Australians at War Film Archive

Oh right. I was born in Wynnum, Queensland on the 16th December 1931. My father was a migrant from Britain and my mother was from Ireland

and we lived in Wynnum until the war started and my father enlisted in the Second World War, sorry, and I went to school first in Manly State School, and I think after about two years after the war started we moved up to Brisbane and my father was always away in the army.

He was a member of the Australian Instructional Corps. Having been a veteran from the First World War he served in France with the British Army. We lived in Brisbane and we lived in Rosalie, Rosalie, yeah, and that’s where I had my formative years and I went to school at the Marist Brothers College, at Rosalie.

Used to ride my bike up there and during the war years the school was cut down a lot. We had to, we were only going to school half days sometimes and some days we weren’t going at all. Didn’t have much schooling really and a lot of the time when we were at school, we were digging trenches in the early part. So we used to be out there in the yard digging all the slit trenches and during the school hours if the air

raid sirens went we used to get into the trenches and throw stones at each other and make weird noises like Japanese Zero fighter planes coming down. It never ever happened but I continued my schooling there and because of these constricted hours that we had for schooling, only half a day each day, like five half days a week,

even if we had five days, I had trouble with my education. I spent three years in the third grade and I think the only reason they put me into the fourth grade was I started smoking and knocking round with sheilas [girls], so they got rid of me for corrupting the younger kids and put me in the fourth grade. Anyway I finished up, I left school in the sixth grade and went to work, tried to get an apprenticeship and in those days straight after the war

apprenticeships were hard to get. And I did start to do a couple of jobs as an apprentice carpenter but all they seemed to want me to do was saw up logs of wood in the timber yards, so I branched out into something else. I took other jobs in Brisbane until finally I became a matelot [sailor] with the sea, as a merchant seaman,

and I spent about three years before the mast, around Australia. Got a trip across to Canada, via Hawaii, and New Zealand and Fiji. And in the meantime my father in the army was transferred down to South Australia to Adelaide. So when I squeezed enough salt water out of my socks and decided to go ashore,

I moved down to Adelaide and lived there with them for a while. And then I took on a job as, in the, because I had no proper skills and very bad education, I took a job in a factory at Chrysler car factory on the trim line, putting upholstery together and I did that for a while until the motor industry wasn’t really good. They

put me off because things were going really bad, so I went to another place to do the same sort of work again, motor trimmer, so they put me off there so I went to another place to work and they put me off there and I finished off back at Chrysler again, so I did this for a few years. Then I looked in the paper and I saw an ad that said, it was an army ad, and it said “Tradesmen required in the Royal Australian Electrical Mechanical Engineers Motor Trimmers”. I thought “Well I can do that”.

So I filled out the application, they sent me down to the RAEME [Royal Australian electrical and Mechanical Engineers] Workshops in Adelaide and I did a trade test, and I passed it, so they agreed to enlist me as a Group Five Motor Trimmer, and in those days Group Six was the highest group you could get for a private. I said ‘This will do me.” and I joined. They told me that private was probably the ceiling

rank that I’d ever get and I said ‘That will do me. A private in the army, in the permanent army with a good future, I can do twenty years, it’s better than taking your chances outside in the motor industry.” So in I went and did the recruit training course at Wagga Wagga, Kapooka that’s it, and at the end of your

three months training, we did twelve weeks in those days, at the end of your twelve weeks training they do an allocation and everyone has to front up for an allocation to corps. Mostly they’re looking for infantry fellows; they’re looking for armoured corps and artillery and after that just a few. It’s mainly for those three arms corps that they want and of course they tried to talk me into going into the infantry. They said “You’d be

better off in the infantry. You’re more inclined that way than what you are RAEME.” And I thought “An infantryman Group One and a RAEME man Group Five, I’ll stay Group Five.” So I stayed with the corps at RAEME and they posted me down to Broadmeadows in Melbourne, it’s a northern suburb, and I was posted into the first medium workshops,

and I think in those days they used to say you were shadow posted, shadow posted to other units. They had a lot of people who were only in units on paper. The actual body was somewhere else and they called it a shadow posting. But I was physically there at 1Medium Workshops and others weren’t there but they were on paper that they were there and I stayed there for a while. And I was lucky there because they had a major,

an administrative major, it was Major Self and I still remember his name and he said to me, he said “You’re never going to get any further, being a craftsman, a private, in the trade you’re in, you should change trades and do something else.” I said “Well what can I do?” He said “Clerk-technical’s a good idea.” So I said “Alright, how do I do that?” And he said “Well I’ll set you some questions on a daily basis, you go away, get the answers, come back

and give me the answers and I’ll tell you whether you’re right or wrong. You find them, go around to the Q store [quartermaster’s store] and it’s the clerk-techs that do all the ordering of RAEME stores and that sort of thing and find out these answers.” So he did, he gave me all these questions and I used to go away and have a heck of a time finding all these answers. He was pretty good, not bad for a major to waste his time with a private like that and while this was all going on, suddenly

he brought to my attention that there was a clerk GD [general duties] course going on and I could become a general duties clerk. So I said “I’ll have a go at that.” He said “Well you haven’t got enough education.” So I said “How can I do that?” And he said “Go and do a class two education course.” which is about the equivalent to the seventh grade and I went and did that and I got a B pass, strangely enough. And back I came and they sent me off to do this clerk duties

course, which lasted about three or four months, passed that, came back to the unit and they said “Just hang around, do your job and we’ll get you a posting and you’ll go somewhere as a clerk-tech, or a clerk GD.” either because clerk GD’s could do either job. So back to work I went and suddenly one day I was sent for, to the orderly room, I was still a craftsman and they sent for me to come to the orderly room.

And I fronted up there and there was another young fella, another craftsman, he fronted up there too, the two of us and I thought “Hello, I’m in trouble, I’m going to be on an A4, I must have done something wrong and they’ve found out. I’m being charged with an offence.” And the RSM [regimental sergeant major] lined us up, the two of us there, one behind the other and says “Righto, attention, quick march, left, right, left right.” into the commanding officer’s office, “Halt, right turn.” And this is typical of a charge, how they hear it but I didn’t know at this time

that if they were charging me they should have told me before, but I was too young, too green a soldier to realise. So I fronted up “Right turn” and the CO [commanding officer] started off about good soldiers and bad soldiers and all that sort of stuff and “As from today you two are promoted to lance-corporal”. I looked at him and I said “Who, me too?” and I

think it was the worst thing that I could have said because I almost lost it. He got furious, he said “What do you mean ‘you too’.” I think he thought that I probably knew that I was going to be promoted to lance-corporal but I didn’t know and I thought “Fancy me being a lance-corporal. They told me I’d never get passed craftsman.” So that was it, my first stripe and it’s got to be the biggest stripe you’ve ever seen. There’s nothing more powerful on this earth, than a lance-corporal and I was as proud as punch. And trying to sew it on the uniform,

it was a great big vee in those days that you had and trying to get it so it didn’t look like wings. And anyway I got it on and I’d moved to the first rung and that was great. And shortly after that I was posted. A posting order came in and I was posted up to Sydney, to Dundas, not to Dundas, I was living in Dundas, in the Signal’s Quarters there

but I was posted to Parramatta, the 1/15th Royal New South Wales Lancers in the LAD. And I was it, I was the only RAEME person in the LAD [Light Aid Detachment]. The rest were CMF [Civilian Military Force] in those days. So I spent a bit of time there and I was posted into a corporal’s position as a lance-corporal and the commanding officer was a captain, the senior cadre officer, the regular army officer.

He was a captain and his name was Captain Grey and who finished up eventually I think as a general, but he was a hard man and a typical armoured corps fella and when it came the time for the annual confidential report, whether or not I was to be promoted to corporal, he gave me a wonderful recommendation. “He’s outstanding at this, he’s outstanding at that and the other, however

he’s only been in the unit for a short period of time, so therefore he is not recommended to promotion to corporal at this time, however I feel sure that in a few months time when I report on him again, I will recommend him for corporal.” Now there’s an Irish recommendation for you. “I know he’s good enough to promote to corporal now but I’m not going to do it, but I will do it later.” Anyway the corps got this and

the corps didn’t like it. The postings officer down south said “If they don’t want to make you a corporal Craftsman Rodger, then we have units that do want to make people corporals, so we’ll shift you.” So they took me out and took me back down to Melbourne and posted me to a unit in Melbourne and gave me back to where I came from, but to 3 Base Workshops, which was in the same building and gave me a corporal, two stripes on march in.

And then I was a corporal, so I was the orderly room corporal for, not for long either, for about six months, then a sergeant’s vacancy came up within the unit and they made me a sergeant. And during this time while I was a sergeant, the regimental sergeant major marched in, he’d been in Vietnam, ex-training team, a warrant officer, Don Hodgart, a gentleman,

and one of the finest RAEME warrant officers that you would ever meet, if not the best, top soldier. He took me under his wing. He was a rough and tough sort of bloke but for some reason he liked me, I don’t know why, but anyway we got on really well together. Within six months of him being there he said ‘There’s a staff

sergeant’s vacancy here now, I’m going to tell the colonel you’ve got to be a staff sergeant” so he went in, came out and said ‘They’re going to promote you to staff sergeant.” He got me promoted to staff sergeant. From this stage I’d gone from craftsman, to, oh from lance-corporal to corporal in six months, from corporal to sergeant in another six months, and from sergeant to staff sergeant in another six. So there’s eighteen months I went

to from lance corporal to staff sergeant. Now he was an ex-member of the training team and he was a tough soldier this fella. He was fair but hard, tough. He didn’t take any nonsense, no crap and he told me about what he did on the training team, the type of work he did and I used to have a few pots of beer with him, in those days I used to like a tube.

And we were over in the sergeants’ mess and he told me all about it and he said “It was good, it’s up to you.” I said “I wouldn’t mind doing that.” He said “Well it’s up to you, you’ve got to qualify, you’ve got to pass the course.” I said “Well I’ll do the course.” so I volunteered for the course. They sent me for, I think they sent me for a psychological examination course first to see if I was out of my mind because I was willing to do it. But I did it and then I went up to Canungra and did the

course and it was about three or four months, a tropical warfare advisors course, and everybody on it was sergeants and above and there was one major, a scattering of captains, and warrant officers class one and class two and staff sergeants and sergeants. Then we did this course and it was a pretty tough course and it was run by ex-training team fellas who’d been to Vietnam, worked with the team

and knew what it was all about. Physical fitness was probably the hardest part of it. They used to get us up every morning before even the sun came up and we were running around the camp carrying weapons, marching, or jogging past platoons of infantry, platoons that were preparing to go to Vietnam. They did what they called the battle efficiency course there, shorter than ours, and

more inclined to physical fitness than anything else. But on our course we did all sorts of things, like company tactics and village defence and cordons and searches in villages and how to negotiate mine fields, which reminds me of a funny thing. We were doing a village cordon and search, they had a mock up Viet Cong village with all the bunkers and

all the holes in the ground and all the huts and all the things you would see in an normal Vietnamese village. And we did this search, we cordoned it, we blocked if off and then we searched it. I’m not sure what I was at this stage, we used to change around, being company commanders, platoon commanders, platoon sergeants and section leaders. And we were

moving around inside the village searching everywhere and suddenly I stood on a mock mine, boom, up it went, smoke under my foot, “Staff Rodger, you’re dead, stood on a mine, you’re dead”. So I moved, stood on another one, boom, oh my God, well I shifted again and I blew three of them up and the chief instructor yelled out “For Christ’s sake, Staff Rodger stand still and leave some mines for somebody else to stand on.” I said “Righto.” so I

was dead for sure and I was out of that but I’ll never forget that and I learnt a lesson there, don’t step on mines, especially three of them and a funny thing was when I did get to the funny country I never stood on one, people all around me did, all around me and I never, ever stood on one. Maybe I got my share in the training. But anyway we did the course and I qualified. It was hard to qualify too because I

was a RAEME fellow and you really are, you’re competing against each other because they make the pass mark as hard as probably the best people who attended and if they’ve got fifty on the course and thirty of them are infantry fellas, who are scoring really high, they make the rest of you look silly, see so you’re inclined to get a bad pass because the infantry fellows were their bread and butter. And all

they did for the day’s training, the next day we had to study up what we were going to do, the RAEME fellows, well I was the only RAEME fellow on it but the RAEME fellow and the Service Corps fellows and the signallers, and all those, would be sitting up all night, reading from books and studying and writing notes and all that sort of thing, whereas the infantry bloke would be over in the sergeants’ mess having a few beers. Where in the morning he’d sit on the toilet with a book and just thumb through it while he’s having his morning crap and he’d read it all, close it up and he would shine

when you got out there, because it was their bread and butter.[so basic] Anyway I passed the course, came back home to Melbourne, and waited. I think I passed, did the course early 1967, and it was December 1967 before they gave me the nod and said “Righto RAEME.” see the corps were all allocated a certain

number of people to put in the training team. There was a hundred members of the training team every year and these people were replaced annually and most of them were infantry corps, a handful of artillery fellas, because they needed advisors for the guns, tanks for the armoured regiments in Vietnam, some of those, signal corps fellows, intelligence

corps fellows and the likes of the RAEME blokes and the service corps and that sort of thing. We weren’t given our tasks to do like our trade, we were given infantry jobs, same as the infantry fellows. So RAEME was allocated one RAEME person per year for the team and that year it was me and off I went. They posted me over there.

You don’t want me to do any detail of that now, do you? I’ll do the, come back?

A small picture?

Righto, well I went to, I arrived in, pardon me, I arrived in Saigon in early December. I went over by QANTAS [airline], QANTAS used to take us over, went across

by QANTAS. We arrived at night on the QANTAS plane, in the dark and everyone you look at as soon as you get on the tarmac has got to be VC [Viet Cong], in your mind. You’ve got it drummed into you, about the VC, to be on your toes, to expect them but to see the Vietnamese for the first time at the airport is a bit of a shock, especially in the dark.

And I looked down the gangplank and there was a sea of these little white hats that they used to wear, a sea of these, I didn’t know what they were at this stage, all these white hats and they were just two feet above the ground. I thought “What the hell is that? All these little cone things sticking up” and then when I walked down the gangplank it was the working party, the Vietnamese working party that was sent out there to unload the plane and do all the cleaning up and all that. And there they were in the typical Vietnamese squat, down on their

haunches, women and men, because it’s hard to tell the difference because they all look alike with their clothes, similar type clothes, the silky gowns that they wore. And to see them for the first time you sort of nudge away and you walk around them thinking “Oh my God, who are they?” They wouldn’t be there if they were bad guys and they trucked everybody off and of course I was picked up by

the training team people and I think there were two other guys going to the training team with me and I forget who they were and they put us in a Jeep and took us into Saigon. Ton San Nhut to Saigon is a fair way, it’s a fairly long drive and it’s through very, very heavy traffic. At this stage Saigon was teeming with people, people from the countryside had all come to the city to get away from the war.

And there was thousands, the population of Saigon was enormous, I wouldn’t even hazard a guess but they were shoulder to shoulder together on the street with their put-puts, their motor scooters, their little Lambretta motorbikes with seven people on it. Seven people on one Lambretta, the whole family, mum, dad and all the kids and a pig and a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK if they could get it on, and all this as we went down the road in an open Jeep,

and I’m looking at them all and thinking “Well this must be alright, because the guy driving us is a member of the team, and he’s been here a while and he must think it’s alright, he’s not holding a gun.” We’re not armed of course and in we go, into Saigon. They billeted us for the night and the following morning we went into the hut and were interviewed by the commanding officer and allocated our places where we were going to be sent.

The advisers were sent all over the south of Vietnam. You operated in various units throughout the country in twos, two Australians sometimes, maybe one Australian, one American but you were always in two’s. We were allocated our spots and then we went off to where we were to work. I served in 1Corps for

openers, up in a place called Nam Hoa , just west of Hue and then moved back down south and was there for a little while in Saigon, as the administration bloke, moving people around, going out to Tan Son Nhut, picking them up, the newbies [new recruits] that came into the country, and watched the scared look on their faces as we drove through all the traffic. I went into the Mekong Delta after that, served in Can Tho for a while and then

went across to a place called Tra Vinh in Vinh Bin Province, where the delta goes into the ocean and served out my twelve months and went home. And went home to a great greeting, I was told by my wife at the airport, not at the airport, when I got home that she didn’t want me anymore

and I served for another twelve months in Australia, in various units. I went to Army Headquarters. This warrant officer, Don Hodgart, who had given me the inspiration to join the team was now the captain, or lieutenant I think, anyway doesn’t matter, he was an officer and he was in the posting office and he was deciding who goes with the posting officer, the senior one, he was

recommending to the major who goes where and he said “I want that bloke back here with me”. And so I got posted to a bloody desk job in the postings office in Army Headquarters at Albert Park in Melbourne. And I said to him “What the hell have you got me here for? I don’t want to be here.” He said “Sit down, shut your bloody mouth, I’m here for two years and so are you.” I thought “Oh my God.” So there I was pushing

paper around the desk and after twelve months of slogging away in Vietnam it was a bit boring and tame to be working there until finally one day, what did we do? We had a blackboard there, not a blackboard, a board, I’m thinking of Ros Kelly [a Federal politician in the 1990s criticised for funding allocations worked out on a whiteboard] you know when they say blackboard or whiteboard. She was the one that used to rub everything out. Do you remember her? Politician, she got the sack. Anyway we had this board and the names,

all the units were up there, every RAEME unit and every posting or position that RAEME had within these units had a name that you could take out of this unit over here and pin it in there and put him in that corporal’s vehicle mechanic job or take this clerk from here and put him into this job and that’s the sort of thing they did. And you had to find vacancies and he said to me “Go out and find me half a dozen vacancies for vehicle mechanics that I can put these new vehicle mechanics in that I’ve got coming

in.” So just for a joke and I planned this before, just for a joke I went out and I got a hanky out of my pocket, and he’s inside of his room and there was a glass wall there and he’s watching me and I put this hanky up and I tied it round my eyes and I got a dart out of my pocket and I stood there with the blindfold on and I just threw it at the board. And when it landed, I picked up the hanky [handkerchief], went over and wrote down the name or the position,

went back, pulled it down again, and I had a little glance and he’s there watching me with his narrowed eyes, typical regimented sergeant major, but there was one mistake I made. The major was over here and he was watching too and when I finished I took them all into him and he’s calling me a mongrel and everything for the way I did it. The major said “Mick, come here” and I went into the office and he said “Mick, where would you rather be,

working here or out in the field in a unit, as a CSM [company sergeant major] or something like that?” I said “I’d rather be out as a company sergeant major sir.” He said “I thought so.” He said “You go and have a look at that board, but don’t use your blindfold, you find a CSM’s job, anywhere, and it’s yours.” I said “Thank you sir.” I went out, I found one, Puckapunyal Area Workshops needs a CSM and I took it into him and he said ‘That’s your’s, pack your bags and you’re going.”

So off I went to Pucka [Puckapunyal] as a company sergeant major. I enjoyed it there for a while and one of the mistakes I made with my mate who was in the posting office at this stage, was over a pot we talked about Vietnam, about the training team and the things he did there and the things I did there and I said “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind going back.” He said “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind going back either, but I can’t, I’m medically unfit.” See, he couldn’t go back. I said “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind going back.”

but it was fatal to say that to him because he sent me back. I was working in Pucka workshops and they sent me across to 2RTB, and I was a company sergeant major at 2RTB, which was training national serviceman, second recruit training battalion Puckapunyal and I did one intake there. And I saw all these fine young Aussie boys coming

in, in the morning, to start their three months training, some had no shoes and socks on, long hair and guitars and mum holding their hand, saying “Don’t forget to change your socks” and we had to make soldiers out of these fellas, and they did become soldiers too. We were very proud of them but we were doing this course, a three month course it was and I think it was about

half way through it and suddenly they said to me, Army Headquarters said “You need to do a tropical warfare weapons course, because down the track you never know you might go back to Vietnam with the training team.” And I thought “Oh yeah, that’s alright, I’ll do it, it’ll be a couple of years before they ask me and I can always say I’ve changed my mind if I have.” But I didn’t feel too bad about it and I went off and did this course up near Sydney at Singleton [north of Newcastle], the infantry training centre, where they taught us to handle

and fire all the NVA [North Vietnamese Army], Viet Cong weapons. There was everything, swords, pistols, right up to recoilless weapons, we could fire everything, they even had some little cannons there that the NVA were using. We had the whole lot, we got to fire the whole lot, fire their mortars, fire their machine guns, learn to strip them down and all that sort of thing. It was a pretty handy thing to know, because on a battlefield if you’re running short of ammunition

and weapons you can always pick anything up and use it yourself. So I did this course and when I came back from the course, I marched back into Puckapunyal, went into the sergeants’ mess and the RSM was there, Pat Jones, I’ll never forget him. He said “Mick, you’ve been posted. We’ve cleared you in the Q store, we’ve taken all your

gear out of your room that belongs to the army and handed it all back in, we’ve packed your bags because you’ve got to be in Watsonia, because you’ve got to go to Vietnam, straight away. We’ll let you stay the night here, but in the morning you’re off.” I said “Oh my God, that’s great isn’t it?” Just like that, overnight. So the following morning and I had a car and all, I had to get rid of that, so the following morning I turned up at Watsonia,

marched into Watsonia and a good mate of mine there was the RSM of Watsonia, not of Watsonia, he was the command sergeant major, Cranky Jack, Warrant Officer “Cranky” Jack Morrison, you heard of him? DCM and bar [Distinguished Conduct Medal], two DCM’s, never quite made the Victorian Cross, but he was good enough, I’ll tell you. Anyway he took me under his arm, I knew him, I knew him before and I spent a couple of days there with him and in the morning,

I think it was the following day when I was leaving, I came down to the sergeant’s mess to have breakfast and Jack called the whole sergeants’ mess to attention. And he said, as I was leaving, that’s right, I’d finished breakfast and I was just about to leave and he called the whole mess to attention and he stood them all up and he said “Mick Rodger here is going back to Vietnam to fight for you bastards,

wish him good luck and give him a cheer.” So they all cheered me, clap, clap, clap, clap, and I thought ‘Oh my God, I’m getting the royal treatment here.” Outside I go, ‘Thank you Jack”. He said “Don’t worry Mick, if you get killed, I’ll give you a good funeral.” Because the command sergeant major do, organise and run military funerals and Jack had that job. He said “I’ll give you a military funeral and because you’re training team mate, I’ll even have tears for you, I’ll cry.”

So I thought “Gee that’s pretty good, Jack Morrison crying, this I’ve got to see.” Anyway he farewelled me and off I went, down to Sydney, spent a couple of days in Sydney and I was back on the plane again and I was back on the way to Saigon again, QANTAS air but we arrived in the daylight. Got out of the plane, saw all the Vietnamese there and I’m saying good day to them,

Chao ong manh gioi and chao co and chao ba, chao em and this is hello sir, hello miss and hello mrs, hello kid and got in the Jeep and drove into town and I’m looking at them all, saying “Get out of the way you mongrels, don’t get so close with your bikes.” and all this sort of thing as we’re going down to Saigon, got in there, met the commanding officer. I think there were about four of us this time going to the team

and he sat us all down and briefed us. This is how they did it. If there’s four of you going back, you sit down with the commander, he’s at his desk and he sits you here, here and here, four of you here and he briefs each one of you, in front of the others, so that you know what he’s been told, so you can get a picture of the area where he’s going. So he briefs him, he briefs the next fella and he brief’s the next fella and then he briefs me. He said “Mick, where you’re going it’s raining mortars. They are

being showered with mortar rounds.” I said “Sir, tell me the good news.” He said ‘There’s none, that’s it, the guy you’re replacing was hit by a mortar and he will be coming out at the same time you’re going in.” And they sent me off, put me in a C130 out at Ton San Nhut, back to Ton San Nhut, into a C130, which is a Hercules, flew me up to Da Nang,

spent the day in Da Nang, was briefed there by the major, what he knew of what was going on and the other three were to come with me and they were farmed out to the various units up there but he came with me down to Chu Lai, because I was going to Quang Ngai, in Quang Ngai Province and we went down to Quang Ngai city. Landed on the airstrip at Quang Ngai

and they put us on a Jeep, landed there with a little Otter plane I think it was, a very noisy little Otter, made a hell of a noise and just about stood still when it flew and would have been flown by Air America I think. That’s the CIA’s [US Central Intelligence Agency] air force, we called them and they flew us in, got off, went into the MACV [US Military Assistance Command Vietnam]

compound in Quang Ngai city and as I got out of the Jeep, waiting there to get on the Jeep was an Australian soldier, Warrant Officer Mann, sitting there in his chair, all pale and wrapped in bandages and a medal hanging off him and that was the guy I was replacing and that was really good to see that. Walked over to him to say “Good day Pat” and he say’s “Good day Mick”. I said

“How you going?” He said “not too bad, I’m doing better than you. I’m going.” I said “Righto Pat.” He got on the Jeep and went back to the airport and flew out and I was put in another Jeep and taken up to Chu Lai, a place called Landing Zone Bayonet or, as the Yank’s called it, LZB Bayonet.

We were going up to Chu Lai, weren’t we?

I was going up to Chu Lai, which was a landing zone they called it and the landing zone was used for bringing in and taking out helicopters. They used the landing zones on this base, it wasn’t a fire support base, it was a landing zone and it was where the regimental headquarters for the 6th ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam] Regiment was there and there were four

battalions and the headquarters for them all on this hill. I arrived there with the major, he took me in, introduced me to the commander there. He was an American lieutenant colonel and they had a 2IC [second in command] major and these were the senior advisors from MACV, they were Americans, and two or three of the American advisors who were present.

And the formalities, shook hands, “Good day, good day, good day” and the commander, the lieutenant colonel said, oh he was a full colonel, yeah. The colonel said “You’ve got to go out straight away on an op [operation]. You’re needed out there. There’s only one advisor and you’ve got to get out there.” You have to have two advisors, you can’t have one, you can never have one advisor on his own with a battalion of Vietnamese because he’s one out.

