remember the way it was, such a beautiful natural place. And now they call it progress, well you make up your own mind.

Yeah it was, because it’s all high rise as well. Even Malacca her little, which was reasonably small then, now is huge. and its all high rise, you know multi story 5 star hotels and when we back there after coming home in ’69, ’70. I think she went back in about 1983 and it all started then and she

said she didn’t like it. And I’m not sure she likes it that much now compared to what it used to be. So all the naturalness has gone.

Different, totally different. That’s not to say you can’t have a good time because you can. They look after you , they know the tourist trade inside out and back to front. And they are very good at it

I think it was more common than not. I know of more people that stayed in Malaysia than wen to say Hong Kong or Tokyo or whatever. Why? I think

it’s A, because they spent all their money and didn’t have any left, or B, it was because you got better value for your Australian dollar in Malaysia in those days than you did in Hong Kong for example, I don’t know. But I would suggest that they spent all their money and had too good a time and had none left to spend anywhere else. So I certainly didn’t want to go anywhere else, I was quite happy to sort of look at that place.

Coming back?

The pair of us do you mean? Yeah it was hard, the first thing I did when I got back, its true there is no place home and the first thing I wanted when I got back here was a chocolate milkshake and a meat pie because you couldn’t get them over there

and that was what we did. And I think Maria lived on them, not lived on them, but ate a lot of meat pies because she liked the things, and I said, “Hey, with a child coming you are going to have to do better than this,” so she made some changes to her diet, but she loved them. No not a culture shock you just fit in. In fact the hardest time was when we came back and they had just changed to decimal currency in 1965 and we were over there. And we came back and all of a sudden the old pounds, shillings, and pence was gone

and you’ve got dollars and cents, and were trying to make sense out of how much a dollar note was, ‘cause we used to have paper money in those days not coins, and we used to always relate that back to the equivalent in pounds sterling and so forth. That was just the mentality because I thought what was going on here you know. One dollar, how much is that? 10 bob, well I ain’t paying ten bob for a packet of cigarettes, ‘cause that was the way, but not now, all just, all gone, it is what it

is but that was one of things we had to get used to.

The only

change that I didn’t notice the second time was that the exchange rate for the Australian dollar to the Malaysian dollar wasn’t as good as it was before, I suspect that is because, well two things I think. A, Australia had not long gone to decimal currency, so perhaps that had an effect on the world markets on their money value, and Malaysia was developing and becoming stronger monetarily

I suppose so you got a little bit of this and a little bit of that, that’s just purely my opinion it would be interesting to hear what other people have got to say, but I think those two things certainly contributed to it.

Yep

We started the training cycle again

and with an intensity that I had never seen before. We knew that this, where we were going this wasn’t a joke this wasn’t a small war this was a fair dinkum one, it had been going for what 6, 7 , 8 years then. So we knew that this was pretty fair dinkum stuff and we were trained accordingly, and I tell you what when we left here we were super fit and very, very good at what we were doing and so were the previous

Australian troops that went over there as well. It wasn’t a game.

No, yes, but a different type. I mentioned before that that little thing wouldn’t take, wouldn’t stand the constant bombardment of artillery requirements. Well we changed to a Canadian gun, which was called a M2A2; it was mainly from Canada and would you believe they are still using it today. That’s how good it was then

and it was suppose to become obsolete a little while ago but they have extended its life. But it was quite good, it was a lot heavier, a lot more robust, and you could actually fire the thing indefinitely and it would never break down it just kept going.

No, no it wasn’t it was you’d move around with a vehicle or a helicopter. But very good piece of equipment

Exactly the same 7, it was the same calibre, it fired exactly the same ammunition just was operated a bit differently that was all.

No at that stage I had been promoted and I had my own gun so who ever was on that worked for me and you just got whoever they gave you, and it was up to you to kick them into shape and

make it worthwhile.

Oh dear, I came back from Malaysia in 1969, I’d say late 19, yeah just before I left Malaysia I think, or certainly soon after we got home I was promoted to sergeant and then had my own gun.

Yeah it was but a lot of it can depend on how hard and how far your commander wants to push you or how far he thinks you need to be pushed to get the job done to be as good as he wants you to be. Some had greater levels of expectation and so forth, others don’t. I think this fellow he was probably a little

more intense than some of the others but we were required to do a lot more things in Vietnam than we were ever required to do in Malaysia as far as gunnery was concerned. I’m not sure that you will understand, but in Malaysia for example we weren’t really required to fire the thing in a complete circle, lets give you a basic example, the bad guys are over there so you shoot at them there and all of a sudden they slip around behind you so you have to turn the thing around

there and do that. We didn’t really have that requirement in Malaysia but we certainly had it in Vietnam because they could be anywhere and you had to be capable of turning that thing around so that requires some skill, let me tell you, to do that, and it requires a degree of physical fitness because the damn thing is heavy it weighs about 2 tonne

No you pick it up and turn it around, physically lift it and turn it around on its wheels

and put it down again, so it was fairly intense, and that could go on for periods of time, 2, 3, 4 hours. So you can imagine physically how demanding that could be

It was a whole unit. In an artillery battery there is about 120 guys so we had the whole lot

that’s everything that you need to operate, we had cooks, medico, medical people, mechanics, people to repair the guns, and then you’ve got all the soldiers and artillery people so it’s a complete little unit all on its own.

We did lose a few, one poor devil broke his arm so he dropped out and didn’t go. The drop out rate was fairly minimal , I don’t know what that says whether they were determined to

do the job and hang in there and get it done. some of them probably shouldn’t have went in all honesty, they weren’t perhaps quite as good as they should have been, but we won’t mention who because I’ll get a liable suit thrown at me or something. But that’s the same in any army unit you can describe. There are some people there that get though that maybe shouldn’t but they do. And the main reason

that they do I think is because of the team environment around them, people will help them. If they are finding the going physically tough, then people in their team will help them get through and I think that’s a good thing.

Yes we did. The reason that I stayed behind, the normal length of time in Malaysia was two years and then you would come home. I actually did two years and 6 months along with a couple

of other people ‘cause national service had just started and they were not yet ready to come overseas to Malaysia so they asked some of us to stay behind an extra 6 months until the national servicemen came. so that’s how I didn’t two and a half years.

That suited me fine, I loved the place, yeah I was one of the first to put my hand up, I’ll stay another 6 months. So that was good, that was quite okay with me.

Yes indeed, no better no worse than regular soldiers. Most were very good and you get the odd ones that mumbled and moaned and bitched and complained about the least little thing, regular soldiers do exactly the same , they were no different to anybody else, and never go treated any different to anybody else. W e probably used to give them a bit of shellacking about being a “nasho” [National Service soldier] but that was

done in good spirit there was nothing derogatory or nasty about the terminology, just one of those things that Australians were good at.

Yes, I did, I had about half I think out of 7 blokes I had 3 or 4. And I had no complaints at all.

No, the 12 months prior to going, 9 months out of that 12 months we were out in the scrub training. So in effect you were actually away from your wife and family for almost two years. If you weren’t training then you were over there. So that was not a lot of fun for your missus and kids. Like I said before they are stuck with the kids while you

are out doing what you got to do.

Absolutely, we were in Townsville which is subtropical and that’s where we were going we were actually going to a tropical area, so the climate there was good and the army will always find the most horrible ugly, dirty, difficult places to do their training, and probably because they get it for nothing or they get it cheap. And that’s where you’re going

be a hell of thing let me tell you, but that’s what they did.

Yes, every so often you were required to be tested on your skills with that weapon to make sure you still knew, if the thing didn’t fire for example, what the hell am I going to do to fix it and make it go. And you had to maintain your proficiency with that

to a certain standard as well as doing your gunnery. It sounds difficult but its really not difficult.

The artillery, and I speak only for the artillery,

what we do and they way that we train in peace time is exactly the same as what we do in war time so nothing changes. It is exactly the same, I suppose the other people it might be exactly the same with them, I know for a fact that that’s what we do, the way we train in peace time in exactly the same way we fight in war so there is nothing different. You just, perhaps there is a little more intensity there because if you get it wrong then somebody could get killed that shouldn’t have been killed but

that’s it in a nutshell. We do it in peace we do it in war.

Hurt our own troops? No, never and that is because of the training that we do, or that we did before we went away. At that time it was generally recognised that the troops that we sent to Vietnam were the highest trained that ever left Australian shore. There was never any doubt in my mind that if I did it the way I had been trained to do it

there would be no accident. And I can say without fear of contradiction for anybody else that might see this, I was in charge of a gun, as a gun sergeant for a number of years and not once during that time did I ever make a mistake and that is due to entirely to the training that the artillery makes you do and the system of what we call independent checks. There is nothing that I did that somebody else wouldn’t do or none of my soldiers wouldn’t do and that

doesn’t mean you are looking over their shoulders, there are ways and means you can check without them even knowing. And that’s the artillery survives on that. And it’s second to none in my opinion, the way they train.

