Australians at War Film Archive

Yes, sure. I was born at Glenelg in 1945 and Mum and Dad

used to help run a boarding house that Nan and Pop owned. And my first memories really were of living out at Wingfield. Dad had bought some land and built a couple of homes, one for his Mum and Dad and one for himself and one for my Mum. And they were the early memories that I had as a child. It

seemed as if we lived in the wilderness in those days, Wingfield. We then moved from there to a place called Pennington which was where I went to school. Dad had a service station and I used to help in the service station and a milk round. I remember I went out on the milk round one morning and there was a

horse and float and the horse bolted and I ended up back home in no time flat with no milk in the back of the float it was all over the ground. I went to school at Pennington as I say and then Dad bought a farm and we moved out to a property of about 3,500 acres out past Murray Bridge.

And I was I suppose about 11 at the time. We spent five and a half years, almost six years, on the farm so I learned to be a farmer. And by the time I was 12 my father needed me to work so he suggested that if I was to pass Year 7, Grade 7 that is, I could leave school and help him.

And that’s what I did. So I left school at the age of 12, having got my grade 7 under my belt, and thought that I was well-educated, enough to be a farmer anyway. However, 4 years later we had 4 bad years in a row and Dad decided that best unless he sold the farm we would probably go under. So rather than do

that he bought a couple of taxis and a ute and moved back to the city. Sold the farm and moved back to the city. I had no education of course at the age of 16 and decided to get a job if I could. I started to work for a television and radio place called Miller Radio in Weymouth Street. They wanted to send me to school but because of my lack of education I

couldn’t go. So I decided that perhaps as my brother-in-law had spent 6 years in the army that I should perhaps look at joining the army. I’d always been a very good shot on the farm. My job was to provide all the food for the dogs and I used to have to go and get kangaroos and things like that which I did. So I was very good at stalking kangaroos and I thought I might make a good soldier

so I decided that I’d join the army. So I sat for the entrance examination and passed that and my mother thought I wouldn’t get in because I had flat feet. But they gave me some exercises to do and to come back in 3 or 4 weeks time and if I had an arch or the makings of it they’d admit me to the army. I did that, went back, and joined the army. I went off to Wagga Wagga to do my

general training. I did 12 weeks there, off to the school of artillery and then posted out to the Homefield Regiment in Holsworthy NSW [New South Wales] – from there an army career. Posted over to Malaysia and met my wife in Malaysia. Her Dad was in the air force. We got engaged, I came back, and Karen followed about 6 months later and we were married. From then on postings throughout Australia –

I was a platoon sergeant at Puckapunyal during National Service training soldiers for overseas, for Vietnam precisely. And I hadn’t been to Vietnam at that stage so tried to get in any unit I could to get to Vietnam. It took me a couple of years but finally I got there and spent 6 months in Vietnam. I came back home, had a week at home and went back to Vietnam again. That was a mistake. However, I spent a total of a year in

Vietnam. I came back and had very different postings throughout Australia here at Woodside and then off to the UK [United Kingdom] for a couple of years – the UK, Germany and Holland. A couple of months in America doing courses all over the place and finally back to Sydney as an instructor. From there back to Woodside, off to Canberra and promotion to a WO1 [Warrant Officer 1st Class] which was a master gunner

and then back to Adelaide and discharged. I then decided that I perhaps should just have a job that didn’t really have a great deal of responsibility. So I applied for a job with Boral in the building industry when I got back and worked there for 18 months. I purchased a truck and forklift and carried out some product for them for about 2 1/2 nearly 3 years. I sold that and decided to go into real estate. So here I am 15 years

later in real estate and I’ve been retired now for about a year – helping a little bit. I’ve recently sold my business and I’m helping the fellow to find his feet administratively and then hopefully I can fully retire. I’ve lived here in this house for 20 years. I bought it when I left the army and never wanted to move.

We had 18 addresses in 16 years all over the place so it felt like we were living out of a suitcase sometimes. We had two boys, Adam and Eamon, born two years apart. That’s what Karen wanted two boys, two years apart, and we managed to do that. We had no children for six years. Karen felt pregnant in America on the way home and the doctor said she had a virus, some virus.

We had been there in Adelaide for 20 years. My Mum and Dad, after I came back my sister’s marriage broke up so Mum and Dad went to support my sister. They’re now both deceased and so has my sister. I have a brother, Bill, he’s living at Stansbury, I see him infrequently but I’ve got a fishing boat and hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot more of him. I do go fishing with my nephew,

Stephen, and that’s good relaxation for me. I guess that sums up to where we are today. I’ve moved around a fair bit and had a very interesting army career and several overseas postings and would do it all over again if I had to. Is that 5 minutes?

No actually but the very first memories I had were of living out at Wingfield in a big home that Mum and Dad had built. I used to be a tearaway because I was spoiled rotten. My mother and father said to me that I’d been a

mistake so my sister and brother protected me a fair bit. So I used to get away with murder because there was a substantial age difference of 10 or 12 years between my brother and sister and myself. I was pretty well spoiled you could say. If I ever got into trouble my sister would grab me and race out of the house so I didn’t get a smack. So that was funny. I used to have a nasty habit if Mum upset me I would

run down the main hallway and Mum had a runner and I would just slip sideways and skid on the runner and knock it out of place because I knew that used to upset her dreadfully. So she’d then chase me and give me a crack if she could catch me but I was very quick.

They were good honest people. Hard working and my father had been a miner during the war. As a young man he used to break horses for the

mines to pull ore out of the mines. He was a tough man. He joined the militia during the war and was called out a couple of times in the militia but couldn’t go away because he was in a protected industry so to speak. And I’m quite pleased that he didn’t go away. He did in fact used to do a lot of shooting, he was an excellent

marksman. He was so good in fact that he actually shot himself. They had an accident where he was out shooting kangaroos and somebody had left a shotgun, loaded, in the back of the buck board. He was wearing his army grey coat at the time and pulled it out from behind the seat and the hammers tripped and both barrels went off and just about blew his right arm off.

And he was the only one that could drive so he had to drive 60 miles back from the station back to the Broken Hill Hospital. Of course they sent him down to Adelaide. They expected he’d lose his arm but a very good specialist, Sir Henry Newlin, carried out the operation. They managed to save his arm and he was in and out of hospital for 18 months.

No, I don’t remember that, no. I wasn’t born at that stage of course. I was born later in Glenelg when they moved down from Broken Hill. Dad had ceased to be a miner and they came down from Broken Hill to Adelaide and worked with Nan and Pop in the guest house or boarding house. My first memories really were of Wingfield where I had

lots of paddocks to play in and things like that and we used to play at being soldiers and had the old dinky toys with the army cannons and things like that which I used to love. But that’s really my first memory as a child. Probably I would have been about 4 or 5 I’d say. I remember Dad building the house and he made the bricks because

after the war and during the Depression bricks were very hard – building material was very hard to get so he actually made the bricks himself with brick moulds. And I can remember that, with my brother helping, mixing concrete and ash, cinders, to make bricks. So that was probably the first real memories that I had of helping out so to

speak, to make the house.

I think it took a fair while. They did one first, they built one, and the second house took a bit longer. They ended up building two houses next to each other and the first one was for my Mum and Dad and then they bought the second one for Nan and Pop (UNCLEAR). So Nan and

Pop stayed with us obviously until the other home was built. They were quite good sized homes for the day. Nan and Pop’s wasn’t quite as big but the one that Dad built was quite a large home.

My pop worked until he was 80. There used to be a bitumen factory on the corner of the street and Pop

used to work there. And I always remember it, I thought “Gee Pop, when you stop working I think you’ll die.” And basically that’s what happened. He stopped working and two years later he was dead. My Nan, she lasted until a ripe old age, I think she was about 93 or 94 when she passed away. She didn’t pass away until well after I’d joined the army so she lasted a lot

longer than poor old Pop. But he was a very hard working man and the old school, very, very honest and a very straight talker. I don’t think I ever heard him swear or say a word out of place. He was a kind man. Nan was very strict

and by geez if she said, “Jump” you jumped. I never really got to find out whether her bark was worse than her bite, I was too worried about the bark.

Yes.

No, I started going to school when we moved to Torrens Road, Pennington. When Dad built another house and a service station

on Torrens Road, 702 Torrens Road. That’s where I started and that was at Pennington that I started and I stayed there until grade 6 when Dad bought the farm on the Bowhill Road going to Murray Bridge. To start with I boarded at Murray Bridge but I hated that. I went to the school at Murray Bridge

and for about six months I boarded. Then I said to Dad “Look.” The bus was about 7 miles away, the school bus, and he really didn’t want to take me every day. So I said I’d ride my bike to and from the school bus. So I used to ride seven miles a day to the bus and back again in the evening. The bus would then do something like 80 miles picking up other children before it actually got to the school

and the same was repeated dropping them off. So it was a fairly long day but I preferred that to going to board, to go to school. Anyway Dad dangled a carrot that if I did well at grade 7 that I could leave and work on the farm which is what I really wanted to do.

I was a bit young to do that. I used to help and potter around with

Dad hosing down the driveway and things like that. I used to think I was helping. I’d go out on the milk round. Dad had a milk round and the service station at the same time. And I remember he bought a taxi ute as well and he had three businesses going at the same time. My Dad was always a bit of an entrepreneur and I remember he used to drink at one of the hotels, the

Rosewater Hotel I think it was and there were some unsavoury characters there but Dad used to make friends with everybody. One of the guys asked him if he could use his utility to do a job and Dad said, “Yes, of course you can, no charge, take it and use it.” Well they took it all right and they used it. And about 11 o clock Dad got a call from the local police and they said, “Do you own a utility?” And he said, “Yes, we do.” He said

“Is it registration number so and so” And Dad said, “Yes it is.” He said, “Look, we’ll be around to see you” because it had been used in a robbery. Dad didn’t see the funny side of that so he never, ever loaned a vehicle to anyone else after that. I think it taught him a bit of a lesson. Not everyone was what they said they were. But the police got the people and they had to face the courts. The police thought Dad was in on it of course but my Dad was absolutely as

honest as the day was long. He used to like to give things away, not to receive, because that was what Dad used to do. If someone wanted money they’d come up to Dad and say, “Can you lend me ten pound Ab?” Ab was his nickname, Albert was his name. He’d say, “Yeah, no problem,” but he’d never get it back and he wouldn’t ask for it either. My Mum used to get upset about that but that was just my Dad.

Yes, we used to have a horse called Steve and Steve knew the milk round. He’d pull the horse float and Steve knew that milk round back to front. If ever we got a new customer we’d have to pull him up. But once we’d pulled him up twice at the new customer by gee the horse would remember that that was a new customer

and the horse, you wouldn’t have to drive the horse it would just go to each customer, pull up at each customer, and either Dad or myself would run in and deliver the milk, pick up the money and leave the change if needed and that was it. So the horse was almost human I used to call Steve. He didn’t like to be ridden very much but when he came back and Dad would feed him he’d have a half a 44 gallon

drum which had been cut in two as a feed bin. And he used to like to tip it over and it was a game he used to play with Dad. And Dad used to say, “Well, Steve, if you don’t tip the bin back over then you’re not going to get fed.” So the horse would get the bin and then he’d tip it back over so he could get that bin filled with hay or feed. So it was a game they used to play every morning and I used to love it, I used to enjoy that. He was a great horse except once he bolted.

He was either stung by a bee or something made him start. I was in the milk float and he took off. Dad said, “Put the hand brake on” and I did and it didn’t make any effect. He bolted all the way back home, about a mile, and of course Dad got stuck into him, you’re a bad horse, gave him a belting and he never did it again. A very smart horse that one.

Yes, my father was a very good horse trainer.

From the age of 20 he used to train and break horses for the mines at Broken Hill and they used to pull the ore out of the mine. So he was a very good horse trainer my father.

Yes, we went off to the farm. That was fine, yes, when I got to Murray Bridge to out past Murray Bridge on the Bowhill Road, it’s about 17 miles outside Murray Bridge on the Bowhill Road.

And 3,500 thousand acres – a lot of it wasn’t cleared. So we set about clearing a lot of the acreage and Dad bought a big crawler tractor. And my father was also a boiler maker, a fitter and turner and could weld and do just about anything and build houses.

There wasn’t much he couldn’t do. He was a mechanic. In those days I think you had to

do quite a lot and he learned by doing it. I had quite a good grounding on the farm. My father had me driving a vehicle from the time that I was 11. If he was busy shearing or something like that from the age of 12 I used to drive the utility into Murray Bridge and I’d sit on pillows so I could see over the steering wheel

because my mother couldn’t drive and I was a reasonable size for a 12 year old. The first year on the farm I really got to be a strong lad and quite bit for my age but we’d always leave the ute [utility truck] on the other side of the river if you like. Not on the Murray Bridge side we’d catch a taxi in so that the police wouldn’t get upset with me. They’d turn a

blind eye [ignore it] most of the time anyway so long as you weren’t driving erratically but I was quite a good driver. And I learned to drive just about everything – well I did, I learned to drive everything on the farm down to the big large diamond-T truck that my father had. In the end I could drive the crawler and knock down the scrub and so on and so forth and I used to do that. I used to do the seeding and the ploughing and

things like that. I’d finish school and come home and jump on the tractor and do a couple of hours ploughing. I’d end up with the lights on going around. They knew I was OK because they could see the tractor turning with the lights so they could see everything was OK. And when I’d done a couple of hours I’d come on home or Dad would come down in the ute and pick me up. But I used to enjoy that very much.

Yes, oh yes. I had

decided that, yes, I liked the farm work. I was going to be a farmer for the rest of my life. But the seasons didn’t turn out in our favour so we had to leave and Dad came back to Adelaide. I enjoyed the farm, I used to like the life. And certainly feeding the

dogs was one of my jobs and I had to go out and trap rabbits and if the kangaroos got into plague proportions which they sometimes used to, they’d knock the crop down so we used to go out and shoot a couple of kangaroos to scare them off so to speak. It would only take them 2 to 3 weeks to forget what had happened and they’d come back again. So 40 or 50 kangaroos running around a nice crop of wheat or barley

would soon make a mess of it and so we had to keep an eye on it and every 2 or 3 nights we would go out and around the paddocks of a night with a spotlight. And we’d get some rabbits for the dogs and we might be able to get a kangaroo. We had four dogs. They were working dogs, a greyhound and a couple of sheepdogs. One was a bit useless so he was more a pet than a sheepdog but they needed to be fed and you couldn’t afford to buy it and there was no such thing as pet food

in those days in a tin so they had to be fed and that was my job.

Mainly wheat and barley. The barley was a better crop to grow because it didn’t need as much rainfall. But the wheat we grew one year was absolutely fantastic. I remember it was called Ben Covern, that was the strain of wheat. It was a big deal in those days

it was rust proof. That’s laughable because in the Malley you’d never ever suffer with rust because there wasn’t enough rain. If we got 8 to 9 inches a year we were lucky and you’d get a good crop out of that. A couple of years we didn’t even get our seed back. The days were tough but they were enjoyable. We had a good family life together and everyone was very close and we all used to work very

hard. Mum used to cook. She’d make everything even ice cream she could make. We used to have an old kerosene refrigerator. And when television came in my father hooked up a generator system so that we could have a TV out on the farm. And I thought that was very clever. We even have electric light then we didn’t have to light hurricane lamps any more or the oil lamps so that was very good.

Well my father and mother were both musically minded. And my Dad used to be a teacher at the Adelaide College of Music and he used to teach piano and piano accordion and he was quite gifted

with the piano and certainly the piano accordion – he could make that talk. We used to be invited out when they found out that Dad was a musician to the country dances. So we used to go to the dances quite a lot. I’d been playing the drums since I was about 7 so I used to go and take my drum kit out and I learned to play all the old military two-steps and the foxtrots and the waltzes and things like that with the

old style barn dances and things like that and that was good fun, I used to enjoy that. It wasn’t the pop music that I liked but it was OK it was music and I enjoyed that. I’d learned piano as well for 4 years but didn’t like that as much as the drums.

I picked it up by ear to start and was playing for several years until we came down to Adelaide and then I had some formal

training from Gary Haines and Gary I believe is still playing and a very good drummer, Gary.

Well, really I wasn’t at school that long. I didn’t like Pennington School very much. I remember we had a principal there who was very, very

strict and who hated dogs and I loved dogs. One day – he used to carry a cane, quite a large cane up his sleeve. And he used to walk stiff-armed and if someone stepped out of line he wasn’t averse to giving them a bit of a crack across the backside with the cane. Anyway, this day a dog came on the ground and he threw the cane at the dog and it bounced along the ground. And he missed the dog and I laughed and of

course I had to beat a hasty retreat before he could identify me. Mr Dansy, I can never forget him. He was a very strict principal. I often laugh later on in life about the army, they thought they were strict, they didn’t know Mr Dansy did they?

I don’t think so. They never actually hit me. He threatened to a couple of times when I was doing my

basic training but they never did.

Yes, I quite enjoyed the school at Murray Bridge. There were a couple of nice young girls there that I quite took a shine too and I made lots of friends. I used to make friends quite easily but I hated boarding and was very homesick.

So I asked that I could come home and that I was prepared to go by school bus and ride my bike and Dad agreed because he really did need me as well. So that was just Mum I had to get around and I got around her fairly easily. She was a bit of a soft touch my Mum. Dad wasn’t quite so easy to get around, he was the disciplinarian. But

I got around him and came home. And I had quite a few chores to attend to then and the first chore he gave me was to feed the dogs and to set so many rabbit traps and go around the rabbit traps in the morning before I went to school. I used to check them twice actually, morning and evening. But it was only about 25 traps we used to put out so it wasn’t that many.

Oh yes, I always fed the dogs, they always had food. A kangaroo would last them about 4 or 5 days so that was OK. And they would just about eat half a rabbit each or more a day. They greyhound was very good. We went out spotlighting and the greyhound would probably end up getting four or five very quickly

and even more if we wanted to because at times there were plagues of rabbits. They had myxomatosis [disease that affects rabbits] at that stage so of course you wouldn’t let the dogs eat anything that was infected with myxo [myxomatosis]. So we had to pick out the rabbits that hadn’t been affected by myxomatosis.

Yes, the eyes were badly infected so that’s how you’d tell.

No, I‘d much prefer to be on the farm. But my father had told me I had to do well at grade 7 otherwise I’d have to repeat the year because I couldn’t leave school officially until I’d finished my progress certificate, grade 7.

So with the chores that I had to do and one thing and another and the homework that had to do I had a pretty full day. Dad used to like a beer of a night and if we went into Murray Bridge he’d have a couple of beers on the way out. And I used to get a packet of potato chips and a bottle of lemonade or a big

pint of pub squash as it used to be called in those days and that was fine. I remember he came home one night and I’d been out doing a job in one of the paddocks where we were getting ready to reap a paddock of wheat and I was cutting down some mallee shoots and the dog took off after a kangaroo and I didn’t have my rifle with me. And the dog bailed this kangaroo up and it was quite a big buck kangaroo and I couldn’t drag the dog away and the dog had been injured. So I tried to knock the kangaroo out and I hit it in the side of the head with a bit piece of rock and that was a bad mistake because it jumped over a bush and grabbed me and pushed me backwards. Luckily I had a knife on me.

And I pulled the knife out stabbed it in the chest but it put one paw around my shoulder and scratched me and whacked me in the face with its other claw. And I had a double patched pair of trousers on and it brought its leg up on the inside of my thigh and kicked down and backwards and just about ripped the trouser leg off me and cut my

leg. So I decided that discretion was the better part of valour. The dog came in and launched itself at the roo and pulled it off me or it would have been still kicking me. I decided I should go back and get my rifle and by the time I went back of course it was dark. I got the rifle and went back out and couldn’t find the roo. I could hear the dog barking but couldn’t see and

my father came home and he said, “Where’s the dog?” And I said, “The dog’s out, we’ve got a roo.” Mum had cleaned me up at that stage so I didn’t look so bad. I told him I’d left the dog so he clipped me in the ears and we went back down and tried to find the dog but the dog wasn’t even making any noise any more. We thought the dog had been killed. So about 10 o clock that night we heard a whimpering at the back door and the dog had arrived back

and he was badly ripped. So we had to put him out in the shed and make him comfortable. We couldn’t sew him up because the tear had been so bad that the left rank and most of his rib cage was exposed. The kangaroo had kicked half his ear off and opened up the side of his face and down the left-hand side of his rib cage.

So, I’ve no doubt that the kangaroo was dead because he wouldn’t leave a kangaroo until he’d killed it, I know that. Certainly it took me about six weeks of nursing the dog to get him back to the stage where he could stand up and be fed. I used to feed him Aspro [aspirin] crushed up in milk to ease his

pain and we nursed him back to health.

He survived, yes. But whenever he saw a kangaroo again there was no holding him. He changed his tactics. Instead of a frontal assault he used to attack from the rear, grab them behind the neck and they just couldn’t get rid of him. He used to be so great with kids and the cats could come and sleep on him during the winter but kangaroos look out. He was crazy

but a great dog and very fast.

Yes, that’s right and we had a few bad years and Dad had to sell the farm then we came into Adelaide. Once we’d sold the farm the gentleman who bought the farm and didn’t

settle fully, went back on his word. My father used to be a great one for handshakes in those days. Of course, that wasn’t the way to sell something and my father used to trust people and he’d take them on face value. He’d always been cautioned about a handshake, that one day it would catch up with him and it did. He was never ever paid the full amount that he was

owed but at least he made enough money out of the sale of the farm to pay off all his debts and buy a couple of taxis back in the city and put a taxi truck on with Central Taxis. The idea was for me to drive the taxi truck but my mother wouldn’t hear of that she wanted me to go back to school. In the meantime I’d got a job working for a 2-way radio company repairing

TVs [televisions] and two-way radios but I wasn’t able to be trained technically because I didn’t have a formal education. So I decided that I’d follow in my brother-in-law’s footsteps. He’d been to Japan and Korea and was probably instrumental in me joining the army, getting the bug to join the army and hopefully see the world a bit as he’d done. He was in Korea during the Korean War

so that was one of the main reasons why I inquired about the army.

He told me about the travel and interesting things that he’d seen during his time in Japan and that travel was an education he thought and that you didn’t need a formal education to be able to get on in the world

especially in those days. And that the army would educate me anyway if I managed to join the army and I did that.

Yes, I did. When I joined the army luckily they immediately recognised that I had potential

but because of the lack of formal education I was somewhat limited as to how they could employ me. And during my initial training I did first year high school in 3 months and that was in addition to my normal training. They then assessed me at first year high school level. They gave me a piece of paper

to prove it. I didn’t quite feel that that was enough and when I actually left recruit training I went off to 1 Field Regiment. Now 1 Field Regiment was at Holsworthy and I was fortunate enough to be transferred into a unit where they were interested in people and

took the time to – in fact the battery captain was a top man and he took a bit of a shine to me and said that the wanted me to go to Officer School and recognising that I didn’t have the required education standard he said, “Look you can jump second year high school level and go straight to intermediate level.” He said, “And if you can get

that we’ll send you off to Officer Training.” So I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted officer training but he was very enthusiastic about it so he really didn’t give me an option he said, “You’re going on it” and that was it. So I went on an education course, army class 1 education course and that was a 3 month course full on, day and night, and I passed that.

So that gave me a secondary education to some degree. Later on in life I went further than that and did my leaving certificate. But, yes, I did regret not having a formal education. I believed that I was capable of doing much more than I did and so did the army in the end but I was quite happy with what I did anyway so that was that.

But Peter, Peter was a top guy. He taught me a lot, he took a lot of interest in me.