What we do is when we go out in pairs we support each other, we look after each other because I and he, or he and I, we are responsible for each other and the only one’s that could do this was to fire United States artillery, whether it would be ground gun fire or naval gun fire, gun ships, the

American gun ships would only answer to us, not the Vietnamese. The fixed wing aircraft, like the Jakes [Forward Air Controllers] that organised fixed wing air strikes from the Phantoms and Medivacs [medical evacuation helicopters]. Last but very important: none of these people will answer to a Vietnamese. They would only respond to an American voice or an Australian voice and they got to know us. They knew me by name, these

fellows in these planes and if I wanted to, if I got wounded the other fellow could get me out but if I was on my own and I got wounded, nobody could get me out. The Americans would not bring a helicopter in to pick me up because the Vietnamese voice was exactly the same as a North Vietnamese voice or a Viet Cong, so they would only respond to us. Anyway he said “You’ve got to get out there,

you’ve got to get down to the battalion straight away.” I said “Alright then.” New place, new stuff, what do I take,? I take a rifle of course and plenty of ammunition, basic pouches and packs and bedding and all that stuff. “Here take this hammock, you’ll need this hammock to sleep on, take some flares, take some grenades and take some twenty millimetre canister and flares” and one of the sergeant’s there, American sergeant,

said “And take fifty dollars, stick it in your top pocket.” I said “What do I need fifty dollars for in the scrub, in the jungle?” He said “If you get killed I can rob you, provided I can get to your body before the Vietnamese do.” I thought ‘well that’s a great bit of humour, isn’t it?” I didn’t take fifty dollars but that was the humour, ‘Take fifty dollars and I can rob you if you get killed.” So I grabbed all this stuff together, down to the landing zone, pushed me into a chopper,

and said goodbye to the major and all the others. I said ‘Thanks Major for bringing me up here, it was a waste of time.” so off I went. And I’m the only one in the chopper, but of course there’s the two pilots and they choofed me down past Quang Ngai City, down to a place called Batang Peninsula and it was pretty heavy jungle there and they were flying all around the place and suddenly they came to a little opening in the jungle,

and down they go with the chopper. And I thought ‘There’s a battalion in here somewhere, but I can’t see it and what are they doing dropping me here?” So they dropped me in this little tiny clearing, well they dropped onto the clearing and I thought “What are they doing here?” And then they said “Out”. I said “What do you mean out?” They said “Out, O U T, out.” because they didn’t want to stay on the ground themselves, see with their chopper they’ve got to get up, get you out and go. I said “Righto.” so I grabbed all my stuff and

I’m standing there in the middle of this little landing zone and I’m the only one there and I think, “What am I going to do?” And then I look around the edge of clearing and I spy one lanky half dressed body, standing up over there, just a pair of jungle type pants on and boots and a belt around his waist with a 45[pistol] hanging off it and a PRC25 radio set and the hand

piece in his hand. And he just stepped out of the shadows and he said (demonstrates) so I walk over to him, lugging all my stuff, and in a broad American accent he says “How you going mate? Alright?” He shook my hand and “I’m Ranger Ralph Potter, I’m the advisor with the 1st Battalion of the 6th Armoured Regiment.” I said “Well I’m Mick Rodger, the replacement that’s come out.” He said

“I’m glad to see you.” So he took me into the battalion area, which once we got into the jungle area I found it all, you could see if from the ground but you couldn’t see a thing from up there. He took me over, he said ‘This is our spot here, our little spot, swing your hammock between those two trees there and put your poncho thing over the top, that’s our hole in the ground” and we used to have

our trenches dug straight underneath our hammocks. And the hammocks swung and when the shit hit the fan you just rolled out of your hammock and you’re straight in the hole. And you’ve either got your rifle with you in the hammock or it’s in the hole and you’re radio’s sitting there and you’re ready for business. All your stuff that you need, your maps, your grenades, smoke, everything, it was all lined up. So I put all this up and he said ‘That’s the hole in the ground we go into.”

we both fitted into that hole, because his hammock swung at one end and mine hung at the other. And he said “When the fireworks start, we get in that and if you can beat me into it, you’ve got to be bloody good”. He said “because I’m real experienced at this.” I said “Right o”. So we sat down and he briefed me on the battalion, what it had, what the companies had, what weapons they had,

what likely enemy forces were out there that were likely to have a go at us and talked about general things as well. He was from Chicago, I was from Brisbane, Adelaide, and Melbourne, I was from everywhere and we talked about all that and in the course of the evening, bang, bang, bang and they start firing and bang, he’s in the hole, and I’m shortly after him. And he says

“You’ve got to be good, I beat you.” I said “Yes, you sure did” and we got out of the holes afterwards and we were sitting there again and a little later on it happened again, bang, bang, bang and we’re back in the holes again. He’s there and I’m on top of him but the third time it happened, it was different, I was in first but he was on top of me and I said “look at that, I beat you” and he said “Anyone that can beat me into a hole has got to be a dead set coward”. I said ‘good,

that’s me.” But we got on pretty well, he was a great guy and we completed that operation there and you want me to go into the details of operations?

Ralph survived, yeah, but I don’t know how as he was a reckless gung-ho fellow. He was a guy that I used to have to say to

him “For Christ sake, don’t stand up Ralph, get down.” “I’ve got to, I’ve got to stand up because I can’t use the radio, I can’t raise anybody”. “Duck down at least, get your head down.” but we had a few scary times together, him and I, quite a few scary times together and he survived, I survived, he got wounded, I got wounded, but we survived and we’re here today, well I am. I don’t know where he is now.

But at the completion of the operation we were called back in, did an operation up in a place called Hep Duc, pulled out of that and went further west to a place called Kham Duc, did an operation in there and went into a country called Laos, wasn’t supposed to but I had no choice, going into Laos. Came back and did some time down

in a place called Binh Son, regional force outpost and had Americans there. Did some time there, got an urgent call to go to Tra Bong Valley. The American advisors that were in Tra Bong Valley, their compounds were overrun

and they were all killed. We had to go up there as a reaction, my battalion went up there as a reaction to chase the NVA that had done it. They were a sapper battalion I believe from memory, that attacked them and overrun them, killed all the American advisors, luckily there was no Australians there. Well lucky for Australia there were no Australian advisors there, unlucky for the Americans there was Americans there and

I think they committed a classic breach but I won’t go into that. Then we chased them out of the Tra Bong Valley up over the mountains and down into the flat land and we walked all the way back down from Tra Bong Valley, past outposts, past five support bases, looking for VC, came down out of the mountains

probably west of Quang Ngai City, starving and filthy and dying for a feed. Found a Viet Cong cow, killed it and ate it while it was still alive. It was still quivering when they were cooking it, poor cow, but we were starving. We’d been eating grass, peanuts and blood, animal blood. It was

disgusting. The grass wasn’t too bad, and the peanuts were nice but the blood wasn’t the best. You look like vampires when you all sit around together sipping on this mixture, passing this thing around, it was terrible. And I think it was around about Christmas Day, we spent Christmas Day like this and Christmas Day is pretty important.

To Americans they all always resupply their troops with anything they want, it don’t matter where you are. With Americans no matter where you are if you want something and they can get it, they’ll give it to you. Not this old style we used to have “Oh you’ve got to be tough”. The Yanks would have bloody ice cream in the field if they could get it out there, drop it packed in ice, they’d drop you a ton of bloody ice cream and you’d be sitting there like a mongrel, absolutely putrid, you couldn’t stand

the smell of each other and you’d be eating an ice cream. But that’s their style, which is good, it’s good for morale. It does show that they think about the troops in the field. They just don’t put you out there and forget you, they look after you if they can. And on Christmas Day they always tried to get Christmas dinner to everybody, everybody, all the Americans and any Australians that were with them. So on Christmas Day the commander,

the full colonel, came out in a helicopter, landed on the ground, come over wished us all a merry Christmas, the two of us, the two Americans, the American and me I mean. This wasn’t Ranger Ralph, this was a different bloke at this stage. Had an American sergeant, a big, bald headed fella that used to chew tobacco and spit all the time, and with a real drawl. Mr Rodgers he used to call me, Mr Rodgers and they gave us this Christmas dinner and we sat down and eat

it. We’d been living for three months on garbage, fish heads and rice and grass and peanuts and blood and they gave us this turkey dinner and we got dysentery. We couldn’t handle it and the two of us were medivaced [medical evacuation] the following day and taken into a hospital in Chu Lai, to the 27th Surgical Hospital I think they took us to, 27th Surg, which was based in Chu Lai and

they looked after us there. They dewormed us and everything. We had parasites in our bodies that they’d never seen before, couldn’t find them in the book and we took a lot of medication I tell you to get rid of all that. Anyway after that we did other little operations but nothing much until the last couple of months.

I was starting to wear out. I was getting pretty weary and I knew it and I was getting pretty tired so they took me up into Da Nang and put me in the house up there, gave me a rest and I stayed there until I came home. I worked as the admin officer in Da Nang, running around fossicking for things and taking people all around the airport and that sort of stuff,

until I came home then they got me in the plane, sent me down to Saigon for a farewell. The commander at this stage is a different fella, a full Colonel Leary and he gave me a nice farewell. He made a speech. Not often you get a full colonel to say goodbye to you publicly in front of other people, thanked me and said I did a good job and all this thing. And then congratulated me on doing

two tours. I was the only member of the corps of the Royal Australian Electrical Mechanical Engineers to ever do two tours and in a purely infantry role and he gave me a good report on that. He wrote all that down in my confidential report. And I said to him, I said to everybody in my speech amongst other things thanked them all and all this sort of stuff and I said ‘There’s not enough military police in Australia to get me back on a plane for a third.

I’ll will not be coming back, I’ve had enough, I never ever want to see a war again” and to this day I still haven’t and I won’t and I hope we never see one here the likes of that. Anyway I came back and they sent me into the headquarters, they had no positions, CSM type positions available at that stage,

so I went back into the Headquarters Southern Command doing training on paper, putting people on schools and courses and that sort of thing. And he said after a couple of months doing that, there were two warrant officers there, him and the other guy and I, Keith Scutt and he said “We’ve only got one position here, the

establishments been reviewed and there will only be one warrant officer position and one of you has got to go. We need a warrant officer in the military district of Brisbane at the 1st Electrical Mechanical Engineers”. I forget what they called it, but it was a RAEME unit in Brisbane or a RAEME unit in Sydney, and he said “One of you has got to go”. So I thought ‘The other fellas a married bloke, I’m single,

I’ll go.” I mean I come from Brisbane in the first place, I was of course born up here and I thought “no”. I wasn’t real keen but I said “One of us has got to go and it might as well be me because he’s got to uproot his family, wife and kids.” So I said “promise me you’ll only leave me there for the two years and you’ll bring me back to Melbourne?” I had rocks in me head, I wanted to come back to Melbourne. Melbourne’s a lovely place if you never leave it but

once you leave Melbourne and come to Queensland, Melbourne’s not so good. So I came up, arrived in Brisbane, and went to the headquarters in town and was doing schools and courses, training, marking examination papers and setting exams and that for people to do training within the corps. Until, I think I was there for about twelve months and they gave me a posting to the 1st Electrical Mechanical Engineers Service Unit at Bulimba,

as a regimental sergeant major, so they promoted me to WO1 [Warrant Officer One]. So I went down there and took on the job with all these CMF fellas. Worked with a major there called Ossie Hogan, a larrikin, a nice fella, real larrikin though and we worked together, we worked well. I like him, he seemed to like me, we had a few tubes [cans of beer] together.

I used to drink in those days and I soldiered on there, I think it was about 1975 I went there and around about 1980 I was still there and suddenly out came this signal from army headquarters saying ‘The following Warrant Officers Class One will be promoted to captains with effect from the 1st of January 1981”. So they made me captain,

straight from WO1 to captain and what a magic jump that was. I was calling a lieutenant “Sir” one day and they were calling me “Sir” the next. But anyway, they called me sir because they wanted to I think, but some of the lieutenants called me sir anyway, before I was a captain. Well I did it and they made me Adjutant Quartermaster of the unit and I did all the paperwork and all that, all

the Adjutant stuff. I was actually the Adjutant of a CMF unit, I became the OC [Officer Commanding], the senior officer there. He’s actually the second, really the second in command of a CMF unit because he answers to the colonel. The colonel will be a CMF colonel, lieutenant colonel, and he always goes to the Adjutant, the senior ARA cadre man because there’s no use asking the other CMF people because they’re only there once a week.

And we’re there every day, all day, five days a week, except when there’s training, we’re there seven and we worked quite well. Had some good commanding officers there, good CMF colonels and I had enough of CMF by then, a couple of years doing that job and I put in for a posting to the District Support Unit at Brisbane. So I went there and they made me the

Quartermaster. I was supposed to be the Administration Officer but they made me the Quartermaster and I didn’t tell them that I didn’t know anything about Q but because I was a Captain, he said “You’ll be the Quartermaster.” so I had to get the book out and start to learn. One of the funny things I did I got the QMS [Quarter master sergeant] in and the QMS is a warrant officer and the QMS of any unit knows more about Q than anybody else. It’s his bread and butter. He comes up as private, all through the ranks

and they’re very, very experienced. And I got him in my office, I brought him in and I said to him “You’ll find that I’m a different Quartermaster to any you’ve ever had before.” He said “Yes sir, why’s that?” I said “Well you do all the work and I sit in this office area and command.” I said “You’ve got any problems that you can’t handle in the way of Q, bring them to me. Anything to do with the administration of it, the paperwork

and that sort of stuff, dealing with other commanding officers and other officers, I do all that. But the day to day grinding and the running of the Q store is yours and I’ll give you a free hand.” He said ‘Thank you very much” and off he went and he did the job.” He got that way that he thought he was the Quartermaster and every now and then I had to bring him in and say “Hey, I’m the bloody Captain here, I’m the Quartermaster, I’m running this.” “Oh yes, sir, yeah, yeah, I’m sorry.” “But when you refer to the Q account, refer to it as ours, not mine,

it’s not your’s, it’s really mine, right?” “Yes sir.” But we worked well and I did go and do a Q course then and learnt a bit about it but there was no way in the world that any Q course would ever teach me what he knew. And if I was to go in there and start waving my arms around and changing things, I’m only going to make him angry and upset him, because he’s got it working exactly the way it should work. And if some upstart young officer, or old officer like me

comes in, and a lot of young officers did that, they changed things, they wanted things run their way and they didn’t listen to the experienced old dogs, but I was an old enough dog to listen to another dog who’s bread and butter was Q and he did the job and we got by. And I stayed there until I was discharged and the corps said because of my distinguished service career, they made me a major, so I’m now a major retired.

So that’s it, and since then, since I’ve retired, I retired in 1986 and I took on a job as a security guard with Armaguard, delivering money, other people’s money, sat in a truck with millions of dollars that didn’t belong to me. And I took the job as casual only and

I did that until about 1994 and at that stage I couldn’t do it anymore, I was medically unfit and they put me off because I couldn’t carry the money anymore, couldn’t even drive the truck because of my injuries and they put me off and DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] made me a TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapitated pensioner]. And I have been in retirement ever since, full retirement, living here with my beautiful

wife, the greatest human being that ever walked this earth. I’ll tell you that and I’ll tell you that honestly and we’ve lived here for seventeen years, at this stage, from 1986 till now, so here we are.

Yeah, yeah.

When it ended.

Thirteen when it ended I think.

Yeah, my father actually what they called the Militia in those days. He joined up before the war started and they put him in the Militia. I think that was a different term for CMF and then when the war started he became permanent forces. I remember when he first joined he used to wear jodhpurs, these things that they used for riding horses and leather, big leather

gaiters, whatever they are, on his legs and a slouch hat. I think he had a blue puggaree on it and a white band or something like that. And his tunic, I forget his tunic, I think he used to dress like a cavalry man in those days I think. He might have been in the cavalry when he first joined because I know he did used to ride horses during the Depression. He

used to ride horses round before I was born. He used to ride, even when I was a baby, I don’t remember it myself but they lived in Maleny and he used to ride his horse around looking for work. An Englishman with his swag on the back of his horse, rolled up with his British accent, “Good God almighty, I’m looking for a job, could you have any work for me?” I can imagine it. You can imagine them looking at him and saying “Yeah, we’ll make you a stockman”

with the British voice he had. He worked, he did work for somebody up at Maleny for quite a while and they lived there on the property. Ruddles I think they were, the Ruddles at Maleny until they eventually moved down south to Manly. In fact I think in those early

Depression days we lived at the back of the Manly Strand Theatre, in the theatre itself, until finally we got a house and we moved to that up in Stewart Parade, Manly. And where the house stood, there’s now a block of units and I used to play there on the beach. Played there round the Wynnum, the Manly, sorry, round the Manly jetty and the guns there. Oh prior to that we must have lived, we did,

we lived in Chestnut Street in Wynnum, that’s where I was born. I was born at home in Chestnut Street, yeah, no hospital. I think Wynnum was too far by road to make it. Had midwives in those days, so I was born there.

Yeah, I had a brother.

Older brother, who also enlisted in the army during the Second World War, seven years older than me. He enlisted in the army during the Second World War and

I think after about three months he was medically discharged because he had rheumatic fever or something like that, rheumatic something or other. I think it was rheumatic fever they called it, so he was out but my father stayed in. Because of his previous experience in the First World War in France, they made him a Warrant Officer Class Two pretty quickly. He moved quicker than what I did and they put him in the Australian Instructional Corps, which

was a pretty well known army unit. A lot of people from the old days would remember it and he was instructing the troops, the younger troops, to go to war. Because of his age and that I don’t think he left Australia in the Second World War. I think he remained in Australia as an instructor for the entire war. And afterwards he stayed in until about 1956 and he was discharged in Adelaide.

He was gone when I joined the army. He thought the military training, when I said to him “I’m thinking about joining the army Dad.” he had a mate, his mate was a captain, he was WO1 [Warrant Officer class 1]my Dad, RSM, and his captain mate used to sit in the kitchen drinking a few tubes. In fact they used to get themselves a little barrel every now and then and put it up on the kitchen table and drink it. Good old soldiers, but I sat down with them and said “I’m thinking about joining the army”.

They said “Yeah, that’s a good idea except we don’t think that you’d be able to handle the discipline.” I said “I wouldn’t be able to?” “No, no, you’re too bloody firey, you wouldn’t be able to handle it. You’d be in gaol half the time because you’d be telling sergeants to go to buggery.” “You reckon?” “Yeah, yeah, you’d be better off as a sergeant than a private, I’ll tell you.” So oh yeah, anyway they said “It’s a good idea if you reckon you can handle it, do it.” So I did it, I joined,

and now I outrank the both of them. Good old Darky, he was a veteran from the Second World War too and they both passed on since then.

He saw me join, he saw me come back from my first tour. He saw me make the rank of warrant officer class two and he was very proud of me and Darky McKenna, the other bloke,

he saw me too. Poor Darky was in a wheelchair with no legs by then and I think his nurse was still giving him a glass of beer, with a straw so as he could have a drink. They were the old school tie those fellas, I mean a lot of the, in the old days the big decisions were made in sergeants’ messes. More decisions made in a sergeants’ mess I think than anywhere else, certainly not in an officers’ mess, not to the extent. The

warrant offices and the sergeants, they’re the ones that make lots and lots of decisions and then they put it to the commander and then the commander says ‘That’s a pretty good idea. I thought of that. I’ll take the credit and it happens but that’s where the ideas, a lot of them come from there.

The RSM does, the RSM is the king. We call him ‘The king of the shit” right? And when they made me a captain I became the shit of the kings, you see what I mean?

Reversed but he’s the king and he answers to the commanding officer only. The regimental sergeant major is the second most important man in the unit. The commanding officer of course is first and the regimental sergeant major is second. He answers straight to the commander and if the commander wants to know how the troops are going he asks the RSM and if the RSM doesn’t know, then the RSM’s not worth a crumpet and he would get (demonstrates) but I’ve never heard of it happening.

You’ve got to be a highly trained soldier to be a regimental sergeant major. You’ve got to know how the soldiers think, what they’re likely to do, what they did do and what they want to do and you’ve got to be able to see it and predict it . So that way the commander gets to know what’s going on with the troops. A lot of the nitty gritty stuff he doesn’t want to know. The regimental sergeant major deals with it himself. Quite often if something happens,

if something happens and somebody gets charged, they’ve committed an offence, they should front the commanding officer and he deals with them and he sentences them to some punishment if they’re guilty and they’re generally guilty because the RSM wouldn’t charge them if they weren’t. So, but a lot of the things that do happen the RSM doesn’t bother to take it to the commanding officer, he deals with it himself, because he thinks it’s trivial, not worth the commanding officer’s time and he

deals with it and they take the punishment that he gives them and they do it. If they don’t do it, they front the old man and by then the RSM will tell him ‘This guy knocked back my offer, so he gets dealt with.” So you’re better off to take what the RSM gives you. He’ll tell you you’re on duty for a couple of nights because you did something that he didn’t like and then you front up and you do it. You’re on guard duty for a couple of nights, you don’t whinge. You can whinge on your own, but not to him

and you do it. Very powerful man.

It goes on his record and all, yeah. It’s with him the rest of his army career that he did so and so and this is trivial and the commanding officer will throw it out but if it’s trivial the RSM wouldn’t take it to him. The RSM knows what the commander will find, what

his findings will be and in a lot of cases commanding officers will ask the RSM what sort of punishment he should give because the RSM knows.

Yeah, I did but I didn’t see him

much of him in my, see I don’t remember a great deal before the war. I don’t remember anything before the war, I don’t think. I can just remember when I was about five, or six or seven. I can only go back that far and I think I was about eight when the war started. I can remember little bits before the war but during the war I hardly ever saw him because we were, we moved up to Brisbane so we could be near him because he was at Fraser’s Paddock, which is Enoggera, Enoggera Army Camp.

Part of it was called Fraser’s Paddock and he was there and he was sometimes at Canungra and sometimes he was down in Sydney at the infantry training centre down there. He was at Wallangarra sometimes and there were prisoners there I think. I think there was war prisoners. I think they might have just been non-Australian citizens

who were aliens, who were from the countries we were at war with, were interned and put in Wallangarra. And he was there, I don’t know why but I can remember he was there for a while. We moved down there for a little while too. Couldn’t have stayed there for too long because we stayed in a hotel, so I didn’t see him a great deal until after the war. And then being in the army he spent a lot of time with the army

too and in those days, unfortunately, the soldiers used to spend a lot of time together. After the end of the day they seemed to spend more time with their mates than what they did with their families. Families came second I think, to the old Digger from the Second World War, those that were in the permanent army. I’m not saying that about those that got out but those that stayed in, the sergeant’s mess was a very popular place.

It’s not like that now. I don’t think they drink the amounts of alcohol that they did in those days. My father wasn’t an alcoholic but he did like a tube[beer] and a cigarette. He couldn’t breathe fresh air, it had to be cigarette smoke. And he did, I was proud of him being a warrant officer class one. He was a regimental sergeant major and I used to tell people he was. Some people didn’t like it, they told me, ex-servicemen, “my father is a regimental sergeant major”

and they’d say “Oh he’s got to be a bastard.” Yeah , “might have been to you but if you’re alright he wouldn’t have been though, it’s your own problem if he was a bastard.”

There was only, I was never game to mention it. One of the things you do in the army is you try not to old soldier. While you’re in you try not to

name drop, like “my father was this” or “I know somebody who was this, that and the other.” so I never ever mentioned it. But I did meet one of his mates at the recruit training battalion, who was a captain and I think he was the quartermaster, and he lived in the same street as us in Adelaide. He lived just down the corner and I remembered his face and I remembered him being with Dad but I never ever

said to him “Hey I’m Fred Rodger’s son.” never and he didn’t. It didn’t make any difference to him either, because when we were going on, in the middle of the recruit training they give you a break, three or four days or something, they send you home, put you on a bus and send you to wherever you’re parents are or wife and kids are and I went to Adelaide. And we’re all lined up there waiting for the bus

and this captain from down the road called the roll, and I said “Yes” and he said “Yes, what?” I said “Yes sir”. He said “Just remember that otherwise you won’t be bloody well going on your rest and recreation you’ll be staying here.” And it made no difference, he knew who I was. He knew that he knew my father, he knew me and it made no difference.

He was fair dinkum, I wasn’t going to go, “Yes sir.” So that’s military tradition.

Life was, well we thought it was alright. When you look back now it was pretty tough, we didn’t have much, we had very little. We had ration coupons

and your parents had to use coupons to get food, to get meat and groceries, I think, clothes. I know clothes were a coupon job and petrol, of course, was rationed. A lot of people used charcoal burners on their cars because petrol wasn’t available. They used to chug around here burning charcoal.

They just lit a fire every morning in the charcoal burner, I think.

I never saw the intrigues of it, how it worked, but it was a charcoal burner, so I guess they just lit a fire and burned the charcoal and it generates the power that drives the pistons. And they had these charcoal burners mounted on the back and they had black out things on their lights, headlights. Had those black on the top and then the windows, lots of windows on the cars had sticky tape across them.

Would have been bad for vision but they had them because any blast might shatter all the glass and this was on windows of shops and houses and everybody had a trench. I dug a trench in the backyard, my mates and I. We all helped each other, we’d dig a trench in your yard and then you dig a trench with me in my yard, and then we put a little roof over the top of it. In fact

we put an old door, an unused door over the top of ours, and then put dirt on top of that again, and I put a little chimney down the back so me and my mates could get in there and smoke and the smoke went up the chimney. And we thought we wouldn’t get caught but my mother used to look at the chimney and say “You boys are smoking again”. “No Mum”. “Well there’s smoke coming out of that chimney.” We didn’t have much, I used to go to school dressed

in a little pair of shorts and a little shirt and a tie and bare feet. All dressed up but nothing on me feet. In the later years when things got a bit better, they expected us to wear shoes and I used to wear shoes then. I can remember getting my first pair of shoes, the first ones I’d ever had I think and I slept with them, they were that good. Shoes were very important because I’d gone up a rung.

Yeah, yeah, you only had coupons for shoes and you know the way kids go through shoes. You couldn’t buy two or three pair a year for the kids so they accepted bare feet and it was pretty cold during the winter time, to run around the schoolyard, a rocky schoolyard that’s been all dug up into trenches with bare feet. And, what was I going to say?

Yeah, yeah, and I used to go up to school, ride my bike, we didn’t go to school many days, half days when we did go. We often saw the fighter planes flying around. The Americans used to buzz the place. I think you used to get the sky jockeys that wanted to show off and they’d come round in their Mustangs [fighter planes],

or whatever they were in those days. I don’t know about Spitfires but they had Kitty Hawks and they looked pretty impressive. They used to come right down low and fly around Rosalie, all around. Maybe they had girlfriends there they wanted to show off and thought “I’ll fly over your place this afternoon” and they all seemed to have girls and there were Americans everywhere. That’s one of the things I remember most about

the Americans. They seemed to be in everything, they were in the shops, they were in local areas, they were in parks. They were always in parks with bottles of booze and girls. They didn’t have much opposition as all the young men were overseas. All they had to worry about was old fellas like my Dad and me, and I was too young. They got the pick of the girls and they had the Battle of Brisbane[ riot between US/Australian servicemen] too and I can remember that.

I can recall it was broadcast everywhere. It was on the radio that, I think it was an American canteen, somewhere in the city, I’m not sure whether it was in Elizabeth Street or Adelaide Street, I don’t think it was in Queen Street, and they had this American canteen. And the Americans were, like I said before, if the Americans can get something they have it and

the Americans had everything in their canteen. They had stuff that we couldn’t even dream of. They had tins of peanuts and they had chocolates and they had silk stockings and God knows what else they had. Cigarettes, I guess and chewing gum and I could never get chewing gum. The first piece of chewing gum I ever had was American and I got a packet of American chewing gum and I didn’t even want to eat it. I kept it for months and months and in the end I lost it.

I should have eaten it, shouldn’t I? But it was so precious to me that I kept it and anyway they had this battle in town. I think the Aussies wanted to go into the officers’ mess and for some reason or other they didn’t allow them. I don’t know that was the rule that they weren’t allowed or whether that was just a rule they made up on the day for this, this particular bunch that wanted to get in, I’m not sure. But they didn’t take no for an answer, the Aussies and there was a great fight.