Oh yeah, yeah we had, normally I think it was about 10 days. So you

spend that with your wife and family knowing that the net 12 months is going to be a hell of long time. So we just spend that, we didn’t go any way we just stayed home and you try to spend as much quality time with your wife and family as you can. What else can you do? Nothing just let them know, and that’s what we did.

Oh yeah, hard for me, but like I said, not as hard as leaving your missus home with all

them kids while you are away. You are preoccupied over there most of the time and then when you get some time to yourself and your thoughts return to home, and oh have I written a letter and all of a sudden you start to panic, god I haven’t written for 3 or 4 days and so on. But other than that you are preoccupied with what is going on and your missus is home with the kids with all the worries and debts and bills and that sort of stuff that goes with it. So I’m not too sure who had it the roughest to be honest.

Very

little. there were people there who supposedly would help you but there was a bit of hierarchy in the army and I guess if you are a private soldiers wife then you might find it difficult going to somebody a bit further up the ladder to get some help. I know of instances where that had occurred, the padres were very, very good. But and I think there was a family liaison or a family welfare offer or something. WE never had occasion to visit them so I’m not too sure about that.

I fortunately had a wife that could cope with anything that came her way so I didn’t have to worry about that.

From when I was away? I don’t think so I think that she was quite happy to do it on her own but I wonder if it would have got a bit rough whether she might have sort of said well these people are not so good but she didn’t. She had and we had very good friends who were living

close by and their husbands were overseas with me. If one of those ladies got crook they would take care of it themselves. Hang on I’ll knock up a feed and I’ll bring it over, or she’s crook we’ll go and take the kids and bath the kids and do all that. So the little internal welfare system took care of itself, and amongst friends that’s a great thing to have.

Left where?

Yeah, oh yeah. I certainly do, it was from Townsville airport and of course its an emotional time for everybody. And I remember when I left if you asked me exactly what day and date, no idea. but I

remember the events of that day, I thin we left at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon from memory. And you sort of live with those sorts of emotional things, that’s it I don’t even remember the day because I went on what was called the advance party, they always send some people over first to take over things and get ready for the main people to arrive later. But ask me what day I can’t tell you. The date, I wouldn’t have a clue.

What I packed? All military stuff.

yes indeed, I remember the most important single item that I took and I asked if I could take it, I used to fiddle around with and play guitar a lot and I asked if I could take that over and they said, yeah by all means take it with you and I did. And any time we were sort of back in the base camp we would just sort of fiddle around and get drunk and think you are Elvis Presley and you’re not really

‘cause it sounds terrible, yeah just that, that’s the only personal thing that I wanted to take.

Yeah, of course, yeah of your wife and children and that sort of business. Nothing other than that. I think they were fairly strict on what you could take but I don’t know of anyone who was denied much. Strict because of space I suspect and weight on the aircraft

Yeah, actually so was I because I was aware having been to Malaysia a couple of times, there were certain sizes and dimensions but hey said, “Nah, take it with you take it inside,” so we did.

Originally or in total?

Originally I signed on for three years which was the minimum time and then I thought this

is not too bad, I sort of responded to it pretty well and I went for six years and then totalled up to 21 years or 20 years and 11 and a half months or something, what ever it might be.

No, with one exception, when I came back from Vietnam I’d had it. The stress levels and all that I thought no more of this. And I actually opted to take a discharge I’d had enough

but then after I had had a bit of leave and got back into a normal type life I was close to being what they call a pensionable age. You had to do 20 years in the army to get a pension; you could take your time after that and have a pension from your superannuation fund and so forth. And we rethought that and I said to Maria we may as well do at least the 20 years and come out with

quite a nice little pension. So we did we decided we stick out the last few years.

Oh, no doubt about that. I couldn’t do what I did without knowing that she was home taking care of the family. It just can’t work otherwise. I knew blokes that would go out on exercise or whatever, and they'd only be there a few days and they get brought back from the scrub ‘cause their wife couldn’t cope. And that would happen time and time

again and when it came time for them to reengage, sorry don’t want you. You are a liability, so like you said it’s a two way street, it really is a partnership. She looks after back home while you do what you do and she contributes to your career just as much as you do. If not more so, ‘cause you don’t have to worry about what’s at home.

Yep, went by plane

Yeah it was civilian actually Qantas. We went over by Qantas and going over you could have a beer if you wanted to they were fairly strict on how much you could have. And it was quite a alarming actually when the damn thing landed at he airport in Saigon it blew a tire and it went off with an almighty bloody bang, and oh Christ we’ve only just landed and the buggers are shooting at us already.

And it turned out to be a tire, that’s all it was, but it was a bit, you know, we had just landed there, and I thought, what the hell, didn’t even give us a chance to get organised yet. So that was a bit, well we laughed when the pilot came and said don’t fret yourself it’s only a tyre.

Who else? Oh friends that we’ve still got there was about 6 of us all together. There was an officer

I can’t remember who he was and just 5 or 6 other blokes that were going to just work out, find out, and how things ticked so that when the other mob got there everything went smoothly, just take over and keep going.

Well they are already on the ground anyway the people who are there before you have set it all up. So you just accepted that. Certainly in the early part and we never changed it the whole time we were there. And then you look at,

see guns, there are 6 guns in a artillery battery and they’ve all got letters A, B, C, D, E, and F. And whoever got A gun would be over there so you allocate them their sleeping quarters and who was going in what tent and just all that mundane sort of stuff. So as soon as they arrived at the unit you could say, “Right sergeant get your people your down there and away you go.”

Yes it does, oh yeah you can’t have somebody in this

particular gun and his tent is 200 yards away, they have to be close. And that was quite, it was already there it had been put into practice and we just said right they’re your two tents put in whoever you think in those two tents, so it had to be like that, but it was simple.

No they were actually sandbags; because I think I told you before about the water, heavy rain and the tents that we slept in had a sandbag wall about

oh 4 foot high right around and I think It was 4 sandbags thick, and then you actually slept inside, they put a tent over the top of that and you sleep inside so that your bed and you were down below the top level of the sandbags so that if anything happened you didn’t get injured. If one landed in the middle of the tent, well too bad, that’s the chance you take. But I remember

the people that we were with and I woke up in the morning and I said to the fellow that was sleeping over there I said, “Did you see that rat?” and he said, “No,” and I said, "I’m not exaggerating the damn thing is about that long,” and the rat turned out to be a mongoose. And we said, oh we’ll feed him we’ll keep him here because while you got a mongoose you got no snakes, they kill them. But I thought this thing was a rat.

Absolutely I didn’t do anything to scare that away at all, but we never had any snakes

so its just things that you learn and I’d never seen one, to me it looked like a rat. But it wasn’t.

Yes, you were you’ve heard the song that John Farnham sings, what was it? Only 19 and it’s true, we put pin ups on the lockers and VB was a good beer to drink, and all that sort of stuff. The pin ups in all honesty

came out of Playboy magazine and all that sort of stuff that people put up there, prior to me getting there, it didn’t bother me I just left it there.

Yes, you had a , about that wide, and just high enough to hang some stuff in but you didn’t need any more ‘cause you were never there, you didn’t need to use it much.

Purely military, I never to any

civilian clothes at all, you are testing my memory a bit here. Yes I must have because if you were lucky enough to get a day off they would take you down to an R & C [rest and care] centre at Vung Tau, swimming pools and, so yeah I must have taken maybe one or two sets of civilian clothes

In Vietnam, no wash them and put them straight back on again, ‘cause there was no such thing as a parade ground there. You were in a war and as long as you kept yourself clean and your clothing and all that clean, don’t iron it. In fact some units didn’t even wear rank, they just

that was it you had to recognise people by who they were and you knew he was a captain and so forth. We didn’t do that but a lot of them did.

Yep always, I’ve still got mine.

in Malaysia yes I did. I’ve had those for god knows how long, they are not the originals I lost them somewhere, I’ve had those for quite a while.

Never take them off, no you are not allowed to ‘cause if you get wounded that’s

one of the things they use to identify you. If you are dreadfully wounded I mean if you are disfigured, then the first thing they will look for is where are his dog tags and that’s how they can identify you.

They had a laundry service, and you would mark your clothes accordingly put your number inside and then just take them up to the

Q store which looks after all the supply and clothing and so on and they would take them away and you would get them back a couple of days later washed or at least they used to remove the dirt from over there and put it over here, they used to tell us it was washed but they didn’t smell like it half the time. So , but I didn’t have to do it.

No it was taken down to one of the civilian villages just down the road and they’d organise for the local people there to run a

a laundry service and that’ what they called it a laundry service and we took advantage it.

Yes

No doubt absolutely no doubt

the reason I say that is because even though they had done their corps training their artillery training when they come to me I used to use a couple of short sharp words to them. I said that we considered ourself here the best in this unit if you don’t think that way you can leave right now. If you stayed you going to get what the rest of them get to get up to scratch. Now I never had anybody that turned away and it was just a matter of a few days because they had their basic skills training and then you

polish them up a little bit and you just sort of keep at them and now you’re just about right. And encouragement is the word. Then after that if they got it wrong it was slightly different but initially and I never had anyone, I can’t remember anyone that was a complete dunderhead they were really good.