Peter Badcoe. Unfortunately he was killed in Vietnam but he was a good boss to work for and he was very strict, a disciplinarian, but a very human man. He took time out to explain to

us what we were going to be doing and why we were going to be doing it – long, long before the psychs [psychologists] decided that if you told a soldier something and the reason for doing it they were more likely to do it without question and to do the job properly. And he used to follow that principle and I thought that he was way ahead of his time and I enjoyed working for him. I had

met all the requirements for officer training and because I was under age, you had to be 21 in those days to do something wild like that, even to join the army you needed your parents permission. So they sent off the application forms for my parents’ signature, they sat on it for 3 weeks. In the meantime Peter went off on leave and

I was called out on parade one day. One of the guys overseas had been killed and they were looking for someone to replace him quickly. And my battery had just come back from Malaysia so they didn’t want to go again. I said, “Oh gee a trip to Malaysia, that’ll be much better than being a second lieutenant, yes, I’ll go.” So when he came back from his leave I was in Malaysia

and he was pretty upset. He definitely had his mind set on me becoming an officer. I wasn’t quite sure, was just turning 19 and I just thought, well, I’m not sure that’s the way I want to go.

I think possibly my lack of formal education.

Although I’d gone through and realise now that they were fears that I needn’t have worried about because I was equal to the task but it’s very difficult when you’re so young to know what’s the best thing for you. I’ve no doubt that he had the best interests for me at heart. But unfortunately I was snapped up to go to

Malaysia so my career path changed to one of an NCO [Non Commissioned Officer]. When I got to Malaysia there was a period where I spent a lot of time on the guns and learning the equipment because it was equipment that I hadn’t known before. I’d been trained as a field gunner at the school of artillery at

Manly and the course that I did was quite a complicated course in field artillery and that’s what I was doing at 1 Field Regiment. And Peter Badcode actually grabbed me off the gun line and sent me off to do a driver operators course in signals because he knew that in my dossier I had an interest in signals so he

grabbed me and he sent me off to do that training which I did. So when I had been qualified as a signaller and a gunner and then being posted to another unit I had to retrain because the guns were completely different. It was from field artillery to a defence artillery. So I had a another learning curve to go through

which I quite enjoyed because I was a quick learner and liked to learn about guns. This was a pretty complicated gun and it fired two rounds a second and a complicated piece of equipment like that was a bit of a challenge. So I did some promotion courses and passed those and after a few months I was promoted to corporal or bombardier as we call them in the artillery. So a

fairly quick promotion actually to a bombardier. I was a bombardier at 20 which was quite fast. So I decided that perhaps I’d made the right decision after all. After a short time in the army I’d been promoted and I could see the third stripe in my mind’s eye. And as a sergeant of course you were pretty well ‘King Pin’ as a sergeant

so I went along those lines. One of the jobs that I did voluntarily was at the radio station. The RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] base at Butterworth where I was stationed had a radio station and of course I had an idea that I might like to be a radio announcer and they were asking for volunteers to

be auditioned. So I went down and passed the audition and went and did the training and then I became a part-time radio announcer for radio Butterworth. I actually met Karen at the radio station, my wife.

In Malaysia, yes. Karen’s father was in the air force. She was actually going to school at the time, doing a correspondence course, on the island of Penang at the

RAAF School there. And Karen had been working before her Dad was posted to Malaysia and she was working and wanted to stay behind but her Dad wouldn’t let her and that’s how she got to meet me. Karen had a show called ‘Teenager’s Half Hour’ on the radio station and she was a very good announcer. And she got to play all of the latest

hits on the ‘Teenager’s Half Hour’ program. She was a librarian as well, used to do a lot of library work and other work as an announcer as well so she got to have quite a big following. I had a couple of shows and used to stand in as a general announcer and I had a show on Saturday nights called “Party Time.” I used to take requests from the locals and from any listener

and play requests.

We were playing all the latest music of that time. The Beatles and The Beatles were just the latest and greatest thing. Of course The Beach Boys were on the scene and Elvis Presley was on the scene and The Deltones were on the scene and it was an interesting time for music. And I enjoyed that immensely it was just something else that I’d learned to do and

I missed that quite a lot when I came back to Australia. It was something that I enjoyed doing and playing all the latest music and having access to all of the latest music was very good.

Yes I did, yes. Music has always been a very keen interest of mine. I like all sorts of music I like jazz,

classical, pop. I don’t like bee bop but then again I don’t know many of my generation that do like the bee bop stuff.

Oh yes. I got to be quite a reasonable drummer and in fact when I came back from Malaysia I formed a band at Woodside when 111 Battery came back. We had quite a few national servicemen

there at the time and national service had started so I had a small group. We used to play at local pubs and things like that.

Oh, I think we called it the ‘Purple Grove’ or something like that. We all wore purple shirts in two shades of purples and things like that. That was the latest and greatest thing – anything that was purple was in in those days.

I bought myself a car when I came back from Malaysia, an old Falcon, and things like that so I had mobility. Six months later Karen came back from Malaysia. I asked her Dad could she be sent back and we’d be married. And he did and we did, we were married.

No, I’d very much made my mind up that I was going to pursue an army career. I was very regimented. I had quite a lot of discipline at home so the discipline was no problem for me. I was a very self-disciplined person anyway. Once I had set tasks to do, I did them and I’d follow through. So I found that the

study and the advancement and the chance for the postings and travel that perhaps wouldn’t be there normally were very interesting to me. And I just thought that that was something that I would enjoy. And Karen, with her background with her father in the air force, they’d been used to travelling as well, so I really couldn’t have picked perhaps a better partner in

that respect because she was used to travelling. Years later after I’d left the forces Karen used to say, “It’s two years since you’ve left the army we should be moving somewhere.” We always felt like well two to three years are up, it’s time to go, or it’s up 12 months surely we should be moving somewhere. But 20 years later we’re still in the same spot. I guess that music was an

option. The piano wasn’t. I learned classical piano and used to play pop music by ear. I played the keyboard by ear later on and could thrash out a few tunes reasonably well and picked up playing the piano accordion. My Dad showed me a few pointers on the piano

accordion and I learned to play that by ear as well. I haven’t played it for years now it’s got a stuck reed so I must get that serviced and get back into it now that I’ve retired and probably get a keyboard and stick it out in my den as well. So I’ll start back into music proper. The drums are a bit noisy but I like to play the drums. I usually choose when nobody else is in the home to do that because I can turn the stereo up high and put my headphones

on and away I go and don’t annoy anybody perhaps except the neighbours.

Well my father had been in the militia for a couple of years during the war. He thought that it would be good for me and it would be a

good career to pursue. He knew I could handle the discipline because he was very much a disciplinarian but he was pleased that I was joining. My mother was not. My mother didn’t want me to go because I was basically her baby boy because of the vast difference between by brother and sister.

Well twelve and ten years’ difference. My sister was 10 years and my brother was

older, he was the eldest. I was 17 when I joined the army so, you know, my brother was 29. I just thought that that would be a way of pursuing a career that I would be good at it. And I knew I would be good at it. I know that sounds arrogant but I knew I would be good at it because I could take instruction and give instruction

and I could do physically lots of hard work because I had a good background on the farm. I had a good strong back, I was very fit, very, very strong. The army gave me a medical and I had flat feet but I told the doctor that I used to walk ten, fifteen miles and think nothing of it

shooting. And he gave me some exercises which I did and built an arch in my foot, I was that determined.

Yes and she knew of course my father when they were married, of course, when he by accident shot himself and he

had a terrible wound and of course he had to give up the militia when that happened. But the militia really in one way saved his arm because if he hadn’t have been wearing an army grey coat which took a great deal of the impact he would have lost his arm. So he was always thankful for that. But I remember as a kid when we were on the farm he used to occasionally pick out a black pellet, it used to come to the surface and that was years and

years and years later. But it never used to fuss him, he was a tough old boot, Dad. He was a gun shearer in his days so there really wasn’t much he couldn’t do. He could weld, he was a boiler maker he was a fitter, he was a turner, he was a mechanic, he was a brick-layer, he was a builder. And he used to say to me “There isn’t anything you can’t do, the only thing you have to do is try and there’s no such word as can’t in the

dictionary. If someone says you can’t do it you then set out to show them how you can” and it always stuck with me. I remember he gave me a belting – I must have been about 13. I’d told him a lie and he said to me, “Adrian, your memory’s not good enough to tell lies.” He said, “You should always tell the truth that way you don’t have to have a good memory.” That’s after he’d given me a belt, not a bad one

but he just said to me, “You shouldn’t tell lies because you’ll always get caught out.” He said to me, “You don’t get found out you put yourself out because you can’t remember the lie, you can always remember he truth though.” And I’ve found that a good principle in life.

My brother-in-law went to Korea. John and my brother were similar ages.

John was a few years, 3 years older I think, 3 years older than my brother, 4 years older than my brother. John would be 74 now. He went to Korea and Japan and was perhaps instrumental in me joining the army.

His travels overseas and it sounded exciting. And he was involved in combat. He was an infantryman during the Korean War and they were completely

surrounded at one stage by the Chinese army. And they all thought that they were going to die so they basically said goodbye to one another and sat down in their holes and proceeded to beat back some of the bloodiest charges that the Chinese had ever put in. And the Chinese were not used to people standing up to them and even

today the Chinese have recorded in their military annals that Australians don’t run. Australians will stay and fight. They couldn’t take the position and in fact the Americans awarded a Presidential Citation for that action. I believe it was called Kapyong, the Battle of Kapyong. But he didn’t elaborate, not any

blood and gore but he just said that it was an experience that he would never forget. He said that he thought everybody should do military service.

He didn’t say that everybody should do war service he said that everyone should do military service. He believed that Australia was not able to defend itself even all those years ago and that people expected

certain things within a community and were not called upon to make any if you like pay-back to their country. They expected certain things as their right when in fact the country asked not a great deal back. He was a very proud soldier but only did 6 years and that was enough for him. He was the most senior

six-star private in South Australia I think. He never wanted rank, didn’t want the responsibility. But quite a few of his friends went on to be officers and one chap in particular was quite famous, I just forget his name, but he actually made quite a name for himself in Vietnam. But John said six years was enough for him and he thought that perhaps 6 years would be

enough for me but it turned out to be 20 years for me.

Yes they did. And so I was off and away.

I went first to Wagga Wagga. And Wagga Wagga was in New South Wales

and I spent 12 weeks there of basic training.

It was hard. We basically ran everywhere. They toughened you and luckily I was pretty fit when I went into the army and for me it was relatively easy. But a lot of other lads had difficulty keeping up especially on the runs.

I must say that not a great deal of thought was given to protecting ankles and sprains and stretching and doing those things that we now know we should do before doing substantial exercise. Just as an example, they used to drag us out of bed at 5.30 in the morning, called the roll,

we’d stand there for 15/20 minutes in the cold in sandshoes, and I mean sandshoes, there was just no support whatsoever, shorts and a t-shirt. And when the roll was complete “Left turn, quick march, break into quick time, double march” and away you’d go. No warm-up exercises, out of a warm bed, stand out in the cold for 20 minutes get freezing cold and you’d have

goose bumps on your goose bumps and away you’d go. And they wondered why people used to come back with pulled muscles and sprained ankles and things like that and they said, “Yes, go down to the RAP [Regimental Aid Post] and get a Codus,” or get whatever it was in those days, an Aspro, or even two if you were lucky, take those and keep exercising. That was the way you got over a sprain. They couldn’t afford any down time, you had a commitment to meet and if you broke a bone you were held

over until the next intake or if you failed, no one really failed, they’d push you through and make sure that you didn’t waste the taxpayer’s money. And you’d get through after the 12 week period and you were a changed person, everyone looked the same.

I don’t think it change me all that much. It certainly changed my form of dress. As a single soldier we had to wear uniform everywhere basically.

When we were living in we were encouraged to wear uniform even when we walked out. It was only later on with the onset of Vietnam and all of the people that were against Vietnam that we were told that we weren’t allowed to wear uniform as it was a source of antagonising the general population by wearing uniform so we were told not to wear uniform.

I would say it was devastating. I loved my country, I wanted to serve my country and was prepared to lay my life down for my country and believed that my country’s uniform was very important to me.

To be told not to wear it was a big blow and I know that it affected others the same way.

Funny you should pick that word. It’s a sense of shame that everybody brought back from Vietnam. Not during the time but after. We were made to feel that and I don’t believe that we should have been.

We acquitted ourselves very well and we used to think of ourselves as ANZACs [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] and the equal of the old ANZACs and to be told that you weren’t, particularly from the RSL [Returned and Services League] that went down very hard. When you know what you did and you know how hard you tried and you did nothing wrong, only brought honour to the

country and to the uniform.

No, they have a lot to answer for I believe, the RSL. I believe the World War vets were the same. I would have thought they should have learned by their experience not to repeat it but it seems that they chose not to avoid taking that on board.

Yes, turned out not to be. In fact I only joined the RSL about 10 years after I left the army.

I decided that the RSL would be the last organisation that I would join. But I found the RSL to be disappointing. I found them to be disappointing in many ways. They say that they’ll do something and they don’t do it. They offered me a position as Director of War Graves. I was interviewed for an hour and a half by Bruce Ruxton

at the end of which he said, “Yes, you’ve got the job, pack your bags. The Prime Minister said that you will be automatically appointed, you are our selection.” So I couldn’t believe it I said, “Well, I’ll wait to find out.” He said, “No, no, here’s the information. Start reading it for the job. You’ve got the position.” Six weeks – the President of the RSL, John, said to me, “Well congratulations.

If Bruce Ruxton says you’ve got it, you’ve got it.” But in fact I didn’t get it. I didn’t even get asked to Canberra. The Prime Minister found out – I suppose, the Prime Minister found out that the President of the Vietnam’s Veterans’ Association in South Australia had been seconded as a candidate for this position. It didn’t quite suit them to have someone – maybe they thought I was radical, I was far from radical.

I had written to the Prime Minister on a couple of occasions over veterans’ issues and on both issues I was vindicated – making their war service loan portable. People prior to ’87 didn’t have portability. So all Vietnam veterans didn’t have portability with their service loan. Gough Whitlam [Australian Prime Minister] rephrased that to a Defence Service Home’s Loan –

it was the same thing. So the later people, the latter people could actually make it portable. Sell their home and transfer the balance from one home to the next. But if you were pre ’87 and indeed all of the national servicemen who had been serving their country and had their marble pulled out of a barrel were being discriminated against. And I’d written to the Prime Minister.

That was Mr Keating.

And he chose to ask Mr Humphries, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, to answer that letter. And he said, “Yes,” I was quite right and that they would address it at the next session of parliament. And they did and they made it portable. So I had a win there. But having cost the government quite a lot of money I wasn’t quite persona grata, I was persona non grata I think you’ll find in the diplomatic

area and in the political arena. But I certainly wasn’t a radical. I held the conviction that I should be apolitical in a senior position as President of the Vietnam Veterans’ Association but my job was to look after the welfare and well-being of all veterans and it was something that the RSL had chosen to turn a blind eye to at that stage. They’re much better now of course because there are a

lot more veterans in the RSL.

Well in 10 years time there won’t be any RSL unless the Vietnam Veterans start standing up and being counted. I have mixed views about what happened to me. It was never ever explained. Bruce Ruxton never ever wrote to me, he never acknowledged the fact. I met Bruce at a conference later and he looked away from me which I found

disappointing. With a reputation as big as the man I found that disappointed. However, these things pass.

Yes. I found that as a President of the Vietnam Veterans’ Association that media would appear on my doorstep. A TV Channel when I was working for one

firm just appeared without notice at the front door and said, “Is Mr Walford here?” And they said, “Yes, he’s down the back.” And they spent 2 hours filming me. That was in ’91 when we sent troops or the announcement was made that we were sending them to the Gulf War. Half a page in the Sunday Mail. I mean you couldn’t believe that they would devote half a page in the Sunday Mail to my comments. However,

it was my position to stand up for veterans and I did that and I feel that I did a good job.

I think so and I certainly made my presence felt here with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. And Mr Lalor, who was the Deputy Commissioner at the time, said to me, “Look, Adrian, we can’t recognise all of these cancers, it would break the government.”

Well the soft tissue sarcomas that were worrying lots of veterans. And there were about 26 families of cancer that we were looking at and that the Americans had looked at also and said, “Look it’s more likely than not that these things could have been caused by exposure to chemicals.” To a cocktail of chemicals – to dieldrin to dioxane to defoliants to you name it. Even the

drugs that we were taking were carcinogenic.

For malaria.

No, it was called – I’ll think of it in a minute but it was a cherry red pill that we used to take. It used to cause cancer in mice so one would think it would probably cause cancer in humans if you took it long enough. But the old

methods didn’t work anymore. People were getting malaria. The paladrine that we’d taken in Malaysia wasn’t working any more. So we had to take this cherry red pill, it was called Dapsone actually and that was one of the pills that they found out was carcinogenic so we had to take that. The Americans realised that there was a problem and they actually said, “Well, look, we’ll recognise these

26 families of cancer that have more likely than not been caused by exposure” – generally exposure to chemicals, defoliants, drugs that were ingested. And insecticides and things of that nature which of course everybody was exposed to in Vietnam.

No, no, the Deputy Commissioner, Mr Lalor, told me, “Look, we can’t afford that.”

I guess for once in my life I did threaten him with a picket 24 hours a day at the department if they didn’t do something and do it fairly quickly as the Americans had chosen to do so. I think it was about 3 or 4 later that they made the announcement that the Australian government would also recognise those families of cancer that the Americans had as more likely than not were caused by war service.

No, they didn’t pay out, they never

paid out. They never paid any compensation. We were fighting at that time – it was a case at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for a Mr Mike Shar, he had a pituitary adenoma on the brain, it was on the frontal lobe and they couldn’t operate so his was the first case to get up. We’d actually had a lieutenant colonel whose

death occurred before it went to court and his wife ended up taking it to court and it wasn’t allowed, it was thrown out of court. But I believe that she actually got the war widows’ pension later once the Americans had – they revisited that case and I understand that it got up. It certainly was not found as being likely that it was caused by his military service. Lots of things were

wrong. The Evatt Royal Commission, the decision was based upon fraudulent information.

The Evatt Royal Commission into Agent Orange [herbicide used in Vietnam] – agent whatever – purple, white. The Evatt Royal Commission relied on evidence which was fraudulent and misrepresented. Trials that they assessed,

reports that were given by scientists were falsified. When Santo [Monsanto chemical company, a manufacturer of Agent Orange] was found out in the end in America they were disciplined over it but the government has chosen not to revisit the Evatt Royal Commission.

The commission’s findings were that there was no evidence that chemicals had influenced or had caused

veterans any harm whatsoever and that is still the Evatt Royal Commission, the findings of the Evatt Royal Commission. We’ve asked for it to be revisited but I don’t think it ever will be.

It must be, it must be. At any case, the veteran is now given the benefit of the doubt. So at least they’re treated now and each case is

looked at of course on its own merits but at least now the veteran can get free treatment for cancer which is very good.

No, compensation is not paid. If it is found that it is more likely than not that you were exposed to chemicals, you were in those areas that were exposed to chemicals, then you have grounds to be awarded a

pension –either a TPI, Totally and Permanently Incapacitated pension or a part pension. That’s a very good thing, a step in the right direction by the department. And they’d been very good at it but initially it was the purse strings that were well and truly closed. We got to be quite good

friends the deputy commissioner and I. We used to have a bit of shadow boxing and we used to slug each other occasionally but we got to be good friends and we got to have a lot of mutual respect. I would never go in bouncing him. I would just say we need to discuss this and we would get more out this by discussing it than threatening one another and we usually did. And I found that it was a very rewarding job to be able to work closely with the Department of

Veterans’ Affairs. I have a great lot of empathy for them. They’re doing a very difficult job and most of them do it very well. They only asked me once to do a presentation. They didn’t ask me back again I think I was a bit close to the bone.

Well I had to go into what we call corps training.

That was basically a matter of being allocated to a corps one you’d finished your corps training. My platoon commander was an artillery man so I realised later in life that what he was looking for were people he’d like to go to his corps so he influenced them to go into his corps. And I had an idea to go to signals but he said, “Well, artillery’s the best place to go because you’ve got faster promotion and we’ve got

signals, we rely on signals” and he influenced me into making that my second choice.

Yes, that’s right. Well obviously I got artillery didn’t I? They allocated me to artillery. So I went off to North Head at Manly, New South Wales, and had to wait for about 3 weeks before a gun course started

and just did general duties around the barracks area. Working in kitchens and working as stewards in the officers’ mess and things like that and some funny things happened there. So, basically waiting for the gun course to start and 12 weeks doing the gunner course and pushing artillery pieces around the gun park and stripping them and assembling them and maintaining them and going out and firing them and so on. That

took, the ballistics side and gun drill and the technical side, a full 3 months. At which time we marched out of the school of artillery and were allocated to different field units.

Well, one of the stories was when I was working in the officers’ mess.

And I suppose this has always played on my mind. Soldiers don’t have a great deal of time for some officers. Some officers they will run through broken glass barefooted but other officers lacked leadership. The younger they were sometimes and the quicker they were promoted the worse they were. The senior officers were excellent but as a young steward put in the

officers’ mess for a week to serve food I found that it didn’t pay to upset the cook. One young captain had and the cook actually took a dislike to this chappie. He came in for a meal and he was the only one in the mess. He was the duty officer and it was on a weekend. And Jock the cook said, “Who is it?” And I said, “Oh, it’s Captain

Mac.” He said, “Oh, that idiot.” I just raised my eyebrows and he said, “What does he want?” I said, “He’d like a steak, medium rare.” “Ok, fine.” With that he threw the steak on the ground and jumped on it, threw it on the hotplate, spat on it, turned it over and spat on it again. And I was absolutely horrified, totally horrified that he would do that and after about three minutes, he put it on the

plate and said, “Take it out to him” and I said, “No, I’m not.” He said, “I’m telling you take it out.” And I said, “I’m telling you I’m not.” I said, “You cook that steak.” He said, “All right” So he put it back on the hot plate and cooked it for another minute on each side. He said, “Now take it out.” I said, “All right.” I thought by this stage all the germs would be dead anyway. But he had another spit and turned it over and I had to take this steak out. Well I took it out and put it front of the officer and

raced straight back out, I couldn’t bear to stand there. About 30 seconds later, “Steward” – I had to go back out of course. He said, “Could you please ask the cook to cook the steak a bit?” He said, “You know, it’s terribly runny.” So I took it back in and Jock said, “Yeah, not a problem.” So he threw it on the ground again and repeated the same set of circumstances and then put it back on the hotplate and cooked it really well this time, exactly how the officer wanted it.

So I had to take this steak out and put it in front of the officer and he ate it. And he called me out again and said, “Steward” and I thought, “Oh no, here we go, he’s found all the dirt and muck that was in the steak.” He said, “Please tell the cook that that was the best steak I’ve ever had.” And it was about then that I decided I really didn’t want to be an officer. And another occasion I

found phlegm floating in the milk jug and that sort of doubly made sure that I didn’t want to be an officer. But I was only young, 17, very impressionable. So the cook certainly impressed me. I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. That was the only time, in fact, that I saw him interfere with a meal and he had been drinking. But it taught me one thing, never, ever upset the cook.

Wherever you go, whatever you do, never upset the cook. And if the steak isn’t quite to your liking never ask for it to go back to be cooked because the cook knows how the steak should be cooked, not you. And he’d done this on several occasions and the cook got sick of him. So, yes, never upset the cook.

Yes, of an evening if we didn’t have exams we could go down to

Manly which was perhaps a couple of kilometres down the hill from North Head, a short walk. It was good going down but not quite so good coming back up with quite a high steep climb. But the Corso in Manly was of course anything a 17 year old could wish for. You weren’t supposed to drink in the pubs but we

did. And if you were in uniform no one questioned you and we used to wear uniform in those days. No, it was quite a good posting, Manly. I was later on posted back there on the staff of the school for 3 ½ years in the Air Defence Wing after I did my training overseas. But obviously I attended the school right throughout my career I used to go back to do courses. And I used to enjoy going back to the school of

artillery. It’s now moved to Puckapunyal. I visited Puckapunyal about two months ago, to the new school of artillery just to see how it was. But you can’t replace that environment, you can’t replace that tradition. The old coast artillery battery that was there during the war – all the old lines they had a lot going for them, the military tradition, but the government wanted the

the land so they sent them to Puckapunyal in sunny Victoria. No, my military training at the school of artillery was intense. Twelve weeks went very quickly once we got into the course but I didn’t like doing the general duties side of things – guards and mess duties, working in the kitchen and working as a steward in the officers’ mess. What an education. I found the sergeants’ mess much more amenable

and the cooks much friendlier because the cooks of course, the sergeant cook was in charge of both messes and the sergeant cook used to cook at the sergeants’ mess and the sergeants’ mess had the best food anyway. The officers used to think they did but the sergeants’ mess was (UNCLEAR).