I believe they were tossing barrels over the balcony into the street and knuckled[punched] away. Of course there would have been a lot of resentments from the young fellas coming back, especially when the Americans say things like “We’ll take care of your women while you’re away” and things like that. They’re just individuals and they spoil it for everybody. But I remember that but we were very lucky they were here really because they did keep the Japs away. So did the Australians too

but between the two of them, from my recollection of it, between the Australians and the Americans, we’re sitting here today like we are, which is good.

Yeah, I remember that, the Negroes weren’t allowed over the south, from the south side, weren’t allowed over the Victoria Bridge, that’s what I remember being the Brisbane Line. [The so-called Brisbane Line was nothing to do with the segregation of Negro servicemen. It was an Australian proposal to abandon the northern parts of Australia as undefendable in the event of a Japanese land invasion.] And the Negroes never were allowed over that line,

they were all over the south side. South Brisbane was docks mainly over there in those days and there was the Blue Moon Skating Rink over there, lots of rough waterside type hotels where the dregs of the place used to gather and that’s where the American Negroes were put and they weren’t allowed across. And I don’t ever remember if they got angry

with that and came over the bridge and caused any problems. I don’t remember that but I do know that because their skin was the wrong colour they weren’t allowed over and who’s idea it was I don’t know, probably the Americans because in those days the Americans didn’t want to mix with the Negroes anyway. They kept them apart. I don’t think they were in the same units.

Yeah, I did, but I must have been over the south side. I can remember seeing them.

They were always real flashy guys with lots of jewellery on them and their accents were different, different American accent. But I don’t remember if I saw them on the north side of the bridge. In those days I used to go everywhere. I used to catch a tram, from Rosalie was a penny, or something like that, or tuppence and jump on a tram and you could just go anywhere. Trams went all over the place, South Brisbane, went right out to Holland Park,

all around town, down the Valley and down New Farm. Down New Farm way I think you could go and Breakfast Creek, all those areas.

To travel?

I used to like going into town and I used to like going to Breakfast Creek. We used to do a lot of fishing, my mates and I. We had our bikes and we used to ride our bikes to Crib Island,

from Rosalie down to Crib Island, hire a boat down there and go out and tantalise the fish. We used to catch some too. We used to catch tons of whiting in particular and we used to have fish at the Hump at Hornibrook Highway. Ride our bikes down to the Hornibrook Highway and hire a boat there and row. There were three of us used to go out in particular and one of my mates, Henry

Miles was taller and bigger than the rest of us. We liked going fishing with him because he could row see, and we’d sit down the back telling him which way to go “A little bit to the right, a little bit to the left.” He used to row and he used to like it. We used to tell him, we used to tell him, we’d say “Gee Henry, you’re a good rower”. “Yeah mate, I am.” (demonstrates) “Chest, nuts, knees, chest, nuts, knees,” I can remember it, and we’d catch bags of whiting there

too, because some of them were probably illegal but didn’t matter to us. We just used to fry them up whole, heads and all. You gutted them of course and scaled them but always left the heads on, never took the heads off fish, which was a good thing because when I got to Vietnam and was eating fish heads and rice, it didn’t put me off, seeing these eyes looking at me, like it does today. A lot of people won’t look at the eyes of a fish, got to take the head off.

Well I did, in Vietnam we did, it was a delicacy.

No, never. You give me a fish head and I’ll (splutters) and a chicken’s head they used to give us. The Vietnamese would give us the chicken’s head because it’s a delicacy. You could eat the brains and the eyes, they’re good and spit the peck out, the little pecker, the bill. And

you had to eat what they gave you. If you were there with the Vietnamese and they decided to give you two or three chicken heads, you had to eat them because if you didn’t you’d loose face and they’d laugh at you, so you had to eat them and you didn’t know which part you were allowed to spit out, which part you weren’t. But if you spat out the bill and the feathers you got on alright, but if you spat out the brains and the cheeks or whatever was

on them, yeah. And vitlone [?] is another delicacy they have too.

Vitlone is a unborn duck egg that they cook, it’s got the baby duck in it, embryo, or whatever it’s called and they crack that open and cook it, crack it open, drink the juice and then eat the unborn duck. It’s pretty soft. You can

eat just about all of it. You can eat the bones and all. They call that vitlone and that was a delicacy. They used to have in Da Nang, they used to have these food carts coming around the streets “vitlone, vitlone, vitlone” they’d be calling and people would rush out and buy it. Beautiful duck eggs they were, I’d rather have my duck alive, well not alive but fully grown one that’s sliced up on a plate, cooked.

Yeah, one of the worst things they had was the sauce they used, fish sauce. Nuoc mam sauce, in the primitive style of it, out in the paddy fields, those that lived out in the paddocks, they used to have an earthenware jar and they’d catch these little fish in the paddy fields. And they

were harvested under pretty unhygienic conditions because the Vietnamese used to use their fish ponds as toilets as well and they used to have a long-drop toilet in the middle of the fish pond and the droppings from faeces would go into the water and the fish would eat it. And then they’d catch those fish and eat those fish and some of them they would put in this vat and I don’t know what else they’d put in with it but they’d leave it in there until it absolutely

rotted and it turned to liquid. And it was one of the most vile smells that you could ever smell. It was absolutely disgusting and then they’d take it out and, they put some chillies with it and then they’d take it out, put it in little jars and use it on the table and that was on just about everything they eat. And it got that way that I couldn’t eat fish heads and rice unless I had nuon mam sauce on it. For two reasons because I couldn’t eat it without it and the second reason was that

if you were eating it and I wasn’t, I couldn’t stand the smell of it, so I’d eat it and then I couldn’t smell it anymore. The smell goes, it’s not so bad, it’s disgusting sauce.

It tastes better than it smells, yeah. It’s a disgusting smell but when you think about what it is it’s, if you see a dead fish on the ground that’s all rotted away, you’d look at it and say “Oh my God.” But

if it’s in a vat and it’s the same thing, they eat it and we did too. I ate a lot of it because I lived with them for two years, most of the meals that I had was theirs. They used to feed me in the field. I didn’t take rations with me. You can’t take rations for two or three months, so I ate with them. Every day their battalion commander would get his cooks to cook up a meal, whatever it’s going to be and I had

what we would call a batman, but we called him a radio boy, he was my radio boy. He used to carry my radio. Another one would carry the secret set if I had a secret set, which I did on the second tour and he would dig the hole for me to hide in and he would put up my hammock and poncho, all for me. The battalion commander made him and he was sort of a guard for me as well but he would come with my food with a little bowl,

fish heads and rice or whatever it was, a bit of nuoc mam sauce, a couple of, what do you call them again? The sticks? A couple of the sticks anyway and I would eat it and the clue to using those sticks is you don’t pick food up and put it in your mouth, you hold the bowl under your mouth and you shovel it in and that’s the proper way to eat Vietnamese food. And that’s what we do, we sit down and have all that and spit out the heads and beaks and wash it down

with a Vietnamese tea, a very weak black tea with no sugar and sometimes the battalion commander might have a bit of sake with him too, a bit of rice wine or something but I never used to like to drink in the field, because I always wanted to know what I was doing, never wanted to lose control, so I didn’t ever drink. But yeah,

so much for nuoc mam sauce.

Yeah, when we got back into a bigger village and we were there the Vietnamese would still do the cooking and I’d still eat their food but when we got back

into the regiment base, back in Chu Lai, the Vietnamese battalion commander would move to a separate spot. I would stay in the advisors hut, where all the advisors that weren’t out would stay and that’s where the commander and second in command and the radio operators, we had a command post of our own and the radio operators would be in there.

And when we were out they would go to the CP [Command Post], the radio operators would go over there and the commander would go into his command and control, his “Charlie-Charlie bird” and fly around and organise the operation from up there. But while we were on this rest I used to have a grease and oil change. Change my clothes, have a shower and have a shave because I used to look like this, in fact I didn’t look this good,

beard was all over the place and I’d go and get a haircut. It was pretty safe to get a haircut there. You could trust the barber. You couldn’t trust the barber in the south, in the Mekong Delta. You had to go in two’s to get a haircut there because one would have to sit there with a 45 in his hand, while the other one got a haircut because you didn’t trust the barber. But up there you could trust the barber because he was cutting American’s hair all the time. Get all that done and then

shoot into the 27th Surgical Hospital Officers’ Mess, air conditioned, tons of booze, beer, whisky, rum, you name it, they had it, five cents a glass, five cents a can, it was great and then we’d stay in there and if we were staying in long enough and I’d been out for quite a while, I didn’t go to sleep for three days. I’d be awake for three

days, wide awake, still drinking or doing whatever and then crash, then bang, back out again. We used to come out of the scrub, my webbing would be hanging off me and I’d go back in the scrub and I couldn’t do the belt up. I made up for bad times because out there you’re dreaming of about “When I get back I’m going to drink a whole bottle of this and I’m going to drink a dozen cans of Budweiser beer, wash that down with some Pabst’s Blue Ribbon beer,

I’m going to have some fried chicken.” and we’d have dinner there and all, have meals there. Go and have pancakes and maple syrup and fried eggs and bacon for breakfast. They were good the Americans, they do provide everything, iced tea, coffee and milk, they can’t make coffee but at least they try. Yeah, the Americans had the term we used “We used to get our rocks off man.” and that’s what we did,

we got our rocks off, make the most of it. Except when we went to Da Nang, we did the same thing up in Da Nang. Whenever we got the chance to get up there they give you some money, they’d pay you, you get paid in military payment certificates and some Vietnamese dong [currency]. And you had to be on your best up there because the major lived there, so you had to behave yourself.

You had to have good Australian clothes on, you couldn’t wear American clothes. We wore American clothes down south, you had to have good Aussie clothes on and your slouch hat and you’d front into the bar and the same thing there, five cents a glass for a beer, five cents for a shot of rum and all that sort of stuff. And on the counter, on the bar they had a little tin hat, First World War, Second World War tin hat, the old bowler thing and they had that turned up,

and they would put the round part down and open at the top. And a little sign on it says “If you tell a wary[war-ee; [waries, army slang for exaggerated tales or lies, “I was there…” stories] you’ve got to put five dollars in the tin hat,” so you try not to tell waries because it’s going to cost you five dollars and five dollars would buy a lot of drinks too, at five cents a throw. And fellas, some fellas would tell waries and some fellas would say “I don’t give a shit what you say, I’m going to tell you this wary, whether you like it or not” and plonk five dollars straight in the hat “listen to this, blah, blah, blah” and they’d

tell you what happened to them. And you’d think “Christ, what’s he bothering telling me that for, because I saw that happen to me too.” Same thing, we all did the same thing, we all saw the same things, but some of them liked to tell you that, I suppose some of them thought that you didn’t see what they saw but we did. And some people used to get angry with people telling waries. Some people would want to knock their blocks off, “If you don’t shut your bloody mouth I’ll

whack you.” “You leave him alone, leave him alone” but that’s the way that different people dealt with their thoughts and things that were in their mind, because you saw some shocking things. I saw some shocking things that I couldn’t even tell you today that I saw and you probably wouldn’t even believe me.

Yeah, she used to juggle the rationing. I suppose she was used to that sort of

thing because she’s Irish, you see. My mother was born in Ireland and she went across to England and married my father, committed a very bad sin marrying an Englishman and then they came out here and my mother was still in the Irish ways and no matter how harsh the living was it never bothered her a great deal because that’s the way they did live in Ireland. They didn’t have much over there so she got by.

I remember her and her friend, May Jackson, they used to go out at night and steal vegetables from the gardens round Manly and come back with some carrots and we’d have carrots for tea, a great big main meal of carrots. And peanuts too, peanuts seemed to follow me everywhere. There was a peanut farm there too, and they used to pinch these peanuts as well, all sorts of vegetables came into the place. And

of course prior to the war my father used to fish. He used to go out to St Helena Island. He’d got out and fish and he’d take me out with him on the boat and he’d row, like Henry, he was a big fella, he’d row. And he’d fish out there, catch some whiting and that’s how we lived. I think we lived on a lot of fish and a lot of vegetables, hijacked vegetables, stolen vegetables.

Before the war too, because the Depression was still on, see. It was only, I think it was only the war that pulled the people out of the Depression mainly, everybody got out of it then, but then they had a different sort of Depression. They couldn’t buy anything because it wasn’t brought into the country. They were taking things off you more than giving you things. They wanted your pots and pans because they were made of aluminium.

I used to go round and collect them. They didn’t grab them but I used to go round with a, I don’t know what I used but my mates and I we’d go round and collect everybody’s aluminium. People used to voluntarily give it to you, they didn’t have to, but most people did. They got rid of all their aluminium pots and pans and it all went to the war effort. They melted down the aluminium and made aeroplanes I suppose. A lot of people did, they were pretty good. We had, I can remember

we had tons of pots and pans, aluminium stuff, all gathered together in this big dump. We’d gather it from the houses, dump it there and then take it away. People were very good. They were a good style of human being in those days and yeah I used to do that in Brisbane, not in Wynnum, when we got up to Brisbane, because I was a bit older. But I can remember in Wynnum, Manly I went to school

for the first time at Manly State School and I used to go, once a week I used to get a ride on the back of the dunny cart. It was an old horse and cart. It was a real big, grey box and had a big horse out the front towing it, another Henry and the big horse out the front and there was a big step on the back with cabinets on the back of the cart where they used to get the full tins out and put the empty,

get the empty tins out and put the full ones in. And it must have been terribly unhygienic and I used to sit on the back step and ride up the hill, going to school, feet dangling, because I was that small my feet wouldn’t touch the ground and he’d take me all the way up the hill. He collected tins on the way and all that sort of thing and then I’d go into school. I never thought about the mess I must be in and nobody ever said anything, maybe I always smelt

like that. But they were good days and I can remember that state school, it was really good. I had the honour later on in years when I was a captain of being sent to Wynnum, to Manly, to Manly? No, it wasn’t the same school, must have been Wynnum, to one of the high schools there to talk to the students on Anzac Day Eve and it gave me a great deal of pride to come back to Wynnum,

where I was born and I told the young people that and to be standing there and to be able to talk them and tell them, not warys but to tell them the story of the ANZACs [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] as I knew it and it was good.

Oh yeah, my mother was the old style

Irish. If you did something wrong you got a flogging, and a real flogging. My mother would belt me with the clothes prop, the clothes prop or the dolly stick. They used to use a dolly stick for the washing in the copper to pick the clothes out and my mother would grab that and chase me around the yard and belt the living. I had to stop in the end and let her give me a hiding because otherwise she’d keep chasing me for ever, so I thought I’d be fair to the poor old bugger, I’ll stop and let her belt me.

Yeah, oh they were tough. There was none of this “Have you thought about what you just did wrong? Have you put any thought into this?” There was none of that, you were thought afterwards when you were rubbing your bum and saying “Oh God, I shouldn’t have bloody done that.”

Well I nearly killed my baby sister one day. I sat on the edge of the pram and I was playing with her and it overbalanced and she flew out and hit her head on the

floor and because her head came out like this and my mother chased me round the backyard and I think I broke the clothes prop. They used to have the clotheslines and the clothes props with the fork on the end holding the clothesline up and ducking and weaving around them, I broke one of them and then she finally got me with probably the dolly stick and gave me a hiding. But really I think it was she gave me a hiding because she was worried about what I’d done with my sister, but then again

when you think about it she left my sister bloody crying on the balcony while she gave me a hiding. Which was the most important? Belt him or fix her up, she should have fixed her up. I can’t tell her that now because she died, she was a hundred and two and she passed away.

Yeah, it was, Irish see? Good Irish stock. There were no germs around that could knock her over. She’d been brought up with them all. You know what I mean?

The harsh bringing up that they had and I had the same sort of thing, you just don’t get sick, like they mollycoddle them now and they’re open to all these diseases. But in those days we were exposed to everything, everything that was around and we got a dose of it and we got better and we survived and my mother was one of those.

No I didn’t, no I was a lazy bugger

and I didn’t, I don’t even think I cut the grass. I don’t know who cut the grass, maybe nobody did. I don’t remember us having long grass. My father always had WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, no matter where we lived. In the backyard he’d have a little WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK run because he loved having the chickens and the fresh eggs. He used to let me hold their legs while he chopped their heads off, which is frightening when you think about it. He’s wielding a dirty big axe

and the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK ’s only this long and I’ve got hold of his legs and the axe is going to land there which is about a foot away, but I trusted him. He never hit me but yeah, I always did that. I was always the number two on the axe. Yeah, and I can remember right up until he died he still had WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s. 1970 he died while I was in Vietnam on my second tour and he still had chickens in the backyard, WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s we called them then,

in Adelaide. Fruit trees everywhere.

Oh there was, there really was in Queensland. Yeah, we really thought, even I thought it as a child, I thought ‘These buggers will probably come here.” Because they used to have the sirens in the

streets and used to have air raid drills. Down in Rosalie hanging off a lamp post would be the big siren and it would wail (demonstrates) and everybody would be in their trenches. If you were at home you’d go in your trench in the backyard, at school you’d go in one there. If you were in town there were these big steel, big concrete block houses, right up the middle of Queen Street. There were tons of them, straight up one side of the road so they wouldn’t get in the way of the

trams, right up the main streets of Brisbane, these dirty big block houses and when the sirens went everybody went into them.

Didn’t know that?

Yeah, they did.

I think it was Queen Street, might have been Adelaide or Elizabeth Street but in the main streets of the city, a whole street of them. There might have even been two streets of them, I don’t remember, but they were in town, yeah. They were there for years and there’s probably still some around today

that they turned into public toilet blocks. There’s none in the city though but they were there.

If you were smart you did. If you were lazy and not smart you went to the neighbours and hope they’d let you in but everybody I knew had a trench with overhead cover, which was pretty good to learn all that when I was a kid. So when they said to me later on “Dig a trench”

I knew what to do.

I can’t remember any of that, no. I think I was more interested in playing games.

Yeah, oh yeah, I had a pick handle

for a rifle and in Rosalie there, in our backyard we had our, there must have been an old disused factory in the paddock behind us and we used to go in there and there were all these brick walls over the place and we were, we had great fun in there. We were soldiers, sometimes we were cowboys, but yeah, and rifles were pick handles and two clothes pegs was a pistol, the old fashioned wooden clothes pegs. You’d join them together with their prongs and

you’d hold that in your hand and that was a little pistol. We used to make all our own stuff because you couldn’t buy toy guns and we had everything. We had pretend tin hats I think. An old piece of rag and an old rag hat or what ever, a felt hat and that was a tin hat but one of the fellas really thought that, one of the boys really thought that the felt hat was a tin hat and

he hit me on the bloody head twice with a brick. It hurt, the tin hat didn’t work.

Oh my God, I’ll tell you I had a terrible head. Maybe that’s what wrong with me now. He hit me twice in the head and I think that second one must have been deliberate. Grenades see, used to throw grenades.

But we had a ton of fun.

We used to get in the paddocks and we’d fight from sand dune to sand dune and where there was heaps of dirt lined up we used to call that we were in the desert then and the sand dunes and we used to like going out to Rainworth. There was a creek ran through a park just down from Fernberg House, the Governor’s place and it’s still there today, it’s a park.

But it was a creek in my days and we used to go there swimming, in the nuddy [nude]. And we used to get in the tunnels there, this was at Rainworth, we’d get in the sewers and we’d walk in the sewers all the way up to my place, push the manhole out in my backyard and come out in my backyard, which was pretty damn stupid. Because if it had rained heavy we would have got drowned but that’s what we did. We could go round the district in the sewers, if you could, push the manhole up

and turn up in someone’s yard, say “Good day, how you going?” Push the manhole down and go, give someone a hell of fright. These are the things that we did rather than damage people’s property I suppose and defacing things with paint, we did that.

Yeah, and coming home from the pictures of a night we’d throw a stone on someone’s roof and that was real dangerous. That was bad, throw a stone on the tin roof and run like hell.

No, we weren’t that brave, no, no, throw stones and run, coming home from the pictures. Threepence a night, threepence at the pictures to get in and we’d all sit there and watch Roy Rogers or Tom Mix or some damn thing and the serials that used to be on every week, the old serials, The Green Archer and The Phantom

those sort of things and Lon Chaney would be The Mummy, Boris Karloff, yeah.

Well as I teenager we were the first of the Bodgies, the Bodgies and Widgies.

This is after the war. I used to go to Jack Busteeds’ Jive Club in Adelaide Street and learnt how to jive. Crepe shoes on. We used to wear bell bottom trousers, great big bottoms, the wider the better. We were like sailors, great big bell bottom trousers. They were smaller at the top and went down and tapered out

and we used to have to wear, the trousers were always tailor-made. You had to have a wide waist band, a high waist band with five buttons, was pretty good, seven buttons, you were out of it, that’s American though. You were really a jiver if you had seven, seven of those buttons there. No belt, just a flap across here with five or seven buttons. I had a brown pair with seven buttons on it,

I had a grey pair with five buttons on it and we used to love buying trousers and they were always tailored, never bought anything off the rack at all and we wore crepe soled shoes because they gripped the floor better for the jive. And they were still that jitterbug stuff, throwing the girls up in the air but I never did that, I did the more sedate, what we called jive and

I think it was Wednesdays and Saturday nights we used to go up to Cloudland and they had a section roped off for the jivers and the straight dancers over here and we used to go in there and jive. The girls would have their skirts on down to their knees with rope in the bottom I think they had and their best pair of underpants on because they used to twirl around and you could see everything on their bodies and these little crepe shoes and little

socks, little white socks. And the girls used to have short hair I think, fairly short because I think the style was after the war was fairly short hair for women, the men had short back and sides still. We never grew sideburns, we had short back and sides. Whether you liked it or not it was the standard haircut, short back and sides. “How would you like your short back and sides?” “I’d like it short back and sides, thanks” and that’s exactly what you got. You couldn’t tell a barber you wanted something else.

He’d look at you and say “If you wanted some stupid haircut you’ve come to the wrong place.” short back and sides was what you got. And when you join the army you get it again. It was later on when they turned to, we didn’t call each other bodgies or widgies in those days, we were just jivers. I think the bodgies and widgies part came along in the late forties, getting around about the fifties, before they started calling them bodgies, then they

went to stovepipe. I never ever went to stovepipe pants. I stayed the same, as a jiver from the early forties or the mid forties. We used to have fun. I bought a motorbike. Hop on the motorbike and drive up to Cloudland and try and win a heart up there. Had to be there for the barn dance, if you didn’t jive, you were into the barn dance, you did the barn dance because you got to dance with all the girls,

not just one, and you had to have a dance in the barn dance. My mate used to say “We’ve got to be at Cloudland before the pro B starts.” “What’s the pro B?” “The progressive barn dance.” Cause that was the favourite dance of the night, that’s the dance where you win or loose for the night. Some of my mates used to pop the question “can I take you home tonight after the dance?” Every girl in the pro B in

the hope that they might jag one and then a lot of fellas used to book later on dances during the pro B “can I have the next dance?” “No, I’ve got it booked.” “Well can I have the one after?” “Alright then.” And the girl had to have a memory of who she booked it with but that’s when the hearts were won and lost, during the progressive barn dance. Because after that if you hadn’t put the word on one of the girls you were walking around looking, scratching your head, because there were no girls left, they were all dancing. Only

the ones you don’t like are left. We had fun. They had a balcony on the Cloudland Ballroom. If you were lucky you could win a heart and take her up there and show her the stars and if you were real lucky you could get to take her home on the back of your motorbike. Yeah.

Wasn’t done by the women. It was only done by the men and that’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? Women were very, women,

I think it was drummed into them by their mothers that it was a pretty important thing not to do it. I don’t know what they told them.

Yeah, and I’ll tell you what, those bad girls had a ton of fun, because they had all the blokes. Yeah, they weren’t expected to, men were expected to be experienced and have sex and women weren’t, so how the heck

do you work that out? So there got to be a few girls that were going to be pretty busy giving the young fellas their experiences.

It is, it’s hypocritical really and these same fellas when they got married and had daughters, they expected their daughters to not do what they did and

it went on for many years I think.

It still goes the same, does it? Yeah, it’s funny isn’t it? Which means it’s probably a man’s world in the way of sex.

No, it was a grease and oil change. I never used that expression steam and cream, that’s rude.

You know what it is.

Oh yeah, they had,

there was two places that I knew, just around from the Brisbane Stadium, which was later to become Festival Hall, which they pulled down last week I think. There was Albert Street, just down from the stadium on the other side of the road, gee I remember where it is, and in Charlotte Street, there was a place. And the reason I remember them is because the queues that used to be at them. On a Friday night there’d be a dirty, long queue up the road

and you had to be careful which queue you got in to get into the stadium. If you got in the wrong queue you finished up in the brothel. I wasn’t allowed in the brothel because I was only a kid in those days and we used to go to the stadium and see the fights but I used to see the Americans and Aussies in the queue and they’d have fights there too. Because they’d start off a conversation with each other and the American’s only had to come up with something like “I’ve been here having a good time while you’ve

been up in New Guinea.” something like that and there’d be a fight. The same in Charlotte Street, they’d be there but my recollections of them were they must have found the ugliest girls they could, or women, they were never young girls. They were always women and they were dreadful. They looked like they were drop outs from being barmaids, because barmaids in those days were always peroxided dripping jewellery. I’m going to offend a lot of barmaids

that were around in the Second World War, but that was what I saw of them, not that I spent much time in hotels. But they seemed to go from bar maids to brothels, or the other way around.

It was a pretty low profession for women, yeah, but unfortunately a lot of women had to do it because there wasn’t any men, but then again there wasn’t much beer either. They used to put the kegs up on the bar in those days. The beer was pulled straight from a keg into a glass. The only way it was chilled was if it was put in a fridge before it went on the bar. Once it was on the bar it was a free range keg, it wasn’t getting cold anymore but

it didn’t last long. It would stay on the bar there and they’d pour it and then they’d chock it at the back until finally and people used to yell out ‘The kegs on the tilt.” so you’d all have to get up there and get a beer before the keg was empty. As soon as it was empty that was probably going to be the only keg and ‘The beers off.” and people would start drinking something else. That’s where that expression “piss off” came from, “Piss off? I’ll have a rum instead then.”

You get that?

Yeah, that was a great expression, people used to say “piss off” and say “Alright I’ll have a rum then.” It came from those days because it used to be off.

No, I don’t, no.

No, that’s the limit.

It was our

Saturday night out and as I got older, if we went on a Saturday night, if we had two glasses of beer before we went to the dance, that was it, we were going to have a great time because we were half chocked [drunk], two glasses of beer. God, they spill more than that when they have a drink now, but we weren’t beer drinkers. We weren’t really drinkers at all.

I think it’s because there was none around, you had to be in a club or something during the height of the war to get a beer or you had to be in a pub and fight for a beer when it was, because it was rationed, when there was a keg. If we went into a pub as kids to try and get a beer, old fellas would see us as opposition. We were going to drink something that they were going to drink. For every beer that we had, that was

one less for them, so we weren’t ever served. We were never allowed in, so we weren’t beer drinkers. The only way we got a beer later on, twenty one I think you had to be to drink in the pub, we used to get somebody we knew, my mate had a friend that used to take a half gallon jar down to the pub and fill it up for us and two or three of us would drink that. It was hot because he’d probably get it during the day and we’d drink it in the evening,

terrible stuff. No wonder I don’t like beer now.