Yes, we did.

One of them cost me a lot of money let me put it that way.

Well I did something that I shouldn’t have done but if he’d have used him common sense and we’d come out of the jungle for a 36 hour leave and there are certain places that are out of bounds. And it was almost impossible to keep track of them even though before you went down people would read you out, you are not allowed to go there. So if got caught in one of these and

In one of these out of bounds areas, a pub

and I wasn’t supposed to be in there and he booked me and it cost me a lot of money.

Possibly

It could have been, let me be brutally frank here, it could have been that there were prostitutes in there who were diseased and they weren’t taking care of themselves and of course you get a few beers and before you know it

you have lost a few soldiers for a few days. Those reasons or it might have been as you say there might have been undesirables in there it might have been a known black market establishment and so on. So they put it out of bounds.

I got docked some pay for doing other things as well but we better not go into that because that military policeman night end up watching this one day.

No I wasn’t I was intolerant because we’d come out of the scrub and I tried to talk sense into this fellow and said

look we’ve just come out we’ve done all the right things and he wasn’t having a bar of that, now he was a corporal and I was a sergeant and I wonder if he just thought I can stitch you up and there is not a bloody thing you can do about it. I don’t know but it happened and it was just over and done with. I wouldn’t even recognise him now, don’t even remember his name, I did for a while but I don’t anymore.

Well

it didn’t affect anybody either than me and soldier that was with me, we were both off, they were off my gun and we went there together so we were the only two people affected was me. But when I got back out to where the other fellows were, bad news spreads like wildfire and they were giving me hell when I got back out there I can tell you that. So it was fun

I think they were maligned a lot

there were some really good people amongst them but every now and again you would get somebody like this who was a little bit of an upstart. Even then they were quite professional in their job as good as anybody else. I think perhaps they couldn’t realise that perhaps oh this fellow has just come out of the scrub I need to perhaps back off a little bit here and accept what he is telling me occasionally they wouldn’t do that. But they’re alright I know some of the old Second World War guys used to call them meat heads and

all sorts of other ugly things that we can’t go into here but they are a part of service life and a necessary part of service life.

Oh yeah

Hard to say I never had much to do with them. Something serious might be offering violence to a superior officer. I mean if you were my superior and I threaten to punch you in the nose then I’m in big trouble, if I do I am in even bigger trouble. And if they put you in a military corrective establishment I think they call them you have no idea what you are going to let yourself in for. I’ll tell you a story. I met a fellow Maria and I travelled around

Australia and he had done his national service and he was a big tough strong man working in the mines and I saw him with his shirt off one day and he had a huge scar. And I said, “What happened?” and he said, “Oh, somebody stuck a billiard cue in me some years ago,” and then just through conversation he said, “Oh I did my national service” and he said, “I got myself into a bit of trouble and they put me into the Holsworthy corrective establishment.” He said, “I have never known such mongrels in all my life.” He said, “I thought I was tough but they just about did me in

and I was only there for 7 days.” He said, “Some of the things they used to do, you’d be sound asleep and I just happened to be there in the middle of winter and they put the hose in the cell for no reason.” Or he said, “They’d take you out and make you dig a hole and then they’d throw a cigarette butt in it or something and say, ‘Fill it in.’” They know ways to make your life bloody miserable, that nobody has ever heard about. I don’t know whether that is still the case but I think it was pretty true then, there were some hard people around.

He would face the military court, when you are in a war situation, there is 2 or 3, I’m talking about my time now and not at the moment. But there were some different levels of military law that they could apply to you

and the most significant one was military law in peace time and military law in war time so when you get over there and all the military peace time stuff is insignificant to what they can do to you and even if I remember it correctly they could still shoot you for desertion when we were there.

Just the scale of punishment I think, it gets pretty serious when are in a war and you do something wrong. If you did

the same thing back in Australia I think the punishment in peace time is probably not quite as severe and I think in war time the punishments, there can be more or a greater scale of punishments I think. So basically that is probably the significant difference between the two.

Oh I would think so especially amongst the Australian people I mean if you rape one of the civilians then you are going up in front of

a military court martial in war time and you know all of a sudden you are in diabolical trouble, let me tell you. They do that more so than perhaps the civilian people because the army tends to deal with its own in wartime. So you are in strife.

yeah it was, I don’t know of any Australians with a couple of exceptions that did anything really horrendous like rape for example, I don’t know, I haven’t heard of any of that. I don’t say that it didn’t happen on a very, very minor scale it is quite possible. We said before

generally the media would get that and they would have a field day, you can’t hide it, I don’t believe you can hide it.

I don’t mean anything derogatory American people because I like American people but we had an American artillery battery with us in Vietnam and we used to foster good relations we would go down to their guns. ‘Cause they had these huge, huge great things, and oh, I’d love to get a hold of one of these

and you know I wouldn’t mind having a crack at that so we went down there a group of about 6 of us and they were quite prepared to let us fire the thing. And we went down and I looked at this bloke and I said to the fellow, “What’s the matter with him? Is he drunk?” and this is the middle of the day and he said, “No, he’s stoned” and this is in the middle of the day in a war and they don’t’ care. Into the weed having a great old time, “Do you want some of this?” “No thanks man,” and they couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t do it

they even had their own drug rehabilitation clinic in the American services, can you believe it. I think have now too, but it used to be the case that if you got caught with drugs in the services no ifs, buts or maybes you are gone in a matter of hours your backside is out the door, we don’t want you.

In the Vietnam War, no doubt about it

There

is no doubt about it

Don’t know never saw it, they would be on the booze in the middle of the day. I never saw any hard stuff but I suppose it was there, I mean if they got marijuana and booze, they just didn’t care

Where there’s a will there’s a way, I suppose some of the locals were growing it somewhere or even them, somebody might have set up their own little garden somewhere. The black market was rife amongst the Americans.

Absolutely I mean you can’t operate, you can’t drive a car, you just can’t operate when you are drugged up to the eyeballs, or drunk, or both. Yep, that’s there problem

Yeah, it has to have an affect. God bless the

Americans they can have them.

It was probably a little bit flatter and a little bit more open, Malaysia was really closed in close jungle most of the time and when

we actually arrived at Nui Dat which was the main headquarters there it was quite open I guess it had been cleared over a period of time so they could put in all the defences but even so you follow the river, follow the valleys down, I thin it was a lot flatter than Malaysia and generally speaking it was a lot more open not as much closed in jungle ‘cause they had those defoliant programs going that killed everything. So perhaps

that was the reason why.

yeah we had a, there is very few soldiers I know that haven’t experienced it because we had it sprayed on us quite regularly, they used that to deprive the bad guys of a place to hid by killing the trees so they couldn’t get in there , that was what it was all about. It was common for these things and we’d think, what the hell was that, ‘cause you could taste it, it was sprayed in the air

but not only that it got in the water supply and everything it is responsible for a lot of hideous things that I really don’t think they’ve come to the bottom of, they’ve got to the bottom of yet. So maybe

Oh probably cancer type things or its no secret that a lot of Vietnam vets have got psychological problems and the extreme ones. How they deal with it in different ways is probably not so well documented. But we

believe is that it was a defoliant that has caused most of these problems and then of course the treatment they got, and on and on, it snowballs. It all becomes one angry little ball that you carry around with you all the time. Never mind you deal with it.

I can understand it, Maria lost a child when we came home and we know people that have had children and they have been deformed and so on and so on

and you look at children that are being born now still over there have got severe deformities. And it’s all linked, in my humble opinion to bloody stuff sprayed all about the place.

We didn’t really know it was all starting to come to a head right about then and then of course it came out that the defoliant was responsible for certain types of cancers and then we began to put two and two together and said it probably was.

We had Andrew now we had our son in 1973 and that’s fine everything has turned out quite okay there. But the one that she miscarried with who knows I don’t know, we can only suppose and we will never really know the truth because the Yanks aren’t going to tell you the truth it will cost them a lot of money.

We were always winning, we were always told we were winning, there is no doubt about it we are going to win this thing, well we bloody well didn’t, did we? And once again it comes back to what the Americans want you to believe, what should be disseminated down to people and so on and so on. And that’s why the American forces, I distrust the American forces to this day. But I like the American people

that’s it.

We, there was a particular group of bad guys they were called the D 445 Battalion and we reckon they were phantoms ‘cause we could never find the buggers we bombed them and shot them and chased them for years. And we said they bloody well don’t exist it’s a load of bullshit that the Yanks are feeding us to keep you on your toes and so on. Well as it turned out they bloody well did exist

now that after the war is over and some of our guys go over they meet them. They meet the commander and so on in the equivalent of what is their RSL [Returned and Services League]. And they just get together and talk, you know there is immense respect, something I’ve thought about doing, but they did exist and they were pretty good at what they were doing.