Yes, they had 25 pounders,

some. They had 4.2 inch mortars, some. They had the L5 pack howitzer and a 5.5 medium artillery gun. They also had, later on, they had an American gun called an M202. The pack howitzer was an Italian gun and it was made to be stripped

down and carried, man handled, and carried by pack mules. It was designed for the Italian Alps and things like that so you could carry them up a mountainside and then reassemble them and fire them from the top of the hills. But we used to call it the meccano set. It was notorious for chopping off fingers and taking huge chunks of flesh out of people’s hands and other body parts. So you had to be very cautious

when you were putting it into action in the anti-tank position and getting it back into the field position because you had the trails used to be changed in different sections and different positions and you had latches and very smart grooves that if you put your finger in the wrong place you’d lose a piece of it. So you had to have your wits about you.

Several people had big pieces taken out of their hands. In fact if you didn’t draw blood during gun drill

the drill instructor would say you’re not working hard enough. If you came off the gun park bleeding then you’d been trying.

We used to change around. We used to do number one through to number seven. Everyone had to learn every other position so you could be a number one or a gun or you could be the number seven of a gun or you could be a number one or two,

three, four, five, six, whatever. You all had to learn the other jobs so you could go from one job to the next position. So if someone was hurt you could stand in and do the laying of the gun. If number one was knocked out you could do the number one’s job. So everyone was cross-trained.

No, I found it boring. The gun wasn’t sophisticated enough for me I wanted something more to get my

teeth into. I didn’t like it very much I thought it was not the right equipment for what we were looking to do. But, then again, I hadn’t been to Malaysia at that stage and the gun was very useful in Malaysia. They used to strip it down to two loads and hang it under a helicopter because we didn’t have a helicopter that was good enough to carry the gun and its equipment by itself with the shields and everything so it used to have a couple of loads to get it into position.

A lot of times they used to take the gun into position without the shields on it so they’d save some weight. So there’d be one sortie instead of two on the helicopter.

Yes, I went out to a field regiment in Holsworthy and it was the 103 Field Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery. They’d only just come back

from Malaysia and they were at Tirenda [?] Camp in Malaysia. They had been there as a field battery supporting the 28th Commonwealth Brigade. At that stage there were still communist terrorists running around the place making trouble. And the

aim of the artillery unit that was posted there was to support the infantry units with gunfire. So that was their job and they used to fly out all over the place. They even went down to Borneo. And during the Borneo emergency they actually put guns out, single gun positions, right on tops of hills and were there for weeks on ends by themselves with a company of

infantry tyring to stop the Indonesians from infiltrating through into Borneo. They came back from Malaysia and had enough of Malaysia and didn’t want to go back. I was on the gun line originally, on the howitzers, and I was offered a position as a signaller,

as I mentioned before, with the battery captain’s party. And he sent me off to do a signaller’s course and a driver’s course and that was an advancement, an extra pay rate, so I did that and worked for the battery captain. And he was a very professional man, a professional soldier. He was a little eccentric sometimes. You’d never know whether he was carrying a loaded rifle or not. In those days we used to

do ambushes on the rest of the battery. And we would actually do the ambushes with live ammunition to quicken their footwork up because we didn’t have automatic firing attachments that we could put on our weapons. So we used to do the ambushes with live ammo [ammunition] and we’d dig a pit and fire the machine guns and sub machine guns into the pit so that no one would get hurt. And it was a marvellous

reaction that the battery managed to get an element of realism and their movement was incredible. One day they didn’t stop quick enough and they ran the radiator of a truck into the barrel of a gun in front because they jumped out before they stopped the vehicle because there were live rounds going over their heads. And there were some live rounds going over their heads as well so they actually

did that and were on the ground before they stopped the vehicle properly so that was not very good. We had done the ambush and the battery put in a very good flanking attack and I was too slow getting on the vehicle because I was picking up the brass and

they drove away and didn’t realise I wasn’t in the back of the vehicle and I got captured and of course I hid the brass so they couldn’t find it. They quizzed me, “Were you firing live ammunition?” I had to say, “No, we weren’t.” But they knew very well we were. I thought I might have been beaten up at one stage. They made threatening movements but I bluffed them out and they didn’t throw a punch

but they were most unamused – an element of realism into the whole training section exercise. Peter used to do that.

Yes, he was very much the soldier.

No, he put things into place so that couldn’t possibly happen. As I say, we were firing into pits, live ammunition into pits and a shotgun into the air

and a 12 gauge shotgun makes a big noise in the stillness of the morning or in the evening. And any rounds that were fired over the head were on a fixed trajectory, way over their head and into an impact area so that nothing could possibly happen. He made sure of that. He was a very precise man.

Very well.

When we used to go out, we used to go out by ourselves. The party would bivouac away from the main section and we used to take it in turns doing the washing up until Peter devised a competition which invariably involved a couple of tin cans that were placed on a big tree about 10 metres away and we’d take shots at it with a pistol. And the first one that missed did the

washing up. I did most of the washing up until I got better. But that’s the sort of man he was. To a young 17 year old lad I thought he was great.

Yes, he was. He was the sort of man that you’d like to have for a Dad but then I don’t know what his fathering skills were like. I knew that he had children

and I knew that he had a wife, currently had a wife, but I’m not sure how their relationship was going because I think Peter said that he was having trouble at that stage. The military was no life for a married person much better suited for a single person at that stage. I think the army was gearing up even

then to send a large force to Vietnam. So we used to spend 10 months of the year in the bush training so they were getting ready.

It was 1964, 1963.

Yes 10 months of the year in the bush. When I went off to Malaysia of course, Peter went off on holidays and I went off to

Malaysia that was an entirely different set up. We were deployed 24 hours a day then in Malaysia on the guns around the air strip. Confrontation had been declared against Indonesia and the Indonesians were trying to subvert the local population. And Sukarno was the President then and he was pursuing a policy of

not quite war but certainly not peace. He was trying to subvert the population to overthrowing the Malaysian government. And when they landed troops on the Malaysian soil they found to their horror that they got dobbed in, the villagers would tell us where they were. So it wasn’t, the confrontation that Sukarno had set up wasn’t working for him, it wasn’t working at all.

Yes, that’s right.

Not really, no. You usually go somewhere as a unit and that was an unusual set of circumstances because Malaysia wasn’t considered to be a very hot

area. You’d lose one or two people in the unit but you wouldn’t lose 20, 30 or 40 people in the unit. And he was killed when they were racing out to the guns for deployment and he was thrown off the back of a truck and fell and was killed. He, I believe, was killed

instantaneously. But I don’t think I thought a great deal about it to be honest with you, it’s just a risk you take.

Not really, because I didn’t actually fill his position. Somebody in the unit moved to his position and I moved to another position. So they didn‘t put me in the gun crew that he came from, they put me in a

different gun crew. Someone who was already there went to that gun. I think they were not quite so insensitive as to do that. So the battery commander I think was quite right in doing that.

Of how hot it was. Stepping off the plane, it was my first trip overseas anywhere

and in particular to the tropics. It was like stepping into a blast furnace, that’s how it felt; it was stifling the heat and the humidity. It took me several weeks to get used to it and once I was acclimatised I enjoyed it – except for the wet season. Of course you got wet and you’d stay wet all day.

But if it wasn’t raining it was perspiration so you were wet most of the time.

It was some time before I met any of the local population. The local population, unlike the Vietnamese, were very supportive and saw the

military there as a good income for their local economy. They were very friendly, very friendly. And you were always made welcome wherever you went and I found the Malaysian people very hospitable.

They showed me straight to a barracks

room and I found that what we used to do we used to split the crew. The guns were deployed 24 hours a day and the crews were split 50/50. And you’d have two days on and two days off and you’d be under tents on the gun position, sleeping in tents, and then you had a couple of days back in the barracks. But if anything happened over the loudspeakers would come,

“For operations, for operations, deploy, deploy, deploy” and we would all have to jump into trucks and race out to the guns and man the guns fully in case of an enemy air attack.

Yes, they could, yes. You could operate with just 2 people on the gun if you had to and fire the ammunition that was on the gun – one to lay the gun and the other one to load the hopper

with the ammunition. So you could fire with 2. The Indonesians never attacked the base. They made two attempts to get through our defences but were detected both times.

Butterworth Air Force Base, Royal Australian Air Force Base at Butterworth.

You were on call all the time. If you were going off base you had to have a

leave pass and they wouldn’t let everybody go at the same time so you had to apply for a leave pass to get off base. And when you went off base you either went into Butterworth into the café or into one of the bars drinking or you went across to Penang into the township of Georgetown, in Penang, or you could go to the swimming pool on base and they had a

canteen there. So you could swim – great facilities. I found that the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] had the very best of facilities wherever they went.

Yes I did swim quite a lot. I was quite a good swimmer – I wasn’t but I decided that with the military training that we used to have to do, we used to have to swim lengths of the pool, up and back, in the

pool fully kitted and with boots on and full pack and rifle. It’s quite heavy so you needed to be a reasonable swimmer to do that so I decided that I should do some swimming and learn to swim properly which I can now. I can swim and float and swim and float and swim and float. I don’t have any fear

of water. I know that I can float for hours if I have to and just relax in the water. Of course fear is anything, you know, if you have a fear of the water then you really have a problem and jumping into the water with a full pack and rifle and then moving from one part to another without a current is hard enough but if you’re doing it in a stream, with a fast –running stream, you need to have a

rope on you to make sure that people can assist you if you get into difficulty. But they were good facilities there so we used them.

Well, we used to sit around and read and do maintenance and go up and work as general duties, stores people or things like that,

just general work around the area. We didn’t have to do ground maintenance because they had the Indian and Malaysian women who used to cut all the lawn and grass. We used to call them the Armstrong Mowers because they used to use a scythe and they’d swing their arms in a circular motion with this scythe and they’d cut all the grass that way. And it was a good way of employing people that otherwise would not be able to earn any

money.

Yes. We used to have a boot boy and they used to do our shoes and boots for us and polish them up and our belts and our brass and our chin straps and our buckles on our belts and things like that. So they used to do that. So when we were back in base it was good. We used to pay them for that of course. We also used to

have – a lady would come around if you had any sewing to be done. If you’d lost a few buttons and said so she’d come around and take the shirts away and sew new buttons on and bring them back for which she was paid. And we also used to have the ‘dobie’ lady so she’d come around and pick up all the dirty clothes and take them off and go away and wash them and bring them all back starched and ironed so it was a good way to live.

Yes, we had to pay the locals ourselves for all those services.

No, no. A few Malay dollars a week I think but in those times I think it only cost us about ten or fifteen dollars Malay a week for all of them, boot boy, clothes, perhaps 3 or 4 sets of clothing washed and ironed and starched.

Certainly your boots done and your shoes done and beds made and it was very good. So we had, if you like, servants.

Well the base was secure. All of the staff, the local staff, had security clearances to get on the base and they knew where they could or couldn’t go. And they were very

honest. We never had any loss of any equipment or clothing or anything like that. You could leave everything unlocked and you’d have no problem whatsoever. Most of the people were Muslim and the Muslim people you’ll find, well, they used to be very honest and sincere. Certainly very obliging

and it used to be funny – if somebody was getting changed and so and so walked into the room she’d, “Oops” put her hand over her face and then turn around and walk out the other way. It was quite hilarious sometimes.

No, not really, most units used to keep to themselves. I met quite a few RAAF guys at the radio station because that was

administered and run by the RAAF. The radio station officer, I think it was Lieutenant Bean, who commanded the radio station. And a lot of he other guys that were there were volunteers both civilian and military. One of my friends, John Halgate, was a volunteer from the battery.

I found out just a week ago that John’s passed away. He was very good, John. He got a job when he left Malaysia – he actually took his discharge in Malaysia and went to the UK. He met an English girl whose Dad was in the air force and immigrated to the UK and got a job on radio with the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] in London. So he did very well but I just heard that John had passed away.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were both young lads. You know, 19, 20, and it doesn’t seem to have taken that long to become almost sixty year olds.

Well in Malaysia we had to maintain the gun every day. So we’d strip the gun and

assemble it.

It was anti aircraft gun – A 40 millimetre Bofors, bristolised Bofors. It was fully motorised so we could traverse and elevate the gun from one position. It was like a control column that you see sometimes in an aeroplane. And the control column you’d tilted back to raise the barrel and swing it to the left to traverse to the left and right for the right. Push it forward to depress

the gun and then you had a sight which you used to lay on the aircraft and apply lead off and then fire the gun. So you had firing triggers on the traversing gear and you could actually fire the gun, aim it and fire it from one position and you only needed one other loader to load the hopper and keep the gun firing. It would be fire two rounds a second automatically and a two-inch round, two inch projectile,

quite a large round to be firing. And the British Army or the British air force had a squadron of anti-aircraft guns as well but they were much more modern than ours, they were the later generation. We’d fire two a second, they’d fire four a second and they also had radar control whereas ours was just optically controlled by the gunner. So we were a generation behind the British which we normally are

with most of our equipment.

Yes, we had to maintain the equipment and the position, make sure the tent was immaculate and the beds were made and the duck boards were swept and the gun position around the gun that all the grass was kept clear. We used to have a revette area around the gun, not around the tents, but around the gun. If a raid came in you

weren’t expected to be in your tent anyway so it was pointless sandbagging them. So we’d race out to the guns and take up our positions on the guns if we thought there was going to be a problem. Load the guns and traverse into the area that we expected the air attack to come from.

Well, there were a few false alarms but they were mainly training alarms. On

two occasions the Indonesians tried to sneak through the defences. And they had multi-engine jet engine bombers. These bombers used to carry a Russian-made stand off missile that had quite a large range. They could have pulled up from their coast and let it go. But on two occasions they actually got under the radar and got through the defences. And when they popped up to what we call “point of weapon release” they were

picked up on the and the aircraft were scrambled out and we were scrambled and put on the guns. Loaded the guns and turned to the position that it was likely the expected approach would be from and get ready to receive an air attack or a missile attack and try and shoot it down. The RAAF on both occasions, and the RAF [Royal Air Force], scrambled fighter aircraft out and pushed them away from the

base out back over international waters but they had actually come into Malay territorial waters. And it popped up on the radar and frightened the life out of everybody and they were on a perfect attack profile for the base. They were just proving I think that they could do it if they wanted to. It wasn’t so long after that that they actually moved one of the radar sets from the base up to the top of the Penang hill which then gave it a very, very

good range and it could look down into the Indonesian mainland and actually see the aircraft taking off from their bases. They were equipped with Russian aircraft in those days because General Sukarno was aligning himself, aligning Indonesia with Russia, and they’d managed to have Russian equipment and advisors and instructors in Indonesia.

And that is why I believe, that everybody was a bit uptight about the fact that he was receiving his equipment and arms from Russia and of course that was during the Cold War.

Oh yes. We knew which sorts of aircraft they had and operated. We also knew that they had a very good performance boundary. We knew the

aircraft because we’d studied them in a lot of detail. We knew their attack profiles and what sort of angles that they would come at for different attacks. So we could expect for a missile attack one angle of approach, for a rocket attack another. For a cannon attack we knew what the profiles would be. So by looking at the aircraft we knew what ordinance we would expect to be delivered on us.

Thankfully that didn’t happen but there were two occasions when we thought it was going to. The only time that we really got close to the Indonesians was up on the Malay/Thai border when we were asked to escort the companies up by truck and we used to act as shotguns and drivers for the battalion companies to go up to the border. There was a large element of about a

thousand or so, fifteen hundred, they weren’t sure, communist terrorists that were operating between Thailand and Malaysia. And they were ducking from one side of the border to the next. Well we weren’t supposed to go into Thailand but we did. They weren’t supposed to go into Thailand either but they did. The Thais knew and we knew. When the Thais put on an operation they’d duck across the Malay side. And when the Malays put on an

operation they’d duck across to the Thai side so it was only just the last few years that they actually surrendered these fellows. So they held out for years and years, something like 40 odd years. So you have to talk about their dedication. My father-in-law used to fly missions against them when he was there, over the years, many times. They put bombing runs in on the suspected enemy camp areas

and caught a heap of them at one stage in the open and killed quite a few of them. But he was a gunner at the time, a tail gunner in a Lincoln. And they caught quite a few of them in the open and they took a lot of casualties.

Yes, ‘Bull’ Story. Well,

Bull was a legend. When I did my corps training Bull Story was the regimental sergeant major and he had a reputation, boy did he have a reputation. He was the sort of guy that you tried to keep away from because

he would check your dress out and your haircut and everything like that and your boots and if they weren’t good enough you might end up with three or four more duties to do, guards and things like that. So you’d always try and avoid the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major], Bull Story. It’s quite funny because you could see, if you were in a position of advantage, you could actually look at people ducking and hiding as he walked around the area. He couldn’t see them

but I could see them and they’d be actually avoiding a confrontation with the regimental sergeant major because he had a very good voice he was a very fine stamp of a man and he used to move around the area very smartly and if you didn’t you were in trouble. It didn’t bother me because I always used to be able to play the game but he would always be able to manufacture something.

One of the most famous stories, and you’ve probably heard it before, when he was the BSM [Battery Sergeant Major] of gunnery wing, he was walking along the vestibule and he happened to notice that one of the gun course’s soldiers was putting on a pair of red football socks under his boots and gaiters. Now, of course you couldn’t see that once the boots and gaiters were on that they were red football socks but he made a mental note of the

soldier and said, “Ah, it’s recruit so and so, OK, right, OK, yes, he’s in that course. Right, I’ll inspect that course.” So once he got to the parade ground and the whole gunnery wing had marched on the battery sergeant major who was Bull Story at the time said, “I will inspect Number 1 of 1961 gunnery course”

and at that the sergeant in charge of the course marched out to meet the BSM and fell in behind the BSM and they walked off to have a look. When Bull got level with this soldier, he recognised him and he said “Gunner so and so take one step forward.” And the gunner looked at him and he said, “Don’t look at me take one pay step forward.” And the soldier looked at him and he said,

“Don’t look at me, take on pay step forward, march” And the soldier went, “bang, bang.” Now, “Let me look down your mouth.” Bull looked down his mouth and said, “You’ve got red football socks on get them off as soon as you get off this parade.” And that’s a true story and of course everyone’s in absolute hysterics, they’re laughing inside but they didn’t dare laugh out loud. But it’s a story that’s gone on for years and years and it’s a true story and that’s the sort of thing that he would do. And

he is a legend quite frankly. If you were to go to the sergeants’ mess at the school of artillery you would see his name mentioned many, many times. A very famous man. And he was at a time at the school where he could make an impression because it was a new army. It was the end of the Second World War and you had things like Korea, Malaysia and then later

Vietnam but that wasn’t even thought of at this stage. The French were still battling the Indian Ben Fu when Bull was yelling at people. And they say on a quiet day in Manly you can hear him – at the Corso, if the traffic wasn’t too bad you could hear Bull Story giving the orders, which was a fabrication but that was the sort of reputation he had. The funniest thing I’ve heard is that when he was RSM later a couple of the sergeants had made

references about the mess and it wasn’t being run properly and of course Bull takes offence at any, any sort of criticism. And at the mess meeting he stood up and he said, “Right, I’d like to bring it to your attention that some of the members have been making allegations about the running of this mess. I want the alligators to stand up now” – the ‘alligators’ [those making the allegation] to stand up! Well of course the whole mess did break

up with laughter. Instead of those that made the allegations stand up he said the alligators to stand up. Well that cracked everybody up. He wasn’t well educated but he was well-educated in life and commanded a great deal of respect and still is loved to the day. There are many others like Bull who have huge reputation. The likes of Don

Donkin, Don Donkin was my RSM in Vietnam. Don Donkin was an RSM at the school. Don Donkin was an advisor in Vietnam. Don Donkin was a man who had received Vietnamese and American citations for valour. But he’s known to the corps but doesn’t have the reputation that Bull had. He didn’t

do the outrageous things that Bull did. And Bull did a lot of the things that he did because he could and getaway with it. And the officers would grin and just get on with things. Bill Ladell is another RSM. These are famous people in artillery. Bill French, another one. All of these people are Bull Story

In my mind they are Bull’s equal but Bull has that charisma which is talked about by the old gunners to the new gunners. Bull used to throw the window up in his office until it hit the runners and it would make a terrible noise. How he never broke a pane of glass I don’t know. It was like he was opening the breach of a gun with fury. “Boom” throw the window up. And the window would run up to the

top of the runners, a big timber heavy window, and hit the top so the lead weights would hit the bottom and you’d know it was coming because you’d been there for a while but the soldiers who were a bit slow and didn’t duck behind a tree or bush or whatever, he’d lean out of the window and say, “That man there.” And someone would stand up, “Yes, you’ll do, get here.” You had to go and clean out the toilets or something like that. But you see the old diggers that had been there for several weeks, we knew to just stayed down low

and you didn’t get he crappy jobs. But that’s his reputation and that’s the sort of thing that makes a corps. Other corps have these people as well but Bull, for artillery, he was the epitome of the cranky old warrant officer that we all tried to emulate but do it with finesse a bit more finesse.

Well Peter, I counted Peter, he was really a mentor for me. He started me off on my military career and I have a lot to thank Peter for. He gave me a lot of guidance and a lot of coaching. He’s a tough man. I remember one night I was fast asleep and I was his signaller. And we were on an exercise out at Puckapunyal and they’d spotted

lights out on the horizon – 15, 20ks away. He said, “Right, I’ll investigate” and grabbed me, “Grab the radio, grab your webbing, grab your rifle, we’re off.” And that’s what he would do. 15 to 20ks [kilometres] later we came up on a feature that was illuminated by what appeared to be a camp fire. We could see a bundle or a shape near it but we

couldn’t make out what it was. I had blank rounds, I’m not so sure about Peter what he had. It may have been live rounds for all I know. He had an American M1 Carbine at the time which wasn’t issued. Maybe he thought he was going to go and shoot a bit cat of some sort I don’t know. But he stalked up one side while I covered him up on the other side with blank rounds. And I could see this figure and he approached from a completely different

direction and I could see him moving very slowly up to the figure. And suddenly he rammed the rifle into the figure and the figure stood bolt upright. It was a soldier in a sleeping bag who’d been left behind as a fire picket for a fire which had gone through this feature and left a big burning stump that was glowing red and burning in the windy night. And that was at least 15 or

20ks walk. And then we shot a (UNCLEAR) and went back home again. But I can tell you I was more than ready for bed but we didn’t go to bed we stayed up. We played a game of cards. Then it was reveille, we had breakfast, shaved and away we went. But that’s the sort of thing he would do. And we were going through the range one day and we started taking fire, and it was friendly fire of course on an exercise, we’d driven into an impact

area, almost, and it was the tanks firing 50 cals [calibre] and we spun around and as we spun around a kangaroo hopped across the road. And Peter had a shot at it and hit it and he jumped out and tracked it and couldn’t catch it. Life was never dull with Peter. We were always doing something different and he was very much the soldier,

every inch the soldier. He, I think, lived two centuries too late. He should have been with Genghis Khan. He should have been with the Roman Legions. I always knew that Peter would make a name for himself but I was devastated to find that he was killed doing it. And he left a big impact on

me and I consider it a privilege to have known Peter Badcoe. And I hope that my army career – looking down, I hope it’s made him happy with what I’ve done. And I think he’d be happy with what I’ve managed to do. But he was a great man.

He was a great man. And he loved his soldiers and he looked after his soldiers but he trained them very

hard because he knew he was training them for war.

And to help them stay alive. And he did a wonderful job. When he changed corps and went to infantry – I was disappointed when he changed corps because he was very much a good artillery officer but he’d always had a bent towards being an infantrier and I knew that and he told me that and I wasn’t at all

surprised when he did change corps to go to the training team. He would have found it difficult getting a position as an artillery major, there weren’t so many. So he changed corps to get there and was promoted to major to go away. I heard that the VC [Viet Cong] had put a price on his head – for the soldier that shot him, the VC had put a price on his head.