Oh yeah, I had girlfriends. I pinched my best mate’s girlfriend off him, that was a lousy thing to do. He rubbished me so much that she found me fascinating, which is pretty good.

He was on my side and he was meaning to go the other way, so she tossed him in and went with me.

No, he still stayed and went out with her mate then.

Yeah, he copped it, because we were pretty good mates so he had to forgive me, or I forgave him for rubbishing me, so he should forgive me for taking his girl. So that’s fair.

No, no, I was still in Brisbane then. I enlisted in Adelaide.

Yeah, in 1961, so I was still in Brisbane, after I left school I took those various jobs. Tried to be a carpenter but they didn’t, I don’t think I was ever able to pass any of the education courses. I tried to be a junior postal officer.

It was a pretty basic examination and I couldn’t pass it. I didn’t have enough education to pass it, because I was only got to the sixth grade at school, so I couldn’t get a job. Where education was required I couldn’t get one. The only job I ever got where education was a criteria was the army and they took me in and I finished up doing senior.

I did the lot, senior, I walked away with a twelfth grade education, which wasn’t bad for a sixth grade dropout. I went to a Catholic school and I knew more prayers than I knew arithmetic and so I wandered on with small jobs until I went to sea. I became a seaman and I went down and applied to be a seaman and the

union representative was what used to get you the job, the union rep. And to be able to join the union, he worked, he was a supervisor or manager or something at Gates Dry-cleaning or Laundry, down at New Farm. And he said “You come and work for me for a while in my factory here, washing clothes and that, and I’ll get you a ship, I’ll send you to sea.”

So alright then, I went and worked with him. I worked with him and I was vacuuming out boots that the waterside workers used to use, those big boots to walk in refrigerators. I was vacuuming them out, I was working on the washing machines putting dirty clothes in the washing machines and taking them out and putting them in the dryers. I was cleaning down rollers that they used, taking rust off rollers that they used for ironing sheets, dirty great big rusty

dinosaur roller that he had there and hadn’t been used for a hundred years. It probably come off the Ark, only had one, I don’t know where the other one was. There was supposed to be two of everything and then I got in the roller, between the big roller and the actual iron part where the roller comes down and presses on the iron and presses the sheets, I had to climb in there. I was probably the only one that was slim enough to get in because I was built like a drover’s dog [skinny]in those days, so I slid in there

and with the sandpaper I cleaned all the rust off the whole bloody thing and then they moved it around a bit more and I used to hope like hell that they didn’t drop the big roller on me. But I managed to do it and anyway I worked there for a few months and he finally got me a ship, put me on and I went out and went to sea and they put me in the sink washing up dishes and the sink was the size of a bathtub and I stood there all day washing, breakfast,

lunch and tea dishes. I had to stand on a box so as I could reach into the bottom of the sink and the cook used to keep his bottle of plonk [wine] in the sink and I had to be careful I didn’t wash that and throw it out. The cook would come over, put his hand in the sink, pull the bottle out, pull the top off, look around, no-one looking and (demonstrates), top back on and put it back in the sink again. “So keep on washing those dishes”. “Righto” and I’d be washing dishes and that’s all I did.

Yeah, I suffered through that and then the ship went out of action. It de, not de-commissioned, anyway they sold it for salvage, it was taken off the run, so I went back to shore again and I went back to him again, and was back in the laundry again until he got me another ship again and I was on a little ship called the Elsana,

that used to sail out of Brisbane up to Thursday Island. And I graduated from being a dishwasher, no I didn’t. I went on that as a dishwasher again and the pantry man used to say to me “I can’t see water sloshing over your shoulders, you can’t be washing properly.” I used to have water splashing all over my shoulders to prove that I was doing the job properly and then I graduated and they put me in, looking after some

cabins and I was a cabin boy, I suppose you could call me, and I was making flipping beds and scrubbing floors and all that sort of thing, and cleaning toilets. Then I graduated from all of that to scrubbing decks and washing paint. I did this for three years, but the pay was good. Merchant seamen used to get good pay. Used to get paid for home port days because you

weren’t at home, you’d get paid extra for those days and it was pretty good money, so I did that for a few years. And in the meantime I, my parents moved down to South Australia and my father was in the army still and he got transferred down there and when I got sick of scrubbing the decks and chipping paint I went down to Adelaide and stayed there. Then I got a job, I got a job at

Chrysler’s. That’s when I went to Chrysler, Chrysler in Adelaide and the firm is now Mitsubishi and I think it’s at some Park, I forget the name of it now. Anyway I worked at Finsbury, manufacturing chairs, the seats for the cars for the Dodge and the Desoto and all those flash Yank tanks from the old days. I worked

there, got the sack and the work, because the motor industry, still is today, fluctuates up and down and it’s real down days in those days and they put everybody off. Used to keep a skeleton crew just to keep it going just to manufacture a few cars and I got the sack, so I went to another place. I went to a Freight and Auto Industries and got a job doing motor trimming there, making seats for buses,

seats for the government buses and the work went out there. They lost the contract for the buses, so I got the sack there and I went to Tubular Art I think it was called, Tubular something at Daw Park and I worked there as a storeman, no, as a driver and I was a storeman cum driver, they called it a storeman’s job. I just used to go and pick up nuts and bolts that they wanted and deliver them down to the upholsterers and put them

together. Got the sack from there when GM Industries went bad. Those were the days when chairs were all vinyl with stars all over them and pink, pink vinyl, and pink Laminex tables, remember them? You might not remember them though.

The sort of stuff they fight for today to put in the place to make it look like the Sixties, or the Fifties.

So I got the sack from there when the chair industry sort of died off a bit and then went back to Chrysler again, because the motor industry was picking up again. So went back there and worked there assembling upholstery. They even put me on the line putting motor engines together and I didn’t even now what I was doing. It was funny, I was putting the stuff on the right hand side of a car and I was having trouble getting it

on, well putting all the trim and all that on, and there was a fella working on left hand side of the car, he was doing the left hand side trims. And I went around to him and said “I’m having trouble here” and he’d been working there for years and he knew backwards how to put all the trim on the left hand side of the car. I got him round to my side and he couldn’t help me at all. He said “I can’t work this out because this is the right side of the car and I only know how to put it on the left side” and that was the limit of his knowledge.

He was an expert with the left hand side of cars, not worth a crumpet on the right hand side because it was all around a different way, see what I mean?

It was mirror thing but he couldn’t see that. Anyway worked there until I got the sack, because the work fell off again, it just slowly, one of the problems that they had was when the industry starts to break down, say they’ve got fifty people working on this particular job because they’re manufacturing say fifty cars a

day, when they drop down to forty cars a day, they’ve got to get rid of ten people. They put off the no-hopers first and they go out and get a job when vacancies do exist and they’re the dumbest ones. They keep the best people to last and by the time they sack their best people there’s no jobs left, the dunder heads have got them all, they got out first. So you’re better off being a dunderhead,[simpleton] or pretending you are, or if you know the axe is going to fall “make me first.”

so I can get a job because by the time I get out there, there’s no jobs in the industry at all and my mates that I’d worked with at Chrysler, they were sacked because they couldn’t make the grade, they weren’t good enough, they had the jobs. So I went down to Tip Top Bakery, that was the only thing left for me to do and I said “Can you give me a job?” They said “Alright, you can deliver bread, start in the morning.” So I fronted up in the morning in my delivering bread outfit

and he said “Right-o, get down the back and get your horse and cart”. I said “Get your what?” “Get your horse and cart, we deliver bread by horse and cart.” I said “Do you?” He said “It’s down the back” and I went “Oh my God, a horse and bloody cart”. The only horses I’d ever dealt with was watching them on the races and I went there and the stable boss said “Your harness is all hanging up there, take old Jessie there, that’s your horse,

saddle her up, put all her bridle and that on her, there’s your cart over there, put her on the cart, and back into there, the bakery to get your bread.” I said “Well I don’t much about horses.” so he had to saddle her all up for me and he said “Watch what I’m doing so you can do it again.” He did it all for me and I think he did it all for me every day after that because I didn’t have a clue. I still don’t know to put the harness on a horse. So I got the horse and I said

“Right-o you mongrel, go forward, now go back”. I had a heck of a time, backed it in, put all the bread on and they said “Off you go, there’s the book where your deliveries are, don’t worry about not knowing where it is because old Jessie there she knows where to go anyway.” So I just put her in action, put her in gear and out we go down the street, and she just plodded along, trot, trot, trot, trot and the first house she pulled up at was on the book,

Number 24 Blog Street, so I had a look, half a loaf of brown, a thing-o, a bun, and of I go, in the basket, and I delivered it and the same thing happened all along. The only problem was that if anybody made a loud noise, like a backfire or a cracker went off, Jessie took off and she was gone. I’d be standing there, Jessie would be belting down the street, she’d do the whole run. She’d run down the street, up the next street where we used to go,

down that street, down here, down there, the whole run and back to the bakery and I’d have to go back to the bakery and get her. Sometimes she wouldn’t go all the way back. She’d decide she was going to stop at one certain house and stay there, so I found her there but sometimes she’d go all the way back. And a lot of things used to frighten them, cars on the road, and she wouldn’t let me go past a place that I had to deliver bread to. She was pretty good, but sometimes they had

to give me a lantern because we were still out in the dark delivering bread. It was killing me, it was a terrible job so I got the newspaper one day, the Advertiser I think it was called, and I looked in it and I saw this big military ad “Wanted, tradesmen”. They called them “coach trimmers with motor trimmer skills wanted to enlist in the army, trade enlisted into the

corps of RAEME” and I said “I’ll have a go at that.” So I went down and applied and did all the medical and the doctor that gave me the medical gave me a great compliment. He said “I wish I had another thousand guys like you.” He said “You’re medically fit.” and I was. I was a fit as a Mallee bull and I did a trade test. They sent me down to one of the workshops and I did a trade test, motor trimming,

and got a pass at that and then they offered me a posting. They said “If you enlist in the army we’ll send you to Melbourne to One Medium Workshops at Broadmeadows. So I discussed it all with my family, my father and his mate that was still in the army, no my father was out. His mate was still in the army I think and we sat down and over a few pots they were telling me that “Yeah,

I’d probably make a good soldier, but provided I was a sergeant or above, you won’t last five minutes as a Digger [soldier], you’ll be in trouble because you’re too fiery, too hot tempered.” And I thought “No, I’m not as bad as what they make out.” Father didn’t really try to put me off it, he was just laying the facts out, that you’ll have a hard time doing your recruit training. So I made the decision, I did do it,

I joined and I went to the Recruit Training Battalion, at Wagga, Kapooka and did my three months military training there. And I did speak when I went on leave with the captain that was a neighbour, did I tell that on here?

“If you don’t call me sir, you’re not going on bloody leave.”

“It’s as simple as that.”

No, I didn’t think it was right, I thought “I can do this.” I thought “I can do this and I’ve got to be careful what I do, just give myself

to them and let them train me” and I did that. I relaxed and just said to myself “I’m here for three months training, these people know all about the military, I know nothing about it, they’re going to teach me, let them teach me, I’ll learn, whatever they say to do, I’ll do it” and I did. And right from the start, the sergeant met us. We got off the bus at Kapooka,

got off the train and got on a bus and he was an ex-British Army bloke I think. He was a sergeant “Rah, rah, rah, tangled tooth Tommy Taige” we called him and he was the old school tie with the slouch hat on the side of the head, “Get in the trucks and do this and do that” and we got in and took us down to the Q store [quartermaster’s] and issued us with all these things.

Took us down to the RAP [regimental aid post] and gave us all sorts of injections again, that we hadn’t had before. We’d already had a bundle of them in Adelaide and we got some more when we got there and I think the worst one they gave us was the smallpox, which knocked a lot of blokes out, smallpox injection. And kitted us all out “What size do you take?” “I take this”. “Right, this one’s near enough, it’s two sizes smaller but that will do.” Then afterwards we all swapped around our clothes till we got something that was reasonable and fitted.

Gave us our barracks block. The barrack blocks were the old tin huts. I think they were Nissan huts, real old from the Second World War, might have even been from the First World War and they had no windows, no glass in the windows and this was June, in the middle of winter, in Kapooka, in the country towns of New South Wales. And it was cold as heck at night and

there was no glass in the windows and you couldn’t shut the door and some mornings when we woke up we couldn’t see down the other end of the hut for the fog. It was as cold as heck. Anyway they kitted us all out, we got our rooms, get into bed, you’re getting up in the morning five thirty or some ungodly hour we thought at the time, they had us out of bed, staggering out in our great coats for a roll call. And they call your name

and you answer “Sir” or answer “Sergeant.” whichever he wanted and we’d answer our names and we’d go back in and we’d start getting ready. Go and have breakfast and get all your clothes on and move into, move outside when they call you again, line up inside in order of muck, because we didn’t know how to line up. Just a column of blob there, left, right, left, right, put the left foot first, the right foot second, the left foot next and

they’d march us down the road, all out of step, into the hut. And in came this second lieutenant, tall, whippy, young fella, with a limp already and he’s only a second lieutenant and he’s limping already. In he comes and we’re all told to sit to attention “Sit there and shut up, put your hands on your knees like that and sit to attention, that’s the position of sitting to attention.” and we all sat there like that, and just looked straight ahead.

“Right-o, rest.” and I this second lieutenant stood there in front of this, behind this lectern and he said “I am your God, there is no other God above me, I am God, you will obey me in everything I say. If I tell you to do something you will do it and you will do it quickly and at all times you will not go to anybody else except me

because I am God.” And this was, we were sitting there trembling, we had found God already and he’s a second lieutenant, but he’s got a problem, he’s got a limp and this was our introduction. So we thought ‘That’s it, and you’ll do this and you’ll do that.” Then they took us out and they started to train us. Started to teach us how to stand up for a start, how to stand in lines of threes and how to march, how to salute. And then

gradually they introduced us to rifles and taught us how to handle rifles, how to march with rifles, how to strip them down, and how to load them and unload them and how to fire them. How to clean and prime hand grenades, how to throw them and how to hide when you do throw them. Lots of range practises, lots of drill and one of the big aims is to train you to march out, which

is a formal parade on the march out day and I forget now how often it was but some Fridays, whether it was once a month or every week, we had a battalion parade, they’d put us all together. There’d be the advanced battalion, the advanced companies over there, like the company that had been there the longest, the one that had been there for it’s twelfth week and it’s marching out, it’s leaving today. They’d be real good and then there’d be the next platoon that’s only been there eleven weeks and then the one that’s been there ten,

oh companies they are, nine, eight, right down to us. I don’t know if they really had eleven but whatever the amount was they had. They did have A Company, B Company and Charlie Company was in existence so they probably had eight platoons. There might have been eight platoons at that time I was there, so the 8th Platoon was marching out and the 1st Platoon was there for their first time. And we’d do all this drill, various degrees

of professionalism. The guys marching out would be the best, the guys just arriving would be worst and you’d feel terrible and say “Are we ever going to look like that?” You’d think “We’re never going to make it but maybe they’ll accept second best when we march out.” But we did, we made it and we were first and we were as good as them when we left. So it was pretty good and there was a close knit thing, we all had to work in together. You all had to work together as a platoon and they put about ten of you in a hut, yeah

put about ten of you in a hut and you all had to help each other. In the mornings there was always everything to be done. You had to, you had to have your bed made and made up in a certain manner, used to fold all your blankets and sheets up with blocks of wood in them so as when they were finished they looked like a television set. There was television in those too, yeah. So it looked like a television set

sitting at the top end of your bed, all your basic webbing was laying at the other end of the bed, that’s your belt, straps, ammunition pouches and your packs and in those days everything was blancoed, the belt was blancoed, these days they blacken them. But they were done in Blanco [Blanco whitener].

Blanco is like a, you know the white cream you used to put on your

Well I suppose I heard a lot about the service because he and his mate, my father and his mate, used to sit at the

kitchen table and they would talk about nothing but army, that was all they knew, was army and they would talk about all these things that happened during the day, happened last week, happened last year and what they were going to do next week. And they’d use all these military terms, like the Q Store, the QM, and the OC and the OCS [Officer Cadet School] and the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters] and the GHQ [general headquarters], and I knew all those terms, so I knew what they were talking about. And I used to hear the stories

about what soldiers did. They used to have some laughs because as an RSM you see some funny things, terribly funny things, I’ll tell you. You get some of the best excuses. Soldiers can think up some of the best excuses for doing things that they shouldn’t do, some of the best excuses you’ll ever hear. “Why I did this” and you think to yourself ‘That’s original, I haven’t heard that before, I’ll let him off.”

Oh yeah, yeah,

I had one bloke one day, he fell out of the back of a Saracen [armoured personnel carrier], up at Puckapunyal. They bounced and he bounced out and he landed on the ground. He didn’t get badly hurt, he just got shaken up and this is at Puckapunyal, it’s out in the sticks and I said to him “You’re shaken up young fella, go back to your room and lay down and have a rest and I’ll see you later.” He said “Right-o, thank you Sir.” off he went.

I went looking for him. I couldn’t find him and I had everybody searching the place for him. The following day he turned up on parade and I said “Where the hell did you get to? I told you to go back to your room and lie down.” He said “Oh I thought you meant my room at home. I live at Geelong.” which is a hundred and twenty kilometres away, “So I went home” and he was dead serious. “You went home to Geelong, did you?” “Not my

room over here, I didn’t think you meant that, I thought you meant my room back at home, so I went home.” And I thought “You bugger, I can’t charge you with being absent without leave, because the CO will kill himself laughing at that excuse too.” So I let him go, but so innocent he was, maybe he rehearsed it all but he got away with it, I’ll tell you.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, well it was all

based on basic military tactics, that’s the broad term for it. They tried to throw in the extras that you’ll come across but there’s a lot of extras that they didn’t throw in, a lot of things that were a surprise when I got there. But anyway they thought I suppose that if we knew, and these guys were ex-advisors and they were probably told by AHQ, Army Headquarters, that this was the doctrine and this

was what you were to teach, because army Headquarters really didn’t know themselves what was going on, what you needed to know. So if you know basic military tactics, you’ve got something that you can do. So we went through and we learnt field craft and map reading, navigation through thick jungle and all that sort of stuff, which is pretty important and stuff we needed to know.

Radio procedure, but they gave us Australian radio procedure, which resembles American radio procedure, but it’s not the same. We did section formations of how to move, how to move platoon or companies in the bush, the formations that you can adopt for different situations and different terrain and the likelihood of meeting

enemy. And contact drills, when you meet the enemy it’s called a contact so the contact drills, which is good to learn too, but they didn’t do that in Vietnam. Nobody ever did, you couldn’t get the Vietnamese to do it, but at least if you do that, you do something. Contact drills, going to ground, returning fire or whatever it is you’ve got to do, is better than standing

there scratching your head saying “Christ I’ll wonder what I’ll do” because it’s probably going to be too late then, you’re dead and so you do these contact drills and it’s good stuff. They taught us village defence, village cordon and search, which I told you about before. I told you about that on the movie didn’t I? The village cordon and search where I stood on all those practice mines?

That type of thing, but some

of the things they didn’t teach us, which was very important and they should have, was American voice procedure, now that is something else. American voice procedure is very hard to get used to especially when they’ve got these different accents they use, that they have. Negroes in particular are terrible to understand when you first hear them. They use all this slang and they use it all on radio, whereas

we had very formal, British type thing “Hello Foxtrot Two Three, this is Foxtrot Four, how do you hear me? Over”. Whereas the Americans will come on and say “Hey Foxtrot, how you hear me mate?” Or not, mate, “How you hearing me?” “I got you Lima Charlie, how me over solid copy man” and all this sort of stuff and when you first hear it you say “God damn what did he say?” And then they come up with things like shackle,

which they use a shackle code, instead of saying things in clear, you put it into this code. You pick out all these letters on this whiz wheel and you use these letters to indicate other letters and they have to put them on a whiz wheel to find out what you said. So you’d put them down in letters and the first time I heard an American Negro come on the radio and say “Ask con shackle, prepare to copy all”. He said “I’m going to

shackle, prepare to copy, over, get a pen.” So you get a pen and a piece of paper, “AARS shackles Alpha, Quebec, Roma, how copy oar?” You’d think “What the hell did he say?” But none of this stuff was mentioned, it was just typical Australian British type follow on radio procedure and that should have been taught the correct way. They never ever taught us how to get a medivac in,

the procedure for getting a medical evacuation helicopter on the ground, there’s all that procedure you’ve got to go through. There’s certain things you’ve got to say, there’s codes and there’s all this information you’ve got to give to the pilot and there’s information that you’ve got to give to get an artillery run. They never told us that. If you want rounds on the ground from the arty [artillery] , you’ve got to get on the radio and ask for it but they never told us how to request guns on the ground, ammunition on the ground, or rounds on the ground. They never taught us how to run an air strike

because I don’t think they ever believed that a snotty-nosed warrant officer, an Australian, would run an air strike, would have all that control, but I did. I used to call in an air strike. I’d call in Jake [forward air controller], the spotter, the spotter plane in the little tiny L1A1 or whatever it was, L10 or something, whatever they call them, little tiny thing that used to flutter like this and some of them pushed with pistons in the front and some of them had pistons in the back.

They had propellers and I’d call them up and I’d ask for an air strike and I’d have to indicate all that stuff, because I had a battalion on the ground in thick jungle, and I had to indicate to this guy where everybody is, and where the bad guys are. So I’ve got to start identifying where my troops are, and I’ve got to identify where the bad guys are and I’ve got to identify how many of the bad guys there are and what sort of an area they’re over and I’ve got to start telling him I’m ready to mark things.

And he gets the fixed wing on and they’ve got Snake Nape and High Drag. Snake is a twenty millimetre cannon and Napalm and hydrag bombs, the big things with the wings on them and you’d have to make a selection of what you’d want “What would you like? Would you like Napalm or would you like twenty millimetre cannon or would you like high explosives?” “I think I might kick off with a bit of Napalm, how’s that?” “That’s not bad, that’s a good start.” it’s like ordering a meal but none of this

was ever taught to us. “I’ll have a little bit of Snake, just run over it.” twenty millimetre cannon into them, and now we’ll give them a little bit of Napalm.” so nape them and you’d have to mark your elements. You had to have smoke and you had to have smoke out that he can identify and you have to have smoke out that the enemy hasn’t thrown out, because they’ll throw smoke too. If he say’s to you ‘Throw a red smoke” and you say “Yeah, I will” the enemy

will throw a red smoke too, it’s on them and they say “You’re all over the place, where’s the bad guys?” Because the bad guys have got the same coloured smoke as you, so we just used to say, he’d say “pop a smoke.” so I’d just pop a smoke, any colour, and out it would go and he would identify it and say “I got a grey smoke”. “Yeah, that’s me”. And it’s too late for the bad guys to throw a grey smoke because the second grey smoke has got to be enemy, and then they’d drop it on that.

The bloke in that whirlybird, that spotter, he’d fire a white phosphorus round at them. It would do two things, it would mark them, it would do three things, it would mark them, it would kill them or they’d run like hell and get away from it, because it’s a frightening thing to be on the ground and see white phosphorus coming at you, because you knew you were going to be hit by an air strike. So they’d start to drop the bombs and once they started to drop the bombs, these

Phantoms planes would be doing like a Ferris wheel, one up and one down and they’d just go round and around and once they got on target and they started to drop the stuff, it’s very hard to adjust them. So you’ve got to keep adjusting your own troops and telling this bloke up there where your guys are, so you might need to keep marking your area and you might need to start indicating a different area for them, so the air strike can move over. And none of this was taught to us

and we had to learn all this on the job, on the job training. You get out there for the first time, you’ve just arrived in the country, the Vietnamese battalion commander says “I want an air strike” and you say “Well I think I know what an air strike is, but I don’t know how you do it”. So you’ve got to rely on the other bloke who’s been there to teach you what to do, and that’s what we did but we didn’t learn it at home. And that’s a

failing that they had. There was the radios, how to run an artillery strike, how to run an air strike, how to run a medivac and how to run gun-ship helicopters. You’re going to be hosing down the area with M60 machine guns, sometimes with mini guns, and the more modern ones had mini guns and they’d fire something like six thousand rounds a minute, which is probably nothing to what they fire today. And you’re going to have

to adjust that and these guys are your gunners leading out and they’re hosing down people that are probably thirty metres from you or forty, fifty, might be further, but thirty metres was too close. Once they moved to thirty metres they were almost with you and it was very hard to use them, it was very dangerous for yourself. You had to be able to handle that, because it’s a big responsibility. You’ve got six hundred Vietnamese soldiers and yourself

and your mate and you’ve got this great big massive thing up there with a gun hosing everything down and you make one mistake and you’re all dead, got the lot of you. So they should have taught us all that and they didn’t. They didn’t teach us some of the nasty things that they did, there was a lot of nasty things that the NVA, the VC did, that they didn’t teach us about. They did hint on it when we did an intelligence course. We did an

intelligence briefing down at Mosman and they did tell us some things like the Viet Cong, in particular, if they want to take out a village they take the lot out, they take everything, they annihilate it, they even kill the animals, right down to the bottom. They did tell us that sort of thing so that’s what you had to be careful of. They always took their wounded with them if they could,

they never left bodies behind, so you’d know that, sometimes you’d know that you killed twenty of them and there’d be five bodies but you’d see blood trails and all that where they took them all away. They were very devious. They used to do a lot of assassinations. They’d come into villages and they’d knock off village chiefs of a night but both sides were doing that, yeah, both sides

were doing that. Not the Australians, no, not us, but the Americans were doing it, the CIA. They didn’t like a village chief, they’d give a weapon to another Vietnamese that lived in the village and he’d knock him off and then in the morning they’d just say the VC came in and killed him, but they were doing it. But that’s pretty good, I mean you’ve got to do something. You can’t have people in the village that

you know were VC, running the place and you can’t prove it and if you do eliminate them openly, everybody knows and everybody says “What the hell did you do that for? He was a nice guy”. They don’t know that he’s not, so you’ve got to do it in an underhanded way but there were special people doing that. I didn’t do that, not guilty. So the course there was a lot of physical training in it. We were up every morning

early to jog all around the camp and we’d kick off in the morning and do our training and we’d finish up walking up dirty big mountains, map reading all the time. You have to map read, you have to know exactly where you are all the time, because if you have to deal with something like an air strike or artillery, you have to know exactly where you are. So if you are walking through the scrub and you’ve

got a weapon and a map and you’re following the battalion, where’s the battalion commander gone because they all look alike to you at first, until you get to know his special features. From the back they all do look alike even when you do get to know them and you’re looking when you’re moving around the land. You’re moving the map like this and saying “Where the heck are we?” And we’d go up these big yamas [hills, mountains] and one of the instructors he

was, his favourite habit was first thing of a morning we had to come out clean, clean and dressed. They never inspected us because we were senior NCO’s so they didn’t expect us to be polished and all that sort of thing, but we’d come out with clean, dry clothes on, everything fresh to start the day. And there was one fellow there, Mick Coffey, a warrant officer called Mick Coffey. He’s a Queenslander too, I think he’s still up here somewhere in the north, and

in the morning he’d get us out and say “Right-o, we’ll do some training” and we’d march off to Hard Standing, which was the good dry area where our camp was, march us down to Canungra Creek, and march us into the Creek. “In the Creek, get in.” and we’d be in the creek up to our waist in the water. We’d say “We’re not training here, we’re training further up.” “Yeah, I know, but you’re nice and clean and if you’re clean you won’t train properly. If you’re filthy, it’s not going to bother you.” So he’d march us,

he’d walk on the side and we’d go through the creek, all the way to the training area, get out sopping wet and start our training. Because it’s very hard, when you’ve got soldiers and they’re nice and clean and you say to them “We’re going to do contact drills, everybody on the ground.” they all very carefully look around for a grassy spot and “I’ll lie down here.” but if they’re filthy, they’ll just dive on the ground, it doesn’t matter. So he got rid of all that, your worries are over, you can do

what you like. But the training was good, cranky Jack Morrison marched us all the way up to the top of the hill, a great big, one of these big yamas down in Canungra, in the jungle and through vines and wait-a-whiles [spiky tropical vines]. Suppose you’ve heard of the wait-a-while, it grabs you and keeps you there? And when we got to the top Jack was standing there, cranky Jack, and he’s all dressed up and he’s got all his medals on. He’s

got a whole chest full of medals and he said “If you want to come back from Vietnam looking like me, pay attention to what I’m going to teach you. You have to live in this friendly jungle. It’s not a terrible thing like you think it is because you’ve just come up that big yama with all these things grabbing hold of you, you can live off this jungle. For example I’ll show you this” and he walks over to a puddle, puts his hand in, brings out a stubby, pulls the top off, and drinks it.