No, we couldn’t catch them but they were worried about us, there was a doco done by one of the TV channels, some time ago, and

it was SBS I think and they said that the North Vietnamese were more concerned about the Australians than they were about the Americans because of the experience we had had in Malaysia and they’d heard that you know the Australians are generally regarded as the best people in the jungle in the world. Now I don’t know what they’ve said about us because it’s a filthy bloody joint sometimes. But we were we were good at it so they were a bit wary of us but they had a nickname for the Americans used to call them

running dogs. Sort of thing that was interesting to hear the commander say that. this is not just a fabrication this is what he said they used to do.

Yeah, it was an insult

I don’t know whether they thought that they weren’t worth a cracker and they could stitch them up any time they liked ‘cause they would turn around and run. There is that suggestion I suppose whether it is true or not. That’s stated I’ve actually got the tape that

states that.

Absolutely and not only personal discipline but their discipline in the scrub too. If they were going looking for trouble, you’d absolutely wonderful to see. If the Yanks were going looking for trouble they’d be working down the middle of the road with the thing hanging around their shoulder, looking like they were going duck shooting. And they got a transistor radio stuck up here on a radio band on their hat and they are listening to the local armed forces

radio, and they are going looking for trouble , I know who is going to get trouble. The Australians were totally the opposite they wouldn’t’ move along tracks wherever possibly they would walk along the scrub ‘cause if you are on a track, obviously you are in trouble and that’s the way they did it and that’s why they were so bloody good.

No I was with the guns and that was it, we provided fire support for those poor buggers that

needed it. We had a couple of scary moments which turned out to be nothing but at that time you are not too sure. So we did what we had to do.

What would happen was if a particular group of infantry people going out to do a job they would be allocated some guns to use at their priority, you know that’s

if I get myself in the shit I can ring them up on the wireless and tell them this is what, you know, give me some bombs basically. And we would always move to stay in range of wherever they were moving. It wasn’t a very big place so you didn’t do a lot of movement, but basically that’s what it was. You were given somebody to look after and that’s what you did, and did it pretty bloody well too I might tell you. They were pretty professional.

If I had done that I think that would weigh on my mind until the day I die because you got it wrong, now it might mean that you did something wrong. And they can prove it they’ve got

procedures they go through to find out how it happened and as I said before , I’ve never done it and that’s something that pleases the hell out of me.. But it does happen and its bound to happen and such is the nature of war somebody is going to make a mistake and some poor bugger’s going to die that probably shouldn’t. It’s happened how many times in Iraq with the Americans, the good old Yanks again. It was interesting to note that when the SAS was there doing their job they never lost one soldier. Now what does that tell you

Absolutely very, very good at their job. So that’s it.

There is a saying that was true that daylight belongs to us because we had all the superior all the guns and the bombs and airplanes and

the North Vietnam or the Viet Cong if you like, had nothing. But the night time was a different kettle of fish. They had the advantage because they worked at night. And they, that’s when they would do their work at night time. We began to overcome them a bit with night vision bits and pieces and so forth. Of course if you prepare your defences well which we have proven time and time again by

the Australians in particular then you are going to equip yourself quite well. And I think that’s why they probably enjoyed having a shot at the Yanks rather than having a shot at us, but sooner or later they would have to have a go at us because it couldn’t be seen that they were a bit wary of where we are and what we are doing. Yeah the night time belonged to them

Well you have to give yourself sufficient time in day time to get ready for the night time. We learned a couple of lessons there where that wasn’t quite the case and they got belted to be quite honest with you. And what you would do is around your position you set up defences such as anti personal mines, clay, I don’t know if you know what a clay mine is, you can set it where you think and hope to Christ they are going to come

so if they do you have got the advantage. So you do that around your position, you have other things like trip flairs where if they come where you hope they will they click the wire and up they go you can see them ‘cause they’re stuck up with all these flares and you can give them a bit of a dust up. As well as that its not just a matter of pacing in up at night time and going to bed you always have sentries on duty at strategic points around your position all night and all day, as long as you are there.

There is always somebody looking, listening, watching to give you a warning of anything that is going to happen. That’s something the Americans don’t do. They have no idea why we do what we do but we stay alive a bloody lot longer than they do I can promise you that.

If he was suspicious, I’ll tell you what happened, and this is an incident that happened to me. We were in bed and it was absolutely pelting down the bloody water and the rain

was everywhere and I was sitting there feeling miserable even though I was wet as hell and one of me soldiers came over and said, “Hey,” and I said, “What’s the matter?’ and he said, “I think there is somebody outside the wire” and I said, “Okay, right,” so I went across and it was difficult to see because it was a grey night and grizzly rain and if something moved you’d swear blind it was a person, so I said alright and I rang up the officer that was in charge of the local defence and I said, “I’m not real sure,”

and he said, “Well maybe we’ll go back to bed,” and I said, “No, no,” and I said, “Why don’t you show some faith in these two soldiers that have come and woken me up and we’ll give them a bit of a blast up?” And he said, “Righto, that’s what we’ll do,” so I got, this is a howitzer a gun and its got a shell that you fire it is like a big shot gun cartridge. So we got everybody out there and we just pointed this thing and let fly with it and it cleared everything. Well it turned out to be nobody there but that was the sort of thing, that’s what your sentries are there for. If they even get suspicious

and then if you back them up, if they know that if they do the job and they ‘re going to get backed up probably they will do it even better and that, I’m glad that idiot of an officer said yep let fly. So we did that and it turned out pretty well. And that’s what we do.

Absolutely you say these guys have been good sentries, they were suspicious, and that’s all it takes, a bit of suspicion and you have to go out and give them support so we did.

A sentry, oh yes. Everybody does it, but it is. While everyone else is asleep you’re there making sure they don’t’ wake up dead. It is a very responsible job.

It depends, see you will always have people taken away from your unit; some are home on R & R [rest and recreation] some are sick, some are required back in the base camp to help somebody peel spuds and do all that sort of stuff

so generally speaking you are probably out of 7 people you are probably down to 4 or 5 most of the time. So you work that out 5 people over from 6 o'clock at night to say 6 o'clock in the morning. And you divide that that lets you know how much sleep you are not going to get at a particular time. If there were 6 people it would be two hours so five’s about, you know you’d be there for two and half hours or something like that.

If nothing interrupts you then you can get

back in bed and go to sleep until they wake you up in the morning. I can remember one particular place where things were really bad for manpower. And we were averages 3 or 4 hours a sleep a night, but he days weren’t quite so bad there wasn’t a lot of activity so you could have a bit of a snooze and it wasn’t as bad as it seems.

Oh of course you get a bit strung out

you get a bit edgy after awhile that’s why you are promoted for a start because you’re the guy that is supposed to be able to handle it. But you are also the guy that is supposed to be able to handle the guys that are out there trying to do it, so you know if you don’t want the promotion and responsibility then don’t get promoted. It’s as simple as that.

Probably barbed wire and then the machine gun posts, with your sentry post you would have a

machine gun in them as well and another nasty little thing that used to fire hand grenades.

No, not that we know about anyway, they got through some defences because people got there late in the afternoon and didn’t have a chance.

Yeah well this is well documented, you’ve heard of coral and Balmoral? Well that was pretty much the case there, they arrived late in the afternoon, too late to set up proper defences and they paid the penalty

I don’t know I wasn’t there I’ve only read it in books and of course you can do that, but it is common knowledge that that was why they got a bit of a dust up because they didn’t get there in time to get properly organised and get their defences done and so forth. Now

I don’t think anyone will dispute that.

Got there earlier. There is a lot of dithering I think there was a change of mind, a change of position, the whole thing didn’t quite work the way it militarily should have. But they got out of it quite lightly I think they had only one or two people killed but they stitched them up pretty well. They, I forget the, it doesn’t matter the figures, but they

gave more than they got. So that’s an example of their training I’m sure.

No, no never had anything to do with them thank god for that, except for the artillery mob that was with us. Their idea of securing a position at night time for example, let’s take an infantry platoon, this is back then, this will do, righto we will sleep here tonight. And just before dark they

get everyone to line up and they would shoot the hell out of the scrub, shoot every bush and whatever, okay were’ sae now lets go to sleep. And that, seriously that is some of the things they used to do, how could you do that, I couldn’t sleep

No, they didn’t want to be any where near them

Yeah, they’re going to cause you more harm than good

no not nice.

In the scrub? No, I saw them once back in camp I had to go across to headquarters for some reason, no I went across to the medical centre and they had a couple in there that were treating, like I said before, they were getting medical treatment, and they just looked bloody scared as we were

you couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little buggers they were only tiny people. And you knew basically who they were because they had black pyjamas on and they had handcuffs and all sorts of things on. And they were getting some sort of medical treatment, good god almighty, poor little buggers.