Their

intelligence was very, very good. People don’t realise just how good their intelligence was. They had radio intercept stations. They had spies. They had people who had brothers in the Vietcong and a brother in the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam], they were having 50 cents each way, that’s the army of the Republic of Vietnam. The family didn’t really mind who won because they had a brother in each who would look after the family when the outcome was finally known. They’d

tell people what was going on, they would let them know. They knew that this major was called Major Badcoe. They used to call him ‘the galloping major’ in Vietnamese, whatever the translation was. He was called ‘the galloping major’. They realised that he was a threat and he could inspire second class soldiers to do first class jobs. And he did it by example which he always

said to me, “Adrian, when you lead soldiers” (‘Wally’, he used to call me) “Wally, when you lead soldiers you have to lead by example.” He said, “You’ll be a leader one day you have to lead by example.” He said, “Don’t ask them to do anything that you can’t or wouldn’t do yourself.” He said, “And lead from the front.” He said, “And you’ll find that the soldiers will follow you. He said, “If you tell them what they have to do and stand back they will not, they will not

respect you.” And it’s something that I always took on board. If we had to dig a hole I’d always jump in first and show them what the requirement was. He taught me a lot and I only wish that he was alive today because he was the only officer to win the Victoria Cross. He to some degree was scoffed at sometimes by his fellow officers because of his dedication. Where they were

perhaps playing at being officers, he was an officer. Where they were perhaps playing at being a career officer, he was a career officer. He was destined for great things he really was and I feel sure that he knew in his own mind that if he didn’t win something he wouldn’t be coming back. Well he did both, he won something and he didn’t come back.

As I understand it he’d done some brave things. He’d carried wounded soldiers away from a contact, he’d recovered them when they were stuck out by themselves. He had led by example. When troops faltered he’d rallied them to take the objective. I understand – and that’s how he got his nickname as the galloping major because as soon as a shot was fired he’d run towards the

sound of the shooting. It’s the same as the old cavalry, you ride to the guns. Well, Peter ran to the guns. Wherever here was a problem Peter would show up. And in fact the day Peter was killed he wasn’t supposed to be out. He was supposed to be on R&R [Rest and Recreation] overseas, out of Vietnam. But the person he was going with I

believe the story goes couldn’t go for some reason so Peter delayed his until they could both be together to go away together. Peter went out because there was a unit in trouble, drove out to where the unit was in trouble, got to the unit, inspired them, then they faltered again. They were taking casualties from a heavy machine gun that was firing at them. So Peter took another

Australian with him and he went off to the side, plus his signaller, and they outflanked the machine gun. And Peter went to throw a grenade at it and his mate pulled him down. And of course when he got up the next time he shrugged that off and went up the next time and threw the grenade. But as he threw the grenade he was shot through the head with a heavy machine gun round so death would have been instantaneous. But he died doing what he loved.

He died as a soldier. He was a very good man.

Yes. I don’t like to hear people speak in a derogatory term about Peter but Peter did have – on occasion he did put some other officers’ noses out of joint. And if I ever hear anyone

speaking derogatorily about the man I always defend him because he’s the best officer I’ve ever worked under. And, OK, call me an impressionable soldier at 17, 18 – I was 17 ½ and I just know that he was a top guy. And the soldiers loved him and his Vietnamese loved him, the people that he was working with.

I think they would have known that he was a special person.

No, they don’t. And when they do things that they should be recognised for, I’m so pleased that he was recognised for that. But he’d earned that citation at least twice over I thought. Just reading the history he’d earned it

twice over. I don’t want to make too much of it, I don’t want to dwell on it too much, it does upset me talking about Peter. I’ve come to terms with it. I’ve got my own little shrine to Peter in my little bunker out there and I’ve got his photograph – that’s the Peter I used to know. And he always used to wear his RAA [Royal Australian Artillery] flashes which used to upset the BC [Battery Commander] and he used to tell him to take them off. Then he’d take them

off but he’d put them back on again. But they were flashes and rank insignia that he’d got overseas. But he was a beaut guy. Like everybody he had a few problems but he was a beaut guy. He was somebody that I would follow anywhere and would have

but our paths never crossed again and he was dead and I was shattered.

Oh, yes. He was just going to make an impact and it was his second trip to Vietnam. He’d gone over as an advisor for a two week stoush and came

back and was determined that the battery should train harder and he made sure it did. And 103 Battery did serve in Vietnam. So that’s Peter. He left a wife and children I know that and I did see them at the Welcome Home Parade in 1987 but I didn’t go forward. A lot of

people knew Peter. P.K. Robinson, he was a bombardier, I think Peter’s dead now. I know ‘Cocoa’ is, ‘Cocoa’ Bostock. We used to call him ‘The Tracker’. He was Peter’s batman. And Cocoa as the name would suggest was coloured and we used to call him ‘Tracker’. And Cocoa was a very good tracker as well and Peter used to take him out and they’d go out

kangaroo shooting. And Cocoa would track the kangaroos and Peter would shoot them all right, he was a good shot.

Not that many. There was one, Billy Bostock, Bill was our Battery Guide in 107 Battery. He had coloured blood in him, Bill.

He’s dead of cancer now. I’ve got a photograph of Bill. He was a big man. He got wedged into a bunker system that we found. We were out on patrol and Bill would insist on trying to explore the bunkers and the little spider holes that we found. And he went down head first, I’ll never forget, it was funny, and we didn’t know that that bunker system had been salted with CS Gas crystals [chemical agent] and he got a real lungful of that and trying to come out we had to grab him by the feet and pull him out

backwards because he was a big guy and the tunnels were small. But he would insist on going and having a look because he wanted to hunt for souvenirs you see. Bill was big on souvenirs. He’d already managed to get a cross bow which was set up on an ambush so he had that dismantled that and he had this Vietnamese cross bow. He was a funny guy. Whenever we went out on patrol he wanted to

go out as forward scout and I wouldn’t let him because all he wanted to do was shoot a deer. He didn’t want to shoot Vietcong he wanted to shoot a deer that was his big aim.

We used to move pretty well I must admit. Our second role was infantry and I taught infantry minor tactics for a long time and my people that I used to take out regularly they were pretty

good and they moved pretty well. We figured that unless they saw us coming that we would usually be able to get up on them close before they heard us because our discipline was very, very good.

Oh the training was excellent and Peter Badcoe was partly responsible for that. Don Donkin, when I went to 4 Field Regiment, was

also very responsible for the training that we received at 4 Field Regiment. My new CO [Commanding Officer], Colonel Fulward, was a top guy, 4 Field Regiment CO. He insisted that everybody – firstly that he knew them by their first name and secondly that he got around and met everybody and thirdly that he had the regiment together and said “You all work as a team.” The officers listen to the

warrant officers. The warrant officers listen to the sergeants. The sergeants listen to the bombardiers and the bombardiers listen to the gunners and we work as a team and we get the job done and we all come home safe.” Well, we didn’t all come home safe but we mainly all came home. And ‘Brush Mush’ we used to call him, not to his face, Bushy, ‘Bushy’ Fulward. He had a RAF like moustache. Bushy Fulward. He was a top man.

And Don Donkin, they were a great team. Don’s first trip in Vietnam was with my training team. He got himself entangled with a huge contact with a company he was with, a company of rangers, Vietnamese rangers. And they got on to a huge contact and they spotted what Don considered to be a Caucasian and a big man as big as Don, and Don was about

six foot three, six foot four. And Don estimated that he was at least six foot plus. And Don thought that he was Russian and he was kitted out with Kalashnikov and carrying all the right equipment and very well equipped better than his North Vietnamese friends. And

Don sussed him out as a Russian. He was seen to fall and Don said, “Look, we want this bloke let’s follow up.” They followed up, in fact they followed up over where they should have, they went in to Cambodia. And of course the VC thought or the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] thought, it was a mixed bunch, that they were safe once they were over the border. But of course Don pushed them through to try and catch this bloke because he’d been hit. Well, they

didn’t. After about 15/20ks all they found was a torso, no hands, no head. He’d expired obviously and so he couldn’t be identified they took his head and his hands and left the rest. But Don always knew that that was the Russian.

Well, you couldn’t prove it but Don knows and it’s a long time since but of course Don wasn’t supposed to

talk about it.

No, Russia denied ever being there but they were. I mean we know now since that the Russians were flying North Vietnamese aircraft. They’ve since admitted that. I’ve seen Russian pilots interviewed on the history channel about engaging F4 Phantoms and F105 Thunder Chiefs and having a go at B52 Strato Fortresses. It was experience they just had to have. It was the

Cold War. They found a way of hotting it up a bit. As the Americans tested their equipment in Vietnam so the Russians tested theirs with their people. With their service to air missile systems they had advisors there, we knew that. They were operating the radars. They were training the North Vietnamese. You don’t just get to be a heavy air defence weapon system operator just by being shown how to do something. The

Russians were teaching them and they were operating them. We knew that but you couldn’t prove it and Russia would not admit it. China wouldn’t admit it but I know that that’s the truth.

No, Queensberry rules [fair fighting] are out.

We were always not allowed to go near the Vulcans, they were the one aircraft that were off. We couldn’t go near them they were guarded day and night by sentries and guard dogs. And we didn’t know at the time but they were actually nuclear-armed.

No.

Well, you see, they were the very first stealth aircraft. They were designed – they were a huge delta winged aircraft. If you look at the American stealth aircraft today they’re all delta wings type aircraft. What the British designed without really knowing it was an aircraft that had stealth characteristics, stealthy characteristics. In other words it couldn’t be detected by radar. They also had very

sophisticated jamming equipment on board. I knew that but I didn’t suspect that they were nuclear-armed and they were. They were carrying nuclear bombs. I spoke to one of the RAF guys who was attached to them who knew they were but they were told to shut their traps [close their mouths] and say nothing to anyone. Of course after the event and we’re more than 30 years down the track it’s not a problem and he said to me he said, “Did you know they were nuclear

armed?” And I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” And he said, “Yes they were.” He said, “No one knew that except the air crew and the base commander.”

I believe that they would have used them against the air fields in Indonesia. They would have taken out, tactically taken out the air fields where the Indonesians had their main

air force, bomber force, located. They’d made two threatening postures over the time that I was there, just under two years, and on both occasions they’d managed to surprise the base.

That’s when they came under the radar and then they shifted the air defence radar up to the top of Penang Hill. The MCRU, the mobile control reporting unit, they got that up the top, they

drove it up to the top of the hill. It should have been there in the first place from day one but no one thought that the Indonesians would attempt an aerial assault on the base. Had they a nuclear, tactical nuclear weapon, on either one of those sorties they could have launched and been gone. At point of weapon release the base could have been wiped out totally. But even the Russians weren’t that stupid as to give

Sukarno a nuclear weapons system. He had the means of delivering it but he didn’t have the means. He didn’t have the actual article.

Yes, that’s true but it could have changed the course of history if they’d used a nuclear weapon around Dien Bien Phu when the British were suggesting that they do that. And the

French were asking that they do that, they look at it. It’s not widely known but Australia flew a profile mission to see whether it could be done and gotten away with. My father-in-law was aboard that aircraft and, yes, they could do it but the Americans said no. A wise thought because it would have immediately brought

China and Russia into it. And the French shouldn’t have been there anyway. As it turned out the Americans shouldn’t have been there anyway.

Absolutely right. But you’ve seen what’s happened since. A lot of people have left because they don’t like living under communism. It’s only just recently that they’ve, in the last ten years or so, they’ve opened up the borders with

China. They now have free trade. They didn’t have enough money to feed the people so they had to let them do something and sell it. So the communist regime has asked for western development and I see just recently that America has now lifted all trade sanctions on Vietnam which is great for the people.

Yes.

Excellent. Very good. I found that there were lasting friendships.

Lieutenant Townley, Jim Townley, was my troop commander in Malaysia from 1964 to 1966. When I came up for retirement Jim was the Director of – DRA, Director of Royal Australian Artillery and he was the boss of artillery if you like as a full colonel and I was a warrant officer class 1. And when I applied for my discharge he was a bit upset

and a bit outspoken about it and asked me very promptly to come to his office and explain this rubbish, why I’d applied for a discharge. So I told him. He wasn’t happy and offered me another position but I’d made a decision to go and I’d decided that 20 years was long enough. I didn’t really want to start another career in the army. I wanted to start another career but in civilian street

to see what I could do out in civilian street and have a break from the army and get back to tours and just start fresh and that’s what I did. But he was a good bloke and he wished me all the best in the end and said if I had a change of heart to come back and talk to him. Because we were – he was my boss and I respected him

greatly but there was a bit of mutual respect there and he didn’t want me to go. They’d spent a lot of money training me – $750,000 in a two year period, more than an F1-11 pilot in a two year period so they wanted to protect that investment. And I thought I’d given a fair bit back so I decided to go.

Yes.

The sergeants were an odd bunch. It was a different system. People weren’t promoted on performance, on merit, they were promoted on seniority. So if they’d been in a rank level for a certain period of time or were qualified when they got to the top of the list, unless someone didn’t want them, they were

promoted. There were some very good sergeants. There were some useless sergeants. The useless sergeants were covered by good bombardiers and their crews. The good sergeants had to cover the useless bombardiers and their crew. So there were checks and balances in the system.

Not really because we weren’t tested. It might have been a different story if we were

tested. But it didn’t really matter because one way or the other the crews would do their jobs. The number ones were there to fire of the guns but if targets of opportunity arose we had a life expectancy of 48 hours. So in 48 hours we would have been finished anyway.

Well, the air defence unit had a life expectancy of 48 hours. So if the shit hit the fan so to speak we would all be dead in

48 hours so it didn’t matter. We’d give it the best we could but flack suppression was a primary objective of enemy aircraft and because we were not mobile, we were statically deployed; they knew exactly where we were. They overflew the base more than once. They had high altitude reconnaissance aircraft fly over, a Mig 21 fishbed, we had nothing on the base to catch it. This plane would fly 1.5 times the

speed of sound. The aeroplane would fly over the base, by the time the pilots scratched their bums, jumped into the aircraft, started up the engines and took off they were over and gone. Right across Malaysia and out the other side and come back 200ks further down. They’d photograph the base. They knew exactly where the gun positions were, they were static positions, we didn’t move so they knew exactly where we were. So we had a life expectancy of 48

hours and we all knew that but we’re still here they didn’t do anything.

Yes, they used to have a lot of leave that they could go across from the mainland to the island, Penang.

But we didn’t have a lot of free time and they had to have a special leave pass to leave the base. And if there were any reason why leave couldn’t be granted you weren’t allowed to leave the base. For example, if there was a lot of air activity of the Indonesian mainland they’d just say, “No leave.” If they thought that

there could be the chance, and they could see them in the end, when they were actually taking off from the air strip. They could see all activity that was going on in Indonesia and there was a substantial amount of activity going on. They could actually say, “Don’t let the guys go on leave” you know, “Keep them in the base and five minutes and that way 5 minutes and they can be on the gun.” But if you wanted to you could go to the

swimming pool, that was still on the base. You could go down to the canteen, what they call the NAAFI, Navy, Army, Air Force Institute, the NAAFI. You could play bingo there or you could have a meal of some sort so you didn’t have to go to the mess to get a meal. You know, it was very well taken care of the base.

Oh, the best type of food you could possibly wish for. The

RAAF had a kitchen open 24 hours a day. So if you were on duty and you wanted to have a meal you could just walk into the kitchen, the mess and have a meal. Unless you were out on the guns, when we were out on the guns we used to cook ourselves, we used to do our own cooking. We had a little area set up in the tent. There was a little kitchen with a portable gas

stove, a little cooker there that we used to have the ability to cook our own meat or eggs or whatever we wanted. There was always a plentiful supply of meat and eggs and tomatoes and vegetables and fruit. That’s just the way the RAAF travel. They travel with their bellies full all the time. So we were quite

grateful for that, for the army to have that sort of rations. The access to those sort of rations was living high on the hog as far as we were concerned.

We cooked steaks or we might cook bacon and eggs for breakfast or something like that. There was no shortage of meats, any sort of meats. We might cook a stew or a curry or

something like that. Cut the steak up and make a curry or a stew or braise, you know, we could do all those sorts of things on the little cookers that we had because we had our own cooking utensils and plates and forks and knives and spoons and cups and a little table where we could sit down and have a meal.

Oh yes, just in the tent, just an extension to the tent. Usually you’d put two tents

end on end. One part would be a kitchen and a little dining area and then the other part would be just for sleeping. You had a little toilet down the back away from the tents. You have to walk about 30 metres to the toilet and that was just in the ground, just a thunderbox [toilet] as they were called in the ground. I remember in the wet season a cobra had a go at me as I was going to the

toot [toilet] and this was during the day of course. There were sheets of water laying everywhere and I looked around and there was a cobra coming up to me with its hood up like that through the grass. And I just took one look at it and I was just there boots, and socks rolled down over my boots, and a pair of shorts, and my dog tags. That’s all I had on me so I wasn’t in any fit condition to tackle a cobra that was looking pretty mean. So I did a U turn on the

spot and raced back to the tent with a 12 foot sheet of water I never even put a ripple on it, straight across the top. I got a shovel and we got back with brooms and picks and shovels and we got it, it was about a 6 ft cobra, huge cobra. It got into the stormwater drain and started to swim away but we got it. Of course the Indians wouldn’t kill them, they used to worship them. The ladies wouldn’t kill them with their Armstrong Mowers when they were cutting the grass alongside the airstrip.

They often used to pick one up with the scythe and they’d just flick it up in the air. Some would and some wouldn’t kill them. I saw a lady – the RAAF had a golf course – I saw a lady pull one out of a hole at one of the spots on the golf course and she actually killed it, she killed the snake. But there were plenty of snakes there and big

spiders and so on and scorpions.

No, you just expected it to be there. That’s the sort of place were you find tropical wobbly gongs as we used to call them. But in the jungle it’s not unusual to see snakes wriggling in all directions when you’re walking through the jungle. To find a break in the tree canopy and a bit of a sun and they all laze around in the sun and when you come across them they just

scatter in all directions.

Not at air defence unit. At air defence unit if there was going to be an attack we fight from the gun

so you get out of your bed and you race to the gun and you’ve got a gun which is sandbagged right around so you do your fighting from the gun both in the air defence role and also in the ground role. So if someone was to break into the air strip we had a 40 millimetre anti aircraft gun which has a secondary role as a ground defence weapon. You don’t want to ever have to try and assault a 40 millimetre Bofors gun, it doesn’t even bear thinking about

because it’s two rounds a second, a two inch shell high explosive coming your way. And the destruction that you could wreak would be absolutely horrible.

They attempted to get attack profiles into the base but we also had a reconnaissance

flight, a Mig 21 fly over the base at great altitude and photograph the base.

No. We were actually at China Rock which is in a place

around from Singapore. We travelled by road, air and sea to get there. And it’s at a place called Johor and they landed 60 Indonesian commandos just close to our camp. A group of the Indonesians actually went through our camp. We didn’t know they were there. We had sentries on guard and the camp was lit up, we had generators running for the

power and things like that. And they actually did a reconnaissance and decided that it was too strong and too well constructed to take on but they came through and did a reconnaissance. We actually, we were about 5 kilometres from where they actually ended up being strafed by ground attack aircraft, Hawker Hunters. And they came up from Singapore and

they ended up giving up in the end. But they were told that the local population would support them. When they went into the Kampongs to find out whether that was the case, to get fed, the Malays wouldn’t have anything to do with them. These were uniformed soldiers, they were commandos, Indonesian commandos. And the Indonesians were finally

caught by Malay rangers. The Malay rangers were actually walking across a clearing and one of the Indonesians actually stood up, he was a warrant officer and he stood up and said ,“Are you taking prisoners?” We know the Malays weren’t taking prisoners they were shooting them as they were getting them. They brought one of them back through our camp and his hands were tied behind his back and he’d been shot. It doesn’t take long for that sort of information to get around

and the Indonesians knew that the Malay field police weren’t taking prisoners. So they said, “Are you taking prisoners?” and the Malay rangers said, “Yes” they would. He went like that and everybody stood up and they were all around them. If they’d said, “No” they’d have been wiped out. So they all surrendered by then they had a real good hammering for a few days by air attack and lots of soldiers in the line. But no they

actually walked right through our camp and we didn’t know that they’d been there. Because we didn’t know they’d landed until afterwards when we were told. That was a bit embarrassing I think. But we’d gone by road, air and then finally by sea and did a sea landing to fire out to sea at a place called China Rock on anti aircraft

guns. Of courses when the Indonesians saw that we had Beaufors guns they wouldn’t take us on because they are devastating in a ground role. But they certainly tried to get support from the locals and the locals wouldn’t give it to them. Denied them any food and support and reported them to the police. So they didn’t get the reception that they were hoping for, the Indonesians. 111

Battery actually did capture two but that was earlier. That was in Penang. They had a couple of infiltrators coming in and they caught them and it was funny because they had loaded weapons but we didn’t. They surrendered. Just as well because it was bluff on our part and fair dinkum on

their part. So after that the powers that be decided that we should all carry loaded weapons when we were out by ourselves. One of the Kiwis was actually dragged out of his tent by a tiger. It grabbed him on the head and pulled him out of his tent kicking and screaming and that was another good reason, because there were tigers there, to have people armed. He had massive injuries, head injuries but

they sent him home. He went a bit silly. One could imagine it would be a pretty horrific thing to have a tiger grab you by the head and just pull you out of your tent. But the rest of the guys beat the tiger off him and saved his life.

Not very good, they weren’t very well trained and

certainly weren’t very well motivated. I don’t think they really believed in what they were being told and I certainly don’t believe that they were well led.

They just walked through. They crawled through. There was that much noise going on Blind Freddy could have walked through it. Generators running in the middle of the night to power electricity and lights and to run generators to

charge batteries on the air defence gun position. The air defence gun position is by no means tactical. It’s not meant to fight ground defence wars it’s meant to fight anti-aircraft – it’s meant to attack aircraft. So when you’re charging up your batteries for your guns it does take a lot of time and it also makes a lot of noise to do it. You’ve got to run two-stroke engines to charge the batteries to power the gun.

It’s the sort of thing that people don’t understand unless you’ve been part of that group of people. They make a lot of noise. So they’re not the sort of unit that you would find normally out on the forward edge of the battle field. You would find them back behind protecting main points – bridges, airfields, radar sites,

things of that nature where of course they are noisy sites anyway.

No.

Yes. They had a big fence around it and the Malays used to have a patrol vehicle that used to go around every hour or so just to check that the perimeter hadn’t been interfered with. They used to protect the planes. They were all

floodlit and they used to have dog-handlers walking around the aircraft. They were alsatians and they were trained to bring a human being down. So they thought that the aircraft were dispersed and went in tight spots but not far enough. They weren’t dispersed far enough out. But for security reasons they had to be in fairly close. They

figured that if the Indonesians were going to hit them they’d get plenty of notice. That is a lot of flying training immediately preceding a strike of some sort. The only time the base was threatened was from the air. The local population were very friendly and they wanted us to be there. Of course Dr Mahathir today has a very different opinion

of the relationship between Australia and Malaysia. But all those years ago the relationship was very, very good. If not for Australia and New Zealand and the UK I’m quite sure that Indonesia would have invaded Malaysia but we were stopping them. The amount of equipment that the British in fact had in aircraft bomber

type aircraft and stuff like that, that was a big disincentive for the Indonesians to do anything. They made a couple of attempts. They had a C130, a four engine transport aircraft, up on the Malay/Thai border. It started dropping paratroopers. And we scrambled two aircraft from the base and one of the British aircraft fired a missile,

a fire streak missile, into the aeroplane as it was heading out to sea and it chopped a wing off and crashed into the sea. We don’t know how many killed but the Indonesian Radio in Jakarta announced that one of its aircraft was missing containing dancing women but they were actually paratroopers that they were dropping on the border. So those were the sort of things that went on.