He said “You can find anything you want in the jungle”. That was the start of his lesson and then he showed us the food that you can eat there, the different things, the berries and the things. And when the lesson was all over, there was about thirty or forty of us there, all huddled around in the scrub and when the lesson finished he said “I’ll now show you what was taking place while you were all listening to me. Stand up Bloggs, Jones, and Smith.” and all these soldiers all stood up, that were right with us.

They’d been lying there for the entire lesson, camouflaged in the jungle, right near us and we could have fallen over them and we didn’t see them. So that just shows you what it’s like in the jungle, you can walk right past them and unless you’re looking and you know what to look for, you may never see them. You may never see them at all, they may kill you. So that lesson stuck.

Yeah.

They taught us some of the language down at the intelligence course. The course at Canungra was mainly how to defend and fight and how to operate with the company and how to move the companies

within the, it was only a company-size too. When we got there it was a whole bloody battalion on my second tour, which is a lot of companies, four companies, sometimes five. Down there they taught us about the village, the people in the villages. They taught us the language, they taught us the badges of rank that we were going to see.

I can’t remember them telling us how they lived, they did tell us how they lived but I can’t remember them telling us much about how they lived. They told us about some of the food they ate and that we’d be living with them and be eating the food with them and never drink the water without tablets in it. God if you waited, if you didn’t drink the water without tablets in it, you would have died.

Yeah they got that right. I’m going to have to wipe my eye, it’s running again. They used to do interrogations in the bunkers there. They had the forts,

forts, bunkers on the heads, North Head [Sydney Harbour] I think it was or South Head, I forget whether it was North Head or South Head. Anyway they had all these gun emplacements and they used to, some of the earlier fellas they used to put them in there and lock them up. Did you hear about that?

They used to put them in there and lock them up and treat them as prisoners and take away everything that they’ve got off them.

In case they were ever captured, which was a waste of

time because the Americans issued us with a 45 pistol, so that you’d never get captured. The 45 was a personal weapon for you to use on yourself if you were ever captured. No-one was ever captured, no-one that we know of. I think the task force had some missing but missing is, if a bomb landed here and you and I were blown away, she would know we were hit by the bomb but as far as the Government was concerned you’re missing because they never found your bodies, so you’re

listed as missing. But they put them through this, it was pretty undignified I believe, that they put them through. They tormented them, said terrible things to them and then treated them exactly as if they were prisoners. Deprived them of everything except basic stuff to keep alive and with the threat that if you fail this you don’t go to the team.

I don’t know if anybody ever failed it or not but it was a pretty terrible thing to do to them.

They’d stay there for days apparently, yeah. Some of these older fellows, an old friend of mine, an old warrant officer, Ozzie Ostario, who I worked with on my first tour, have you ever heard of him?

Well he was put through it and they were saying some terrible

things to him. They were calling him a girl and he likes boys and all that sort of stuff. They find out, if they get you to admit anything, to say anything they use it against you, “You a married man?” “Yeah”. “Your wife’s playing up you know, she’s with other blokes.” things like that that get you angry but it was never used because nobody from Australia ever got captured.

I never, I never

did it because I couldn’t speak Vietnamese. I could speak some but not enough to interrogate anybody. I used to give them to the Vietnamese and they’d interrogate them. If we were out in the scrub and we captured somebody and I wanted to interrogate him the Vietnamese did it and I was just there to watch or walk away, because they had their own methods. They had methods of getting the truth and sometimes it was good to get

the truth because we could do things. If were back at the base, like I was at Binh Son, I was on an outpost there, they had the Vietnamese Special Police. I forget what they called them now but they were special police but they used to do a thorough interrogation there. They had real thorough interrogation methods and they had a gaol just outside the compound that they used to lock them all up in and

they used to let them out every afternoon to go to the toilet. Once a day they were allowed to go to the toilet, late in the afternoon. They’d let them all out and give them two minutes to do whatever they had to do on the paddy fields. It was open paddy fields all around it. They were isolated out there. They’d come out of their compound and they’d be running to go to the toilet, because they’d been twenty four hours and they’d be squatting down going to the toilet and

the time would be up and they’d start shooting at them, bang, bang, bang, bang, and they’d be running back to their compound, back behind the barbed wire with their trousers round their ankles and still trying to do a crap and get back into there, but I never ever saw them hit any but they used to terrify them. And they’d get back inside that thing like a flash and that was it for twenty four hours more. If they wanted to do anything they had to do it in there and had to take it with them next time they left.

These were the same people, they were VC or NVA or whatever they’d captured and they didn’t treat them real good when they interrogated them either. The Asians are like that, very tough on each other, very hard.

No, the only thing I knew about Communism was the Russians weren’t talking to us we weren’t talking to them and they had what they called Communist terrorists in Malaya and I don’t know, confrontation with Borneo was involved with communists or not. I don’t think it did. I think it was just confrontation with the Government but

that’s about all I knew. Didn’t know much about it. Didn’t bother me much, didn’t need to know I thought, but I did learn afterwards. When I came back after my first tour I started to see it and I started to see communism in Australia and by the time I came back from my second tour it was definitely here and it was pretty high up too. The Deputy Prime Minister of

the country eventually [Dr Jim Cairns, Deputy Prime Minister in the Whitlam ALP Government from 1974-75] in my opinion was so close to being a Communist that if damn’s not close to swearing, nor was he a communist. Yeah, I knew more about it afterwards. I knew I could see it and I could see how damaging it could be. It was going to damage this country if it got a hold.

There’s not a soldier that joins the army that doesn’t want to go to war. If they tell you they don’t they’re

bloody liars because they wouldn’t join in the first place if they didn’t want to go to war. A lot of the guys, I guess of my era, our dads and brothers had been in the army, had been in the war and we wanted to be a part of that too. We wanted to be able to stand alongside them in the RSL [Returned Services League] and say “I was there, I did it too.” even though the RSL didn’t want us when we came back. It worked out differently but

it, they do, it’s like training a horse to run and never giving him a race. You train for it, it’s what you join for, for the training, the life and war’s part of it. If a war turns up while you’re there, well that’s where you go, that’s where you expect to go too. Because there’s nothing worse for all your mates to have gone and you didn’t go. I meet a lot of ex-National Servicemen,

I’ve met a lot of ex-National Servicemen who went to Vietnam and I’ve met a lot of ex-National Servicemen who didn’t and I have not met one ex-National Serviceman who didn’t go to Vietnam who’s not envious of his mates that did go. They’re very proud of them. Those that did go are very proud of themselves and you can see that now when they come out of the, they come out of the woodwork on Anzac Day and Vietnam Day, or whatever they call it and they’re very proud of what they did. These are the same guys that walked into

Puckapunyal with bare feet and guitars under their arms and hair two feet long. They’re now mature men who’ve been to Vietnam and are proud of it and we were proud of them too. They never worked with me but I’ve seen the deeds that they’ve done and they’ve done well, the same as the rest of the army.

I don’t know. I can’t recall anything other than the normal training. They never, over a few beers we had some talks with them but I can’t recall anything like that. Jack used to say a lot of things but that was Jack, cranky Jack Morrison.

Oh two

DCM’s he had, Distinguished Conduct Medals and Bar. He had bayonet scars on his face from the Second World War and he was tough. He was a big fella and greatly admired in the team, greatly admired in the entire army in fact and he was funny. He loved to bang on the camp act, he liked to bang on a bit of a sissy act and he was six feet odd

tall and well built guy, hard as nails and he’d stand in the bar and he’d stand there with what we called the Artillery Stance, with his heel of left foot say inside the arch of the right foot, like that, like a ballet dancer. And he’d have a hanky maybe tucked up in his shirt sleeve and he’s say, he did this one day in the Melbourne Hotel in South Melbourne, waterside workers and painters and

dockers everywhere, “You know what Micky?” “What Jack?” “I reckon bloody civilians should be tied in bundles of ten and burnt” and I said “For God sakes Jack, don’t say that in here”. He didn’t care and I got him out of that hotel as quick as I could because these painters and dockers would be looking at him wondering whether he was fair dinkum or not and they’d look at him and say “He’s a bloody ponce, look

at his bloody hanky hanging down and the way he’s standing.” And he was tough as nails, wouldn’t have mattered if they’d had a go at him, he’d have been back into them. He was a lovable character he was. He passed away. He was the Command Sergeant Major at Southern Command when he left and he got a job at the Arts Centre when he left the army, they put him in the Arts Centre and all the people in the Arts Centre had uniforms on and a cap

and they had a crown because they worked for the Government sitting up on here and he was the only one that didn’t wear it. He said “I was never a major in the bloody army and I refuse to bloody wear it, so I will not wear a crown up there”. So he didn’t wear it. Everybody else had one but they let him take it off, because “I was a warrant officer.” he said “I wore it here, not up there.” He’d turn over in his grave if he

knew they’d made me a major, he wouldn’t talk to me anymore probably.

The first time?

Yes.

Yeah, when we got off the plane we had to change our shirts. We had to take a civilian shirt. We were all in polyesters. Had to take our army shirt off, our polyester shirt, and put a civilian shirt on. A whole plane load, whatever it was, a hundred and forty or whatever the plane took off all these young men, short back and sides, all with polyester green pants on and a civvy shirt,

highly polished shoes, walking off the plane. Down we went, had a few beers, and I’m not sure whether it was the first tour or the second tour, both times I went we did the same thing in Singapore, we were there having a Tiger Beer at the bar and over the loud hailer came a very British voice, which turned out to be a British officer, “Would the Australian troops inbound, outbound.” or whatever it is,

“For South Vietnam, please board the plane now.” I thought “Well crikey; he’s just shot the whole lot down.” Here we are dressed up like bloody civilians, pretending, and he calls us soldiers going to Vietnam, and that’s what happened, we got back on the plane and away we went. I think it was on the second tour they did that, not the first one. Don’t know what they proving.

Yeah, maybe it was the getting off that was dangerous, not getting on, yeah, never thought of that. And then on the first tour we scrambled back on the plane and it’s not far from Singapore to Ton San Nhut and as we were approaching, you know what they’re like on QANTAS planes or all aeroplanes. They always tell you we’ll be arriving at so and so at such and such a time and the weather is going to rain like buggery or it’s overcast or one thing or the other. He said “We’re bound for Ton San Nhut

airport. We’ll be touching down in about twenty minutes time and the weather forecast for Saigon and Ton San Nhut is hot and cloudy with light to moderate flak.” Intermittent gunfire, that’s great, he had a sense of humour this guy and we continued on. We couldn’t land, on the first tour, we couldn’t land because

there were, the Americans were conducting an air strike and they used the Ton San Nhut strip for military aircraft as well as civilian, so the Phantoms were taking off from the strip and they take priority. Inbound, people in planes wait, so we had to circle round Saigon, Ton San Nhut, all that sort of place, while the Phantoms took off and while they were still running the air strike, we had to keep away from it because they would need to come back

in again, possibly for emergencies or refuel or whatever, so we just circled all around, looking out the window, trying to find out where the bombs were being dropped, “Is that an air strike over there?” “I don’t know, it’s burning.” Maybe it was an air strike, maybe it was just a bushfire or what and anyway we’re doing all this and all this is building up more tensions for the, it’s pitch dark and finally they let us come down.

And down we came, because running an air strike, the first thing you think of when they say they’re running an air strike is “Who’s running it? Is it the other guys running an air strike on the place we’re going into or is it these guys running an air strike somewhere else?” Anyway we found out it was the other way around, the safe way, so anyway we came back down on the ground, in we go and we get out and we walk down the gangplank and there they are, all these little hats, all just this far above the ground,

crowds and crowds of them, and everybody’s leaning over this side as you go down the gangplank “Don’t get near them, they might be one of them.” Like I said before they wouldn’t be there if they were enemy and then they truck you off and take you into town. The training team went in a Jeep, not into town, they took us to a villa that they had outside of Saigon. Just a villa right

in the village we were living with the Vietnamese and we went in there and they had a few beers and slept the night there and in the morning we started.

Oh he wished me good luck of course and said keep your head down. That was about it, yeah. I think my mother was more worried that something was going to happen to me. My father said “Oh yeah, you’ll be right”.

Mother’s worry, yeah, I don’t remember a great deal about that. I did spend some time with them before I went. They give you a weeks pre-embarkation leave, so I went and saw them. They were in Adelaide and I was living in Melbourne at the time.

Oh yeah, the intense heat, the humidity and the, Saigon had a terrible smell. To me it smelt like rotten foliage or rotten vegetables, decay, decaying vegetables or timber and stuff, yeah. And once you got into Saigon itself it stunk of garbage, complete garbage,

because there were so many people there, there were thousands flocked from the countryside to live in Saigon, to get away from the Communists, from the Viet Cong. Of course the Viet Cong were harassing them and taking their food off them and money and their young people to join them, so as many as they could they went to Saigon. And sanitation and that couldn’t keep up with the

number of people, the streets were covered in garbage, the traffic was just unbelievable, the mass of traffic. Everybody brought their scooter with them or their Lambretta [motor scooter] or whatever and they were putt putting everywhere, and it was just absolute chaos, because the Vietnamese when they travel round they stack as many people as they can onto the transport.

These little scooters, little Lambrettas I think they were, they could fit eight on them, eight. Mum and dad and all the kids, yeah, so I can still remember the smell of the place. The smell is probably the worst.

Yeah, it is, yeah.

No, we went with the Australian, we went to the villa, the team had a villa, just for the team only, on the outskirts of Saigon and we spent the night there. The next morning we went to the Australian, oh no, not Australian, it

was the Free World Building they called it in Saigon, the Free World. The headquarters for Americans, the Thais, the Koreans and the Australians were all in there, all their administrative headquarters they were all located in there. The team had a little hut right at the back of the compound near the barbed wire, right on the outskirts and the others were in a great big building. Security there was pretty good to get into

the compound area. They had the Vietnamese with mirrors used to go around and look underneath the vehicles to make sure there were no bombs stuck underneath them and explosives. Every vehicle they did this to, so we went in there and were briefed there and then we went to the American MACV Compound, somewhere else in Saigon and we were issued with all the American equipment, and this is on top of all the

Australian stuff that we got. See we got two sets of greens Australian and two sets of this and two sets of that and then we got two sets of American greens, and two sets of everything. The first time I went there I still had the primitive webbing that I had in recruit training and it was Second World War stuff. It was the khaki Blancoed, khaki

material made out of, I forget what it was made of, very thick stuff anyway, but it was khaki and I used to blanco that. The Americans gave me the American pouches so I used them. Our pouches held more ammunition, bigger magazines but the Americans was a lightweight stuff, jazzy.

Regional forces.

And popular forces.

ARVN.[Army of the Republic of Vietnam]

The popular forces, commonly called the PF, were local village people,

where neighbours, where all the people in this street say are all part of it if it was a little village. And it’s a bit like that thing, what’s that thing they have now? Neighbourhood Watch, except they were all, all the males were in this force and they all wore a little uniform and they had a gun and

they were responsible for taking care of the village. They used to sit out there at night, one or two sit out at night in a listening post and listen for anybody that might be coming into the village so they can warn the others. They used to have and they have little tags, one of them might be asleep with a piece of string tied to his toe and the other one’s out there, awake, having a look and if he sees anything or hears anything, he just pulls it and hopefully the other guy will wake up or he won’t pull his toe off

and they’d all be prepared. Now that’s PF. The Regional Forces were something like our CMF who trained and operated very close to home but went out a bit further and they went out on day patrols, while the others stayed at home, didn’t patrol and these one, the Regional Forces, went out in the morning, came back in the afternoon and protected the village

where they lived. And the ARVN, was the Army of the Republic of Vietnam with professional full time soldiers, who went anywhere, anywhere and everywhere that they were sent, but mostly worked within the Corps areas that they were allocated to and Vietnam was broken up into four Corps areas. There was 1 Corps, or Corps One, Two Corps, Three Corps and Four Corps was the Mekong Delta. Australians operated in the,

the Task Force operated in the Third Corps area, 3 Corps. Two Corps area was only advisors and 1 Corps was only advisors and so was Four. That’s the only Australians were advisors in those Corps areas.

Well I was, on my first tour I was in a place called Nam Hoa, which was a little village west of the Citadel City Hue, the ancient capital, and they were

a mixture of ruff puffs. We called them ruff puffs, RFPF, and they were ill equipped. They had, some were bare footed, some had shoes, some had helmets, some had the inner of the helmets, some had the outer, some had a rifle, some didn’t. And we used to train them to take care of their village, because they had, within the compound was our headquarters, and we lived there and their

commanders lived in there and the soldiers manned that, day and night. But outside of the village, separate from the compound was their families. The families were living in the ordinary little houses that they’d always lived in and they’d till the soil and grew rice and all the other vegetables that they grow and they had a little marketplace and they traded amongst one another. We’d go out with the RFPF,

with the PF mainly and we’d do a little patrol outside and then we’d come back into the village every afternoon. If we did an operation we’d come back in the afternoon and stayed there. Never stayed out overnight but they didn’t go out very often, only went out once or twice a week. They mainly stayed in the village area and we did Med Caps [US Medical Civil Aid Patrols] there, We used to guard the medical people,

Med Caps. The medical people would come along and do a medical check on the people and check them all out and give them tests and find some that had TB [tuberculosis] and some that had this, that and the other. TB was pretty prevalent amongst the Vietnamese and give them medication, look after their children and check their children and give them some medicine for them and we used to guard that. The other advisor and myself would stand guard there and watch while it was happening.

Because it would be an ideal time for the VC to come in and knock them off and get the medicines off the doctor, off the medical people that were treating them, so we used to guard that. And they were being supplied with vegetable seedlings and all that sort of stuff, and they were being taught how to properly cultivate their ground and grow things to look after themselves. And

yeah, and then we had within the compound, one of the first jobs that I did when I got there was to try and get them to make a bunker. There was tons of bunkers within the compound but they never had a bunker for themselves, that’s the diggers, so we got all the stuff for them to make a bunker. This is dig a big hole in the ground, put all the sandbags around it, put some overhead cover

over the top of it to keep them safe from mortars and things and it was pretty hard to teach them how to dig a hole. And they had a little basket, bit like the bakers basket, but very small one but with two handles, one handle each side, and they would dig and shovel some dirt and put a little bit of dirt at a time into this basket and when it was full and I mean

just full, one would get each side of the basket and they would take it away, two of them to carry this basket. It was only a shovelful that was in it, tip it out and fill another one. They were filling sandbags the same way, and it was going to take them about two hundred years to build this bunker, so I thought “I’ll show them how to build a bunker” so I grabbed hold of the pick and shovel and that and I started digging and shovelling, all that

sort of stuff. And all of a sudden the other advisor that was working with me, Ozzie Ostario was standing on the side there and he started laughing and he said “Mick, they’re making a dill out of you.” and I said “Why, what do you mean?” And he said “Have a look at them”. They were all sitting around, it was like an auditorium, they’re all sitting down there, smoking and watching me dig and he said “They’re letting you dig the bunker, they’re not going to do it, they’ve got this Australian advisor and he’s bigger than them and he’s digging the hole for them. They’re not going to do it,

you have to make them do it.” So right o, I threw the shovel down, I said “Now you lot, you copy me, you do it”.

Oh yeah, they started to do it but they were very reluctant, but like I said to them “It doesn’t matter to me whether you dig it or not, because when the stuff hits the fan, I’ve got that bunker in there, that’s mine. Where are you going to go?” “Oh no, we be right.” Yeah,

when it did happen, they were caught, they were outside. And Ozzie and I were working together, Ozzie had a 57 recoilless rifle and that’s a fairly big round and he loved this and he traded something for it and he got it. It’s not an Australian, it’s not an Australian issue. And he got this 57 and he loved it and he used to fire it and we had an American advisor that lived in the hut too, in,

I’ve forgotten the name of the flipping place now, anyway he lived in the same compound as us, and Ozzie said to me on the first night I was there, he said “When the shit hits the fan tonight.” he said “And it will because I can feel it in me water”. He said “I go into this bunker here, behind these sandbags here, and

Spud Murphy, the American sergeant, he goes straight behind me or to the side of me, behind these sandbags here, and you go behind those sandbags behind us, the three of us.” behind us two I mean. And he said “When you hear the word fire, duck your head”. I said “Whatever for?” He said “because I’m going to be firing a 57 recoilless rifle and it’s almost as dangerous behind as what it is in the front and

if you get the blast it will blow your bloody head off.” So this was it, he used to fire it and Spud Murphy loaded it and I wasn’t allowed to touch it until finally one day we had some dog teams, some American dog teams used to leave from our compound and there were about ten of them and they used to have themselves all camouflaged up and they had a German shepherd dog, and if the German shepherd dog wasn’t well they wouldn’t go out. The dog

was the senior member of the team and he was in charge, so they came in there and they were going out and off they went. The following day we got a radio call from them “We’re in trouble, we’re surrounded by VC, can you give us a hand.” So Ozzie lumbered up his 57 recoilless [rifle], he said to me “Hey, you carry the bloody ammunition” and they’re huge rounds, this 57 things were great big things and a boxful of them and off we go, into the back of the

truck, took some Vietnamese with us, Spud Murphy came too, he’s usually number two on the 57 and away we go. And we get near the hill with the, where the VC are attacking these fellas, we get on top of it. We’ve got a hill to get on top of it so we can get above it and fire down on them, so we started to run up this hill and Ozzie was running up the hill and I’m running behind him. And he’s a tough man this Ozzie, he was one of those fellas “If you want to be a soldier, listen to me,

if you don’t want to, just shut your mouth, and leave me alone and go away.” And Ozzie started running and I thought “If you can run up this bloody hill Ozzie, so can I” and we’re charging up this hill and I’m dying and so was he, so we stopped and he started bringing up his heart and everything, but thank Christ he stopped. We got to the top of the hill and he said “Right, you can be

number two.” I’m promoted, number two on the 57, “Righto.” so Spud Murphy got on the radio and said “We’re here, where are you? Give us a reference, and we’ll fire you some rounds.” He told them where we were, well they told him where they were, he told us and Ozzie estimated the area on the ground where they’d be and he said “let’s go”. And I’m loading the rounds in and he’s firing them, bang, bang, load, fire bang, and suddenly the American on the radio yelled out

stop, stop, stop.” We said “What’s the matter?” He said “You’ve just wounded three Americans”. And I leant over to Ozzie and said “You bastard, do you see what you’ve done with your 57?” But they were only shrapnel wounds but they were hit so we had to adjust a bit. But I had the wood on Ozzie, he would never let me be number two until then, that was the first time that, this

57 was his and he’d wounded three Americans with it, so after that he let me start firing it then, I graduated.

No, they never fired any artillery onto us. I’ve had Americans caught in one of our ambushes with Vietnamese but we didn’t shoot them,

because when the Americans are operating in the scrub anybody that hasn’t got round eyes is enemy and they just couldn’t get it into there head that the ARVN was operating there and they were on their side, so unfortunately we worked pretty close to them, the Americal Division, they were our neighbours. We used to refer to them as ‘The enemy.” the Americal Division. And we set an ambush near

Binh Son, set an ambush and had all the Vietnamese there, all had gone to ground, and these Americans started to walk into the ambush and they were loaded to the hilt with weapons, they carry everything they can, very heavily armed. And they started to walk into the ambush and I called up, I didn’t know who they were and they had no call sign so I could talk to them, so I called up the 2IC [Second In Command] and talked to somebody on the Americal Division side and told

them that we were in a certain location and “Did they have any troops there?” They said “no, we haven’t got any”. I said “Well these fellas are all great big bloody white men with round eyes and tin hats on their heads and flak jackets and guns hanging out of their rectum.” there were so many of them. “No, we haven’t got no Americans here at all.” I said “Well the North Vietnamese haven’t got anybody looking like

these blokes look. They’ve got to be Americans, they’re not Australians, because we’re too far away from 3 Corps area.” where the Australians were. So we had a little agreement, he said “Well don’t worry, don’t worry about it, just tell you’re fellas not to shoot them, these Americans”. I said “I’m not worried about my blokes shooting your blokes, your blokes will shoot mine because if one of mine stands up with his Asian look, you’re going to shoot him.”

He said “Alright then” so they told this section, they were a section that were supposed to be somewhere else, that was closest to it, but they weren’t supposed to be where they were, so he told them “Stand still with all your American troops, while the Vietnamese all stand up”. I said “Righto.” so we had this armistice and all my fellas stood up. You should have seen the looks on all these American faces, they were surrounded by South Vietnamese troops that they didn’t

know and they didn’t even know where they were, they thought they were some place else. They thought they were way up the track, nowhere near us, so I saved, I probably saved the lives of my fellas because their firepower that they had would have been enormous. The next thing we would have had napalm dropped on because they would have had an air strike as quick as a flash but that’s the only thing that I can remember that was

close to having a fight with them. We had a few fights with our own people, when one company bumps into another, that does happen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had a company moving around, in the Mekong it was. My company was moving in an area and another company was moving in an area and they did a right turn and they came across in front of us and then all hell broke loose. And I’m lying there in the paddy fields thinking

“my God, these Viet Cong have got some fire power. They’ve got 30 calibre machine guns, M60’s” and then it twigged “I wonder if that’s the other company?” We got on the radio and we talked to each other “Yeah, we’re here, we’re in contact”. “So are we.” so we all put our hands up and stopped firing. We didn’t get any casualties as far as I can remember, it comes as a bit of shock, but it does happen, it does happen. It can happen, it’s

poor map reading.

Oh yeah, yeah, one of the most frightening things of accidental killings or woundings, is when you get a contact, if your soldiers in the centre have hand grenades and things like that and they start throwing them, because if you’ve got a company of men and they’ve

all gone to ground and they start throwing hand grenades. I mean we throw hand grenades here and we might throw them twenty metres, there’s got to be somebody else on my side that’s twenty metres away, or it will hit a bloody tree and bounce back and get me. So that was one of the things I had to stop the Vietnamese from doing, was throwing hand grenades because that was extremely dangerous.