I don’t think, I suppose again if you listen to your intelligence reports probably not. I think they were, like didn’t mean too much to them

they’d cut your throat as quick as look at you. If they couldn’t get the answers from you it was by fair means or foul the old torture I think. I don’t know this for a fact, people better qualified than me in interviews will give you better answers than this, but I’m not too sure.

the maximum range?

was 11,000 metres

No you would never see the results in physicality but to help you and know that you have done a good job what the people up the other end would do was tell you what the results were and it would be very short, sharp and brief. They would say something like 10 KIAs, which means killed in action, so many wounded

and what ever collateral military or mechanical damage and they would let you know that. And you’d sit there and go oh we didn’t do too bad. You know and that’s very important, there is nothing worse than you going bang, bang, bang, and sweating and bloody, and nobody tell you what the results are. The minute they do that, you think, right we’ve done a bloody good job. It s a huge difference.

Yes, I mentioned before that we saw some photographs of some young, not more than kids, young girls that had been killed, that they were brought down by the North Vietnamese to fight us, and you think what the bloody hell is going on with this? Is this what we come here to do? So you start to ask yourself a few questions

and I suppose from a male point of view when you are looking at a little girl who is about 12 or 14 years old, that tends to hit me harder than if it was a boy, don’t ask me why, what’s the difference? I don’t know, so yeah, then you start to do a bit of soul searching, this is not nice here.

If they were grown men, fair enough, no, as far as I'm concerned their fair game because

they will do it to you. If they are you know men armed to come and have a shot at you, not a problem at all. Within reason of course, I couldn’t’ just go up and shoot one of them in the head for any reason but if he was going to do me then I would do my damnedest to get him first. That’s the nature of war I guess.

Hell yeah. I don’t know whether I mentioned before, yeah I have, I’ve seen

what a hand grenade can do. Well I was actually in there when the bloody thing went off but I was fortunate that I was in a position where I could just sit around the corner of the bunker away from it but I saw the look on the fellows face that was over there so I could see what it can do.

As it exploded, went off and it made a bit of a mess.

I was watching him and he was laying, the

doorway was there and he was there and the and grenade went off out here, well I was sitting just down here and I just ducked around the corner and he could see it and the look on his face. He tried to protect himself with a blow up mattress, that’s’ all he could do he couldn’t’ react quick enough to get to the side to get away from it and it come through the door. And he turned over and it got him up the back which is probably a good thing if he’s have stayed that way, god knows, it might have got his eyes and all sorts of things. So apart from the mattress which wasn’t going to help

he did the next best thing which was turned his back on it.

he survived, he is alive and ticking, he is doing pretty well. So that’s one of those sad things that happened.

I did a little bit later on but I didn’t know it at the time, I had an occasion to discipline a soldier because I pointed out a little something that was wrong and had we have let it go would have

the projectile would have finished up where it shouldn’t. But when I just quite reasonably pointed out tot his fellow you know he needed to change it, he went troppo. And I’d been with this fellow for 18 months and it just went off and the lid come completely off and so much so that we shifted him from my gun onto somebody else’s.

It got quite heated.

he threatened me with all sorts of things, it got down to if you are not quiet, he was using pretty strong language, you are going to jail, so that sort of toned it down a bit and he made it quite clear, and I agreed with him, that he needed to go somewhere else, and he did, we didn’t make a big deal about it, you got to go.

I’m sure it was

because its unrelenting whether you are out in the scrub or not you are still in a place where a war is going on and it never really lets up it gets worse or it doesn’t it eases off a bit. Perhaps I don’t know I think that’s the case , it just never ends and some people handle it better than others but no disgrace to those who don’t quite do at well as the others, because I know people who have done it better than me even though

you do the very best that you can, there I’m sure a lot of people who have done it a lot better than I have. So, but I don’t’ feel any shame about hat, I did the best that I could possibly do.

I don’t know I don’t feel that I could, but I say that because perhaps there were people that were better at the job than I was, that’s just a broad statement. If you ask me about an egotistical bugger, do I believe that? no I don’t’ I though I was

pretty good at what I did and that’s as honest as I can be.

No, I accept that but probably there were others that were better. I doesn’t matter how good you are there is always somebody better, so there you go.

That’s why you are promoted. People see in you some leadership qualities, the ability to accept responsibility, do a good job, all those things and on and on you go. If you are not

prepared to do that maybe you should look at yourself first of all and say I don’t want to be promoted I’m suite happy were I am. Or you can say well I’ve taken another step up the ladder, here’s a challenge, stupid lets just see what you can do. And that’s they way I looked at it.

Yes it can be. Particularly in a war time, peace time it’s still a challenge but its not as big as that I did okay I think I never did anything too dreadful

I didn’t’ lose any in Vietnam but I’ve lost a couple since we’ve been home. And reunions are really great you look forward to going but there is always going to be someone that is not there. And that happened to me in Sydney you probably recall they had the big welcome

home parade in Sydney in ‘92 and away I went and I rounded upmost of my soldiers and I said where is this particular guy? And I wont mention his name for out of respect the family, but he was good solider and they said, “What are you talking about?” and I said, “Where is he?” and I said, “I was talking to him on Anzac Day and he said he was going to be here,” and the looked at me and said, “You don’t know do you?” and I said, “Where is he?” and they said, “He shot himself.” So the reunions are good but I leant, somebody is not going to be here

so just, you temper it with a little bit of caution I think, and that’s happened a few times since then. Not blokes that I absolutely knew intimately but there were in the same unit, oh bugger he’s died. You need to be a little bit careful. Where it’s somebody that you served with and you think, oh what a bloody shame, I didn’t know that. So there is always a little bit of a

down side to reunions.

No, it was the case back in years gone by. A soldier was given a rifle and it was his and he would take it with him wherever he went but n, bit he more modern weapon because they are so more easily adjustable to

a particular person’s individual shooting pattern you just get a new one or another one when you go to a new unit.

Oh yeah, in that case, I thought you mean if I sort of went from Sydney to another unit in Townsville? No you get another weapon up there. But yes

what you are saying is true when you are in a war situation you don’t even go to the toilet without your rifle you don’t even go to bed without it; it had to be within arms reach at all times.

No, no I didn’t. Never, I never ever used that to shoot anybody, no.

Well I'm not sure we saw people

at times who were skulking around in the scrub and that sort of stuff, whether they knew that we were there and the fact that we had weapons was enough to discourage them or not, but no I never ever fired at anyone.

yeah, we certainly did, quite often it was reasonably easy to identify them, and I’ll use Vietnam as an example, there were some rules of engagements that we used to stick by and as long as you went by them, by and large you were pretty safe. Yep, quite often civilians would walk down the road, you know we might be fairly adjacent to a road or

in one case I remember we were right near a highway. And they would be just driving up and down all day just going about their business. One particular place we were at, across the road from us was an American unit and we heard all this kafuffle in the middle of the night and it turned out that they had shot up the local South Vietnamese commander as he drove down in his jeep. So they got that wrong, so there is just things like that that happen.

No we never did anything, I never had occasion to actually physically shoot at any body with a small, with a rifle.

I don’t recall any nasty incidents, I think probably because they all needed money

their country was in a diabolical state and if they could be nice to you even thought they didn’t like you, and you would spend your money in their shop then that’s fine. And can you blame them for that? No I don’t thin so they have to survive in the best possible way that they can. There is a very good story that goes around about the local madam who owned a brothel and everybody over there was paid in military payment certificates which was put out by the Americans.

And about one to midnight she was a millionaire and at one minute past she wasn’t worth a cracker because they changed all the military payments certificates and hers wasn’t worth anything. So that was a funny little story that goes around.

Oh yeah, everyone came home for 5 days R & R. They would fly you back

all free of charge obviously and you would spend 5 days with your family and then off you go again. they had another thing that they called recreational leave, it was usually 36 hour thing where they would take you to a place called Vung Tau which had been set up with a swimming pool and a picture theatre, open air theatres and it was right near the beach and they had everything. They had sail boats ski boats all that just so you go down there and have a bit of a ski

and get away from the nasty stuff if you like.

I only managed to get there twice in the 12 months that I was there. The second time I had to be ordered to go down there because it was close to coming home and of course your nerves are starting to wear a little bit thin I suppose and I didn’t want to go. And I said, “Look if I go down there and get a skin full of grog and act like an idiot ill get in trouble, and we are going home in a couple of months and I don’t need that.”

But I was ordered to go, I didn’t think too much of that but I went. I didn’t get in trouble anyway so all is well.

Oh they used to bring concert tours over there. We had some of Australia’s best entertainers over there. Old Bob Francis from Adelaide who’s now in 5AA, he brought a concert party over there, and to the best

of my knowledge he was the only one who took his concert party out into a fire support base. And it actually came to our and we were into the concert and they said, “Okay the entertainers are going to come for a walk around and see what is going on.” And I just happened to be washing a pair of socks and this little blonde haired, one of the entertainers, a girl, she come up and said, “Oh, I’ll do that,” and I said, “Yeah I bet you will, these should be shot,” ‘cause they were bloody putrid. But she did;

she washed my socks and hung them out and they were there I think it might have been a bit of a set up but they called on us to show them around. Well they weren’t too clear what was going on but at the end of the day we let her fire the gun so that was alright. But I think it was a bit of a set up job. Other than that in Nui Dat they quite often had, old Col Joy, you might not know these people, there sort of our vintage type entertainers but

on Long Tan Day every day in Adelaide on the 18th of August all these old washed up has-beens turn up and do it again one more time. And each year they get worse and worse, but we go along and enjoy it because I think there is a lot of respect there too, because they were good enough to come along and entertain us in difficult times so why should we not give them their moment of glory and they probably only sing one or two songs and they know just as well as we do that it doesn’t quite work the way

it used to but we all go along and have a hell of a lot of fun.