It was needling, needling, needling all the time. One of my friends Trent, Trent Grawl – when I was a platoon sergeant later at Puckapunyal, he got into terrible trouble, Trent, because his section actually ambushed a group of about 14 or 15 Indonesian coming ashore by a small sampan and they ambushed them as they were getting out of the sampan with their weapons

etc. And when he was interviewed by a paper, I think it was a Sydney paper, they interviewed him in Malaysia, and he said “It was just like shooting ducks in a barrel” and he got into terrible trouble over that poor old Trent. Later when he went to Vietnam he was wounded in the ankle by a hand grenade that he threw. He actually threw the hand grenade at the enemy but it hit a tree and bounced back and fell behind him. He laughed about

it but he didn’t like hand grenades after that.

Yes, I was just a volunteer there in the radio system that the RAF operated and it was just to bolster the morale of the service personnel and their dependants because their dependants were

allowed to go to Malaysia and the local stations, Radio Malaysia, of course would play indigenous music. And they’d have English sessions as well where they’d play the English hit parade as well which people would turn to. But with Radio Butterworth we were playing the best records from America,

Australia and the UK. And we would get a wrap up of all of the different styles of music from around the world and even the locals would forego their Radio Malaysia programs to listen to Radio Butterworth. Radio Mouth they used to call it. And we had a very good radio station. People would say, “OK you were on the radio station, what was your

name?” and you’d tell them and they’d say, “Yes, yes, listened to you all the time.” It was a bit of an ego stroking thing but we enjoyed doing it. It was good experience. You had to operate your console and choose your music and program it and play it, take the requests and then go and find the disc. And they were all 45s of 33 1/3s in those days. There was nothing like auto cue or anything like that you had to cue it

manually, it was good fun.

Well at the time she was just an acquaintance and we got to know one another better. I in fact asked her to go out to the Aussie Hostel, the RAAF Hostel at Penang. I had to ask her mother’s permission because her father was away at that stage in

Thailand on a detachment at Ubon in Thailand. So he hadn’t met me so it was Mum who was in charge and Karen was only 16 so I had to ask her Mum’s permission and she gave her permission and we had our first date. Then we had many more. And we finally got engaged when she turned 17 we were engaged. And

Karen came home and we were married six weeks after I got back from Malaysia. But I had to go all the way to Malaysia to meet my wife. There were only 30 what we called “round eyes” in the base. You know, either single lasses or nurses or whatever so you had to be quick to grab one. There were about 5,000 males and 30

women so you had to be on your metal to be able to say, “Yes, I’ve got a girlfriend.”

Yes, she was announcing and doing some library work as well as announcing. She had her own radio show called “Teenager’s Half Hour” which she used to do and that used to have all the latest hits from around the

world. And that was how I met Karen and had I not volunteered for the radio station my life would have been totally different.

Yes.

Just under two years. When I left to come home Karen’s father got an extension. He was a

warrant officer in the air force and he was a warrant officer armourer, a missile expert. So he was required to stay on because they were re-equipping with the mirage, upgrading the aircraft from the Sabre to the Mirage aircraft so he was going to be required to assist with that transition.

The Mirage, no, the F18 is the one they use now. The Mirage

has been out of service now for about 10 years I think. But certainly the F18 is the current aircraft and the Mirage was the replacement for the Commonwealth Avon CA27 which is the Sabre. The Sabre was a good aeroplane but it wasn’t fast enough to catch something like the Mig 21, the type of aircraft that the Indonesians were

equipping with. In fact when the confrontation finished the RAAF gave a squadron of the Sabres to the Malays and a squadron of the Sabres to the Indonesians to be even handed about it once the confrontation had finished. In actual fact the Malays even received our anti aircraft guns. Once there was no longer a requirement for us to man the guns they gave them to the

Malays. It’s quite funny actually, because the ’67 War, the Arab/Israeli War, one of our guns finished up being captured by the Israelis in the Middle East. So obviously the Malaysians gave the Beaufors guns to their Egyptian friends and the Israelis captured one of them and it turned out to be the

registration number for one of our guns, one of our old guns. So that was quite funny we thought.

Yes, isn’t it?

Well obviously meeting Karen and so on. I class the Butterworth posting as a really cushy posting. We worked hard and we worked long yours but it was

still a cushy posting as far as the army was concerned. We had the best of food and the best accommodation. Even though we were living in tents we were still living pretty well in tents. So if you keep the army busy and a full tummy people don’t complain too much.

Well, when I went back to Australia I went back to

Woodside, which was the formation of the regiment, because we’d been replaced by 110 Battery – 111 Battery came back so we had now a replacement unit in Malaysia, 110 Battery. So it became a 2 battery regiment where it should have been a 3 battery regiment. The government tends to do things on the cheap so what should have been a 3

battery regiment was a 2 battery regiment because it saves money that way. And if we needed to replace 110 battery well then 111 battery could go back in another 2 years time. But that wasn’t required, 110 battery came home back to 16 Regiment and the Regiment was all together then, called 16 Regiment, 16 Air Defence Regiment. In the first instance it was called 16 Light Ack-Ack [Anti-aircraft] Regiment and then it went to

Air Defence Regiment because 111 Battery lost their guns and went to missiles. They went to shoulder-fired missile which was a surf to air missile system which was an American system called ‘Red Eye’. And that was supposedly the latest and greatest thing then. Give every soldier one of those it made him pretty powerful. To be able to aim one of these missiles from the ground and shoot it off his shoulder to knock down an aeroplane.

The RAAF didn’t like the weapon system because it wasn’t very well controlled and it meant that perhaps some friendly aeroplanes could be shot down by these green [inexperienced] types on the ground which they weren’t really keen about. However, the guns were removed from service and in time the missile system took over. I went to

Woodside and was there for a couple of years and then was posted out to Puckapunyal as a platoon sergeant, I got promotion to sergeant. So I went to Pucka [Puckapunyal] to train national servicemen from Woodside. And that was a promotion for me so I had to be somebody different again.

Yes. So Karen went

with me. That was the first move that we made. We were living in Adelaide up at Hazelwood Park. We had a married quarter which was a temporary rental, TRA, Temporary Rental Allowance, off post married quarter and we were quite happy there. But the army said, “Well if you’d like to go there’s a position for a sergeant at Puckapunyal, at second recruit training battalion” and did I want to

go. And I said, “Yes” I’d go. So I went off to Pucka which was a pretty cold place and spent 12 months in Puckapunyal. Puckapunyal to me was a very worthwhile place. It was something I gained a great deal of satisfaction from. You had a busy day. You’d work from about 5 o clock in the morning to about 10 o clock at night and that’s a

7 day week. But it was very rewarding. You would get a bus load of people, 60 odd people. They’d get off the bus with long hair and unshaven and guitars slung over their back, not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, music is great, but some of these guys hadn’t seen water in about a week I don’t think. But after a 12 week period you couldn’t pick them apart

and from day 1 they had to adopt the position of being in the army and not being home with Mum and Dad any more. For some people it was the first time they’d been away from home and it was a great shock. But our job was to motivate, train and make them part of a team so they could blend in

together and help one another and assist one another. And in 12 weeks turn out to be a good example of what Australia’s always done, they’ve turned out good soldiers. It’s a small army, it’s a professional army and we don’t mass produce. We create individuals. But they’re taught first to act as a team and then to think of one

another as individuals and lastly think of themselves. But certainly Puckapunyal was very, very rewarding for me. I trained 4 intakes with the assistance of 4 RDI [?] corporals or bombardiers in some cases. The first platoon I had, I didn’t have a platoon commander. The second platoon I had, I did have a platoon commander

and I had to get him replaced. The 3rd Platoon I had a really great guy, he was a light aviation squadron guy, a pilot. And the next one was a light aircraft, rotary wing pilot as well – an engineer but he went off to fly helicopters and go to Vietnam. So out of 4 platoons I had a couple of really good platoon commanders that would have done

very well in the army. It’s funny when you look back because all of these guys in the years later would meet me in the street somewhere in Adelaide or wherever, and I’m talking about 4, 5, 6, 7 years later and they would always recognise you. And they’d come up and they’d say, “Gidday, Serge, how are you? Gee you changed my life

and for the better.” And I got a great deal of satisfaction from that. One thing that did disturb me though was the fact that we were told the government position. We were told the government line. And we pushed that and the line was that the domino theory was wrong. This was all about that it was a communist motivated thing to take over and to dominate which was the stated principal of the communist

party, world domination. However, I don’t believe that the domino theory, even though it was believed at the time, came to be. Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, yes, they did fall. However, Thailand and Malaysia didn’t. But certainly I felt rather

guilty about believing the official line. If someone tells you “Your country says this is what is likely to happen” you believe them and especially at 21 years of age you certainly believe them. And by the time I had finished, I’d trained something like 250 people most of them for service in

Vietnam. So later on in life I felt a real sense of guilt if you like that they were motivated, highly motivated, and trained and told that this was what could happen. And when of course that didn’t happen I felt rather silly about it and that perhaps I had some atonement to make about

that. And that’s why I joined the Vietnam Veterans’ Association. And I wouldn’t then because I thought they were a bunch of radicals but in the end I did because the government had really forsaken the veteran community and the Vietnam vets in particular. And because of their political, if you like, bias, left-wing bias, perceived

bias towards the left wing, I thought that our government wouldn’t do anything like that to us because that would be stupid because they’d put you at risk. The big thing is they didn’t know that they were putting you at risk. The serviceman is always the guinea pig. The same as at Maralinga [atomic bomb testing site], the serviceman was a guinea pig. I think I mentioned before that my father-in-law flew through the mushroom cloud. But I’m getting ahead because what I say to you is that people who are

motivated and highly motivated can do great things. We motivated people and they did great things. And I just thought that I needed to atone for that but I thought that much later in life, after I’d come back from Vietnam.

Yes, my word is my bond and it always has been. If I

say that I’m going to do something I usually do it or there has to be a very good reason why I can’t. But certainly if you believe what’s told to you and the doctrine at the time was – yes, the domino theory. Yes, we need to go. Yes, we’re doing the right thing and yes, the population is behind you. And when they came back the population wasn’t behind them. It was at the

time but when they came back. I can’t say they were uneducated people, they were well-educated people that were behind the moratorium but I can’t help feeling that they had self motivation to stop this thing before they became embroiled in it too. It was one of the main reasons why they were out there protesting. What really does get up my nose is the fact that when I was in

Vietnam and the other people were in Vietnam that I trained (and they went there before me by the way) – I’m training them to go but I hadn’t been. So there was another thing that played on my mind – that I had to go. How can you train people if you haven’t been there? Well, I’d been trying for a couple of years to get there and finally they arranged a position for me to go and learn to be a number one again on a field gun which I’d never been. I’d been a

gun number, but not a sergeant on a gun. So they sent me off to Townsville for a year to train and go away. And that’s what I did. I spent a year in Townsville, ten months of the year in the bush. Karen went with me. She worked in the hospital at Townsville on the switchboard. She was working shift work there, night shift and day work and all the rest of it. We were like ships in the night I think. But certainly

she had an interest there which was great because when I was out in the bush for about 2 and 3 weeks at a time that’s a long time to be by yourself and you need to have something, a hobby or a job. So she was a receptionist. She had been a receptionist at Puckapunyal army camp there.

She was trained on the oldest switchboard in Australia, a Telecom switchboard. It was an old timber manual thing that she was taught on. So she was actually well able to take on a hundred line switchboard which she did at the hospital. Training was very hard in

Townsville and my crew changed a little bit. Some of the guys couldn’t handle the pace. Some were unfit and couldn’t go to Vietnam so they had to be replaced. When we finally ended up with a crew that was able to go to Vietnam which was fit and well-trained the year was

over and we were heading off. We thought that we were ready. We had trained very, very hard to give a good account of ourselves and that was that.

Yes, well it’s funny about that. The

green machine [the army] has a way of doing things, tried and proven. And the syllabus that is set is improved upon every intake. You can do something to refine it. And to get as much done in the given time you have to motivate people. So what we’d do, for the first week we used to do what we called leaps. And it wasn’t bastardisation it was done for a

reason. And it was done to motivate people to get them used to changing from one form of dress to another. We would say, you’d get 64 guys on parade and they’re all in their slouch hats, battle dress with boots and gaiters, black belt and you want to get them changed for the next period into field dress with full webbing, rifles, bayonets, giggle hats.

You’d give them 5 minutes to do so. Now 5 minutes is a long time and trust me you can get out of one form of dress and into the next form of dress providing you run very quickly from the place of parade back to your room. Tear your locker open, rip your clothes off as quickly as you can and put the next set of dress on and get back on parade in

5 minutes, you can do it. And the people that can’t do it, the people that can do it help the people that can’t. And it’s doing a lot of things – it’s motivating, it’s fostering team work, it’s getting people to help one another. Because that’s the essence because if someone is slow practice will make sure that they come up to speed. So for the first week they’d run everywhere. They’d run to meals, they’d run to showers. They run they don’t

walk. No one gets seen walking, 50 press ups if they’re seen walking. So you see the only way to motivate people is to make them do something. Forget about their troubles, forget about their woes, forget about Mum and Dad back home and the girlfriend. You’ve got problems and the problem is the platoon sergeant and the 4 RDIs and they’re going to watch you, they’re going to be your mother, father, your brother, your sister, your paymaster, your father confessor.

We actually had priests and ministers to do that. But they never used to get to see the priest until about a week. And we’d take them to church and it was funny because some of the guys that didn’t want to go to church later on we were informed that when they were in Vietnam they were praying like everybody else. When the shots were flying they had 50 cents each way. But that’s getting ahead of myself. They were

motivated. And the green machine has a syllabus that takes into account that you can do so much training in so much time. You can teach them to be good at rifle drill, good at basic infantry minor tactics, good at dressing properly and their appearance will be that of a soldier. They’ll have spit polished boots, shoes, their clothes, they can iron, they can wash, they can starch – all of those things that would take months and months

if you were doing the training normally. You can do that in 12 weeks, you can do it in three months and have time to send them home for 4 or 5 days half way through the training stage. Get them back and then you have to fire them up again, motivate. You might do one or two nights of leaps just to get them back into the swing of things. And if they fall behind, and this is why I say it’s not a nine to five job, what you do is you find out their weaknesses and then you work on the

weaknesses. The strengths you let go. The weaknesses you work on those. And if their weakness is weapon-handling you can’t turn somebody out from there that can’t operate a weapon, that doesn’t know how to do an immediate action with a machine gun, with a sub-machine gun, with a rifle or whatever they’re having to use. You have to be able to throw a grenade, not one but two and two practice grenades. They have to qualify

in marksmanship. They’ve got to get a certain number of hits in 30 rounds. And if they don’t do that they have to keep training until they pass or they can’t march out. So people that need extra training get it. So I they’re strong in one area and they’re not in another they’ll all be put together from different platoons and you’d work out of hours and you might have ten or fifteen people from the four

platoons and you’ll have a volunteer RDI come back and train them until they are proficient. Then you’d test them and when they’d gained their proficiency then they passed. But the green machine has a way of turning out people and it just keeps going. And it works. And it turns out good people. It turns out people that are motivated the same, they look the same, they act the same but they are individual.

They have their own personalities. They have their own fears, their own wants, their own needs but they are people who will act together as a team for the good of the country and for the good of the platoon and, if it comes down to it, for the good of their mates. And that’s the whole guts of being able to motivate people. The green machine has a way of doing it and unless you go through it it’s very difficult to comprehend.

Oh no, to the contrary. I would say that 90% of them were not only volunteer national servicemen after their marble had been pulled out. On their NS24s which was the national service sheet they used to have and they were asked a question once their marble came out, “Would you volunteer for national service?.” – 90%, in excess of 90%

said yes they would. But they wouldn’t do it until their marble came out. When their marble came out they said, “Yes, we would have volunteered anyway. Yes, we do want to do it.” The next question was surprisingly “Having had your marble pulled out, would you volunteer for service in South Vietnam?” In excess of 85% of those national servicemen who didn’t volunteer, who had their marble pulled out,

said that they would volunteer for service in South Vietnam. Those are the stats at the time. We couldn’t believe them but they were there for everyone to see. Whether it was peer pressure or whatever, that’s a fact. But most of those people, having been called up, wanted to go to Vietnam anyway. And if they didn’t want to go you, you didn’t have to, you had people such as conscientious

objectors they were called and if they didn’t want to carry a rifle you weren’t supposed to force them. If it was a religious belief, that’s fine. If it was personal conviction that they did not want to carry a rifle, they did not wish to harm a fellow being even in defence of one’s country or defence of our responsibilities to ANZUS [Australia New Zealand and United States treaty] or

SEATO [South East Asia Treaty Organisation] or whatever you want to invoke then you didn’t have to. You could be a medic. You could be a bandsman or a stretcher bearer but if you just didn’t want to serve that’s a little different. They were psychologically assessed and if they were assessed to be unsuitable for service they were discharged. If they were assessed to have been suitable for service in such and such an area that’s where they were

put. And if they went AWOL [AWL – Absent Without Leave] they usually didn’t chase them they just wrote them off and not waste a great deal of time on them. But the vast majority of those lads I have to say were the finest group of people that I’ve ever had the fortune, good fortune to work with. They were totally brilliant and they were from all walks of life and I just hope that today’s youth in

Australia is the same. I don’t think that it is. I think that our national characteristic has been watered down substantially. But they were the most fantastic bunch of people, those national servicemen, that it’s ever been my good fortune to be involved with. And I felt a great deal of responsibility for them later in life that I had motivated and trained and perhaps

hadn’t – to the best of my ability I thought what I was doing was right and that played on my conscience tremendously later. It was something that had to be done. It was something that I wanted to do and it was something that they wanted to do. I actually had people come to me with tears in their eyes to say goodbye and they’d say, “Thank you Sergeant for everything you’ve done.” I choked up quite a few times and said “I

didn’t do it, you did it yourself, you did it, never forget that.” Seeing them later on in life was always a special thing for me and especially if they had been for Vietnam but so many that I’d trained didn’t make it back and I have a special feeling for them and in particular as I hadn’t been to Vietnam at that stage, I’d been to Malaysia which was a picnic compared to

Vietnam. It was great that I could see some of them, I didn’t see many of them, but it was great that I could get to see some of them again, just in passing, walking down the street. It was very good and I didn’t feel quite so bad about it because I wondered how they would receive me and what they would think of me later on in life. And there never,

ever seemed to be any ill feeling. Even people I thought that may have had good reason to, no, they didn’t and I found that rather rewarding that there was no ill feeling towards me.

They were forced. Their number was called out for national service. I didn’t agree with the scheme but that wasn’t my

making, that wasn’t my doing. But their number was pulled out and they were compulsorily inducted into the army. But certainly once they were there they said, “Well, yes, I would have volunteered anyway and I will volunteer now that I’ve been pulled out.” So they were asked two questions, “Will you volunteer for National Service?” And if they said, “Yes” it was volunteer, NS [National Service]. And if they’d say they’d volunteer for SVN [South Vietnam] it was Vol SVN.

And most of the NS24s that I sighted and I had to sight them all because I was platoon sergeant, because they had to be processed by the platoon, went along that line. And I certainly, it gives a lie to what people have suggested since and I’ve heard people say that they were forced to go and that they were this and they were that. No, these people were special people. These people

were a cross-section of all walks of life, all different types of human beings and yet they came together and gave their very best. And the National Service community was probably the best time that the army has ever had. It didn’t have substandard people that couldn’t get a job elsewhere. It didn’t have social outcasts and rejects and got a job like I did because there was nowhere else to go for

me. They had well educated 20 year olds who were individuals. They’d tasted a bit of life and they knew that they had a good chance that they may be injured and even worse killed and yet they still stood up and were counted and that makes me very proud to have known quite a lot of them.

No.

2RTB [2nd Recruit Training Battalion] was only one of 3. There were 3 training battalions, 1, 2 and 3TB – one at Ingleburn, 3 Training Battalion. You had 1RTB that was at Wagga. They used to train most of the regulars there but they also took and then you had the 2nd Recruit Training Battalion which was at Puckapunyal. So when it was at its peak, and we were training almost 10,000 people – to replace 10,000 people in

Vietnam every month that’s a huge, huge requirement for training people and you need to have those training facilities. And it just showed that with a good NCO nucleus you can do, you can increase the size of the army in a very short space of time. Within say 12 months you can do something with 4 intakes in

12 months from the time you go – but 3 training battalions and the facilities are still there they just need to be staffed. The army will never allow the Department of Defence to put National Service back into being because it cuts too much in to the military vote. It takes away too much money from the major equipments and the capital equipments that they need to

purchase. Vietnam was different. We needed the manpower there. When we first went to Vietnam we had World War II boots. They fell to pieces around your feet within 2 weeks walking through. They were boots that were packed in crates in New Guinea. You’d put them on your foot, you walked through a paddy field, two weeks later your foot would come out of them. They just disintegrated. And even the leather – if you wore the boots and took out the jungle

studs and wore the leather two or three weeks of walking or marching or whatever and they were gone, finished. When we got the replacement boot, the boots general purpose, GP [General Purpose] boot, they had a vulcanised sole to start with without a metal plate in it but later they had a metal plate put in the sole to stop punjies from going through the sole into your foot – little stakes that the

Vietnamese used to like to sharpen up and stick on a path with some human dung on it just to sort of add some flavour as it goes through your foot. And they decided that we should have a steel-plated boot that would perhaps help, at least give the soldier have a bit more confidence about where they put their feet. That was a good idea unless the plate cracked and then it used to “click, click, click” if the plate broke. And they could hear you coming for mile

off.

Badly equipped – it always is. You either have a lot of people and no equipment or you have a no people with good equipment. At the moment we have no people and good equipment, there’s not enough money to have both. So what you have is a very specialist group of people that are beautifully equipped

and not enough people as Bruce Ruxton once said I think to protect Botany Bay on a sunny day. But that’s a conventional war. What we’re fighting now or preparing for now is a terrorist war or a war of attrition. So what we actually are setting up for are specialist type of forces with very specialist type of equipment

which is probably the way that we should be going and investing in major capital equipment – new aircraft, new tanks, new armoured personnel carriers. We already have a weapon which like it or love it we’ve got it, it is basically a better weapon than we had before. And it has an automatic capability, a full automatic capability which the old SLR [Self Loading Rifle] didn’t, it was a semi automatic. But the other thing was that you’d fire one

shot and get thirty back on full auto. And we were trained as soldiers to be one shot, one kill, the battle shot which was fine if you could see the target but if you can’t see the target the battle shot doesn’t count for much. You fire one shot and someone fires 30 back. Yes, it certainly takes your mind off sex. That is something now that we don’t have to worry about because a soldier has a fully

automatic weapon with the Styer. The equipment has always been bad when we go to war, out of date.

I had two in four intakes that really couldn’t adapt and were unsuitable psychologically in one case and co-ordination in another.

I don’t consider that to be a very high percentage, it’s less than 1%. And I would say to you that that was an indication of where our youth was at then. I’m not sure where it is now. It disturbs me now. But then, and we’re talking over 30 years ago, the youth were quite frankly

something to be admired.

Yes but I didn’t consider myself that way I was an old man at the age of 23, I was an old man. I’ve always been an old man, responsibility tends to do that to you but I’d always thought responsibility was of my own making but certainly I can’t speak highly

enough about the calibre of the people that the government randomly selected.

Very. And they looked forward to it. They were the equal of grenadier guards on the day. In fact I’ve seen grenadier guards marching and I thought, “Boy, if I was their

RSM I’d give them heaps, they looked like a shambles.” But certainly the drill and their motivation- and they wanted to show their parents who were there, most of them, what they’d achieved, what their platoons had achieved at great personal sacrifice and effort. And they’d achieved a great deal. And the platoon staff used to compete

fiercely amongst the teams to see who would top the drill, who would top the weapon handling, who would top. And every point was valuable. If you lost a point, “Oh, dear oh dear, how did we lose that point?” because you wanted to be the champion team and you wanted to have the best boxers. One intake I had the Bullmer brothers and they were tops and our company won the boxing that intake. They were golden gloves

boxers both of them so no one could touch us that intake. But everything was assessed. Everything was done between platoons in the spirit of competition. So the platoon staff would put extra time into those areas which needed to be built up because of the pride both in what they were doing and their people.