Well we knew our role was to advise, one of the most important things was not with the ARVN, but more so with the RF and the PF, was to make them honest, make them honest in a lot of things. Make them honest in their

administration was one thing because some of the company commanders in the RFPF had bogus people in their unit and they used to pay them wages, people that didn’t exist, and they had people that were dead, that were killed in action, that were still on the payroll, so the company commanders were drawing their wages. They were making a lot of money, a clever move isn’t it? So you had to make sure that if they said they had Joe Bloggs and Bill Smith that they did have Joe Bloggs and Bill Smith.

Another thing was you had to keep your eye on anything that you got for them, that they kept it. That they didn’t go down the village and sell it, like sandbags and wire and all that military type stuff. They could sell that, the Viet Cong would love to have that, they’d buy it and on operations, before they had advisors with them, they would be,

their commanders would send them out and say “We want you to go to a grid reference so and so and then move to an objective this and objective that, that and the other and then come back.” They’d go out and they’d get to the first tree line, sit down, boil the billy, have a cup of tea, have some rice and fish heads or whatever, sit there for a couple of hours, and say “We would have done that operation by now, pack up”. And they’d go back and walk back into the

compound and say “Gee, we’ve had a tough day, we killed so many.” they didn’t have to prove what they killed, or “We didn’t have any contact at all”. I suppose to prove that they had fictitious contacts they would probably fire some rounds off to make sure they didn’t take all the ammunition back. But we were there to make sure that they did so when they had to go somewhere, we went with them and we watched them and they did go there. If they did shirk out, when we came back we’d dob them in [inform],

then they got into trouble.

The Vietnamese?

Oh yeah, I used to do operations with them. In the Mekong Delta we used to go out on day operations, all day. Go out early in the morning, we’d get a message, go out early in the morning, grab our maps and all our gear, go up town to the local village and get all the stuff that

we needed and then meet all the Vietnamese, get in the trucks and then go off and do a daylight operation. And the Mekong Delta was all wide, open plains, all flat country. There’s no mountains there, not in the area we were in and the province of Vinh Binh that I was working in is right where the Mekong goes

into canals and into the sea. And every time the tide comes in the Mekong River backs up and the province nearly goes under water, there’s not much that’s not under water. You’ve got tree lines where there’s little villages and the little villages along the tree lines would probably be two hundred metres wide and only probably thirty or forty metres deep, so there’d be a row of houses here, a row of houses there and they might run all along the

waterline for a couple of hundred metres and that was it. And we used to spend hours going from one to the other. It would take you ages to move from one tree line to the other. Sometimes it would take you a couple of hours and you’re right out in the open, you’re right out in the sun and you’re cooking away and you’d only drink the water that you could carry and you’d get to within three hundred metres, which was rifle range and the buggers would be waiting for you. They’d see you coming, and

they’d be sitting there waiting for you and they’d open fire on you. And you’re out in the paddy fields and there’s no where to go, you can’t hide in water. The water’s maybe by the time you get near the village the water may only be half a foot deep and so what you’ve got to do is turn around, run, scramble or crawl or whatever and try and find a bund, that bunds that they have between the paddies. They used the bunds for walking on but they’re mainly designed to retain

the water within that paddock for the rice growing. And you’d have to sort it all out from there but it was pretty heartbreaking . And sometimes you’d have trouble getting the Vietnamese to move again because no-one wants to stand up and just charge ahead to people that are firing at you in an open paddy. The question that you asked was

“Did I ever see it?” It was so wide apart. We used to operate with three companies. There were two companies with Australian advisors and one company with an American team of advisors and sometimes we’d be pretty far apart, we might be six hundred metres apart but you could still see each other and we’d see them for example moving into a tree line and we’d see them getting into contact and see the fire coming out of the

tree lines. And we’d say “crikey, there’s a bit of a gun fight, we’ll watch this”. So we’d sit down on a bund and have a smoke and watch it and say “Oh look at that, that bloke just threw a hand grenade, and there’s a 50 calibre gun over there and there’s a rifle over there, and there’s this and the other going” and we could watch it. It was just like being at the movies and vice versa, they could watch us. We used to try and keep apart so we didn’t fight each other.

But that’s the sort of war it was in the Delta, that you could sit back and watch it and I can recall that one day I was watching an outpost being attacked by the VC, we sat down, had a smoke, thought “Well it’s there bloody fight, we’ve just fought to all the way over here and by the time we go through all the mud and slush to get there, it will be over anyway, so it’s no use us having a go.” And down the road came all these Vietnamese thundering

down this track and with them was this great big Yank, bristling with all this ammunition, had it all over him, steel pot on his head and puffing on a cigar I think, and he came along and I said “Hello mate, how you going?” And he said “You’re Australian?” I said “Yeah mate, I am.” this is this reaction force going to this outpost to help them out. “You Australian?” I said “Yeah”. He said “I’m going there on R and R [rest and recreation], I’m going to Sydney in a couple of weeks time, what’s it like?” So he stood there talking to me and I’m thinking “You’re the reaction to pull this lot out,

all these soldiers are going with you and they’re in trouble over there” and he stood there and what they call “Shot the shit” for a while and then I said to him “Are you going to go and help those fellas?” And he said “Oh yeah, I guess I’d better, nice to have met you Aussie” and shook my hand and off they went and just continued on. And I thought “I’m glad I’m not waiting for you to bring reinforcements for me.”

With the Americans?

With the Vietnamese?

Well I had, I mainly dealt with the officers, the commander mainly and the 2IC of the

battalion, and to a small extent with some of the company commanders, sometimes I went off with just the company. But the battalion commander I had in the ARVN, on my second tour, was very professional and he had been a soldier all his life. He’d come up through the ranks from a private, all the way up and made him captain and battalion commanders were quite often captain’s in Vietnam, because they just couldn’t keep up with the number of officers. They were losing so many but

this guy was really good and I trusted him and we had a really good relationship. When he said he was going to send a company out to do something I didn’t need to go with them because I knew they’d do it, so I stayed with him. If he went with the company I’d go with him. If he didn’t go, I didn’t go because he was my lifeline and I was his lifeline. He needed me just as much as I needed him. I needed

him so as I could still have the support of his Vietnamese soldiers and he needed me so he could have the support of the great American gun ships and fixed wing aircraft.

Yeah, I was married before the first tour, before I went off.

Married in 1957,

it was ten years later I left to go over to Vietnam. I joined the army four years after I got married and I went to Vietnam the tenth year after I got married, 1957 and 1967 I went the first time.

That’s one of the questions I don’t want to answer.

I don’t want to talk about that.

I was well aware that I’d be shot at, yeah.

I knew that, I knew that well yeah. They told us all that, that we were just not going to train them. The early advisors only trained them, they weren’t allowed to go out but they did but officially they didn’t, but they did. Some of them were killed before they were even allowed, in the times that they were told they weren’t allowed to go out with them, some of them were killed. But because they weren’t supposed to go out with them, I

don’t think it was published so much that they were actually fighting with, they were breaking the rules but heck, you do have to do those sort of things. Your company is not going to take any notice if you say “I’m training you to do this, that and the other, you’re going out tomorrow to try it out but I’m not going with you.” It’s great isn’t it? You’ve lost a lot of faith that they had in you because they think you’re a coward.

See you’ve got to go with them and we often used to train them, we trained one lot one day and then in the evening we took them out for a night time trial and we got into a live contact, so they were really able to use the training they received in the morning, during the night. It wasn’t meant to happen that way but if you take people out into a hostile area for a training, you’ve got to be prepared for it to be hostile back at you.

We took one lot to a rifle range down in the Mekong, right out in the paddy fields. Pulled up in the truck, got everybody out of the truck to fire their weapons, laid them down on the ground and there was a bund three or four hundred metres away from us and we opened fire at it, bang, bang, bang, just training and bugger me, rounds were whistling back at us, “What the hell was that?” The VC were in the bunkers. They

were in the bund having a day off and we surprised heck out of them by firing into their bund, so they thought “God almighty, what are we going to do?” So they fired back, so we had a live range practice and it worked, we got them, and once we got them we could go on with our training then. Yeah, you wouldn’t expect that, would you?

Just like turning up down at Belmont [rifle range, Queensland] and rounds come back at you.

They weren’t very good shots, because they didn’t get all that much range practise,

one on one training on how to handle a weapon, it was pretty quick. They got a recruit training course and all that sort of thing and then they were put straight into combat. But the ARVN were given M16’s, which is a rapid firing weapon, an automatic and I think the aim of it was, and that’s how the American’s use it too, fire a burst and you never know one might hit. The rest will miss, but one of them might

see if you let enough ammunition go. Whereas the Australian idea was to conserve the ammunition, fire single shots and if you firing burst with an automatic, you fire little bursts, don’t just go wrrmp and let it all go. So but they did alright. They were pretty sharp, there young fellas out the front, their forward scouts they used to bump into a lot of people, find them,

so you did find them often, they didn’t bypass them. Yeah and I tell you one thing they didn’t like to fire was a light anti-tank weapon, the LAW, a light anti-weapon weapon. It’s a fold out weapon, an M72 I think it was, something like that, an M74, and it fired an rocket type weapon and it all was in like a little tube,

something like a tube that you might carry photographs around in, one of those things, and to fire it you have to assemble it. You pull everything out and up and little wires go everywhere and you put it up to your shoulder, you fired one round and then you threw it away. It was never reloaded and they didn’t like to fire these because when they fired it the wire across the top of it used to cut their faces

and the back-blast used to deafen them, you couldn’t hear for the rest of the day. So they didn’t like to use them, so they’d go out for an operation and you’d try to get them to fire it and they’d say “no, no, no, no, I don’t understand” or “no can do” and that little weapon had all the instructions on it of how to load it, all in English of course, but it’s all written out there and they used to carry it for so long, all the words would be rubbed off it. It used to be completely bare.

They wouldn’t fire it, they did not like it and I don’t blame them because it used to deafen me when I fired it too.

The ARVN?

They weren’t so dedicated the

popular forces, they were just going through the motions I think. That’s why we had to be very careful with them because they were the dishonest ones that wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do, they’d just bludge, [loaf]sit behind a tree and, but the ARVN fellas were more dedicated. I felt sorry for the ARVN fellas because their whole life was disrupted. They were taken into the army because they weren’t wealthy enough to do

something else. If you were students you weren’t made to go in the army and if you were Buddhist monks you didn’t have to go into the army either, so the other poor fellows were mainly the poor peasant type person who became a soldier in the ARVN and they just pushed them everywhere and they never saw their families. They married very young the Vietnamese, they all seemed to be married and they looked like kids most of them

but they’ve got wives and kids and they lived in hovels, little mud floors, dirt floor shacks made of bamboo and sticks and in some cases made of Schlitz, Budweiser beer cans. They cut all the beer cans out, flattened them out and joined them all together, wire them all together and make a roof for their house. Quite ingenious some of them, the things you can do with beer cans.

I felt sorry for them, the ARVN I did.

It would have only been on the first tour

that that could have happened but I didn’t have any incidents where I could say ‘This guy hanging in the wire was the barber yesterday.” no, no, that never happened. I’ve heard people say that but I never did. We used to have probes. I think they were mainly ours, I don’t think they used, not in my area, not in Nam Hoa I can’t even think of the name of the place now, where I had the RFPF,

they were outsiders. I remember on Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve on my first tour I think it was, or was it New Years Eve? They had a truce Christmas Day or something. They never used to fight on Christmas Day, that’s it, and the company commander told us the next day when we came back, (we were up in the MACV Compound in Hue), when we came back he said ‘The VC came down here last night

and they said to us ‘we’re going to come in here and kill the lot of you and go down the village and knock off your wives”. And he was standing up on a bunker apparently, the company commander, telling them “Okay you bastards have a go” and they were standing their shaking their AK47’s [rifles] at him and I said “You’ve got to have rocks in your head, fancy saying that, they might have shot you.” But they were all strangers, he didn’t know them and they could see them across the river and they shone lights on

them, but they didn’t have a go, they went away. That was the truce, but they used to have a truce on Christmas Day and my second tour on Christmas Day I was, we’d just come down from Tra Bong, out of the Tra Bong Valley, yeah we were down on the flat ground, yeah we had Christmas dinner, but in the morning the VC had been firing at us, popping out of holes and having shots. They were in holes all around the battalion area and every now and then one would pop his head out

and have a shot and so my fellas were going round tossing grenades in all the holes, but they broke the truce. They shot a little boy, the VC I think it would have been and I had to get them medivaced, his sister was crying and I sent them off. This was the truce day but mostly they didn’t violate it, just small stuff like that.

Straight into it, yeah. Just as well it was my second tour because if it had of been my first tour I might have dropped dead from fright. I’ll tell you what there was no mucking about, no easing your way in, it was straight into it.

I think I just slipped back in. The only thing that I was concerned about was new job in a new area, you don’t know the area, you don’t know the people and you don’t know what you should have and what you shouldn’t have. I still wasn’t sure that I had the right gear. I know I didn’t have fifty dollars in my pocket because I know that bugger wasn’t going to rob me and did I have all the right things? Because there’s all these little things that you need.

You need very skinny pencil flares, for openers, and that is for when you’re in triple canopy jungle you can flick these little pencil flares, if you want a medivac or you want something, you can flick it in the air and the helicopters can see it and they’ll find you, so you’ve got to have those. And that’s a trick I never learnt or knew about before. And you’ve got to have 40-millimetre shells, you don’t have to have the weapon to fire it because the Vietnamese have got all them, so you just take the ammunition for it in case you need

to fire that, grenades and mostly smoke. Pop a smoke out of it, you can get it right up high, through the trees. You needed to have a hammock and on my first tour I never used a hammock. We slept on the ground if we slept anywhere at all or if we were back at base we slept in the bunker but a hammock, you just find two skinny Vietnamese, tie your hammock to one of them at one end and one to the other,

and you’ve got your hammock strung. But they used to find trees for us, we’d pull up in an area and look around and say “My God this is where we’re going to stay, where’s the hammock going to go?” And a Vietnamese voice would say “No worries, I fix” and he’d have it hanging out of a tree in no time, quick as a flash, all tied up, little half shelter over the top of you and another half shelter that used to keep the rain off you as it used to rain a lot. But if you were right up the top of the mountains, it didn’t rain much at all but

it was a frightening thing of a morning to be woken up by this, you look up and just this thump, thump, thump on the top of your poncho, this shelter over the top of you. It was a Vietnamese having a wash in the water that’s landed on your poncho and you stick your head out and say “What the hell’s going on?” “No worries chuan uy, I bath, I have wash, yeah, lovely.” and throwing water all over themselves and you’re thinking “God Almighty, I could have saved that and drank it.” but see it didn’t matter to them. Water was a fix all for everything

and they would still probably drink it anyway themselves but I wasn’t going to drink it, not after they’d bathed in it.

At first, at first I had to just watch them, I had to see. First of all I had to learn

to trust the other advisor that’s with me because he’s your life line and he’s got to learn to trust you. It’s worse for him than what it was for me because he’s been with the battalion for a while and he knows what to do but he knows that you’re brand new and you probably don’t know what to do. You don’t know what’s going on and until you’ve been there a while and you get to know everybody and know all the jargon and who’s who,

you can talk to those guys up the top, once you get know them it’s quite easy for you. You’ve learnt what your battalion commander’s going to do, you know all his good points and all his bad points. You know that every pay day, no matter where they are, he plays cards with all his platoon commanders, company commanders, platoon commanders and platoon sergeants and he always wins, always wins.

And this is on pay day, even though they haven’t got paid, to them it’s pay day, and when they stop, if they can do it, they get the cards out and they play cards and he wins. And they’ve got these little tiny narrow cards and they’d be throwing them down and everybody would be banging on the ground with them and then the battalion commander would pull all the cards in and he won again. He wasn’t getting any money but it was all going down on paper and I think it was their way of keeping their job

and their pay and any other little titbit, but that was just his style. That’s the Vietnamese way, that’s the way that they were but it didn’t interfere with his work, he was able to do it. And the battalion commander in my Corps area in that time, battalion commanders were allotted a certain amount of weapons that they had to capture each month and if they didn’t capture that amount

they were sent to gaol on paper, it went against their career, went into their records, gaol sentence for so long, because he didn’t get their certain amount of weapons. So this tended to make them a little bit dishonest too. When they did capture the right amount of weapons that they were supposed to hand in, that was it, they didn’t capture anymore, you know what I mean? And all the rest of the weapons were just farmed back into the battalion to be

carried around. You’d see soldiers walking around with two or three rifles, one M16, and two AK47’s. He never fired the AK47’s but he carried them because they were surplus weapons from last month and if at the end of this month if the battalion commander hasn’t got the certain amount, say it might be two hundred weapons he’s got to capture, for example, and he’s only got a hundred and fifty but he’s got fifty farmed out with his soldiers, he would say to me ‘Tonight is the last night for me to

capture fifty more weapons. We must have a contact.” And I’d say “Yeah, righto.” so all of a sudden he’d get all his fellas, all to fire, boom, boom, boom, boom, call up on the radio and say “We’re in contact and we’ve just captured fifty weapons.” and he was right for the month. Dishonest but it kept him out of gaol. It kept a good battalion commander in the field and they were all happy because they got the weapons they wanted. Didn’t hurt anybody, so that’s what we used to do,

well he used to do and I used to let him do it because if I’d have said “no, you can’t do it” I wouldn’t want to turn my back to him on the next operation, would I?

Yeah, yeah you had to have some gunfire to legitimise what he’s saying on the radio, because if you say “We’re in contact now” and there’s dead silence, because the CP quite often happened to be within hearing distance. For example one day there were three battalions of us in the Kham Duc area operating. There was an Australian and an American with each of

the other two battalions and mine and we could hear each other. We were harboured up for the night, it was late in the evening and I could hear the guns firing and could see all the flashes of the other battalion on the other hill being attacked and I heard the CP, who was on a hill further away, who couldn’t see what was going on, call up this battalion and say “Are you in contact with the enemy at this time?” Or not with the enemy but “Are you in contact at this time? And the Aussie on the radio said

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, will you speak up”. “Are you in contact at this time?” “You’ll have to call me back later mate, I can’t hear you for the gun fire”. And I thought ‘That answers your question for you, can’t hear you for the gunfire.” And another one of the fellas on the, I don’t know whether it was the same battalion or another battalion, but he called up on the radio and asked them to send him out a new hammock and a new poncho for over the top of his hammock.

They said “What happened?” And he said “It got damaged, got ripped up.” He said “How the hell did you get your hammock and poncho ripped up?” He said “When the last mortar attack came in I was laying in my hammock and I stood up and started running and have you ever tried standing up and running in a hammock?” He wrecked it and I thought “Well that’s a pretty good excuse to get yourself a new hammock.”

Yeah, at Kham Duc.

Well Kham Duc was a follow on from Hiep Duc and Hiep Duc we had a, we worked in Hiep Duc and we struck the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] 2nd Division,

we were the 2nd Division too, 2nd Division ARVN and so we had a fight there. Two battalions from the other regiment were just about wiped out, of ARVN. The advisors walked out and they fought with us, the 2nd Division NVA fought with us until they were sick of it, or they ran out of something, maybe they ran out of resupply but they decided to leave and when we woke in the morning we found where they’d gone. They’d just,

a whole mass of them had gone past our battalion and gone out and headed west and I said to the battalion commander “Our scouts and our sentries should have seen them, they must have seen them and they must have heard them” because there were hundreds that went out because they flattened all the ground. It was the width of a road, like the street out the front of your house, the path they left was that wide of them going out.

And then I thought afterwards ‘There’s a little Vietnamese sitting there at his outpost and he sees a division or what’s left of a division walking past him, he’s definitely going to keep his mouth shut because I would too.” It would be a frightening sight for him but anyway we went back then into Tam Ky and resupplied because we figured, well we didn’t figure but the brass, the brains back in headquarters figured that this regiment,

division had gone in the direction of Kham Duc, which was close to the Laotian border. So they took us out and they resupplied us and slipped us into, my battalion into forty six helicopters early in the morning, just before daylight and they flew us across to Kham Duc. It took about an hour I think to fly there and as we were flying into Kham Duc

there was an airstrip, Kham Duc had an airstrip and it was previously owned by, before the NVA got there, it was owned by American Special Forces and they were overrun in about May 1968 and the airstrip had been abandoned and nobody had been back, just the NVA. There was aircraft all along the side of the airstrip abandoned and there were trucks and

there were, and the strip itself was heavily mined so that planes couldn’t land on it. They wanted a fire support base established in that area so that they could provide artillery support for us while we patrolled the area to look for this 2nd Division and as we came in with all these choppers, forty six of them, over we went and we could

see down there the Kham Duc strip, a hill there and a couple of more hills up there and B52’s [US bombers] had been in and done air strikes, dropped all their great big bombs in various places round the area. The Phantoms had been there and prepped three areas, three landing zones. Don’t prep one because if you do that’s going to be a give away, that’s where you’re going to go and then at the last decision, last minute, the decision is made by the

Charlie, Charlie commander in control. He picks a landing zone and he says “We’re going into that one.” and then they go in and it fools the enemy they reckon. Anyway we picked the right one because they had the ground up above and we went in and we all tipped out and the hill up above us was where the NVA headquarters was, the North Vietnamese Division Headquarters was right above us. And they must have thought it was great

when we landed there. We all poured out onto the landing zone, the helicopters are coming in spewing people out, the door gunners on the slicks, which was the helicopters, the slicks, were firing their machine guns because they’re terrified too. They’re all firing and one of the biggest problems was getting shot by a mad Yank because they were still firing when they got on the landing zone and we were already there, because I was in the first chopper on the ground. One of my packs, my big pack I dropped it off and it got hit with rounds, they shot it up

and the slick went, so I did a stupid thing, I raced over to the next slick that came in and punched the door gunner in the mouth and he said “What was that for?” And I said “For the bastard that just shot up my pack” and this poor guy with his big thing on and he’s got this M60 held in his hand and he was a trapped audience, he couldn’t do anything but I was furious, he could have killed me. And anyway out we all get, because we’re all pretty stressed out

and worried, all this is going on and I didn’t want to get shot by a Yank, the North Vietnamese maybe, but not a Yank and then off they all went. We thought ‘This is great, we’re alright” and then all of a sudden that hill up above us, they hadn’t prepped it and that’s where the 2nd Division headquarters was and they opened up on us with 51-calibre machineguns, which is just a little bit larger than the 50 cal that Australians use or the British use.

And they mortared us and they rocketed us and there were all these little bunkers in the ground that Special Forces had left behind and they were all overgrown with weeds and the overhead covers had all collapsed on it, the timber was all inside of it, so we climbed into all those things and tried to hide. We hid in, I was hiding in one little hole and two Americans came with us that were Pathfinders. They

were to establish the gun sites for when it became a fire support base and they came with us. A couple of young fellas and they weren’t part of the fight, they were just there to work afterwards, and we were in this overhead cover thing and we’re sitting there getting bloody mortared and bang, bang, they’re coming in and this Yank had got his cigarette packet in his hand and I’d never seen this before, written on the side it said ‘The Surgeon General has said that smoking can be hazardous to your health”. And he read this out to me, he said “Did you know this, the Surgeon General says that smoking can be hazardous to your health.”

whomp, whomp, whomp, as these mortars are landing. I said “Yeah, give us one of those bloody things for Christ sake” and I lit it up and said ‘There couldn’t be anything more hazardous than this”. I’ve never forgotten that. And as it progressed we started to take casualties and I wanted to get them out, so we’ve got mortars landing, we’ve got 51 cal and we’ve got rockets coming at us

and calling on dust off and I forget which dust off I had, Dust Off Five One or something like that [Dust Off is slang for the US Aeronautical Evacuation units]. I called them up and they came on station and said “Yeah, we’ll come in and get them”. I said “You’ve got to be careful, you’ve going to get hit by 51 cal machine guns.” so we were running round the landing zone dragging Vietnamese, because the Vietnamese didn’t want to put their own wounded into a helicopter because they didn’t want to get shot, so I was muggins me doing it. So I was dragging Vietnamese and throwing

them in the chopper and they were evacuated and I think about three times they came in and I was loading them in, so at the end of the day they gave me a Bronze Star for Valour, the Vietnamese gave me the Cross of Gallantry. It was a pretty busy day and at the same time I was trying to run gun ships. I was hosing them down up the top there with gun ships and

the fixed wing aircraft came on, a few sorties of fixed wing, and I think I lowered that mountain by about two metres, took the top right off it. And at the end of the day, the day didn’t end because we stayed up all night. I had basketball on call. Basketball was a big cumbersome aircraft, I forget what it was, but it just goes round and round in circles, dropping these big flares and they call it basketball because they

sort of bounce as they come down and they sort of go around and we had this around us all night, lighting up the whole jungle. And then the following morning the JAKE, that’s the forward air controller came back on the radio and he asked me “You there Mick? You there Mick?” “Yeah.” “Do you need me? I’ve got some stuff here you can have it if you want it?” I said “Yeah, yeah, alright I’ll have it.” so

then I used it and then I told him to wait and I’d get some more later on and then we moved off and we hit some pretty hefty fights in there. We had, we struck them again early because they joined us then, had gun ships hosing them down and it was getting too dangerous for the North Vietnamese where they were, so they came over and joined us, we were all in together.

It was a big, like a big huddle. There was some North Vietnamese here and South Vietnamese there and no-one was game to move. You just stopped. You couldn’t shoot anymore because you’d shoot each other and had to drop the gun ships and say “no more” because less than thirty metres I think it was with gun ships was too dangerous, so they stopped and we all went quiet, stayed there and

the battalion commander said we’d move and we moved away and the North Vietnamese moved away and we broke contact and that was it. Because we were altogether, we weren’t going to stand there and punch each other and we were close enough probably to do it, so we stopped and they moved away, we moved away and then when we moved on, it took us three days from the time we landed until the time we got on top of that hill where

they were, where they started from. And when we did get to go up the hill on the final day, the final assault, we started to take a lot of casualties from rifle fire as we were going up, small arms. And the reason that I found out afterwards all in the area that we were going up was all little figure targets, the cut out figure in the shape of a man, and these were all behind trees, every here and there, all up the way up and it was

their sneaker range. It was where they used to sit on top of hill and have rifle practice firing at little targets that were behind hills and we approached right on that, we were going up the bloody sneaker range. They must have thought it was great. I think we got about half a dozen of our people shot in the head before we realised that this is not the way to go, so we pulled out and went up another way but that’s what happened there. They must have thought it was good

when they saw us, “Oh look at it, can’t believe it, these idiots are coming up through the sneaker range.” and then we finally got on top of the hill, and there wasn’t much left on the hill. The hill was pretty well blown away. We put HE [high explosives] onto it and no artillery because we weren’t within range, HE, and some Napalm but the HE did all the damage and there was weapons broken up everywhere and ammunition.