Oh unbelievable, for a few hours two or three hours you could forget where you were and just enjoying a concert, could have been anywhere. And looking at pretty girls who were wearing not enough clothes probably but not distasteful stuff it was quite nice. Remember the go-go dancers who used to do all that stuff well basically

that sort of , it was good, really good and greatly appreciated. I can tell you, so much so that they were given a medal an entertainers medal for going over there and they should they did a great job

Me? I’m strictly a country music person. I’m not into this head banging stuff and Pink Floyd and all that sort of stuff. I am a simple person with simple musical taste I like good country music and the old fashioned type rock and roll, the ‘50s and

‘60s stuff, with a couple of exceptions, so that is basically my musical taste.

We might get together sometimes and as I said I took a guitar and we’d think we sounded like Elvis Presley and it sounded bloody dreadful but we were too drunk to care and it didn’t matter so. We were just having fun and it was harmless we didn’t do anybody any harm

Have you been reading my mail or something? I did write one actually but an I actually gave it somebody to see if they would record it but nobody has I don’t see why they should but yeah it did write on, but only one I sort of realised that it was not the greatest thing I’ve ever done but I just left it. I wanted to do it basically.

It was about one of my soldiers yeah. I suppose

yes, it was about Vietnam yeah, well it is.

No I won’t be able to sing it, no.

I could show the lyrics but I wouldn’t read it for obvious reasons I couldn’t’ go through that, but you are welcome to use it if you want to use it in your bits and pieces I have no qualms about that at all.

Yes it was a tribute to

Rusty, the guy that I mentioned before that shot himself. And its just that and other people that I have spoken to, their thoughts, their feelings, how the whole thing, including a bit of union bashing and the whole nasty business if you like. But if you want to use it you can use it I’ll give it to you.

No I wrote it here, a long, was along time after I came home, since we’ve been in this house

we’ve been in this houses almost 10 years, 9 years. So somewhere maybe about 6 years ago that I wrote the thing.

Sorry?

Did I feel any better? Did I feel any worse? No I just put it down having spoken to people and heard what they say and what they would like to do to the postman that wouldn’t deliver their mail and on and on it goes.

That was written by obviously a guy in Adelaide and it is generally accepted as, what can I put in, its generally accepted as being the Vietnam Veterans’ anthem.

Which is, it s great song, I like the fellow that did it, I’m sorry he failed at politics because I think he could have been very, very good. He’s it’s a beautiful song.

Oh what? I don’t know I guess out of respect or I always promised myself that I would go and see his wife and I never did, I promised myself I would go and see his parents and I never did. Maybe there was a bit of guilt in there or something like that. All of those things, respect, certainly a bit of guilt, yeah, just those things.

No I took it a little bit later because I knew when I went back I would have less than half way to go. I think I had about 4 months to go after I went back so that was done quite deliberately I reckoned I could hang out a little bit longer when I was initially there and then have a shorter time and I felt pretty confident about doing that and then coming home as a normal person

if you like,

Family things, we, its not a long time, but I just enjoyed the time with my wife and family. We weren’t looking to socialise I think we just sat around talked ate probably had a few beers at home. Do the things that husbands and wives do and so on and so on. We didn’t take off on a holiday obviously I didn’t want to do that

but those sorts of things.

What could I tell her? Nothing I didn’t really tell her about the war about what was going on and that is a bit of a problem because you bottle it up inside. I have done in dribs and drabs since so she now understands but they did something I was going to the counselling service the one that, the Vietnam Veterans one. And the

kids used to say, what’s the matter with the old boy he had been watching too many war movies. So unbeknownst to me my wife took my children to the counselling service to talk to the lady that I was talking to and she told them why I was going and why, almost all Vietnam veteran s were going and what was happening and these were possible things and causes and they just sat there like that, bloody hell so he hasn’t been watching too many movies after all.

And that seemed to change things around, there was no more snide comments, there was a lot more understanding, and its just got better and better as the years go by. So I’m one of the lucky ones I know people that are worse now than they have ever been. But I’m doing all right I’m quite fine, at least I am not on bloody medication like a lot of them, not for psychological problems.

My wife told me she said

said you either, we knew the service was available but you like to thing that, once again the military training, I can handle this. The truth is you bloody well can’t. And she, I think it got fairly grim and she said, “You really do need to talk to somebody, ‘cause our relationship is in a very diabolical state,” there was a hidden message in there for me. And it said to me get it fixed or you ain't going to have a bloody wife and family to come home to if you are not careful. And that’s what made me go

and, but even going, you know they sort of had to keep chipping away. Cause somebody once said to me, in fact Maria said to me before I started going to the counselling service, she said, “You’re like living with the bloody iceman,” she said, “Nothing shows.” And they chip away at it and they chip away at it and they don’t break you down but hey get inside and then they can start to fix it up and that’s what happened to me. If may never be perfect but its a hell of a lot better than what it was I can tell you that. We still have moments

we’ve developed a little system where I can say, “I’ve got the whole shits, I’ve got the shits with the whole bloody world and its got nothing to do with you,” and she knows what’s going on. so don’t’ push me don’t’ badger me and you deal with it in your own way, it might take a day or two but that’s fine. At least you’ve past the yelling and screaming stage. So that‘s a good thin to have.

It was the effects of the war

not necessarily aggression, but he effects of the war, the effect that it has on you. the continuing stress the agent orange the snide comments, the bloody coming home, and so on, all of that it just eats away at you and it turns you into not a nice person

From my experience, if hear loud noises, its

something quite startling the reaction is to head for the bloody hills and get out of the road or let out a expletive you know a real cracker, what the, you know you can imagine what I’ve said. that still happens now, see the army winds you up to do a job, but they don’t unwind you, it a terrible thing. they should in my humble opinion when you are getting towards the end of your service and you had indicated

that that’s you know I’m going to take my time, the last 6 months you should be turned into a civilian. You should be allowed to turn up still being paid by them because they took you on in the first place let your hair grow long wear civilian clothes and delouse you turn into something other than a bloody lunatic soldier. But hey don’t’ do that and I think they really should; there is an onus on them to do that because they have had my services for 20 years. I know people that that photo of the fellow on the wall, he did 36 years, he was at that time the longest serving soldier in the Australian

army I imagine he still is or was. Can you imagine what he’s like, that’s why he lives in the scrub he doesn’t.

Why because they, that actually that is a damn good question, it would be easy to give a blasé answer but

from where I sit it would be because they don’t want to put up with idiots that are keep going to make these smart Alec remarks, they can’t deal with people they are just quite happy, most of them their wives are gone so there is another kick in the guts. They are quite happy and they are not necessarily alcoholics or drug attics they are just people that have decided I don’t need this shit, they are quite happy and this fellow lives in very, very nicely decorated bus

Its got it sown shower and toilet and its all done in red cedar and when he gets fed up he just cranks up the bus and goes 500 miles up the road and just stays there for a while. That’s his lifestyle and he loves it that’s how he deals with things. What makes them do it? All of those things the war the reaction of people and ‘cause he can be quite volatile, if you set him off he is like a firecracker. He knows it so I give him 10 points out of 10 for that. That’s

his life and he’d happy.

I can understand that without reservation and I do. He’ll just drop out for a while and then the phone will ring and I’ll say, “Well it’s you again, where have you been?” “Fishing,” that’s all he’ll say. But we knew that he’s doing and he just deals with life in his own way and doesn’t take substance abuse or anything like that. He is just living his life the best way he knows how, and you would be surprised how many of them do that, there

is a lot.

Well that’s easy, she’s up in the bedroom at the moment, if it wasn’t for her, no not strictly Maria, but if it wasn’t for my wife and family I really think things might have been terminated a long time ago when the storm clouds were really dark and ugly and that sort

of business it was my wife and family that pulled me through it. And they still do, now I’ve got grandchildren, now I’ve got something else to look forward to. Its just family in a word, its just family, in my case, the family, its as simple as that. Because my wife wouldn’t’ quit she wouldn’t give up. Some do and say I’ve had enough, just can’t deal with it anymore, just can’t help you just get out. But she doesn’t so there it is in a nutshell.

Yeah, I’ve got pretty good quality of life, we are not financially dependant on anybody. We are not rich we manage to have a little holiday every now and again. We have a nice Christmas; we’ve got good family, barbeque, maybe a couple of glasses of wine. I don’t over do it with eh alcohol thank Christ for that I’m not sort of blessed with somebody that can tolerate alcohol too much. It doesn’t get any better than that, I would suggest even a normal person who is not a veteran would be happy to be were I am so what more could you ask for.