And the people might not have enjoyed the extra attention but they needed it and when we said, “Look, we are doing this, we’re not doing this for us, we’re doing this for you because if you get into a spot where you have to stop and think what you have to do with a weapon if it misfires you haven’t got time to think about it. It should be an instinctive action. Mag off cock, mag on

cock, re-aim and fire without even thinking. And you have to do that in your sleep. And that’s what they were taught to do and they were taught to do it in a very quick time. And you’d like to think that with that and their corps training they were suitable equipped to go to Vietnam. And I believe they were.

No, I really don’t want to know. I

really don’t want to go there. I can easily find out. I have a book but I just can’t bring myself to look because it puts me, on a personal level, I don’t need that stress. I don’t need that stress. But I know that there are some of the guys that went through me that didn’t make it

back and you knew that was always going to be the case anyway. And that was why you trained them as hard as you did to try and save as many as you could. And we did we trained them very hard.

You see the Americans were funny. They looked at us and said “You guys don’t move fast enough.”

Well we didn’t. The Americans would cover 15 kilometres and we’d cover 5. But it was the way in which we covered it. We might get 2 or 3 contacts and surprise them every time. The Americans would get ambushed 3 or 4 times because they made that much noise they were like a bull in a china shop. They’d make that much noise to draw the crabs as they could and then wonder why they got ambushed.

Our tactics are special forces tactics. Even our standard soldier is trained as the same level basically as a special forces soldier and they always have been. They way they move, the way they conduct themselves the way they have their discipline, their field signals. They don’t talk they use field signals. Even if they see the enemy they don’t say, “Enemy right, engage.”

Field signal – they’d just give a field signal, thumbs down, in other words “Enemy.” When the scout gives a thumbs down signal you know what you have to do.

You don’t move at night. We never used to move at night. The only time that my unit ever used at night was a patrol that I led

into an ambush position which I had led the patrol to the night before which was compromised. And I had to lead them back to the same position, almost the same position it wasn’t quite but it was almost the same position as the previous night that we’d put on the ambush, because as we got into the position from the Buddhist temple they flashed a red light back to the jungle

letting the Viet Cong know not to come in tonight. So I discussed it with the boss and he said, “Could you find the position again at night?” And I said, “Yes, I can.” So I led the patrol again the second night and we left after last light so they couldn’t see us leaving. And that was hairy because we had to do navigation by a compass at night and I had to get them to the

same position – I was within about 25 metres I reckon of where the initial position was. It was the same track, not quite on the junction but the same track. We made it and got into position and they didn’t see us, there were no lights, but they didn’t come through. They didn’t come through but we were ready for them.

You see after last light you’re not supposed to go out

because everything that you do then is done on a communication chord. You tie the people up so that you can’t see them and they can’t see you. We used to have a luminous disc that we used to wear in the back of our hat so that you could see the person in front of you. And you couldn’t let that disc get away from you because if you did you wouldn’t find him again. But at night you’d have a communication chord that was tied between you and the next person and then the next person and then the next person.

And it was in a complete omnibus circuit. So if you had a tug on your right, then you’d know two tugs ‘enemy’, one tug ‘wake up’, two tugs ‘enemy’, three tugs ‘friendly’. And if someone compromised the ambush well then of course you’d open fire. Johnny Brewer was a classic. John was out on

another patrol and he got compromised. His patrol was compromised and John fired the first shot. And John was really nicely set up he had a nice blanket on the ground, the poncho liner we used to call it. And Johnny Brewer, he was a nice bloke, and Johnny was quite set for the night, lying down and watching his arc in front and they came from behind.

Instead of coming down the track they came through behind him. So John had to try and get around very slowly with his weapon. And he just managed to get his weapon up and fire the first round and he dropped the first bloke and the second bloke let go a burst. And it wasn’t until daylight that John found out that the guy had fired and he’d shot either side of Johnny through the blanket. So he was pretty lucky. But John

saved that patrol from being severely embarrassed and he got an MID [Mention in Despatches] for that, John. We used to do that because the infantry were always short and artillery’s second role was infantry anyway so we were trained to do that.

I arrived in 1970

about June 1970 were arrived. We flew over by 747, Qantas, the whole unit, because all the equipment was in place. So they just changed the personnel around and left all the equipment there. So we replaced the battery as they were coming out we were getting off the

plane and there were people waiting to get back on the same plane and they were saying, “No one’s got 365 and a Wakey to do.” Yes, it’s an in-joke, but 365 days was the tour and one Wakey. So you’d get up in the morning and jump on the plane and go home. So we used to say, “You’ve got 364 and a Wakey you’d been in the country a day” so you’d count it off that way.

As soon as you got there. It would be 365 and a Wakey,

364 and a Wakey and that’s how you’d do it so you knew exactly how long you had left to serve on your tour. So that’s why they said “No one’s got 365 and a wakey to go.”

No, I didn’t because the

people that I had trained with I had put through they were long gone. I had spent another year in Townsville so the people that I’d trained had already been posted to units that were going. There’s not one that I can think of that went to 4 Field Regiment. There may have been but I can’t think of any. It’s too long ago. Certainly 4 Field Regiment had a lot of national servicemen. In my

gun I had one regular soldier who was the gun bombardier, Johnny Jackson. And the others were Donny Milton, Cookie Burn – the memory goes doesn’t it – Porky McKinnon – a pommy,

pommy, pommy – I never thought I would forget his name – Porky McKinnon, Donny Milton, Deni Jurgen. That’s not bad I got about five of them, it was a long time ago. Paddles, my original, Paddles Froburn, he had a back injury and couldn’t go and I got Johnny Jackson. I was fortunate to get

Johnny. It was his second tour ad I never forget we got off the plane and we settled in and he took over the equipment and signed for all the equipment, the guns, and checked the ammo and handed out the grenades and ammunition, got their rifles and gave them a lecture on personal security of the weapons, “Remember you’re carrying a loaded weapon now with a magazine on it. Don’t cock it unless you’re going to shoot somebody

and always walk around with it on safe.” So we were ready to go about a week later after a lot of firing from ‘the Dat’ [Nui Dat]. They deployed us out to a pretty hot area right at the base of the Nui Dings. Nui Dings is a mountain range that you can see out from Nui Dat.

We used to call them the ‘Warbies’, the Warburton Mountains. They helicoptered us, choppered us out to that position and dropped us down I suppose it would have been about 3.30 in the afternoon which was very late. We knew it was because that’s how the other battery coral got into trouble, they got into position too late.

They couldn’t get the choppers, the Americans were using them and

we needed the Chinooks, the very heavy lift helicopters.

Yes. In actual fact we got mortared that night and Jacko said, “Look, we’ll get mortared tonight” and I said, “Why do you say that?” And he said, “Because the buggers know who we are, they know we’re fresh meat, they’ll welcome us to Vietnam.” And Jacko was right. I said, “If that’s the case we’d better get into it.” So we did. I mean the shovels were

hot. The way I drove the guys to get their holes dug and three layers of sand bags over the top for their overhead cover. As we were digging in we found out later one of the Vietcong walked up to the position, pacing it out, tying off on a piece of rope how many hundred paces he’d taken from the base plate position from the mortars, that’s about 1,000 metres back of 1,500 metres back.

And one of the young infantry guys who was put out as a listening post saw this Vietnamese guy and he was carrying an AK47 and appeared to be counting. And he didn’t know what to do. So instead of challenging him and if he went to run for it drop him he didn’t do anything. The VC looked up and saw him and thought, “Well, I’m dead if I do anything so what will I do? I know what I’ll do is I’ll turn around and I’ll walk away.” That’s what he

did and the young lad didn’t follow. And I’m glad that we pushed ourselves because we did get mortared that night.

Yes.

Probably. But I know that he was more frightened of the company sergeant major later because the company sergeant major got stuck about it, you could hear him all over the position.

So Jacko said, “Well, we’ll definitely get mortared tonight.” So we were in, three layers of sandbags, on our sleeping accommodation. Jacko and I were laying in the hootchie waiting for our turn in the strong point, for our machine gun turn. We used to do 2 hours during the night.

Yes. So what we’d do is sit there and wait. Anyway,

we were about to doze off I suppose and the next minute we heard the primaries for the mortars and Jacko said, “Here they come.” And of course they really got stuck about the base. They went across it and they went back again and then they stopped. And during the first couple of rounds our battery captain, Captain Pound, said, “Number ones to the tannoy.” Well my tannoy was in the ammo bay about

5 or 6 metres away from my sleeping pit. So I had to get out of the sleeping pit out in the open while the mortars were falling down to get to the tannoy. So he didn’t appreciate what I had to say. Anyway, I took the tannoy back with me into the hole and he was trying to tell everyone to take cover because we were being mortared. So I gave him a piece of my

mind and got back into the hole with Jacko’s laughing fit to kill himself. He thought it was hilarious. So that was, “Welcome to Vietnam.” But it was funny, it really was funny when you think about it but at the time it wasn’t so funny.

Yes, oh yes.

No, not at all.

It was exciting. It was exciting. It was even hilarious in the morning because all those people that had been dragging their feet, not filling the sandbags and putting them on top for over head cover, while Jacko and I were sitting back with the crew having a coffee after we’d cleaned our weapons the next morning and stood to, and stood down, we were sitting on the sandbags watching the rest of the battery dig like

crazy. You could see them actually disappearing. I shall never forget that. And Jacko and I were just sitting there laughing because they were poking fun at us saying, “What’s wrong with you blokes, frightened?” So I wouldn’t have liked to have been sitting out without overhead cover in the mortar barrage because while these guys had dug your hole but it doesn’t stop a mortar from falling in the hole. At least with overhead cover you’ve got some chance of it not coming

in.

Not a soul. Not one person. They walked them across the position and back again and they never hit anybody.

Yes, sure. The second night we were probed on our perimeter and they came up against my gun and we couldn’t determine how many there were but we suggested it was just a group of between 3 and 5 trying to get through the wire. And we had our mines out and their popular trick was to grab the mines and

turn them around and then make a noise and we’d fire the mines at ourselves – very clever people these Vietnamese. So we decided the best thing to do was for me to get my gun and push it up to the edge of the bund and load a splintex round into the gun to try and clear them away from the perimeter. And we did this and I fired a splintex around and the next morning we found that there were some blood trails but we actually

didn’t find any bodies. The Vietnamese were very good at removing people who had been badly wounded or indeed even killed. But that was the first time that they actually tried to probe the position and that was the second night. Later on at 11 o clock at night, I think I mentioned this before, one of the guys went to the toilet and dropped the lid on the toilet. And would you believe that the battery captain raced out of the command

post screaming out, “Take cover, take cover, incoming mortars.” Well under the ground in the command post the lid of the toilet must have sounded like a mortar primary going off. With that the whole position burst out laughing and it really lightened the situation somewhat. We didn’t see him for a couple of days after that quite frankly. He seemed to hide in the command post and didn’t come up for air but we thought that was hilarious and that was that. But the rest of the time we spent in that position was firing in

support of the infantry. And as they’d get into trouble we’d fire high explosive rounds as closely as we could to them because the VC had a habit of when they got into contact with Australians. Artillery would be walked in as close as we could without hitting our own soldiers. And they used to try and what they called “holding on to the

shirt.” They would get in to about 5 or 6 or 10 metres to try and get out of the danger zone of the artillery falling around them. So invariably we would fire within 100 metres, around 100 metres, from the infantry that were in trouble. Or if we needed to fire closer than that we would try to get them to move their location back and then

fire on their location. That was called a danger close procedure and we used to have to be very careful with the guns and indeed make sure that we were laying the guns with a clinometer on the barrel of the gun to make sure that the angle of sight was correct. And indeed we’d take a compass bearing over the barrel to make sure that the direction was correct as well because if you were one mil out in bearing

over 5 kilometres, that’s 5 metres and if your 10 mils out of course that’s a lot more, 50 metres. So the thing is you’ve got to be very careful when you’re aiming those guns because they fire over a large distance. That’s why they used to call us “nine mile snipers.” We could fire at the enemy from a long distance away and indeed we used to have registered a

fire mission around our support base so that the infantry, if they needed support back into the fire support base, because they’d go out and come back to us. We could drop fire down in a known area and they could actually come as close as they could to that area and we could bring the fire in and they were relatively safe. And it would try and – anyone that was pursuing them we would try and make sure that they ran into the fire.

Artillery is pretty impersonal. You fire it in the air and where it lands sometimes is in the lap of the gods. With the wind gusts or something you could be 10 or 20 metres off line very easily over a short space, a short distance of a couple of thousand metres. So you had to be very careful when you fired the guns that you lay the guns correctly and don’t take short

cuts. So we had drills to make sure that we did that and as we fired the rounds I couldn’t wear headphones or ear protectors because every now and again the command post would change the direction. As the infantry moved then we’d have to adjust the fire of the guns so that when the infantry tried to withdraw we could try and put the rounds between themselves and the attacking force and that way have a barrier of

fire between the infantry and the enemy. And you have to do accurate laying for that. It’s not just a matter of point the gun in the direction and fire and hope for the best. You’ve got to make sure every round is fired under the same conditions. And that’s something that takes a lot of training to do. The infantry used to poke fun at

us but quite frankly the number of times we stopped the infantry from being overrun. In fact at the next fire support base we actually, not it wasn’t the next one it was the one after I think, we actually stopped an American position from being overrun. In fact we fired on the American position, on their bunkers. The North Vietnamese were actually tearing the roof off their

bunkers to try and get at them when we fired on their bunkers and cleared them away. The company commander came out to our position the next day and was very, very emotional about the fact that we had saved his company from almost certainly being wiped out. They were right down to the first rounds. And he came out and personally thanked us. And it was about then that I realised that we were doing

good work because it tends to be a bit impersonal as a gun sergeant. You’re firing your rounds and they might be landing 5 kilometres away and people that need them desperately want them to be in the right place. And when they are they really appreciate it. If they’re in the wrong place they certainly don’t appreciate it – if it falls amongst them, because as I say artillery is pretty impersonal it doesn’t care who it hurts.

It sure did. It weighed heavily on every gun sergeant. But we were relatively mature and we accepted that responsibility. We knew that our rank depended upon us shooting our guns and aiming it and putting the fire in the right place. If we didn’t do the job right we could be reduced in rank. In fact that was almost a foregone conclusion. If we made a mistake we would lose our third

stripe and go back to a bombardier or corporal. So you made sure that you didn’t fire either in error or if you fired through “At my command” or something like that then you could be in trouble. So the command post had the absolute authority to allow you to fire and not to fire and when to fire and when not to fire. So if someone said to me, “We’re danger close” we’d (UNCLEAR) but if they said

“At my command” that meant that they weren’t quite ready for the rounds to hit the ground. Maybe the enemy was forming up to do an assault and they weren’t quite formed up. So we were waiting for them to form up to fire the rounds so that they would do the most damage and if you fired too soon the surprise would be lost. So you were waiting for the infantry to order the command to fire allowing time for the rounds to get there. And then the

command post would order the guns to fire at the same time. And if they ordered 5 rounds or 20 rounds fire for affect you had to make sure that you get those 20 rounds in the air as quickly as you could for maximum effect. So 20 rounds per gun in the air it might take you per 20 rounds might take about 5 minutes or less depending on how close you had the ammunition to the gun and whether you had the rounds ready to be fired, unboxed. We usually did. We usually carried about

60 to 80 rounds ready to be fired. If we had to move we had to rebox them up except for the splintex which we kept. We used to carry them to the next position. So if we hit the ground we could load the guns with splintex because the Vietnamese didn’t like splintex which was like a shotgun. We did have that go off at the muzzle like a big shotgun and that was a very good anti-personnel weapon.

The VC only ever really took two fire support on a fire support base, coral and balmoral, during 1968. That was during the Tet offensive and they really didn’t hit a fire support patrol base again after that. They took a hell of a lot of casualties. One of my friends, John Stevens, was at fire support base coral, he won the

military medal for that and that’s quite well documented and that was about the last time that the regular North Vietnamese or sorry Vietcong forces took on the fire support bases with any strength. They knew that there were no joy in taking on guns that had the sort of rounds that were devastating.

And other than firing the one splintex round in anger we used to fire them off and have a ‘yippee shoot’ because they wouldn’t take us on.

Where we fire the old ammunition off, the old splintex rounds off, and get the new ones and get them ready because like anything, if you carry ammunition around for a 2 or 3 months and you don’t fire it off you don’t know whether it’s going to go off if you need it. So you get a new stock of ammo in and make sure that you fire the old stuff off

and just get used to firing it at a different muzzle action, perhaps 50 metres out, to explode and to make sure that you’re competent in setting the fuses and operating the weapon system. They were – quite frankly we shouldn’t have had them. I think they were against the Geneva Convention but we used them, we had them, that’s a fact, no one denies it but then again so

did the Vietnamese. They had a flashette round as well which they used to fire from a large 107 millimetre rocket launcher. So they had anti-personnel rounds as well. We found quite a lot of ordinance wherever we went and the fire support bases used to call us, “Have guns will travel, 107 Field Battery.” We’d go from one support base to the next and we’d build that up and then we’d go somewhere else. We’d either

chopper [helicopter] out or whatever. But the worst position that we went to was the Courtney Rubber which was an old Michelin Rubber Plantation towards, well more than half way through the tour. There’d been a huge fight out there and one of the villages had been overrun and the powers that be decided that they’d push them out again so they deployed us into this area.

We had a, as we always did, an orders group and the battery captain, Captain (UNCLEAR) said that we were going to be moving in on a red road and that we could expect contact on the way in and that we would be taking soft skin vehicles. And I said that that was foolhardy that we should be travelling in at least M113 vehicles which at least would stop a heavy

machine gun if not a mine. But the soft skin vehicles would certainly stop nothing so we could probably look like we’d be taking casualties. As it turned out we hit three mines on the way in and there was only one person killed and that was a little VC scout. But one of my friends, David, had actually looked at me when

I’d made the comment that we shouldn’t be taking land rovers at least, nor should we be taking the trucks in. Dave’s vehicle was a survey vehicle. He was driving a land rover with a trailer behind. We had a driver and he was the vehicle commander and David was the battery surveyor. So I thought it was a bit stupid to take a land rover in because it tracked narrower than the tanks anyway and it was bound to hit a mine, if there was one there, and it did. David was badly injured, so was his

driver and David lost part of one leg and had to wear built up shoes later when I met him after Vietnam. But he was blown about 100 feet away from the vehicle and when the dust settled it was difficult to find him. His driver was the same. One was blown one way and one was blown the other. About 40 pounds of Chicom went off underneath the land rover. It blew the engine out it blew – the front axle

was gone, all the bonnet was gone, the sub-frame was gone, the seats were gone and so were the two guys in it. We thought that they were both dead but they weren’t. They were badly cut up. The tank hit a mine in the middle of the position. That was only an anti-personnel mine and that blew up under the tracks, it didn’t worry it. The APC [Armoured Personnel Carrier] pulled up and a little guy jumped off the APC and lost both legs. And we knew that was a pretty hot

site so we didn’t go walking around too much or doing patrols there it was too hot. We did a couple of runs out with the APCs to see what we could scout up but other than finding a couple of booby traps we didn’t see anything.

Yes. About 2 days later we had a sighting of 3 VC and my gun – another gun fired

on them and my gun killed all 3. The other gun said, “No” they got them but it was actually the round that I fired.

We buried them. The crew were pretty upset later but at the time both crews were arguing about who got the

kills. We got the kills. The other crew disagreed and they nearly had a punch-up over it which made me feel a bit ill but later when they saw the results of their handiwork they weren’t quite so cocky. Then, the little village that we had been sent to to help out, the VC had left but they came back the next

night and started throwing hand grenades in through windows. And we tried to get clearance to fire to support the local troops there and they wouldn’t give us clearance to fire. And it was so frustrating because they wouldn’t give us ground to air clearances to fire in their support. That was Vietnam I’m afraid. The local village

or the local area chief may have had a relation in that VC force, you don’t know. You just never knew whether a member of the family of the local authorities was involved or not. That’s why they wouldn’t give you ground or air clearances to fire. The funny point about it was that before you could fire anything you had to get ground and air clearance through RDTAC [?]

and the Vietnamese had to give that. The local chief had to give that to make sure that we didn’t hit any friendlies in the area. That was very frustrating. They killed a lot of people and we couldn’t help. That’s pretty well Vietnam isn’t it?

We didn’t go out the way we came in. We came in all flags flying but we went out with our tails between our legs I think. We took a fresh track. We made our own track out through the rubber plantation. A completely different way to get out because we knew that they would have mined the track we came in on again. So we didn’t chance it so we just cut

through the plantation and through the jungle and got back to the main road that way. The tanks made a good track for us. None of the trees argued with a centurion tank, they just pushed their way through the bush and we followed them in the trucks behind towing the guns. It must have been a lovely place at one time. The old plantation house was just behind the gun position and it was a two-story, reinforced concrete dwelling which had been

levelled many years before I’d say by air strikes and artillery fire. But it must have been beautiful during peace time. Funnily enough the French were still operating their plantations. They were paying taxes to the VC, to the Vietcong, and taxes to the government. So even though they were double taxed they could still manage to operate their plantations. It all

seemed surreal to be honest and a waste of time when you look back on it but it’s something that I wanted to do and I don’t regret having gone. I regret

one thing and that is the way the soldiers that I trained were treated when they came home.

Yes. I only did the initial training except for the artillery section that I was with. I was the small arms and heavy weapons

instructor and my job was to train the regiment in M60, M72, M79 and GPMG [General Purpose Machine Gun] because I’d used the weapons before when a lot of these blokes hadn’t. They used the British guns, the Bren guns and the British GPMG. In Malaysia they hadn’t seen the M60 before which was an American

machine gun or the grenade launcher, the M79, or the M72, the LAW [Light Anti Tank Weapon]. So as a weapons instructor it was my job to train them. It was funny, I remember one of the guys approached me when we were in Townsville saying that he’d been hit by a piece of shrapnel – it had actually taken the top of his tooth off. We were firing the grenade

launcher, the M79, and one of them had armed prematurely, hit the ground and gone off and a little close and skipped off the ground and exploded. And sure enough he had, he’d taken a bit of shrapnel. The shrapnel was on his tongue and it had chipped a piece off his tooth so he’s lucky it didn’t hit him in the eye really. But I moved them back about another 20 metres after that just in case there was another faulty warhead but that was

interesting but their training was very good.

Very frustrating – because you couldn’t help people – very frustrating. It’s something that is hard to explain to people. That you have the ability to help but the people you are there to help won’t let you help.

You have to question their motivation. You really do have to question their motivation. Why was it that they wouldn’t let us fire on that village, around that village to scare the Vietcong away. They were just running from house to house chucking hand grenades through windows, indiscriminately. Men, women and children were being blown up. And the only reason that they were doing that was because that

whole village was pro government.

Really only one other and that was in the last fire support base that we were in. We were getting ready to come home and people were starting to get slack but I was determined that they wouldn’t.

And one young officer, and I won’t mention his name because he’s a very good friend and he lives in Adelaide, but he tended to take short cuts. And I reminded him of his responsibilities to get ground and air clearances to test fire the machine guns which hadn’t been tested for about 3 months. These things used to be stripped and reassembled every day but without being test fired that didn’t mean a great

deal. They were mounted in strong points and bunkers in the perimeter. The perimeter was then protected by concertina wire and outside of the concertina wire we used to have Claymore mines that could be detonated from the bunkers and they were a shape-charged mine. A mine that would go out and inflict casualties on the enemy with small ball bearings about the size of a finger nail. And it was a

shape charge, it would just spray these ball bearings everywhere. We actually had moved along the wire. I checked it with the starlight scope, there were 2 enemy in the wire. They were turning the mines – I’d asked for permission to fire. The boss said “No, we’ve got to get ground and air clearances there are friendlies in the area” and

he couldn’t get ground and air clearance. Then he ordered to fire without ground and air clearance and the gun wouldn’t fire. Someone had cleaned the gun, de- linked the ammunition and re-linked it upside down which meant that the gun couldn’t break the link to chamber the round and it didn’t fire. And it’s not something that you easily detect when you do this. It’s not something that you easily

detect until you go to fire the gun which we did and the gun wouldn’t fire. And that was the only gun that could be brought to bear at the time. Of course as soon as we made the noise and the VC heard the click they were off for their life through the wire. I grabbed the M79 grenade launcher but by the time I’d got the launcher and got it loaded they had cleared the wire and gone.