Bodies were all gone, they took them with them. Those that survived took their dead with them but we got tons of weapons that they left behind, so we finally owned the hill and we owned Kham Duc. The Americans then came in with sandbags and timber and tractors and trucks and 105Howitzers [artillery guns] and they built it up into a fire support base and that way we were able to move out and operate within the

Kham Duc area and they could give us fire support. But a funny thing, well not funny, but another point of what we found afterwards on that hill when it was all over and we went back onto the original hill that we landed on, was in those trenches where we’d been hiding were the skeletons of all the dead Americans that had been left behind when it was overrun in May of 1968. They were still there, nobody had been back,

nobody had collected them, the NVA hadn’t touched them. They were still dressed in their uniforms, all that was there was skeletons and ragged clothes, tin hats on their heads some of them and they had radios and rifles in their hands and some of them looked like they’d died under pretty brave sort of conditions, they were still fighting when they went.

Some of them were lying with their rifles right in front of them like that (demonstrates), yeah.

The Americans couldn’t go back see? The NVA had it. It was too dangerous. They probably figured, they knew that they’d be dead and they probably figured it wasn’t worth the risk of losing other lives just to get skeletons.

I don’t know whether they knew or not when we went back in that that was going to happen because they never told us. The FBI [US Federal Bureau of Investigation] came in and they went through them all, they sorted them all out, tagged all these skeletons.

Sorry, FBI, yeah, FBI, tagged all the skeletons and that and started the process I guess of identifying them all so they could tell their next of kin, but this sort of thing did happen a lot, where

the Americans did lose casualties and didn’t go back and there was a couple of other occasions where the Americans had called me up on the radio and said “You’re going into area so and so, will you have a look? We lost ten men there a few days ago. Would you have a look and see if you can find them?” And these were the only ones I ever found.

Yeah, they made the big decision, they made a good decision, the NVA, see because we were hosing them down, well the gun ships were and I was directing them on the NVA, marking our position and indicating

theirs and they were moving on them, a hundred yards, fifty yards, and then they came down to thirty yards, they were getting closer. Then it was too dangerous then as they were hosing our area down too. When they got within thirty metres they thought the only safe place here is with them, that’s us. It’s got to be doesn’t it? The safest place on the hill. You can’t beat them, join them so they moved over with us and it was their decision and a very good one

too and they moved with us and moved in amongst us. Cause we were still hiding and they crawled in and hid too, we knew they were with us, and they knew we were there but no-one was going to fire because we would have all annihilated each other. It was like bloody forming a circle for a range practise, you’d all shoot each other, so it was an Irish firing squad. And that’s what they did and it was a good move.

I thought it was pretty good, stopped us from fighting, stopped them from fighting and gave us the rest of the time off because we had a bit of a break while they moved away and we moved away. We were all in this area and then they moved back there and we moved back here and then we all had a cup of tea or something and got stuck into it at a later time.

Yeah, war’s a funny thing, isn’t it?

We say that, you’ve probably heard this expression that

artillery adds a little touch to a battle that otherwise would be just a vulgar brawl and that’s what you’d have if you were all in together, you’d have a vulgar brawl. So they reckon the artillery sorts that out.

Yeah, you do get scared, you get terrified and you try to keep yourself busy. There’s a lot of things you’ve got to do as an advisor, luckily. I think a private soldier would be terrified because he doesn’t really know what’s going on

and that’s one of the worst things of the confusion in battle of not knowing what’s going on. Until you know what’s going on you don’t have a clue and you start to conjure up the worst in your mind. You have a sudden burst of fire and a couple of weapons come firing at you and you can think to yourself “It’s only two people, there’s two weapons firing” but they might be the first two guys of the whole battalion.

They might have six hundred men behind them, so you are frightened. You are frightened of what can happen and I’ve said this before, it’s very frightening even not being fired at, it’s the thought that you might be, you’re moving through an area that’s hostile and you know it’s hostile and you know you’re likely to bump them because you’re looking for them and that’s the aim of why you’re there and any moment it can happen. And you

walk past a spot and you think to yourself “I would put an ambush in here, if I was the North Vietnamese I would put an ambush in here and get us, because we’re sitting targets here, we’re right underneath that mountain there, or that hill there or that clump of trees or something and the reason we’re there is because we couldn’t avoid it.” The Vietnamese didn’t always go around obstacles, they went straight through them and crossed their fingers I think but until it happens you’re really scared and each time

you move to the next object you’re scared again because it can happen there and it generally does happen when you don’t expect it. An area where you would say “nobody would shoot us from there” and they do and all hell breaks loose but the thing is you’re worries are over because it’s happened. You don’t have to worry about when it’s going to happen again because it happening and it’s happening right now and you’ve got to do something and you get so busy.

As the advisor you’ve got to do things. You’ve got to start sorting out how many of them are there, can somebody feed you back the information as to how many there are and where they are and what sort of weapons have they got. You can tell yourselves some of the weapons because you can hear them firing but you can’t see anything and you’ve got to start worrying about your casualties and that first burst of fire, who fired that, them or us? Have I now got half a dozen Vietnamese dying and do I have

to get a medivac for them? What’s going on and you’re trying to overcome this language barrier as well. You’re trying to ask the battalion commander and he’s just as hyped up as what you are and he’s trying to talk to all his companies and he’s trying to find out off their company commander and he’s got this bloody silly Australian leaning over his shoulder saying “For Christ sakes, what’s happening?” And it’s pretty confusing for a while and it doesn’t get much better,

it’s still always confusing, even when it’s all over you’re still not sure what did happen, but you know something did happen because you’ve got bodies on the ground. And yeah, it is frightening, your original question, but it’s what you’ve got to deal with and you’ve got to put it out of your mind because if you don’t you’ll sit on the ground and burst into tears and no-one will have any respect for you anymore. You’ll have lost all your commanding control so you’ve got to stop all that.

It’s a bit like hire purchase, buy now, pay later, no interest for twelve months, you know what I mean? So you suffer it and keep it inside yourself but there’s always a payment down the line. When it’s all over and things go back to normal and you’ve gone home and all that, you’ve got to deal with all these things sometime, because some of them keep coming back to you, so it’s buy now, pay later.

Oh yeah,

yeah, I couldn’t talk, ten years ago even and those first twenty years after that war, I could not talk about it at all. I would burn up and feel all sorts of funny feelings in me. I had feelings of guilt, I think guilt is probably one of the main things that you get, don’t ask me why. Yeah, you feel guilty and you also

feel that no-one believes you anyway and also people didn’t want to know after Vietnam. People didn’t want to know and they didn’t care. I was scared sometimes to say things like that because I think Jim Cairns, who then became the Deputy Prime Minister, if he’d have had his bloody way we would have been tried as war criminals, especially the advisors because of the way he carried on.

So I suppose there’s a lot of things mixed up in but I never felt like, for a long, long time I didn’t think that I belonged, I didn’t feel like I belonged in this country anymore. Especially when I first came back the second time and I’d seen Jim Cairns on the TV with a Viet Cong flag, marching through the streets of Melbourne, and I thought “How’s he getting away with this? This is Australia”

and not so long ago if I’d have seen that in the country I would have shot him but there he is and he’s getting away with it and people are clapping him, people are on his side. And I was in Melbourne and I was in the city, I went to town and I stood in the city there, I was on leave and getting over Vietnam and I was watching all the people, hundreds and hundreds of them, walking past, going wroom, wroom, all running around in circles, all women in their

high heels and all flashed up and the fellas in their, I don’t know what the pants were in those days but they were wearing those small trouser legs and things and little string ties and that. And they were going about their business and having a great time there and nothing bothered them and they had no idea that standing there right amongst them was a mongrel like me that had just come away from Vietnam and the things I’d seen and done and I’d seen other people and I’d seen other people do and this is what was going on in this war and

they didn’t exist to them, it was nothing. And if I’d have said “Hey, I’ve just come back from Vietnam.” half of them probably would have said “You bloody murderer” or something like that. Baby murderers they called us I think. We never killed any babies, never and I never saw anybody do it either. But I never felt as if I really belonged in my own country and there I was. We weren’t allowed to wear a uniform in Melbourne. We were told if we go out in public, wear civilian clothes,

don’t draw attention to yourself that you’re soldiers and this is Australia and those people are still alive today, those young people are probably fathers and grandfathers.

It still is, still is, I’m never going to forgive them but I don’t know who they are see, so that’s good. But I’ll never forgive Jim Cairns, as long as I live I’ll never forget him, never forgive him.

And he did more damage and he was the Deputy Prime Minister of this country. When he died, and I don’t care whether he’s dead or not, I can talk about the dead, when he died I wrote a letter to the Courier Mail and suggested that they dig the deepest hole they could to put him in, get him out of Australian soil, because he was not Australian to me, but that’s my opinion.

Yeah, I’ve got it.

That’s it.

Yeah, the ARVN

They were the best troops they had. They had Rangers and that but they were no better than the ARVN, no.

Oh yeah, a big difference, yeah. These were soldiers, these were soldiers. The first tour fellas were husbands and sons and that and they were only in it to protect their families in the village. And they were going home at the end of every day and sleeping with their family and that,

unless they were on guard duty and they were going home and hutching up at home and it was just a day job to them. And they didn’t go out every day, only went out about five or six days a week and of course every time they went out, we went out with them, but the ARVN were professional ones. They suffered a hell of a lot of casualties, a hell of a lot.

Both, the time I was with them and in general, right across the board. There were more ARVN soldiers killed than Americans, far

more, far more. They never tell you that but there was far more killed. They were getting killed by the drove, hundreds and hundreds of them.

Because they wore the brunt of the war. They went into all the dangerous places, they bore the brunt of it. Don’t let them tell you that, don’t believe the Americans when they tell you, because the Americans if you listen to them they won’t even acknowledge that we were there. They, as far as they’re

concerned when they go into a war zone it’s only Americans that do the fighting, nobody else is there. History will show, probably, in Iraq, that there were no Australians, there was only Americans and they may mention the British, they may but they certainly won’t recognise that there were any Australians there. On the operation on Kham Duc on that first day we had, there was the American advisor and me

and there was the two young fellas to set up the fire support base, two American soldiers and me. And they also sent a reporter, the Americans sent a photographer to photograph the taking back of Kham Duc and when they did do it the story came out in a magazine that it was the Americal Division

that took back Kham Duc and they showed photographs of the soldiers taking back Kham Duc and they were all Vietnamese and you can see that they are. You can see that they are not Americans but they claim that it was Americans that took it back. They also had a photograph of me and underneath was written “Americal Division soldiers awaits orders to move on arrival at Kham Duc” or something like that and I was furious.

They called all my Vietnamese soldiers, one of the American nurses in 27th Surgical Hospital showed it to me when I came in. She said “Look at this magazine here. This is you, they’re calling you an Americal soldier.” Americal that is the American Division and so I said “Where’s this magazine come from?” And she told me that they had an office somewhere at a little shack somewhere in the Americal Division headquarters, so I went in there and spoke to their public relations fella that did all this,

sent the photos out and I said ‘This is me and you’re calling me a Yank”. I said “I’m an Australian and I’m in the Australian Army” and he said “I’m sorry Aussie but when we take photographs of soldiers in combat, they are all Americans, always.” He said “Doesn’t matter who you are, if we photograph you, you’re American”.

It’s across the board

apparently from what he said, that’s the American style.

It wouldn’t be military law, but it’s the propaganda machine. The public relations propaganda for the newspapers, everybody’s American.

Yeah it was. They even claimed all the Vietnamese American and they claimed that they took the place back and I was there with the battalion. They came afterwards, after we secured it, “Is it alright now?” And they came in and they took it, they manned the airstrip down the bottom. They didn’t man the hilltop, the ARVN still retained the hilltop that we originally landed on

but they provided the Howitzers up there, the 105 Howitzer’s to give us artillery support, but they occupied the strip down the bottom. That’s what they wanted was that airstrip so they could fly in and out and they could fly their planes close by. They were probably operating into Laos or something like that and incidentally where we landed on this hill overlooking Kham Duc,

was originally the home of President Diem [Ngo Dinh Diem, first President of South Vietnam from 1955-63]. He had a country home and it was built there on this little hill, I found out afterwards, overlooking the strip and all the rubble that was on the ground around the trenches was from his house. He’d lived there.

No, it was rubble.

It was just rubble but that’s where it had been. Yeah it was rubble and there was trenches all around, fire positions all around the place with the

Americans lying in it.

Pat Mann.

There wasn’t much in that because it was probably the dying stages of it. They were in the Batang Peninsula, that’s a hell of a word, and they had already done the work in there and Mann had been wounded in there and they were probably really in rest, because they didn’t do much there. They had some trouble there. They had an area of ground there that they called the “Soccer Field” and they

called it the Soccer Field because you couldn’t walk across it without kicking a mine, so they nicknamed it the Soccer Field, but they had done all that by the time I got there. And then it was more like battalion in rest and waiting or sitting in block to cut off any enemy that came out. They didn’t do much but we had some small contacts but the big stuff didn’t start until we moved to into Hiep Duc.

We went out of there, resupplied, straight up to Tam Ky and into Hiep Duc, so within a couple of weeks I was up to my knees in grenade pins as they say, at Hiep Duc. The funny thing was about Hiep Duc is when we were leaving Tam Ky the Americans been good they give you everything, ‘Take this” and ‘Take that”. They gave us all a gas mask and I said “What do I want a bloody gas mask for? Enough

to carry now” and I took it and we got on a Chinook [helicopter] and they took us over, put us into Hep Tuc and we moved from the landing zone and it was late in the afternoon and we dug in, the battalion dug into stay for the night. We dug all our pits and that sort of thing and we’re sitting there and it’s about three o’clock in the afternoon and all of a sudden in the air, broad daylight, came flares, fired

from a mortar I guess, fire, flare. I thought “Christ, what’s happened? Someone’s had an accidental discharge with a flare” and then another flare came over here and I said ‘These bastards must be blind, they can’t see us, it’s three o’clock and they can’t see us, they’re firing flares to illuminate us.” That’s what they’re for, to illuminate the ground so you can see and then I found out why. Straight through the middle came

CS gas canisters [tear gas], they bracketed us with these flares to show the position that the battalion was in, a flare there, a flare there and the battalions in here, so fire your gas into the middle. And in it came, all these canisters of gas, and the first thing I said then was “Where’s my beautiful gas mask?” And I got it and I put it on and I thought ‘These bloody Yanks they’re good aren’t they?” We’d

have been gassed, we wouldn’t have got killed from the gas, we’d have got killed when they came in because they were attacking us, a ground attack came in and they expected us to be lying on the ground crying, because that’s what CS gas does to you. It makes you cry and you convulse and you cough and splutter and all that sort of thing. Doesn’t kill you but it puts you out of action so they can come and take it easy. They can just move around amongst your positions and take you all out, but we shocked them. We had gas masks on

and they must have thought when they came after us, when they moved in “look at these ugly buggers, they’ve all got black faces, rubbery faces, and big eyes and this big breathing thing in the front.” That’s the Yanks, they give you a lot of unnecessary things but there’s always a time when it could be necessary. They think of everything.

Yeah, stay close to the battalion commander. He and I had to have a link together. He didn’t want to loose me and I didn’t want to loose him and one of the jobs of his radio boy that he gave me, and sometimes he gave me two to carry the

secret set, he would, he was a body guard for me too, to make sure nobody else got at me because he relied on me because all he had was his organic weapons. If he wanted anything else he had to ask me for it and I wanted to be near him too, because I wanted to know what was going on too because I didn’t want to be in a position where he wasn’t there, because you never know what’s going to happen, you never know.

Well the battalion commander tries to keep close to where the actual contact is, that side but not that close that he’s under fire. He tries to keep away from it, where he’s not in direct contact. He doesn’t stand there with a gun going bang, bang, bang, bang, he moves back and let’s all the companies do that and he moves back to where he can control it, where he can hear what’s going on and he can talk.

They’re constantly talking to each other, the company commanders are talking to him and keeping him informed of just what’s going on, where they’ve moved to, so if they’ve moved to another flank he can alert this company they’re coming your way, or the other way or if they’re starting to run through them they might make a run, the company that’s in contact. And he’s got to be careful of that, that they don’t overrun and come right through the centre. So once

they take him out the battalion would be practically immobilised because the company commanders would have to make all their own decisions and individually too, unless one of them said “You can all go to hell, I’m taking charge, you can do what I tell you” but that’s unlikely with the Vietnamese. They’d all probably be individual with their companies and they’d scatter and they’d go in all directions.

I think the ARVN was probably similar to the local people, the civilians. They looked upon the Americans and us, they put us in the same group as the Americans, as I think they saw us, they mainly saw us as a big PX [canteen] and a PX is a post exchange where you can buy beer and cigarettes and things. That’s the first they thought of ‘This guy has got access to all this stuff”.

They always wanted you to give them cigarettes and get them this, that and the other and I used to get my radio boys cartons of cigarettes. They loved it and it made them like me a bit more so they’d look after me more.

Oh that happened often. Faith, I and others we’ve sat down and we’ve prayed to Buddha, the Presbyterian Church, the Catholic Church, Mohammed, all of them and you know “If one of you is there to help me, for goodness sake, do it.” It’s amazing how religious you can get, it’s true you do and Ozzie Ostario when I worked with him, he became a Buddhist.

He converted to their religion and Ozzie had a temple outside the bunker at Nam Hoa that’s the name I kept forgetting before. At Nam Hoa he had a temple and he used to put his ceremonial robes on and he’d burn joss sticks at the temple and chant, put the joss sticks up in the thing. Sometimes he’d have three joss sticks, sometimes he’d have seven, then when I noticed he had more than three I used to say to him “Ozzie

what do you know that I don’t know? You’re going for the big prayer this time, you’ve got seven joss sticks” and of course Ozzie would turn around and say ‘Tonight’s the night, it’s going to happen tonight.” He predicted all this you know, sometimes he was right, sometimes he wasn’t, but it was his style, that was his style. He was a Second World War veteran, a Korean war veteran, Malaya,

awarded the DCM, spent four years in Vietnam, top soldier. RSM of the Jungle Training Centre before he resigned, left the army. He’s now in a nursing home, he’s in a nursing home down in Sydney. Good old Oz.

Oh it’s hard to pick one because I often thought that and I suppose one of the one’s where I was trapped and in what we called a frag ambush [frag is US slang for grenade]. We were in Tra Bong, climbing up a mountain

and the NVA were above us, higher on the mountain, and we were climbing up this yama, and they were up above us and they ambushed us with these hand grenades and they were dropping all these grenades on us, and you didn’t know where to run. Whether to run up, down, or whichever way, across but we ran and we were lucky that we picked the right direction. But the frags

were all going off behind us and I wasn’t getting hit by any of them and they opened fire on us and I was pushing the Vietnamese up the hill, running behind and all the rounds were scattering all around us. And the leaves were falling off the trees and that was a pretty scary day and we ran and ran and you can probably say that we ran from a fight because we were really ambushed. And we scattered, the battalion broke, scattered,

and the following day we had to rejoin everybody, get everybody back together. Because of the position we were in we couldn’t go in one group, some had to go that way, some went that way, some went down, I don’t think anybody was going straight up but we finished up going up and we contoured around the feature and went up onto the top. And when we got up onto there it was raining and we were absolutely buggered and we just dropped on the ground in our wet clothes and weapons and everything, on our hands and we all just

fell asleep, right on the spot. And I slept all night, I was absolutely buggered and the following morning we had to regroup the battalion, get them all back together again. They’d given us a bit of a hiding, lost a lot of people and then I had to get medivacs in and move round all these areas in a helicopter and stack all the dead bodies of my soldiers into the helicopter

and the helicopter was as full as you could get with all these little Vietnamese and I was sitting on top of them and the battalion commander, the two of us sitting on top of all these bodies. And we got rid of them, so we lost a lot of blokes that day. Yeah, and there was a day when we lost seventeen on mines. Mines going off everywhere,

seventeen dead on the spot. Now they’re decent sized numbers, decent sized numbers and I’ve got to tell you this, this might interest you too. When we were in Kham Duc we moved off the feature and we patrolled the area outside. We moved

around and around and we had a few contacts, North Vietnamese and we captured a, one particular officer, a North Vietnamese officer, a lieutenant, and under interrogation he agreed to show us where a cache of weapons was and it was near the Laotian border. So we took him with us and we got some helicopters in and just one company of the battalion, the commander, one company and

the two advisors and we did a combat assault into, six hundred metres outside of Laos, that’s where he reckoned the cache was. When we got there we hunted everywhere, all over the place, so we figured “It’s not here, it’s got to be over further” and over further was Laos. Now in Saigon when you arrive all the Australian advisors are told “You are not allowed to go into Laos, North Vietnam or Cambodia.

You can only stay in South Vietnam and if I find that you have crossed the border you will be sent back to Australia immediately. It is not to happen.” So there we were, six hundred metres from Laos, with a company, a triple canopy jungle and that’s thick jungle and the battalion commander says “We are going into Laos to find this cache.” And I said

“Well I’ve got two choices, I stay here on my own or I go with you”. Guess what I did? I went with them and we went into Laos, I broke all the rules and went into Laos but it was worthwhile because you’ve heard of the Ho Chi Minh Trail? [NVA supply route from North Vietnem] We found the Ho Chi Minh Trail, walked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, saw all the alleyways and all the little junctions and that, that was on it. Found

tons of elephant dung where the elephants had walked down the mountain tracks and it was under a real thick canopy and there was no way in the world that this part that we walked on could be seen from the air, because it was so dense, the jungle over the top of it. And we searched for this cache that he reckoned was there. We never did find it, but geez did we get some bloody bike riders. We got all these

couriers that come down from Hanoi that brought resupply for the North Vietnamese troops that were in South Vietnam. They used to come down the Ho Chi Minh trail, come out of North Vietnam, come onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail and come down and they could enter Vietnam anywhere they liked, either in the 1 Corps, 2 Corps, 3 Corps, any of those areas, all the way down. Of course they had to go into Cambodia then but the trail went all the way down.

And these bicycles had weapons attached to them. They had 122 millimetre rockets, which is a pretty big rocket and they had mortar rounds and ammunition, very rarely food because they used to scrounge food there, all weapons and we captured them all. We had more bloody bicycles than Malvern Star’s got.

Oh

the battalion commander used to interrogate them but we had to take them with us. Now that’s a hairy[scary] thing at night when you’ve got prisoners because the Vietnamese tend to trust them. At night time you go to sleep and say to the Vietnamese, they had a North Vietnamese bloody bloke, this officer they captured, he was sleeping and he had his hammock right alongside me, swinging in the trees, and I’ve got weapons and I thought ‘This can’t be right,

I’ve got to keep my eye on him” but he never did anything. I suppose he knew he couldn’t get out of the battalion area. It would be a long way for him to start running. He would never have made it but if he’d had a suicide wish, he could have got me, but we used to take them back and when we could get a chopper in, and they were low priority. Oh they might have been second priority, wounded Vietnamese, prisoners and then

the dead were last, low priority and they’d take them back and do them over. But anyway we did all this and we moved out of Laos and went back into South Vietnam and went back on with our patrolling. But we didn’t find this large cache but we did get to see the Ho Chi Minh Trail and I can still see it in my mind,

massive, massive road.

Do they?

Did they?

It does, yeah, but the country would still be the same, it wouldn’t have changed. I think when Confucius died he said “I’m dying, but I’ll be back in a couple of thousand years, but don’t change

anything until I come back” and nothing has changed.

I never had any massages, no I had, I used to go and get a haircut.

They weren’t any good at massaging. But I used to go into, see there was only barbershops, see in Chu Lai where I was there was only the Chu Lai base. It was a very large American base at the bottom of Chu Lai, across the highway and that’s where they had a monstrous great airstrip

and they had allsorts of troops in there, logistic type people in there. It was mainly, I think the thing was mainly for the support of the airstrip to land and take off the Phantom jets for air strikes and the surgical hospital for receiving all the wounded and they had masses of them. You’d go into the surgical hospital

anytime and there was always helicopters arriving and wheeling in bodies and there were lots of them there. And they had a mortuary there, which was necessary of course, but the surgical hospital was the one that I went to, it was the one that I finished up in. I’d only been in Kham Duc I think about, I’d only been in country, May, June, July, August, I’d only

been in country three months and I was standing in the wrong place and I wore a round. I wore a, there was a contact on and we’d taken incoming rockets and mortars and I got knocked over and I got a fractured spine and I couldn’t get out because of where we were. We were there for several days in this thick jungle and we couldn’t,

we had to build our own landing zones. If we had enough medivacs and we wanted to get them out, if we had enough of them and we thought they should be taken out we used to cut ourselves a landing zone. We’d slip into the trees and chop them all down. If we were on the side of a mountain we’d chop them down so that the chopper could come in and just perch itself down or just hover over the top and we’d use a jungle penetrater. They’d lower a jungle penetrater down and it was like a big ship’s anchor and we’d put the wounded on there and tie them on

and take them back up. They’d get a heck of a knocking around on the way up because they’d be going from tree to tree but in an emergency it was worth a try, but I thought it wasn’t too bad. I was in a lot of pain, so I waited several days until I could get out and then they took me out and just gave me a weeks rest and everything’s alright and later on I found out my spine was fractured in two places,

so I probably did more damage than was necessary by staying in the field.

Next chopper out.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s great, yeah.

No, Well I wasn’t knocking around, I think they did all that sort of thing in Vung Tau, maybe I shouldn’t say that?

I think it was Vung Tau where that sort of thing went on. I only went to Vung Tau once on Rest in Country leave [R in C] I think they called it and I only went to Vung Tau for five days. And I didn’t get involved in that. I think I was probably too busy drinking beer but up in

Da Nang, there was a little lady I got acquainted with, up in Da Nang and I saw her and spent a few days up there and knocked around with her a bit and we got pretty friendly. And I couldn’t explain to her the sort of work I did, she thought I worked in Da Nang and I had to leave and go back to my battalion in Quang Ngai and I went back and about two or three months later

I came back and went up to her place and knocked on the door and she slapped me across the face. She said “You bastard.” in broken English “Where have you been for so long?” I said “I belong to a battalion, I don’t work here.” but she could not understand it and by the time I went away and came back the third time, she was having nothing to do with me. She thought I was a butterfly, that I had other girlfriends, I should have been to see her long ago,

but she never believed it. So after that when I drove past her place in the Jeep she used to throw stones at me. “You butterfly” she used to say “You butterfly”. And I went, the last couple of months I was working in Da Nang, for the last couple of months and by that time the friendship was over, she hated me and I had to keep out of her street and I had to go out to the airport to pick up a padre.

They said “Can you pick the padre up, he’s out at Da Nang airstrip?.” so I went out there with the Jeep, got him and I thought “We’ll give him a little bit of excitement.” He’s a Roman Catholic priest and they like a bit of a joke, so I drove down her street and she’s out the front and she spotted me and there was rocks flying through the Jeep and everything. And the priest says “She’s pretty angry, what’s wrong with her?” I said “I don’t know, I wouldn’t have a clue, Father. She must have mistaken me for somebody else.”

I think so. I didn’t go in that street any more because of too much damage to the Jeep.