But it’s a pretty good life.

the legacy of the war? The day I die, but you deal with it, you learn to handle it with help and deal with it and you just keep looking forward. Don’t ever look over your shoulder, ‘cause you will turn around and go backwards, and that is something that nobody needs. You do not need to go back to where you come from when you know what was there when you left. So that’s

as simple as that.

Go bush, no go bush, that’s common terminology, its not now. I will do it if I can get my wife

to go with me. Go bush means I will move out of the city and buy a smaller place out somewhere in a little patch of ground where I can have some WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and a cow and plant me own garden and get away from this rat hole. I don not like cities but at the moment it suits my needs. But I would do it only if she agrees to go with me. Other than that we’ll be here until the devil comes to get me.

yeah I can I was sent to Many as

an instructor and we socialised a little bit there and went out a couple of times and people will make those comments, we shouldn’t have been in the bloody war and what these people did, and f this and f that. And after a while as a normal human being you are not going to take it. And of course it comes to a verbal confrontation which quite often led to a physical confrontation and before you know it you are in trouble with the coppers or you are in trouble with the army because you are still trying to make a career out of this

it didn’t happen to me quite so often but I know people that once or twice a week the police would come around. It was that lack of, we didn’t get a hero’s welcome like we thought we bloody well deserved, like the people from the Second World War got. We got absolutely nothing until we did it ourself. it was up to us to generate our own parade in Sydney and when we started to put that in motion and the government

of course jumped on board and it just swelled up from there. But the Vietnam Veterans who started that and the air force helped with transport t and it couldn’t have been done without all those people that lumped in , including the government, to help us out and finance it and all that but it was the blokes themselves that got it all going. And along with that they decided to build a memorial in Canberra. But again people helped with financing, the government and so on,

the World War II blokes they had their welcome home, parades and all that sort of business. And I mean no sort of disrespect here, that’s just the different in two wars. The Vietnam War was most, one of the most unpopular things that Australia had ever been involved in, without a doubt. And that was the difference between the First World War and the Second World War and so on. It’s as simple as that from where I sit.

No, not off the top of my head. Only at social outings where you might be at a barbeque or something and your missus will hear something and say we’ll go home, we’ll just go home. Wonder off and just leave it at that. I have actually had verbal altercations with people who on the road

they’d call it road rage but it really wasn’t . I just sort of let him have a verbal mouthful of, as I sort of went past him, but it was just that sort of stuff.

Well I'm a bit short tempered I suppose but I hate people that, the thing I hate the most is people who will pull out in front of you from a side street and you’ve got to stand on the brakes to stop from hitting them, and they’ll go 100 yards up the road and turn off. Oh, that

really gets up my nose and I have abused a couple of them, fortunately they were blokes ‘cause I really wouldn’t feel good about abusing a woman but just things like that where you lose control a little bit. And afterwards you get angry with yourself, bloody idiot why did you do that for, just things like that. As far as the veteran thing, no, no I just treat a lot of them with contempt ‘cause I know

they haven’t got a clue what they are talking about, the old save our sons mob and that sort of stuff. That just got out of control I think and then the wharfies got in and refused to send your gifts and the posties wouldn’t deliver your mail and that’s the sort of stuff that really annoys me because they were taking it out on us, not on the government and it was the government that sent us there in the first place

Yeah, and they weren’t going to deliver it they were even going to bring the ships to bring the gifts over at Christmas time, Red Cross gifts family gifts, we wrote letters home, or wives wrote letters to Vietnam and they wouldn’t deliver them they just put them aside. How goods that? Thank you very much, and that’s what makes you mad? When through no fault

of your own you are there doing what your country has told you to do and they wont provide the service they are paid to provide. Quite disgusting, un-Australian.

I haven’t’ given as much as some people but I enjoyed it. Would I change it again, I would make a couple of changes, I wouldn’t have mad ea couple of mistakes that I didn’t.

Yeah, sure, they don’t concern anyone other than me.

When I say that I would do a couple of things different. There comes a time when you are being promoted when you sort of reach a level where you feel comfortable I went passed that level. If I had to do it again I would have reach ed that level and they say we are going to promote you and I’d say, shove it I am quite happy here. I really did get out of my depths a little bit.

I was promoted to sergeant and I

knew the job inside out and back to front then they promoted me to warrant officer and I could do the job but with a lot of difficulty, I found it extremely hard, if I did it again I would go as far as sergeant and that’s it I would not go any further, but you can’t undo it, I don’t; regret, but I realised it was all becoming a bit too hard and fortunately I

took my discharge before they decided to promote me any further. So that was a bit of blessing in disguise I think.

No I don’t’ think so. Generally it was successful, enjoyable, obviously with some exceptions. Demanding, and thankful that I had a wife that would put up with I had to do. Simple as that.

Absolutely, still is. You know as well as I do that behind every good man there is good woman I don’t know how good I am but I know how good she is.

Yes, they did. When I arrived here in Adelaide my last job was with an army reserve unit

I didn’t know at the time it was my last job, but they sent me here and it was normally for two years. And the two key people there the two training staff used to come and go at exactly the same time. So they asked me to stay on an extra 12 months which would create a stagger so that somebody would be there very 12 months and always know what was going on, and I didn’t that because I just bought a house, that will give me 12 months to settle in to it

and so forth. And they said if you do that when your promotion comes we will look favourably on where you want to go. I said that’s fine you can record it now I want to go to Brisbane or Townsville, either way I had a choice of two. So they did that then when the time come they wanted to send me to Sydney and I couldn’t persuade them that this had been said and recorded but the person who said it was not longer in that job. And I said well look maybe his word still counts for something he was a senior officer

and I said well you are not leaving me any choice I am going to take my discharge. And they said oh no don’t be hasty we need people with experience. But they weren’t prepared to give me choice of one tr two so I said goodbye. That really disappointed me and it was a bit of a sad way to end because I then started to become bitter towards the army because they didn’t keep their word and said , basically I said you can shove it so I took the discharge.

Yeah, other than that I can’t think of anything. That really made me get like that, no that was it.

no I hate Sydney, I hate cities, in fact I hate Sydney, worse than all of them, some of the others I can put with, Perth is okay, Adelaide

is just like a big country town anyway, but Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, no, no good, I can’t stand them. Like that country kids don’t like the city.

Oh, when did things start to come off the rails a little bit? Where I was I, can I remember any specific place, no not really. See when you are still in the army you still go the big green family around you, you still got he people who have got all the same sort of problems as you but you talk and you

got your own little network of psychiatrists or whatever, without knowing, got your own support group because they are still in the army the same as you. When you get out, you start to think, Hey, this isn’t so easy anymore, the people that I really feel sorry for are the national servicemen, they drag them out of their job for two years, they completely change their personality, send them away to do 12 months in a place like that with the risk of getting killed

they bring them out of the scrub today, and by midnight tonight they are back in Australia and by 10 o'clock tomorrow morning they are discharge straight back into civvy street. Can you imagine that, they’re the guys I really feel for, they were thrown out, with no support no nothing, at least he regular soldiers still had the army and their mates to talk to. The national servicemen had bugger all, so I really think they did it the toughest of the whole damn lot, for that reason.

Interesting to talk to some of them and see how they are doing.

Do I march? On Anzac Day? Yes I do. I’ve just joined a group and have actually become the state secretary for a group called the National Malaysia and Borneo Veterans Association. Now why did I do that? I was always a member of the Vietnam veterans Association as well. Up until now I always marched with them, but I will not be marching with them in future. We

found that people from Malaysia were the last of a pretty rare breed, those that went and did service in Malaysia and Borneo they came home and just did what they had to do, they went back to work and they did what they did and that was fine, no whining no complaining. Alright it probably wasn’t as dangerous as Vietnam of course

but it was still, there was enough there. The Vietnam veterans to my mind, they are bloody selfish a lot of them, I want this I want that, they should give me this they should give me that. Well the truth is you get nothing for nothing, you’ve got to prove that you need it prove that you are entitled to it. And I quite frankly and this is purely personal view, am sick of hearing Vietnam veterans whinge, that’s why I am

going to take my allegiances back to a bunch of people that I served with, went through some good and bad times with and had a ball they don’t complain. We get together and all we do is laugh, now that is the best therapy I can think of, have a few quiet beers and just laugh. No whinging about, oh my pension this my pension or I’ve got his or I’ve got that, that’s the way it going to be. And that was the reason for actually talking to the Mullion Creek mob because they would become familiar with the National Malaysia and Borneo people who gave me the piece of paper to talk to these guys

and I thought well if they are short of information on Malaysia or Borneo , if I can provide something why not. So that’s why we are doing this.