The officer concerned – I stormed back to my gun and was absolutely irate. I knew that they’d turned the mines and I warned the command post under no circumstances allow anybody to fire the mines because we would take casualties and equipment loss. Sights would get blown away and things like that. And the next morning when I checked them because it was my job for local defence to go out and check the mines, and

disarm them during the day and then arm them at night. They were turned, the mines had been turned. That night the young officer came over to my gun position, and I was really cranky, and apologised to me. As I had requested almost every night at the orders group to get ground and air clearances to test fire the weapons and I gave him both barrels and

said that it was fine to close the gate after the horse was out but just thought that it was bad form that at the end of our tour after everything that had happened that we finished up on a very sour note. It was about a week later that the new battery arrived and we replaced the guns in position and came home but that was a very unsatisfactory way for me to end my tour in Vietnam.

Not that I wanted to kill anybody in the wire but they were enemy and they were trying to hurt us, to make a noise and get us to fire the Claymores and take casualties from our own mines. Brave people and I admired them for doing what they were doing. I don’t think I’d have done that. But that was something that really, really annoyed me. That

is something that really plays on my mind. That things should have been done but weren’t done because it was just too hard because the Vietnamese made it just too hard. There was not enough information coming out to the soldiers. The second fire support base we went to –

I just forget I think it was – Penny – something like that, Tess, no, Fire Support Base Tess. We had a section of tanks, we had a section of tracks and we were dug in along the side of the road and it was a hot area. We’d been firing into the hills about 1500 metres away, white phosphorous because there was enemy activity on it.

That night we heard a noise coming along the road and it was a vehicle. They’d got the ground and air clearances very quickly to fire on the vehicle. They thought it was obviously a VC vehicle. The tanks opened fire with their 50 cals. Our bunker opened fire with its M60. And we could hear the vehicle changing down as we were

shooting the tyres out of the vehicle. It was an American advisor he was driving what they used to call an old dodge, armoured carrier, ammo carrier. And no one knew that he was out visiting his soldiers and he was late getting back to Nui on Trin. And we just shot his vehicle to pieces. How we didn’t kill him I

don’t know. To this day I haven’t got a clue. The vehicle was riddled with bullets. The motor kept going. You could hear him change down a gear as he lost another tyre and flattened it. When he got to Nui on Trin he said, “There’s an NVA regiment down the road you’d better brace yourselves for a major assault.” And it was us. It was kept very quiet funnily enough but the officer in

charge was moved fairly quickly out from the fire support base to do a job with the rural community. We used to do that with officers. We had another officer, a terribly nice lad, who happened to crest twice. And the second time he crested he almost blew up some people in Victor Company. By cresting that means that the rounds just didn’t make it over the

top of the hill. It hit the top of the hill where there were some friendlies harboured up for the night and nearly hurt them. And of course the next day the helicopter appeared. The next morning, the helicopter appeared in the position – he got in it and we never saw him again. And I never saw him until about 3 months ago when he said “I’m in town I’d like to come and see you.” And he came out and saw me and we went out for dinner and had a talk and talked over old times and it was very good.

Lots of funny things happened. I could probably keep talking but I don’t know that you want me to keep going.

The funny part about Vietnam was that it was exciting and it was boring – 10% excitement and 90% boredom. But when it was exciting it was exhilarating. It was almost like

I would assume drugs were like, you had to get more of it. To walk around on a patrol knowing that you really shouldn’t be there and to walk into a bunker system which I did. We had a patrol out and we’d only gone about 1,000 metres into the J [jungle], across a clearing and into the J, into the jungle. And the first indication we had that we could be in trouble was when we saw some black wire hanging from one of the

trees which always indicated that there could be a command detonated mine close by. So I put the patrol down in all round defence and went forward with the scout to check it out. It was just on ten, hanging there and no mine. We looked over and saw that there were some black slits which were obviously bunker systems and we prayed that they weren’t occupied. Then we heard the noise and guessed that they were. So we slid

back and hoped that no one had seen us and I called up on the radio. And then we saw the occupants – they were monkeys. And I have to tell you that that was the only bunker system that I ever walked into that was occupied. And I’m pleased to say that I didn’t have to walk into any that were occupied by Vietcong or North Vietnamese because they would cut the legs out from underneath you. They’d see you before you’d see them. We did

find an arms cache there and we called the engineers forward and we set some charges in the bunkers and collected all the ammunition that we could find – some RPGs, Rocket-Propelled Grenades and some information and some Ho Chi Minh sandals and a satchel with information in it. And the information went back into the intelligence – there’s a term for you, intelligence

section. And the ammunition we stacked into one of the bunkers and blew that where it was. And we made the intelligence summary that day, “The patrol from 107 Battery locates bunker system and arms cache.”

There wasn’t just one. There were about 15 of them, all interconnected. And the idea was to lay charges in each of

them and then connect the charges with what we call a det chord and you would just fire the charge and everything would just blow up. So we pulled back about 500 metres in an APC and just sat there in the open and the guy set off the charge and away it went. And logs and pieces of galvanised iron and sand bags blew up through the canopy of the jungle. And we’d

destroyed both their arms cache and their little hideaway, their home away from home. They used to spend a lot of time digging and I can understand why. We walked out on one patrol into a B52 area, where a B52 strike had gone through. And the depth of the craters was about 12 ft, 14 ft deep, in clay soil

and about 40ft, 30ft across – thousand pound bomb craters that had been dropped from about 30,000 feet. It was like the hand of god had come down out of the clouds and just scooped the dirt of the ground. If someone had been in a bunker system there it wouldn’t have mattered, they just would have been vaporised – their bunker and their person. We walked a bit further and found

a boot with a bone in it and that’s all we found, we didn’t find anything else. It looked to me like an American boot but there was no way of knowing whether it was a Vietcong wearing American GPs or an American who had stepped on a mine and been evacuated leaving his part being. The B52 strikes that we

saw were incredible. They used to call them arc light, arc light. And they would drop 15 or 20 bombs at one time, 1,000 pound bombs. Sometimes they would drop nearly twice as many 500 pound bombs and they’d just go across the horizon and the whole ground would shake and you just felt sorry for anybody under that.

The closest we could be theoretically to an arc light strike was I think 1,000 metres from memory – it may have been a bit further but that was certainly further away.

We were looking for enemy, looking for signs of the enemy, looking to see if command posts had been set up for an assault, looking to see if there were

any – what they used to do was set up – we used to patrol around the fire support base to make sure that there were no channels for advance, avenues of approach to the fire support base. What they used to do was prepare their positions and dig their pits and lay out the direction of approach using tape so that they could move their soldiers in at night. And they didn’t need lights they had white tape

that would indicate the direction of advance into the fire support base so that they could actually assault towards the fire support base without having to use lights or any other guide to give the direction of advance to their soldiers. Or mortar positions, they would dig the mortar positions, get the base plates ready and then come back, put their mortars in positions, fire the rounds and then

run like hell. Because they knew very well that we would retaliate and we could actually fix the mortar position by triangulation of compass bearings towards the direction of the noise of the primaries. You could get within two or three hundred metres of the base plate, even closer sometimes, where the fire had come from. The mortar locating radar, we never used to take that out because it never used to work. They used to leave that back at Nui Dat

and look at it and make it look pretty. It was supposed to work and we don’t know that it did. I don’t think that it ever really worked. The mortar locators always reckoned it did but if it did we were surprised.

Yes, I would like to tell you about a story – there’s some pain, not for us but for the person concerned. I can mention his name he was the commander of 2nd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment and he was a good guy, a top guy, a very good officer, but he was flying very low over the Rung Sat area. We were at a fire support base called fire support base

Gail as I remember. Fire Support Base Gail was on the main route from Vung Tau to Saigon. I think it was Route 1, I might stand corrected there. But certainly we were about 150 metres off the main road just across the road from a little village with a Buddhist temple. And that was where I took the ambush patrol out two nights in a row and that

village was obviously pro communist. The colonel was flying around in his little bubble helicopter, a little Sioux, doing a reconnaissance, and they saw some footprints in the reedy grass that seemed to vanish into nowhere. So they did a circle in the helicopter and came back. And as they came back they went to the hover over where the tracks disappeared. And as they went to the hover

the down draft from the helicopter blew the grass, or the camouflage, off of a pit where there were 3 Vietcong boiling their billy and rice and fish heads. And of course they figured that if they could see the helicopter and the pilot and this fellow looking out the side of the cabin

they must be able to see them which they did. So they decided to fire. So they all fired their weapons at the same time and hit the helicopter. But they didn’t only hit the helicopter, they hit the colonel, and they shot him through the backside. And there’s nothing more annoying I’m told than being shot through a cheek of the backside with an AK47. The helicopter pilot had the good fortunate to have a great deal of

nous and he pushed the stick so that he could get some height and get as far away as possible because the helicopter transmission had been hit and it was terminal, he knew that straight away. So he put a few hundred metres between him and where the contact took place. In the meantime our guns were called into action to fire. And it was only about 2 kilometres from where we were and we had to fire

cut off between the Vietcong and the helicopter pilot and the good colonel. And he was radioing in the fire patrol control orders to the command post. And the reason why we know what happened was because this was all transpiring on the radio all the time and we were told later but of course at the time we were busy firing to keep the Vietcong away from them. So to get to them they would have had to run through a wall of

steel. And we managed to keep the Vietcong away from the good colonel and his helicopter pilot and the crashed helicopter. But I’ve never seen so many people appear in the air so quickly. There were F4 Phantoms, there were Iroquois, there were bush ranger gun ships, Australian fire teams. Hiri Cobras looking around for those people, targets of

opportunity because a helicopter had been downed. And of course the helicopter pilot had made a call and the sky was filled with aircraft very quickly. Well, of course the good colonel was dusted off and the helicopter was recovered and the pilot was taken back to the mess to calm his shattered nerves and have a couple of quick scotches. I don’t know if he drank that’s just a bit of embellishment on my part.

But if he didn’t drink I think he’d take up drinking. Well the long and short of it is that Victor Company, who were the Kiwi company that were attached to his battalion, had always been upset about the fact that the good colonel used to hover over the contacts so they couldn’t hear what was going on – with his helicopter trying to help of course but was always causing a problem because they couldn’t hear what was going on to the

contact. So of course they were delighted when they heard that the Australian CO had been shot down. And they organised a little raiding party so that when the colonel actually got his helicopter fixed they’d actually put a little target on the bottom of the aeroplane. And from thereafter they referred to the good colonel as Target Ass. Of course, that’s a true story and they were quite funny about that. They quite enjoyed the fact that the good

CO had a target, a bulls-eye, painted on the bottom of his helicopter. And to this day I don’t honestly know whether the good colonel knew that was the case that they’d actually painted this target on the bottom of his helicopter so that the VC could get a better go next time. The Kiwis did have a funny sense of humour. They were put on the dry [not allowed to drink alcohol] one night back in Nui Dat. So they decided that they had enough empty cans to

load up one of the guns with empty cans and put a charge 7 cartridge case in to the gun and fire the cans into the officers’ mess tent which they promptly did. So the officers put them back off the dry, they put them back onto having a beer again because they thought it was safer that way. The Kiwis certainly did things differently.

Yes, we did. They were good blokes. I remember

that we were at a fire support base, Fire Support Base Leroy, which was an old American Support Base, about half way through the tour. And I was a bit bored and I asked the boss if I could go out on a patrol with the Kiwis just as a rifleman. He said, “Oh yeah, you can go.” Then we had a fire plan came down so he said, “Oh no, you can’t go.” I was very pleased he said that because they were only gone ten minutes and they were in the

greatest fire fight I’ve ever seen. They got into the rubber, they were gone 10 minutes and red and green faced them, one way, the other way – red that way, green that way. And when they came back from the contact – most of the guys were Maoris there were only about 4 or 5 white guys, if you like that were in that

company or section, a section it was. And I spoke to one of the guys and he said, “Oh, they’re crazy.” He said, “You wouldn’t believe it.” They got two KIAs [Killed in Action] but they actually ran them down. The VC opened fire on them and when of course the VC opened fire the Kiwis just did a left turn and ran straight at them which confused the Vietcong because they thought

that these Maoris were Asian. And it certainly confused them because then they stopped firing and then they realised too late that they were Kiwis. And the Kiwis actually got amongst them and sorted them out. Most of them got away but they got two. The Kiwis used to rather have a fight than a feed I think. And that was their motto and they used to live up to it. At one stage I know that the

Kiwis had twice – one company had twice the battalion’s kill ratio. They had twice the body count of the battalion.

Yes. And they used to really upset the white guys because if ever there was a shot fired they’d run straight at it much the same as Peter Badcoe used to do – run to the sound of the guns. And that’s what he used to teach “The best method of defence is

attack.” Unsettle the enemy and unnerve the enemy and then you gain the advantage.

They were such bad shots. I thought I could hit somewhere really nasty and I didn’t have children at that stage. So they were terrible shots

which is a good thing. Invariably they used to shoot high anyway and you were fortunate that that was the case. But not all of them were bad shots. Some of them were very good shots and their snipers were very good but we were never subjected to sniper fire and we were prime targets for it at a fire support base but we were never subjected to it. The closest I came to rifle fire from the enemy was

going in to Vung Tau when we were in a convoy going in for leave. And they decided to fire a few shots just over our heads just to wish us Bon Voyage for the next two days. They must have been heading in the same direction themselves because they were shooting very high. It was funny about that because the city of Vung Tau was a coastal resort. And it was quite laughable, it was common knowledge that the

VC used to use that as their rest and recreation centre as well. You could freely walk around. I found it absolutely incredible. You could walk around in civilian clothes, without a weapon, and feel relatively safe in Vung Tau because the enemy was doing the same thing.

Yes, it was quite funny actually. The

only upsetting thing was 106 Battery. One of my friends was having a drink in Vung Tau, out of bounds, but Johnny Hall was having a drink in a bar and one of the Korean soldiers cut his throat with a knife. Poor Johnny, he was an orderly room sergeant, a staff sergeant I think, when he died

but the guys that were with him said that he was almost dead before he hit the ground.

Oh yes, to do with drink. Johnny looked at this guy and he kept looking at Johnny. Johnny walked over to see what his problem was and he stood up and he cut his throat. He was a Korean.

Yes, it was. I used to hate coming back into Nui Dat. I didn’t drink in Vietnam. I was a number one, I was a sergeant, I was responsible. So I didn’t drink. If my gun was where I could get at it I would not drink. If I went back for a barbecue for one night on the helicopter and out the next morning I’d have a beer with the

BSM who was back at Nui Dat. But I didn’t drink anyway, I’d probably have a beer, one or two beers, that’s it, finished. We were back in after a bit of a nasty one and the infantry had taken quite a few casualties. One of my friends had lost his platoon commander – he’d lost both legs in a mine incident

and one of the other platoon commanders had lost one leg. And our battery captain, to be battery captain, was then a forward observer, he’d stepped on a mine that hadn’t gone off and it was the second mine he’d stepped on that didn’t go off. The boys were in the gunners’ canteen having a beer and I was in having a beer with the

BSM, ‘Chalky’ White it was at the time. And there was a knock on the door were you saw that gentleman leaning against that partition, and it was one of the soldiers. He said, “BSM, BSM, you’d better come quick, Jock’s going to kill (I won’t mention his name) Captain N.” And Chalky looked at me and said,

“Look, would you go and sort that out, Wal.” I said, “Yeah, it’ll be all right.” So I walked down the track towards the showers and the two guys came with me. They were big lads, one was a lance Jack and the other one was a full bombardier, a forward observer assistance. And we caught Jock as he was coming out of the tent with his armour light under his arm, quite drunk. And I said, “What are you doing

Jock?” And he said, “It’s none of your blankety blank concern.” And I said, “Well, what’s the problem mate?” And as I said that I leant forward and grabbed the barrel and hit the butt from underneath his arm and the two guys jumped on him and wrestled him to the ground. And I took the magazine out and cocked the rifle, there was a round up the spout and it was on full auto. So if he’d had his hand on the trigger it probably would have cut my legs off. I said, “Well if he moves off his

bed he’s going straight to jail and I want to see him first thing in the morning.” And I wondered if I’d done the right thing all night or the wrong thing. So I didn’t sleep at all that night I just lay there listening. About 3 times he tried to get off his bed and I heard him being punched and yelled at.

Put him in jail to protect him and the officer concerned.

The two NCOs assured me they could handle the situation without me preferring charges.

The problem was the captain had stepped on two mines. One had gone off, the primary had gone off and thrown it up in the air. The secondary didn’t blow the mine, it went up in the air and hit the ground, that was an anti-personnel mine. The second one he stepped on was a bamboo switch in the

village and that didn’t go off, that was connected to another mine. And they figured that the third time that he would take them with him.

Yes. He used to drag his feet through the jungle. They used to call him ‘Lurch’.

No, they weren’t happy at all. He was forever saying, “Wait for me.” “Catch up.” And no one wanted to go near

him because he was a liability. Very soon after that they removed him from the FOs [?] and brought him in as battery captain.

I must confess to you that, no, that wasn’t the reason. The only thing that I could think of was the unit’s reputation. The unit was everything to me

and it was a brilliant unit and to have the reputation of the unit sullied by somebody who was out of his brain with drink that wouldn’t normally do that. And because of the system he was able to get drunk, because people turned a blind eye to it. Two cans per man per day perhaps. Well, there were two cans per man even the people that didn’t drink. So the people who didn’t

drink, OK, their beer was given to the people that did. And it’s not my call but where it affects my crew it’s my call. And my gun crew knew not to come near the gun if they were under the influence.

Oh no, that was very different. When you did a patrol you were in a fire support base and there was no beer out there. It was only when you were back in Nui Dat, in the main taskforce

area in Nui Dat, that you could get two cans. Now two cans of beer doesn’t hurt anybody but if you multiply that by two people that don’t drink – six cans of beer after not having any beer for perhaps two weeks you were slightly tipsy. And if you had a dozen cans you were off your brain. And if you had 14 cans you want to shoot somebody. And it did happen. We did have people that were

given the message so to speak. And it’s unfortunate that it happened but there’s only about 5 people who know that that happened. And the person concerned doesn’t know that it happened, it was about to happen. That captain to this day doesn’t know.

No. Some weeks later he was going to charge me for disobeying a lawful command in fact. I didn’t really want to come back off the fire support base but they used to rotate people through to come back for a night for a barbie or something like that back with the pogos [persons not involved in the conflict]. So what I did was actually say, “Well if

no one else wants to go I’ll go back for the night.” It was an imposition really to go back. So I went back and he met me in the officers’ and sergeants’ mess having a quiet drink with the BSM. He said, “What are you doing here Wally?” I said, “I’ve come back for the night, sir.” He said, “No, you’re not supposed to be here I asked for so and so to come back.” I said, “Oh no, he doesn’t want to come.” He said, “Well you get back on the chopper and go back out and send him back.” I said, “No.” He said “What?” I said,

“No.” He said, “Well, I’ll order you to do it.” I said, “Well, the answer’s still no.” And of course Chalky nearly bit a piece out of his glass. He said, “Do you understand I’m giving you an order on war service and you’re disobeying it.” I said, “Yep.” He said, “Well, we’ll see about this.” He said, “I’m going to give you a formal order now. You will be on the helicopter. It’s due in 15 minutes. Make sure you’re on it. That’s a lawful command. Do you understand the order?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Are you going to do it?” I said, “No.”

So I really was disobeying a lawful command which was an unlawful command really because no one else wanted to come in and no one else would have come in but to the letter of the law I should have obeyed it so I was a bad lad. And I didn’t obey it. So of course I went across to see Don Donkin, the RSM, who’d asked to see me. “What have you done now Wally?” I said, “Not much” and I told him what had happened. So he went across to the officers’ mess and spoke to the CO. The CO stuck his

head out, waved to me, and gave me a big grin. And Don came back and said to me, “Right, tomorrow morning you’re going to get a king-size kick in the bum, you’re going to zip your lip and say nothing and that’s all that’s going to happen. Do you understand?” I said, “Yes, sir.” And he said, “Right.” So the next morning I went in and said, “You wanted to see me, sir?” “I certainly did” (UNCLEAR) “Good morning, sir.” And he let go and he gave me, “You’re lucky I’m not doing this and you’re lucky I’m not doing that.” And of course I knew exactly what he was doing

I said, “Have you finished, sir?” I said, bang, “Thank you” threw him a box and walked out. He wasn’t really finished. But that’s not flaunting authority that was a stupid thing to do and he’d backed himself into a corner and then he didn’t know which way to go.

No, there wasn’t, there wasn’t and his fellow officers avoided him like the plague. But that’s beside the point he’s still an

officer and he should be accorded his respect that he’s entitled to.

Well you’d just advise him that he’s doing something stupid and if he continues to do that you’ll have to go over his head. They usually get the idea. And he should listen to his sergeant. The CO told them to listen to their sergeants and the CO knew what was going on. But the CO didn’t hold a grudge against me. In fact he was going to

award me with an MID, mention in dispatches, for my efforts patrolling. But they ran out of them. So he said, “Instead of that, Wally, I’ve given you Subject B for warrant officers, how’s that?” I said, “That’s better. Thanks boss.” Not that it mattered because when I got back from Vietnam I had to go and do Subject B for warrant officer in air defence. So I went back to air defence. They wanted to take me back to Singapore which my wife wanted to do because she would have had an arma and a gardener and two years in

Singapore. Lovely. But the boss said to me he said, “Look, if you go back to Woodside, you go back on promotion to warrant officer.” He said, “What do you want to do?” He said, “Don’t tell me, I know.” I said “Yes, I’ll take the promotion boss.” He said, “Yes, that’s a good idea.” So I went back to Woodside and they downgraded the position to staff sergeant but I got promoted anyway. And then

I was a troop sergeant there for about 18 months or so and then they sent me off to the UK after I’d done my gunnery staff course to the British Army for two years, to do a course with the British Army. So that was all due to my boss’s report from Vietnam and the fact that I’d topped the course for my warrant officer subjects. So we headed off,

first class air travel, my wife and I, no children. And we arrived in London in November 1973. They put us up in a beautiful hotel in London. We were there for 10 days in London settling in. I’d bought a new Alfa Romeo and it wasn’t in London as they said it was. The Alfa Romeo Head Office said, “Yes, it’s there waiting for you, sir.” Of course it was another 3 weeks and so I had to hire a

car. Never buy another Alfa. Then reported to the School of Artillery at Lark Hill on the Salisbury Plains. I could actually see Stone Henge from my bedroom window. I then started a 12 month course which was probably the hardest academic course I’ve ever had to do. An 18 month course packed into 12 months. The same

content and shortened the course.

As far as I’m concerned they did. We – there was a local battalion called D445 which we’d killed twice over we thought and it was still operating. And it was the local main force, VC Battalion.

And 5 battalion came into the country and they were told not to go into the area. And of course the CO said, “Don’t tell me what to do, I’ll take my battalion where I want.” So they went into D445s stamping ground and they got a bloody nose. In the course of the contact they couldn’t pull back because, remember what I

said to you before about the VC holding on to the shirt, and the idea of that is so that they don’t incur artillery casualties. Well that’s the theory of it. But we actually fired all night, we fired illuminating all night to keep the VC off them and we fired HE [High Explosives]. And at one stage we actually fired a lot of HE into one of the targets that we were given and we found out that that was a

casualty clearing station for the Vietcong and they found out the radio interpreters, operators, that were listening in – because the Vietcong had radio sets as well so they used to tune in and listen – and we were actually dropping rounds in amongst their wounded. And it was very, very,

very, very ugly. People that had already been cut up by artillery fire were now blown completely to pieces. And that upset me for a long time that we had blown up the casualty clearing station. It wasn’t intentional but it happened and it’s something that

I can’t get out of my mind. It was the same as the 3 people that we killed at Courtney Rubber. That fact that the crews fought over who got the kill – that played on my mind also. I thought it was just not right to do that but it happened.