Yeah, would have looked good wouldn’t it? Had the following casualties in South Vietnam, this one shot by gunfire and this one knocked out by a bloody rock. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, basically you could say I was suffering from burn out. I’d seen too much, there was too much stress, too much violence, walked up too many yamas with people shooting at us and I generally had enough of war and I was getting that way that every

time a noise went off I was scared, or was starting to get scared and it’s too dangerous for you when you get scared like that and I guess that the senior advisor up in 1 Corps must have thought “Well we’d better do something with this young fella, he’s been here long enough, we’ll take him out”. They used to do that, they’d keep an eye on you and if they could see that you were starting to wear out they moved you out and put you somewhere else.

And there was a lot of movement. A lot of fellas moved, a lot of fellas only did a couple of months in places and they were burnt out, it depended on yourself and it depended on just what happened, where you were. But I was in about the tenth month of constantly going on operations. If I wasn’t going out with my battalion, I was going out with another battalion because they didn’t have the two advisors. The 1st Battalion didn’t, I was with 1st but the 2nd Battalion didn’t have two advisors always.

One of them was sick and the other one, sometimes, sorry, one of them was sick and one of them eventually went home and they were only left with one advisor, so they, I came in with an operation with the 1st Battalion, just in time to join the 2nd Battalion and go out again. And it was getting a bit too much for me and I felt that I was burning out, but I would have kept going

but just suddenly the major said “You’ve had enough down there, I’m taking you out and putting you up here in Da Nang where you don’t have to fight every flipping day.” so I went up there and I was driving around and delivering people and that’s when I took the padre past the young lady’s house. But I stayed like that for a long, long time, even when I came home. It took a long time, I don’t

think I ever got normal. I was going to say it took a long time to get normal but I don’t think I’ve made it yet.

Yeah.

I partook of the alcohol, by geez yeah, loved it but I never took any drugs. But I saw the results of drugs. I’ll give you one incident. I was on a fire support base and my battalion had come in and we went up onto this fire support base and it was somewhere in the back blocks of Quang Ngai Province and this

fire support base had been providing fire support for me. They had eight-inch cannon up there, they were mounted on tracks, Naval guns they had mounted on tractors and every time they fired the tractor would move back and move back up again. But I watched them, the crews giving fire support for a unit that was out on the ground, I didn’t know who they were but I heard them being called up for gun fire and I saw these

Americans moving towards the guns and they must have been as high as kites, all these crews. They were walking three paces forward, two paces back and then one pace to the side and then they kept stopping and doing all this crap to each other, they had all this, the Negro in particular, the Negro did, it was the Negro doing all this stuff, “I love you brother” and hitting them on the arm and “I’ll die for you”. Bloody die for you? They

wouldn’t die for anyone these fellas because they were as high as kites and I was furious because there was somebody out on the ground there who was asking for gun fire. And when you’re out there asking for gun fire, you want it now, not when some hop head finally gets over his drugs and finally gets to the gun and loads it and this is the sort of thing you had to put up with. I mean a couple of minutes, two or three or five minutes to a crowd on the ground that needs gunfire now is crucial. I mean they

could have been dead in that time that it took these fellas to get to the guns. I couldn’t say anything to them because they wouldn’t have taken any notice of me, an Australian warrant officer, but their commander should have made them move there properly and do it. And can you imagine them sighting the weapons and firing the guns and that’s what they did. As high as kites, beads all over them, love you brother, love written all over their hats and all that sort of crap.

But yeah, that’s the effects of drugs and also the Americans had to stop doing patrols. In some fire support bases they wouldn’t, the soldiers wouldn’t go out. They would not patrol their area at all and so they developed what they called the “mad minute” where the commander of the fire support base would say “We’ll get up at two o’clock tomorrow morning and we’ll

have a mad minute”. And at two o’clock in the morning everybody is woken up, they all grab their weapons, they all move out to the perimeter of the fire support base, they all load up their weapons and they all fire for one minute. They fire every weapon they’ve got, everything in the world is coming out of it, for one minute, cease fire, unload and back to bed and that was their patrol for the night. They might get up and do it again another time but they never went out, they used

that minute to clear that area. They used to hope that if somebody was out there moving in, it would frighten them away, they’d go somewhere else.

It might have worked for a bit but once they probe you, you’ve got no choice but to fight because once they get into your wire and they start to fight with you, it might have worked out there but once they moved in and the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese were not stupid.

They woke up to this and I don’t know of any incidents where it backfired on them but I would assume that it did. The first time I struck it I had my battalion out a few hundred yards from an American fire support base and all of a sudden all these weapons opened up. There’s everything in the world coming out

and it’s going out all around in a circle because they’re all out, fire support bases are usually in a round position, shape, or a diamond shape and it all goes out in a circle and no matter where you are outside of that perimeter, you’d have rounds going over your head. And the first time I struck it all this heavy stuff was flying over the top and I said to the American with me “my God, we’re in for some trouble here, the North Vietnamese, what they’ve got”.

He said “It’s not, it’s the Americans”. “The Americans?” And then he told me about this mad minute, so that’s how I learnt it and I learnt it by baptism of gun fire, coming over our heads. We were lucky they didn’t lower their weapons a bit because they would have got us too, because they had some pretty heavy stuff coming out, fifty calibre machine guns and forty millimetre cannons and that.

I can’t recall anything like that. No, if it was going to happen it would have happened in places like Nam Hoa

or there was something that did happen down in Vinh Binh, down in the Mekong Delta. Down in the Delta I had a company, 139th Company and the Company commander was always getting himself into trouble. His company was known as the chicken stealers and when we did an operation his soldiers stopped fighting in the middle of a gun fight,

they’d stop fighting and chase the chickens because that was more important than killing those VC out there. They wanted those chickens, so they’d shove them in their shirts and in their packs and the fight would be gone, all over, the VC would just say “Oh this is great, we’re not being shot at. and they would leave. Or they’d be shooting back and they looked like winning. And we used to have a lot of arguments about this back at the advisors’ hut. The other advisors

with the other companies said “Your bloody company is stealing chickens again today.” and it became well known and I said “I’ve got to have something to say about this.” so I spoke to the company commander about it and the next time we were out in the scrub, and the paddy fields and they stopped and they got hold of all these chickens and I said “Look at them, they’re supposed to be fighting here, they’re not supposed to be chasing chickens.” He said “Alright, I’ll fix it afterwards.” So when it was all over he lined the company up in the paddy

field and he got a big stick and he made them all march past him one at a time and he gave them all a hiding with a stick and he took all their WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s off them and threw them on the ground and belted them and he moved on. They picked up their WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and put them back in their shirts again, but he’d given them a hiding. They still got the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and when he finished he said ‘There you go, I fix.” and I said “You’ve bloody fixed it alright. You’ve given them all a hiding but they’ve all got their chickens”. And he was giving them a hiding across the back and they all had packs on, so he wasn’t hurting them too much but

he’d gone through the motions. And this company eventually got a bit too dangerous for me to be with. They ran on us one day and left the two of us behind, the other advisor and me. They done a bunk and they left me. And the commander, the Vietnamese commander in the area had to come and get us. We were sitting in the paddy field there, deep in water, with the VC around

us and he brought his helicopter in, put it on the ground and put us in. If they had known that we had run out of ammunition, that we only had a bloody 45s left, they would have come and got us but they didn’t know. So we got medically evacuated as we were suffering from exhaustion and heat exhaustion and they weren’t in real sweet. So I was taken out of the company and given the other company, 114th Company, instead of 139th Company and shortly

after that the company commander, he’d done something else wrong and he was in big trouble, so they banished him from the area. They sent him to a very dangerous area where there was tons of Viet Cong. He was only there about two months and his whole company defected and went across to the VC, took all their weapons and everything with them. So it’s lucky that we weren’t still with them and I think that the day that they left us they

were giving us to the VC, the two of us, so we were very lucky that we were taken out of there. We were very lucky that they didn’t know what we had, or they didn’t know what we didn’t have. We had no ammunition for long guns left, we just had 45’s and I could throw a bloody 45 as accurately as I could fire it in those days, because they were bloody great big things and if you and I were here I could probably hit you with it but any further than that away, a great big cumbersome thing

and that’s all we had so we would have had to have got them to come closer to us to shoot them. So they were gone, that company was gone but I can’t think of any other. One of the greatest worries was the training of the soldiers and you bring them up to a standard, in the RF, you bring them up to a standard and issue them with weapons and then they defect. In the middle of an operation you suddenly find a couple of them are gone

and they’ve gone to the other side and with them they’ve taken an M79 and an M16 rifle. Well that’s pretty good stuff to give the VC, they like that, a trained soldier with weapon, have gun will travel. That was one of the problems.

Oh yeah, they could give them a lot of information, yeah, but the things

that worried us the most was that they were trained and they had weapons and they knew our tactics, they knew what we did, how we operated, yeah.

Don’t let them escape. Whenever the company commander thought that someone had defected, we go after them, as quick as you could because he kept tabs on who he’s got and where they are and he did have this sometimes, he say “A couple have gone” but a little

while later ‘They’ve come back.”

They got captured, we got them back again. We rounded them up, yeah, he rounded them up.

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, they wouldn’t be too comfortable, they wouldn’t be in the company any more but apart from that I never had any village problems.

Oh no, they had their own, we couldn’t lay down what they were to do. We couldn’t tell them that you can’t do this and you can’t do that. They made their own rules as they went along and they probably had the same rules as the North Vietnamese.

They are pretty ruthless people to each other.

What with the enemy or with themselves, with their own people? The Vietnamese, I don’t know how they dealt with their bad guys in the field because I never saw it,

they never told me, they kept that from me and they could have done anything with their soldiers. Like it’s quite easy in combat to get rid of somebody, it’s no problem at all. One of the problems you’ve got is how many enemies you’ve made with your own people, when you get in contact how many guns are going to be aimed at you, but I don’t know what they did. I would say that the battalion commander would have dealt with them out there and they would probably have been punished pretty badly,

but when they were back in bases and back in the regimental base in Chu Lai and they dug a big pit in the ground and it was probably a foot or so, just about a foot deep and it had barbed wire stranded all the way across the top of it and anybody that was being punished was put in there and he had to lay on the ground under the barbed wire, with no protection from the sun. They’d give him a drink of

water every now and then but that’s where he had to stay. He couldn’t stand up, if he wanted to go to the toilet he just did it there where he was and that was punishment back in the base. But you don’t have time to do that sort of thing in the scrub so how they dealt with them outside I don’t know but I would say they would be pretty harsh on some of them if they thought they did something really bad, yeah.

The North Vietnamese? They would be the same with themselves you mean?

Yeah, if the NVA overran your position and you had to pull back and you had to leave any wounded behind, your wounded wouldn’t be wounded anymore when you came back, they would be dead and that’s they way my guys probably did the same thing. I never saw them do it but

the company that I had down in Vinh Binh were pretty ruthless. If I was watching I used to have to try to stop them from dealing with them on the spot. There was a sergeant down there that used to like body parts.

He liked spleens, for some reason or other spleens were some sort of a delicacy I think and he used to like the spleens but he only took them off the dead.

Yeah, he was, yeah, yeah, but that’s what they did. He’d rip a spleen out of some dead body but not his own people, well he never told me he was taking them off his own people, they were off the other side. But some of those VC were pretty brave you know. Some of those VC guys did some fantastic things when they fought us. I’ve seen

a couple of VC blokes hold up a whole company or not just one company, but two companies, stop them from moving so that the rest of their gang can escape and just stay there and fight behind a bund or inside of some sort of overhead cover thing and give their lives up, so the others can go. I’ve seen the VC, Viet Cong, do things that would have given them a bloody Victoria Cross,

to give your life up for your comrades so they can escape and that’s what some of them did and we saw that often. They were pretty dedicated. And I took my hat off to some of them, especially the North Vietnamese, they were very courageous soldiers, they were good. But the VC down on the Delta they weren’t bad either but when you fought NVA you knew you had a fight.

I think they, to be honest I think they were, a couple of reasons, they won the war anyway against them and the ARVN had the backing and the training and the fire power and everything that the might of the United States of

America gave them and they still couldn’t keep them away. And the North Vietnamese fought the South Vietnamese in their own paddock. They had to come all the way down from North Vietnam to do it, so I’d say they were more dedicated and probably better soldiers, definitely better dedicated. They really wanted to win and they did.

Yeah I did, I do, yeah the North Vietnamese were good soldiers. Ruthless but so were the South Vietnamese, but everybody’s ruthless in war, it’s not a nice thing. It’s pretty savage, violent, but yeah, I’ve got a lot of respect for the North Vietnamese soldiers.

With Vietnamese and Americans, yeah. That’s the trouble, you do form a bond though. There was, for example, at Chu Lai there were four battalions of us and there were four Australians and we had a bond together but you get a bigger bond

with somebody that you work with. There’s nothing like lying in a bloody, stinking hole being shot at for two blokes to get a bit of a liking for each other. I don’t mean anything rude by that but to under fire together there’s a bond there that never goes. There was a bloke, lives down in Adelaide now, Chris Maccaboy, I worked with him in the Mekong Delta and him and I had a company together.

This time we had two Australians, Chris McAvoy and I and Charlie Chambers and Johnny Pettit had the other company and Chris and I would go out and we’d be advancing, like I said before, we’d be advancing towards a tree line and all hell would break loose and we’d have to crawl back and hide behind the bloody bund. And then you’d get behind the bund and you’d get on the wrong side of it and someone would fire at you from that side of the bund, so you’d have to go over that side again and you’d get shot at again. So you’d look for a bund that’s in a different position and by the time you’ve moved back to the third one, one of us would turn to the

other and say “Do you come here often?” “No, only when I’m being shot at.” And that would sort of break the ice a bit and that’s the bond we had between us and if I saw him today I’d say “Do you come here often?” And he’d remember it just like that. And Rexy Wishart and I worked together in the same company when Chris left. Rex Wishart, he’s now dead and him

and I came under fire and he dived on the ground and I dived on the ground, but we both dived the same way. We hit our bloody heads together and nearly knocked each other out and we were lying on the ground “Oh my head!” and these whiz bangs were flying all around us. I’ll never forget that, now he’s gone, poor bugger.

You didn’t get too friendly with them because if you became mates with them the situation changes between you and you’ve got to be careful of them because the Vietnamese will take advantage of you if they can, especially the companies down in Vin Binh. The company commanders, because we used to come back in every night and

spend the night back in the compound and have a few drinks and sometimes the company commander would invite you over to his bunker. See you’ve go over there and you have a few drinks with him and the company commanders always liked to have women, so they’d have some young girls come there and they’d try to give one to you “Would you like this young lady?” And you’ve got to say no,

because if you say yes and he’s given you a woman, he’s got you. You know what I mean? You lose that thing you’ve got between you. You’re no longer company commander and advisor, you’re shagging mates, we share the same woman and he can start getting away with things. The next thing is “I won’t tell anybody what you did with that woman the other night.” so I’m going to do this, or I’m going to do that or

give me this, give me that and I won’t tell anybody. So you don’t let them ever get anything on you, keep it on the basis of battalion company commander and advisor, never get involved, never. There was one battalion commander too, when we were in the scrub, captured some women one night and he tried to give us the women too, and we said “no thank you.” But I noticed during the night he kept changing them around, his company

commanders, but I kept out of that, wasn’t going to get me into that. The next day he let them all go. They weren’t VC anymore, they were only VC for the night. Only once that ever happened, so that’s the thing you’ve got to avoid.

Yeah I did, there was one adviser, I won’t name the area, but there was one adviser in one of the areas that I was with and he was Australian and he was always sick

and he couldn’t go out in the scrub. I don’t know what his real sickness was but he looked pretty good to me, he could hold a glass of beer. And there was an American with us, this is one of the problems that we had with the battalion at Chu Lai. There was two Americans and me with this 1st Battalion and we were supposed to be two out and one in, one back at the regimental base and two out in the scrub and

then when I’ve had enough I go in and you come out and we hot bed it. Back in the base you had the bed, when you came out and I went in, I had the bed but this fella was always sick. Suddenly got stomach cramps and couldn’t come out, “no, he can’t come out today, he’s gone up to the aid post.” whatever the Americans called it, “And he can’t go out.” And this went on and on and on and on, he was always bloody sick and it was always something different.

It wasn’t some contagious thing that he used continuously, it was different things. He was pretty unlucky you know. He’d have the worst foot ache that you could get or he’d have the worst headache that you could get or he’d have the worst vice that you could get until eventually he hurt his ankle and this is last time we put up with it, he hurt his ankle and couldn’t come out. Then the senior adviser came on and said “He’s fit enough now, he’s coming out” and

he came out and I was to come in and in came the chopper, put him on the bloody ground, he hopped out of the chopper, took two steps and fell over and I looked at him and he’s lying on the ground going “Oh, oh” and holding his leg up and I looked down at him and I went “Shsh” and I got in the helicopter and I said to the pilot “Go” and we went. He was putting on a big act. Five minutes after we’d gone the other adviser said he was up off the ground and he was working but gee, he was hard to get out.

He had what I called “Boots AB.” boots anti-bush, he didn’t want to go into the bush at all. That was about the only one that I can think of there. There was probably others in other places but I didn’t have much to do with them. They were a pretty good bunch mainly, the guys in the Delta were good.

The guys down in the Delta were good, they always went out and we always took our turns and I was getting close to coming home on the first trip and I only had about a week to go I think and I was coming home. And when you get close to, you become a short timer, you start to think about your mortality, you start to worry. You think every time you do something you’re going to get

shot and you don’t want to get shot after three hundred and sixty days in country and you’ve got five to go. But I thought to myself “I’ll give these blokes a break.” I wasn’t supposed to go out, I was supposed to stay in, so I said to the other fellas “One of you can stay in today, I’ll do this last op, because I’m going home tomorrow, I’ll do this last operation” and I think Charlie Chambers was the bloke, he stayed back and I took his place. And we went

out and we stood on the landing zone ready to start the operation and all hell broke loose. The bloody VC were waiting for us on the starting point and the whiz bangs were flying all around me and the first thing I thought was “Why didn’t I keep my bloody mouth shut, here I am and I shouldn’t even be here. Bloody Charlie should be getting this.” But I survived and I came back and the next day

I left and the other Australian advisers that were there, the three of them, they said “You’re not getting out of here, there’s no way in the world you’re getting out of this place, you’re staying”. And I said “pig’s arse I am, I’m going.” so I went down to the airstrip and got on one of these little Air America things, these little tiny aeroplanes and took off and I said to him “Will you do a circle over that base down there, that’s where my mates are?” So he flew around

the base and there standing on top of the bunker were the three Aussies with their rifles aimed up at the bloody aeroplane and of course I’m inside the thing going (demonstrates) to them. And I left them. It’s a great thing to be going home, a great thing. I always used to say that they shouldn’t tell you that you’re going home until the time comes. They should just land a chopper in the paddy field or

wherever you are, walk over and tap you on the shoulder and say “Hey mate, you’re going home”. Because all that stress of knowing “I’ve got twenty five days to go, I’ve got to twenty four days to go” and I think the Aussies down here used to say “So many days and I wake up” or “So many fried eggs” because they used to get fried eggs for breakfast, we never did. And it’s too stressful. You worry too much then about keeping away from this, that and the other,

just tap you on the shoulder and say “It’s your turn, you’re going home.”

The first one, the second one?

Yeah, I did, yeah, I’d picked up

some pretty bad habits and I was smoking like a chimney, far too much and I was coughing and spluttering and I was drinking a hell of a lot of alcohol and prior to joining the army I was a very moderate drinker, two bottles of beer a week or something. But I was starting to drink a lot and the coughing and spluttering drove me mad so

I was on a Melbourne tram and I coughed and spluttered that much I think that everybody in the tram started to move away from me. I had to get off, before I got to my destination, because I was making such a dill of myself and I brought my heart up on the bus stop, the tram stop, so that decided me and in 1972 I stopped smoking and I’ve never smoked since. And booze, I stopped drinking booze about twenty three years

ago because I don’t think alcohol and the past experiences that veterans have mix, they don’t mix. You turn into a mongrel, you can quite easy, too fiery, too (demonstrates), so you’re better off not to drink it, so I stopped.

What’s that? Alcohol?

It doesn’t, it does I think because it brings out another side to you that’s hidden. It’s instant mongrel is what I call it, just add beer and that’s what it is, that’s what it does. I think it’s a great problem with a lot, I think, I’m not a doctor, I

think it’s a big problem with a lot of veterans that the over indulgence of alcohol does bring back, they might not think so, they might not think of Vietnam but that mongrel in you comes out. Because when I came back from Vietnam the first time, I changed then too. I must have because my father said something to my mother. My mother was the great one, my father wouldn’t say directly to me

he didn’t like something I did, he’d tell my mother and Mother would tell me. My mother would say “Daddy.” she always called him Daddy, “Daddy seems to think that you’ve changed a bit since you’ve come back from Vietnam, you’re not the same as what you were.” And I think I said something like “pig’s arse.” well that’s a definite demonstration that I’ve changed but I didn’t think so, but they had seen it and when I think about it afterwards I was swearing in front

of my father which I’d never done in my life before. He never swore, never used any bad language at all and he was shocked I think to hear me saying some of these things. And I think it’s the roughness, the knock around thing, just being with soldiers, because they become a pretty rough lot when you’re away in a country like that. They pick up some pretty bad habits. Some soldiers used to

open up the fridge if they had one and take a stubby out at five o’clock in the morning, things like that. You don’t do that normally, not unless you’re an alcoholic but that’s what they were doing, that’s a thing they became accustomed to, a lot of them. And a lot of them have passed away since then. Quite a lot of my mates that I served with in Vietnam died of an early age of about forty, forty five.

A lot, quite a lot. Various things they put it down too, a lot of cancer, mostly cancer I think.

Yeah, I was when I left too.

I was built like a drover’s bitch. I was at fifty years of age, I was running around the Enoggera Army Barracks, burning off eighteen or twenty year old fellas.

I was as fit as a mallee bull but since then I can’t do all that exercise that I used to do. I can’t run anymore. I used to skip a lot, I had a skipping rope and I used to skip for hours, doing the boxing-type skipping, dancing from foot to foot and that takes a lot of weight off you.

Well one of the things that I suffered from was blast trauma. When I got the fractured spine and the blast it knocked this ear drum out, this one went deaf and this one’s got a big hole in it, or a little hole in it. They can’t mend it because they don’t want to mend it because I’d be deaf if they did and

the blast has weakened the top and lower part of my back and I’ve been putting it off for years but right now, last week I was at that Greenslopes Hospital [Brisbane] and they want to remove some joints at the top of my neck and the bottom and put some bone in from my hip, that’s right and get the bones off the nerves that run down my arms and

legs and all this is attributable to the service. I also get dizziness, disequilibrium. They call it vertigo but I’m not scared of high buildings, but it’s just an imbalance through the ears being what they are. So they made me TPI.

I think I was made for it. I never looked back. It was like leaving Vietnam, I knew that I’d burnt out, I’d had enough and when I left the army I said ‘This is it, I’m going to go, I want to go and I should go and I am going” and I did. And I went out and I had my farewell speech that I made in the officers mess “I’ve enjoyed twenty

five years in the army, but I don’t want to stay anymore, I’ve had enough and I’m leaving it to all you fellas, you fellas can run it now and I’m leaving it while it’s still on top, so if it starts to go down, you can’t blame me.” But I’d had enough. Twenty five years is a long time in the army. It’s not like a civilian job. There’s all these things going on and it’s do this, do that. Even in my last year in the army I was

doing bloody nine range practises, nine. I was out on the range practising, training with and shooting a rifle and I had a sergeant girl who had the bloody cheek to come up to me and say “Excuse me Sir but you’re not holding that rifle properly while you’re shooting it.” I said “I bloody killed bastards with this, piss off.” and she did but that’s the sort of thing that was happening. I didn’t need a bloody

twenty year old sergeant female to tell me I wasn’t holding the rifle properly, the bloody thing had kept me alive in Vietnam for two years and then I find out I can’t shoot it properly. I was hitting the target but I wasn’t holding it properly. Things like that and they forget where you’ve been, what you’ve done and a lot of them don’t want to know. I found commanding officers, the last commanding officer I had I served with him for nearly two years and he didn’t even know

me. He didn’t even know me. He never took the time to open up my file and see where I’d been and what I’d done and he treated me like I was a junior officer and I didn’t need that. You shouldn’t have to march into a new place and say “I’ve done this, have a look.” he should know what’s going on. But the senior officers at that stage didn’t care.

I think it was lowering standards in the army and I think it only happened because it was peace time. I think if there had of been a war going on it probably would have stayed the same as what it was and it was running well, it was going good, the army was full and they were busy. They were busy doing what they were employed to do, fighting, and the peace time army is entirely different. You’ve got all these

college boys with their books that know how to fight a battle and you’ve got to do it by the textbook and you’ve got to know this and you’ve got to know that and if you’re not doing it that way you’re wrong. They’d have a hell of a shock if they went to Vietnam like we did and get involved in the voice procedure and the tactics that they used, the South Vietnamese. Entirely different, nothing in the text book, they didn’t follow the text book, they followed their own text book. You can’t do that, you’ve got to play it the way it is.

So that’s what it is, I got sick of it and so I left and I wasn’t sorry that I left. I’ve never looked back and said “I wish I was in still”. I am pleased with what I did and I’m pleased with the army as it was. The army was great. The army did great things for me, I can’t complain at all. I had a great army life, a great career and for

me to march into the army with a sixth grade bloody education and no skills and to come out as a bloody major and a chest full of bloody medals with senior education, I think I’ve done well and I would do it again if they ever said to me let’s replay it all and do it again. I might change a few things but I wouldn’t change much. In fact

towards the end I’d change a few things. I’d start to tell some of these bloody snotty nose lieutenant-colonels what they could do. I was starting to do that when I left. I was getting into a bit of trouble, so I was questioning commanders and it was quite good to do it.

How do you do it?

When they say something to you, you give them an answer like bullshit and they don’t like it. They call it insubordination.

Whether they’re right or wrong you can’t say that though. You’re not supposed to say that at all but this fella started doing it and I was lucky I got away with it. But I didn’t like some of the treatment, I didn’t like it. There were some old soldiers there in that unit I was in. I was lucky, there was an ex-training team major in the unit I was in,

Alec Morris, DCM,[Distinguished Conduct Medal] and Alec, he knew, he knew all this stuff and he agreed with me. He said ‘They’re a pack of bastards, but we’ll get by”. We used to get together him and I, there was three of us from the training team, there was another captain there, Steve Rawlinson, artillery captain. The three of us used to sit and talk about old times, about Vietnam and how these

mugs were running the army now.

Do it, do it. Oh any young fellas around here, I’ve had a couple of young fellas I’ve talked to “Join the army, don’t hesitate, forget about maybe you’ve got to go to war, join the army and go for everything you can. Make every

post a winner. If they say to you “Do you want to do this course?” of course you do, do it. If they ask you to do promotion examinations, do it. You might say to yourself ‘crikey, I can’t do that’ but yes you can. If you say to yourself ‘Yes I can do it.’ and you want to do it, and you’ll do it and you’ll keep at it and pass it. Because there’s plenty of opportunities, the army had tons of them. They’ll educate you, they’ll train you, they’ll promote you, they’ll pay you more money. They might send

to war but that’s the luck of the draw. That’s why you joined in the first place, wasn’t it? It’s a winner, it’s a great life, it is a great life but when you get old and bold, leave before you blot your copy book.