I don’t know I think they are the last of a rare breed that said look the government told us to go there do a job, we’ll do that, we’ll go home and shut up and get on with eh next one, and that’s it in nutshell. Most of the people I talk to are exactly the same way, we did it, we did it pretty well, its all over and done with

we’ve done other things since but nobody is whinging nobody’s complaining we just laugh. As apart from some of the others who are still whining and will continue to do so until the day they die. So that’s, I don’t’ nee that.

yeah, that’s true

No its just the breed of people

who were there, I think that some of the people who cam home from Vietnam and they found that they could work the system whereas the guys from Malaysia and Borneo weren’t interested in working the system. I don’t know why that should be because the Vietnam people were treated badly and they see that as a way at getting back at the government. I think there is a lot of bitterness in them because of the way they were treated, whereas they is not that bitterness in the Malaysia and Borneo people they just

quite happy to let it all go by, and they just do what they do.

no, not that I know of, no. In fact I can say to you that I know nobody from the Malaysia Borneo conflict that has taken their life.

oh there is heaps of them, and its

well documented that at one stage, and this was a concern for me and my wife that the children of Vietnam veterans had the highest suicide rate in Australia and that scared the hell out of us. I'm not sure that is still the case because they are now grown men and women, but that was a bit a concern it was.

Probably living with the old man seeing him being a bit of a bloody lunatic

and some of them were quite harsh task masters they were pretty rugged on their kids because of A the military background, B, their illness, mental psychological all that stuff, so may the kids thought they ‘d been belittled or, this is all supposition, but perhaps all of that stuff.

I have never done anything outstanding not like I'm not a VC [Victoria Cross] winner I haven’t won any special medals or anything. I would never be remembered for any special action no never.

Principally, Malaysia and Borneo first, the other lot can take care of itself even thought its given

me the shits at times, Malaysia and Borneo first

Because Australia was I think no longer prepared to kowtow to American. I really believe we thought we shouldn’t have been in there in the first place, they had the misconception that we were dragged into the war by the American government and we weren’t we now know that. And they were going to take it out of somebody. Now instead of taking it out on the government the easiest people to get at were the

veterans themselves when they were marching or dong whatever they were doing, and on and on it goes. And the old Save Our Sons; I know you’ve heard about those, I don’t want to go into that. But that got a bit out of control I think it became a bit more than they originally intended it to be. And probably there the reasons that have made people so bitter. The RSL wasn’t good, I mean the RSL wouldn’t let Vietnam veterans in the door that wasn’t a war was there was no

official declaration of war and they wouldn’t let them in. Now most of the RSLs are run by Vietnam veterans ‘cause they need them otherwise they are going to die fold and all the clubs will go over. So it still goes around.

There certainly were other factors and they still don’t know about Agent Orange. Now I believe that has still got a lot to answer for. Who knows what it’s done internally when you’ve been licking it, you’ve been drinking it for god knows how many years. And all that defoliant stuff and then of course there’s the old one that used to be known as

battle fatigue and shell shock, and now its called post traumatic stress. Which is probably a better name because it can happen to anybody. Not just the veterans of wars so that is probably a better name for it, and the effect that that has on a human being, I don’t know, probably all of those things

I would have to say yes because of the way that I used to

treat my wife and family and like I said before he said its like living with a block of ice. So yes, the answer to that is yes, for those reasons that we have just spoken about, and the treatment and so on and of course the old army machine, grown men don’t cry. Well that’s a load of crap. But they build you up to be what you have to be to do that job so they are responsible as well.

Exactly that you try to shut everybody out and you can’ do that you are going to become a time bomb that’s waiting to explode and some of them do. Now may be that explosion is I’ll fix it all up and they take their life, who knows, I don’t know. I just know that I am one of the lucky ones.

yeah, I am there is no doubt in my mind about that and even thought when times get rough and the storm clouds gather, they are going to go away.

so you keep looking forward to that and it seems to me that the good times are longer than the bad times, what the hell let it go.

I was semi lucky if you like I got a job with the department of Veteran Affairs. Originally they said we’ve got a job for you but its only part time. And I said what doing, and they said washing dishes, and I said when can I start. ‘Cause I’d had a gut full of making decisions and all that military pressure and that so I started off in a hospital washing dishes and at 4 o'clock

I’d say they are not all finished but the next shift comes on and I just dry my hands and go home. And I loved it. But then they discovered I had all these skills from the army and before I knew it I was in it up to here and I was going I really don’t need it. But it just happened but there is a military flavour to repat hospital in that were originally military hospital so I did it. But I have to say

that I enjoyed it because I had a lot to do with the old diggers, all the old ex service organizations used to come to the hospital and hold meetings, you know the POW Association would come in and you would help them set up and take photos and do all sorts of things and Anzac Days and all that, it was just a great job and I was enjoying the hell out of it. Well they put one of the jobs up for grabs where I was working, the boss’s job, so I applied for that

and it took me three months, all your series and the financial controller…so I got the job still working in the same area, still working with the same people but you were the boss. So they gave me the job on the Thursday, on the Friday of the following week they called me in and said we have suspended your promotion. And I said, “What for?” and they said they were not convinced that the correct procedure had been followed. To cut a long story short

the two people concerned with my probation had an axe to grind and I was in the middle and one was a little bit more senior that the other so he screwed me basically. And I said, “Ask him why,” and he made the fatal mistake of saying that they were going to readvertise it…probably get the same result and it was at that stage that the lid come right off. And I abused him, not physically, if I could have got hold of him, but I mean verbally in a way, maniac type stuff.

And the boss’s office was right next door the executive officer and he mad the fatal mistake of sticking his nose outside the door so I took a swing at him but he got out of the road. But to cut a long story short they sent me off on stress leave and as it all rolled along they said, you’re being retired, so I was retired. And that was a bit of a, that was, again like we were talking about, my wife said you need some help, that was the catalyst that set it all off.

And then we started to build it up again and with their help its all turned out to be good again.

No never went back to work no. I just took my superannuation entitlements and I was lucky I had two of them one from the army and one from them and I was paying double contributions and that sort thin, walked out of it and never looked back.

my wife and I used to do a lot of work for childhood cancer,

you know fund raising but we drifted out of that a little bit, only because the people we were doing it for had drifted out a little bit and now we just sit back and we save our pennies and we have a holiday every now and again. We’ll probably go back to Malaysia in the next 12 or 18 months and we’ll just do that and that’s the way it will be until the day we die. We make the most of the time that’s lest, at least 20 years I’m not ready to go yet let me tell you. When the time comes even then I will be bloody kicking and screaming

I would say to him get yourself a trade while you are in there. Nobody wants an old artilleryman when they come out of the forces. But restaurant and hotels will grab army navy chefs ‘cause they can cook large quantities of good quality meals for restaurants hotels. That would be one, electrician, because they are all

recognised outside now. Plumbers engineers, you know don’t be a soldier really, but yes be a soldier but get a trade that you can use when you decide to give it away.

What did they give me? They actually gave me a career because I, like we said earlier about two days ago, that I was a bit of a no hoper, they straightened me out and they gave me

believe it or not an education, I actually matriculated. And a solid future with really good superannuation benefits. And they’ve set me in a large sense of where I am now. So who can complain?

I am doing alright. I'm not complaining and if it never gets any worse than this I will be happy.

no, no because there is always the possibility regardless of what you do, you are going to go somewhere that isn’t very friendly. Would I want him to do that with the possibility of getting himself injured or killed, no. No I wouldn’t encourage him to join the forces, more so now with this little pissant

we’ve got for a Prime Minister who promises you that he will look after his veterans when in fact their pensions are going backwards at a great rate of knots.

That is a fact that has been proven by independent arbitrators who have looked; their pensions are not keeping pace with the cost of living.

Well he might find he is out of government very soon ‘cause there is a lot of them and there is a lot of veterans that feel the same way. The sad

part about that is I don’t think the opposition is any better. I really think we have got pretty dreadful group at he moment so, we won’t talk politics, bugger that.

I think so, I probably have seen a lot more of the world and Australia than most Australians. Maria has seen more of Australia I reckon than 90 percent of Australians, we’ve been right around the place

and up and down and across and looked here and done all those sorts of things. Yeah, Yeah its been pretty good.

Ah we don’t have an alternative; it’s all we are, good bad or indifferent. We have to live with it and I don’t care if you are an Iranian or Iraqi or Palestine or Egyptian, I mean that’s all a sad story. That’s the world, that s the human race. In some cases we are disgusting bloody lot, in other cases we are quite magnificent

when you get people like old Mother Theresa for example there is another lady here who’s got orphans in Cambodia she’s campaigning, you know so I think the good really outweighs the bad by a really really long way. It is sad that since time immemorial we have never learnt to live in peace, never. And we don’t look like doing so what the hell, live in Australia, at least we have got something pretty special right here.

Just the opportunity

of doing this because of the gap in the Malaysia-Borneo stuff, I know we talked a lot about Vietnam, but it was that stuff that made me want to do this to fill in the history for no other reason, and we’ve done that. And I'm grateful for the opportunity.

Great I enjoyed it; it hasn’t been too hot either has it?