And it wasn’t the first time that we’d fired on a hospital. We actually fired on a hospital when we did an artillery raid in the Rung Sat area again but we don’t know if we hit anything at that time but there was a hospital in that area, located in that area, and we were hoping that we hadn’t hit it. But

it was an active area there. It used to make me laugh. You’d see 2 engineers out grading a road by themselves when two weeks before the village had been under severe attack yet here are two engineers out grading the road and they’ve got the driver and someone riding shotgun. It just didn’t make sense to

me. And the grader driver said that they’d pulled up at Kam Mai or Kam Mi or something like that, a little village, and the kids came down to get cigarettes and lollies and chocolates of them. And one of the kids, as they were brewing up their cuppa, rolled a hand grenade in with the pin out and it was only for the fact that they went and hid behind the bloody grader blade they would have been hurt.

But they could see the funny side of that and of course all the kids beat it. As soon as the bloody grenade rolled in they knew what it was. But someone had said to this kid, “Here take this, hold this handle and when you get close to the Australians pull that pin out there, it wasn’t splayed or anything, and just throw that and then run” and that’s what they did. You know, you hear about

a tip truck driver – we were back in Nui Dat and the tip truck driver was frightened of a road that he was being told to take metal on to and tip so that they could fix the road for the local villagers. He didn’t like the job so he came back and shot 3 sergeants. He stood up on the hill – with the sergeants’ mess back at Nui Dat, it was illuminated – got to a position where he could view the

bar and started shooting the sergeants there. I think he killed 2 or something or 1 and wounded a couple of others. They just got rid of him and I don’t know to this day what happened to him. We heard the shots. The alarm went off, the siren went off. We all jumped in our bunkers, put our steel helmets on, our webbing, and got our rifles and then we heard what had happened. These things happened all the time. The

cook that was put on strong point duty that was told, “Always challenge before you fire.” The patrol coming back in, the tail patrol, came in the wrong bunker system. He didn’t know it was coming in. He sat up with a start. Here’s someone with a rifle with a green uniform on coming towards him – he shot him twice in the chest, and you couldn’t have put a ten cent coin between the two rounds – a cook. I don’t know if the

next of kin was told what happened to that lad but he was dead before he hit the ground.

Yes it does.

No. No, but I’m not suggesting that a cook has the same training as an infantryman. He shouldn’t have been there in the first place as far as

I’m concerned. I mean you feel awfully exposed when you’re out on the wire, for example arming the mines. You always take your rifle with you. But it’s also a little disconcerting if someone cocks a weapon behind you as well from the firing point and then starts to laugh. That happened to me just once.

No, that’s not funny. He was being a smart ass.

Excuse my French. But I said to him, “You’d better make it good because I don’t miss.” “Oh, just joking, Serge.” I wasn’t laughing. Drink does stupid things. On a fire support base there was no room for drink and they didn’t have drink. They had some fun. You had to lighten the circumstances

and we used to have a bit of fun. I remember one afternoon at Fire Support Base, where was it – it was up in the Courtney Rubber, and we used to be issued with shaving cream in the cans, a pressure-pack can. And no one used to use it but they decided they’d get it out of the supplementary ration camp and have a fight. And I’ve got photographs of Jacko running around, Jack with wet hair and

freckles, he looked like a carrot on legs – and they’re running around the Fire Support base, stripped to the waist, and shooting each other with the pressure-pack cans and laughing fit to kill themselves. And the whole position were rolling in the dust laughing. It was hilarious.

Personally, with the Vietcong? No, we never had hand to hand combat or bayonet attacks or things like that. That was only done twice. In the whole time during the Vietnam War there were only two major assaults on Fire Support Bases and that happened in 1968. We only ever had

probes, we only ever got mortared. And the turning of their, the turning of the mines at the last Fire support base before we were relieved that was the last straw with me. And it just showed that there was a lax, a laxity which we’d gotten to the stage where, “Oh well, it’s a bit blasé, it’s a bit old hat now, nothing’s going to happen.” And the last couple of weeks something did happen.

And you never knew when something was going to happen. You never knew whether that 70 or 80 man force that was 10 kilometres away the day before last was going to come over the bloody wire and have a go at you. That was Vietnam. There was no front line. You’d be like the cowboys circling the wagons out in the middle of the jungle and you had 3 tanks and 3 APCs and 3 guns and you’d fire at the

support base with your mortar sections. And that was it. There you were. We were the cowboys that circled the wagon waiting for the Indians to come and have a go at us. And that’s the closest analogy that I can think of. My greatest fear was flying in helicopters. And we did a lot of flying. I went out on a light fire team mission after that heavy contact that I was telling you about when 5 battalion got cut up.

And the next morning I went out in a gun ship. It was a bit of a joy ride. I was green by the time we landed. I tell you what they just move those things. And wherever we went all you could see where white parachute flares from the night before and the craters and so on. One of the helicopters were shot down that night and the crew stayed in the helicopter looking over their guns all night. The VC were moving around trying to find them. They couldn’t find them. But they were too frightened to do anything. They couldn’t do

anything. They switched their radios off, all the lights off, everything and they stayed there looking over their guns until the following morning because at daylight the VC are gone. At night, they own the night. We don’t move at night, they do. And if there’s movement at night, 9 times out of 10 it’s VC. Unless it’s a patrol going out after last light and then you wouldn’t have any other friendlies in the area so you know that if anything moves in

front of you it’s history. My experience wasn’t a harsh one. I would do it again. I enjoyed my service. I was disappointed with my country when I came back. I still think that it’s a stain on our national

character the way the country treated their soldiers because they did a wonderful job, especially the national servicemen, they did a wonderful job and I’m very proud of them.

It’s too late. The hurt has been done. There are people that won’t admit to being Vietnam veterans, that’s terrible.

They don’t want anybody to know that they’re a Vietnam veteran. Now they should be proud of the fact.

We weren’t political animals. The war was won and then negotiated away. We won the war. I mean, it’s a terrible thing to say but everything that was accomplished by the soldiers, we never lost a battle, but the war was lost by the politicians because it was negotiated away. The Americans just wanted to get out of it they didn’t care how. And we couldn’t stay there by ourselves so we had to

go.

OK. We’d start first morning

procedure, stand to, get that over and done with until first light, the sun would come up. Once we’d done that we had our routine that we had to do. We’d split the crew into two, half would clean their personal weapons and half would clean the gun from the night’s shootings. So they had to maintain it, strip the breach, strip it all down so it didn’t misfire. Clean the barrel, lightly oil it and

make sure that all of the reservoirs were full. And then what we’d do, we’d change around. As soon as they’d all cleaned one lot of personal weapons – we wouldn’t all break down our personal weapons at the same time we’d do 50/50. So half the crew would clean their personal weapons, the other half would clean the gun. And whilst the other half were cleaning their personal weapons if they finished the gun they’d go and do their personal ablutions. They wouldn’t usually have a shower in the morning they’d have one at

night. So they’d have a shave, clean their teeth and have a wash in the basin and then put breakfast on. Then the rest of the guys would finish the gun off and the next morning we’d swap over. So once we’d done that we’d maybe prepare the ammunition for the day. Unbox the ammo and make sure we had enough rounds to do a shoot. We used to try and keep at least 60 rounds ready for an emergency

and then the rest were in boxes. By the time we’d got rid of 60 we could have another 60 unboxed so that was OK. We wouldn’t unbox them all because if we had to move in a hurry you’d have to box them back up again and it would increase your time taken to move from Point A to Point B. But once you’d done that you might go up then for your morning conference. I would go as the gun sergeant; all the gun sergeants would come up

and then we’d have the requirements for the day, whether we were expected to provide any assistance to the infantry that evening in the form of a patrol or an ambush or whatever. And if that was the case then people would be asked to volunteer and then after that we’d go back to our gun positions. We might fire a mission or two as called upon. The infantry used to

move during the day, they wouldn’t move at night. At last light they’d go into a harbour and they’d put down their perimeter for the evening and make sure that all of their arcs were covered. And they’d register their fire missions without actually firing the shots but they’d send the co-ordinates through to make sure that they could call fire in if they needed it during the night without having to register first. So they’d do what they’d call a silent registration. And the command post would do all of that with them and they’d

plot all of the documentation, plot the mission. So they’d have the grid reference, the angle of sight elevation, charge and direction to that point. And if they needed to they would call down, “Whisky Mike, Whisky Mike, fire mission Whisky Mike” and they’d put the information on the guns and fire it and the rounds could be away in 30 seconds. The day could consist of

repairing or putting up more barbed wire, star pickets, digging extra holes if we had visitors coming out or something like that. We used to get people who’d come over for a look, CMF [Citizens’ Military Force] members and they’d just appear on the position and they might be with us for 7 days, 6 days and then they’d go somewhere else to have a look around to

see what was happening. And they were Army Reserve people or CMF as they used to be called. I remember a friend of mine, Captain Barry Newman, a top guy, he was my secretary when I was president of the VVA [Vietnam Veterans’ Association]. He went across to Vietnam for two weeks. And he’d never fired an M16 before and they gave him this you beaut new rifle that he’d never fired before and he shot himself with it. They said, “You’d better go and test fire it in the pit.” He went over and test fired it and

hit a star picket and the round bounced out and hit him in the groin. He said, “Oh, I’m bleeding, I’ve been hit.” They said, “You’ll be right, go down the RAP, get 2 codeine and a glass of water and they’ll patch it up for you.” Then they said, “You’d better get down to the helicopter it’s waiting for you.” And he said, “Surely I’m not going out like this.” They said, “Yes, you are.” No sooks here, away you go, out on the fire support base. But he did a good job. He was a gun number at a

fire support base and did a good job. Certainly there were long periods of boredom and inactivity and we used to try and catch a few Zs [get a bit of sleep] during the day because you never knew whether you’d be up all night. Because it was at night that the VC did all their movement and it was at night when they were threatened, generally, at night, when they threatened somebody who was harboured up for the night.

Not always. During the day – of course we used to move during the day and if they were in a bunker system and our guys ran into them during the day we might be called upon to fire 3 or 400 rounds per gun and that’s a lot of work. We used to have a bucket of water alongside the gun so we could wash the barrel out like in olden times to stop the rounds from jamming because we used to fire so many rounds. So we’d have a bucket of water and we’d put the barrel stave in that and just push it straight up through the barrel.

It did two things it cooled the barrel down and washed the cordite out so we could load the next round. If you didn’t do that your cartridge cases might jam and then you’d have a stoppage and you’d have to belt it out the other end. That was a bit hairy so you tried to keep the barrel pretty well clean and the chamber clean. The barrel tended to clean itself when the driving band went through but the chamber used to cordite up and you could get a stoppage there quite easily.

But as I said to you before 20% action and 80% boredom.

Sure. We went into the Peter Badcoe Club [a soldiers’ club in Vietnam] in Vung Tau which interested me because Peter had been a mentor and I’d worked for Peter for a long time.

Of course they’d built this rest and recreation centre with a huge pool and named it after Peter, the Peter Badcoe Club and that was where we went to for 2 days. They let us go into town and do some sightseeing. We went into the bars and tried to stay away from the Vietnamese girls who were all over you like a rash and wanted to take you home. You wouldn’t dare go in case at the other end of it there was a Vietcong waiting to ransom you

or even worse. But certainly the bars were quite high class. The Grand Hotel I remember in Vung Tau was where all the French officers used to dine and it was very grandiose. And we went in there, a friend and I went in there and had a look around. It had big chandeliers and you know French provincial décor and it was quite beautiful, quite stunning. In fact the whole of Vung Tau

in its day would have been just beautiful. The coastline, they had pavilions there, beach pavilions and things like that that you would see in the South of France and places like that, you know, where the tourist was well catered to. The architecture was French provincial and even more so in the north I’m told than it was in the south

but of course we never got to the north and I wouldn’t go there. But, no, a normal day was spent perhaps firing a few missions, catching a few ZZZs, unpacking ammunition, maintaining the gun, looking after your personal weapons, briefings, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you had to take out a patrol you had about 2 or 3 hours of work to do. You had to brief the patrol, you had to plan the route, you had to make sure that you had a least 3 or 4

fire missions worked out so that you could call fire in at any stage and then adjust the fire in to your position should you need to protect yourself with some artillery fire. And you’d silently register those. You wouldn’t fire them, and then hope that your map reading was correct. It’s unfortunate but we actually did drop rounds on our own people and attack them.

It happened – at the time I’d been evacuated to hospital with vascularly dysentery off one of the sites and I was in hospital when the battery commander came in. But he was firing a danger close mission and he took the zone of a couple of guns so that one round landed behind him and one landed in front of him. And quite frankly he received a very large piece of shrapnel in the shoulder and his signalman was wounded in the buttocks and they were quite fortunate because they were just

laying in a small, shallow depression in the ground and the rounds landed very close to them. Well, our boss was deaf anyway but when they got him to hospital they found that he couldn’t get out of it, that he was deaf, so they sent him home. But he was a good BC, tough, fair. He retired as a brigadier general. I saw him in 1987 and he was a brigadier at the opening of the war

Memorial in Canberra. What was that? What year was that? 1990 was it, ’91 or 92, I forget, but he was a brigadier still serving then but he’s since retired. Lots of guys that I knew and served with, it’s unfortunate, but they’ve developed cancer and a lot of them have since passed away. The battery guide, Billy Bostock –

I’ve got a photograph of him looking in a spider hole, and we had to pull him out of another one. He had a belly full of CS gas and we had to literally pull him out of the trap door, out of the tunnel system. He died of cancer – whether that had anything to do with it we’ll never know.

Everybody was. It was in the water that you drank and it got into the food chain. They

stopped spraying in 1970 because there were so many villagers having miscarriages and they put it down to the defoliants and the spraying. It got into the water table, the water table that we were pumping up and using, it used to come out in the bladder and everyone drank it. The water was assessed as unfit for human consumption in Sydney laboratories but we were drinking it.

But it didn’t matter the Dapsan that we were taking was a carcinogen anyway so it didn’t matter. It’s the same old story you didn’t know enough about it.

No, I don’t think so. I think the director of Medical Services knew and that came out in the Royal Commission. He said, “Well, we knew, but we thought that the risk of getting malaria was higher than the

risk of getting cancer by taking a carcinogen.” So it was a calculated risk on their part and he said that and it was quite clearly that he said that that was the case. But I think that the fair share of veterans that are coming down with cancer is something that you have to live with and something that you think about quite a lot. You shouldn’t but you do and so far I’m

OK. I’ve had a small cancer in the eye and that was removed and hasn’t come back. Other than that I’m pretty right. A few things on my skin that I’ve got to keep an eye on but I’ve got a good medical officer and he checks me out once every 2 or 3 months to make sure I’m OK and if it’s going to be it’s going to be isn’t it? You can’t really worry too much about it but you often think about it because so many friends that you

know that are younger than you have succumbed to cancer. And it’s all different sorts – stomach cancer, soft tissue sarcomas – all that sort of stuff. It’s just something that does, that you do think about a lot and you shouldn’t probably. Just get on with your life and you should consider yourself lucky that you haven’t finished up with one leg or

no legs or traumas. The only thing that I’ve really got a bad problem with at the moment is a few nightmares and dreams and tinnitus. That reminds me of Vietnam. I developed that in mid ’70 and it’s been with me ever since, screaming in my right ear, and that’s a bit debilitating but I’ve got a

generator, a noise generator now and that helps me a lot and I can control the noise in my head partly. I find that if I’m active and engaged in doing something and it takes my mind off it a lot better than having nothing to do. Just sitting down of a night quietly it drives you crazy – but I was crazy anyway so it doesn’t mater. Other than that I’m

OK I suppose. I’m a lot better off than a lot of people are.

Yes, I can. That was a hell of a shock actually. No one really knew what was going to happen. And I just assumed, silly me, that we would all end up as a unit back together for a period of time but that

wasn’t the case. The battery basically went to the four wings of the earth. We got to Mascot Airport in Sydney at about midnight because they weren’t game to bring us back in daylight because the radicals would be out protesting and chucking things at you and calling you baby killers. So rather than have that they’d bring you in about midnight and it still didn’t stop some protestors coming in but they were only in small numbers so you didn’t take any

notice of them. But it certainly was a bit unexpected, the way it all finished. It finished at the airport. Basically, you are torn between people that are there to meet you, Karen and her folks were there, and the people that you’ve lived with for the last couple of years. You sort of didn’t know which

way to go –whether to spend the time, which you wanted to do, with your wife who you hadn’t seen for 6 months, or when you realised what was happening when and they told you, “You’re all going your separate ways, make sure you’ve got all your equipment and your gear and your trucks will be forwarded on to you.” That you were going to be given leave and then sent off all over Australia and you would not get back together again so to say your goodbyes now. That, I thought, was

bad form. The people who had spent a lot of time with and you’d tried to do the right thing with and support one another – I think it could have been done a lot better. Had I been given the task I would have thought it was common sense that you would keep the unit together and then reassemble it, after leave, and then have your farewell and

then head off. And I think that that would have been a less harrowing situation. But there were guys that you’d been responsible for for 12 months and you’d had to look after their welfare, all of a sudden that was it! It was like, “Hell, the umbilical’s been cut. I’m not responsible any more. What do I do now?”

And it’s a funny thing to explain to somebody that’s never been involved in that intense situation where you’re suddenly forced apart and you have no say whereas before you came together gradually and trained very hard and you did all these things together. Now, you’re ripped asunder. It was traumatic. I guess at the

time your brain was spinning, your mind was topsy turvy. You had mixed emotions. But later when you had time to think about it, and I did, I thought there were things that I should have said to these people, there were things that I wanted to say to these people. Those people are now dead of course and I can’t say it. And it would have been nice. It would have cost the government a lot of money to bring us

back together after our leave and of course they were looking to save the dollar and I understand why they did it but I don’t agree that they did it that way. I thought it could have done much better. And there was no debriefing. There should have been a debriefing. And to be asked to step off a plane and assume your position within society again, especially for national servicemen, I thought that was a big

task, a very big task. And of course it would have been cheaper to bring people back together and counsel them and debrief them than the cost now that they’re incurring with people who are unstable and I’d count myself in there – psychologically debilitated and who are angry and don’t really know why still. I think it was

badly done and they should never, ever do that again. At least the soldiers that came back from the First and Second World War had that time on board ship to say their goodbyes. So when they hit the Quay they were well and truly sick of one another and they were happy to go. But to jump on a plane and sit in a seat and you can’t talk to everybody to get off the plane at the other

end and meet and greet your parents or your relatives and then just to go, it’s very impersonal. It’s emotionally disturbing and I believe that it did disturb quite a few people. There were things that they wanted to say. There were things that should have been said which were unsaid and thanks that should have been given that were never given. It wasn’t until 1987, the Welcome Home Parade, that you got a

chance to say things to those that were still around. And that was something that I thought was bad form, really bad form other than the fact that no one really wanted to know. You were a Vietnam Veteran “Shut up and get on with life” and that’s fair enough too I suppose. But with a country that places so much credence

upon the Anzac traditions and the formation of the nation in the fact that we look back to our roots, to our soldiers, and giving them a great deal of credibility for the way in which this nation has shaped itself, I think it’s unforgivable the way the nation let them down, especially the national servicemen. For regular soldiers like myself it wasn’t

so bad. We had our peer groups and we stayed for 10 or so or 12 years after that. But for those young guys, they gave their best and they volunteered, 90% of them, and it’s unforgivable, unforgivable.

In different ways – in different forms.

You don’t know until you start to talk to people, even today. I’d met people who were protestors. I’ve met politicians, when I was president, who marched in moratoriums and I’ve spoken to them about it. And they realise that the hurt that they caused was not intended

but there was no thought given to who they were hurting. All they were doing, they were politically motivated to cause problems for the government of the day. And they had no consideration for the soldiers. If the nation didn’t care about them why should they. The people didn’t really care or the vocal minority didn’t care. The vast majority of people that I speak to

say, when they find out I’m a Vietnam veteran, do you know what they say to me? “Isn’t it disgusting what Australia did to its veterans?” “Isn’t that disgusting, we feel ashamed.” And I think the problem now – it’s a role reversal. It’s the population out there that feel bad. The veterans have adjusted to some degree but there’s now an illness, if you like, in the

population who feel bad about it and they’re carrying the burden now of responsibility that perhaps they oughtn’t need to carry. When in fact the vocal minority who were out there running around with banners and flags and so forth – well motivated and highly principled and against war in any form for any reason, perhaps pacifists –

they were quite right in what they were saying. War was a terrible thing. If you ask a soldier about it they’ll tell you there should be no wars. But it’s not the soldiers who start it, it’s the politicians who start it, so you aim everything at the politician, not the soldiers. You may have been signs that say, “Support our troops.” Have you seen those signs? “Support our troops.” Well, the Vietnam Veterans’ Association have put those out and I think that’s a really good thing to

do. But it won’t happen again. It shouldn’t happen again. Irrespective of government’s or people’s personal beliefs it shouldn’t happen again. We’ve learned, I believe. But it’s too late for a lot of veterans because they’re dead and they died before, by their own hand, before the Welcome Home Parade and I think that’s very sad.

Look, I always believe that we did the right thing for the wrong reasons. We did the right thing. The people just wanted to be left alone I found out when I got there. They didn’t care who was in control, the communists or the democracy. All they wanted was to be bloody well left alone to get on with their lives and that’s fair enough.

I’ve lost my train of thought, it’s getting late in the day, what was your question again?

Disappointment that the army didn’t do more for the veterans. Disappointed that the senior officers who were really great guys,

top men, didn’t stand up more for their soldiers – disappointed that a lot of the guys that I believed that would have stood up for the soldiers had passed away. A lot of these people were political animals. They were looking for appointments. They were looking to cover their backsides so they weren’t going to make themselves a pain in the neck to the government of the day because they were looking for very senior appointments.

So I think that they failed the test to stand up for their soldiers when they should have. And I think that that’s something that they have to live with. The bulk of the Vietnam veterans stood up for themselves were junior ranks and I’m talking about private soldiers here and corporals and

sergeants and some warrant officers but not many officers. The officers tended to go with the RSL. The RSL was more the recognised, government recognised ex services body that they were comfortable dealing with. They were very uncomfortable dealing with the Vietnam Veterans’ Association and

for the reason being that they believed that they were left-wing radicals and some were and they were quite entitled to their opinions. But most weren’t and the government should have listened more to the association and less to the RSL. The RSL didn’t really represent Vietnam Veterans until now

because the RSL now is mainly governed, if you like, or run by Vietnam veterans. Once again, I’d say that the likes of the old guard are fading. In ten years time they’ll probably be dropping off the perch like no one’s business and if it’s not able to get enough associate members

and Vietnam veterans to join, the RSL will be a dead body literally.

Oh yes. I end up punching walls. I have a recurring nightmare where a woman in black pyjamas comes through my bedroom window, wearing a conical hat, and she empties a gun into my chest.

And I try to yell out to warn someone that you’d better get out of the house because we’re going to be shot but I can’t talk because the first shot hits me through the throat and I can’t talk. Not thinking of course as you would that when you hear a gun shot you’re off and running so the family would be out of the door but that’s the recurring nightmare that I have.

I also have a nightmare about the fact that we killed 3 people and I still see the gun crews fighting over those people as to who got them and that’s silly and that’s a recurring nightmare that I have. I know that one of the other members of my crew has the same nightmare.

He wrote to me and told me that he does. And it’s just unfortunate that I can’t get it out of my mind but I’m a lot better than I was. Since I’ve put up my photos I’ve come to terms with it a bit more that while I buried it away, it was in the subconscious, now I’ve dragged everything out, if you like, I’m feeling a lot better. Because it was service that I was denying to

some degree and now I can talk about it openly as you’ve noticed. I couldn’t have done this 10 years ago.

If there is it’s being suppressed. There isn’t anything that I wouldn’t talk about to you. There are obviously other things that have happened in my life but time dims the memory I’m afraid and the things that you think about a lot are at the forefront of your mind. No, I think that’s about all that I would say that I can remember that I need to talk to you about.

Thank you for listening to me.

I hope that in some way it will help the future generations.

Thank you.