Australians at War Film Archive

Yeah, okay well, my father was Royal Navy, my mother was Royal Air Force, they’d married before the Second World War. My father was at sea most of the time as you can imagine in England. He was at the battle of the River Plate against the German Graf Spee. My mother used to pack parachutes for the air crew. Anyway at the end of the war, England was

really on its hind legs, there was no work, there was nothing. We had family in Canada, the US, Australia and South Africa and thankfully we chose to come here. So we arrived here in the middle of 1949, I was six getting on for seven years old. We moved into a house in Port Melbourne.

Well there was nothing in England.

England had been savagely knocked around from the Second World War. We were up in a town called South Shields at the mouth of the River Tyne. And all the industry there was all ship building, it had been bombed out by the Germans. There was no money to do anything. In fact I can remember my grandfather who was also navy, he’d been navy, he was then merchant navy during the Second World War coming home

with half a salted pig over his shoulder and a big wooden box full of tinned Australian jam. We had no food. The Germans were eating better than we were after the war. The Marshall Plan was looking after them, people don’t realise bread in England was never rationed during the war but it was rationed after the war. You just couldn’t get food. So there was an opportunity, five pounds, bring your family to sunny Australia.

You know the history of Australia where it was, what was it, ‘populate or perish.’? [Quote from] Old Arthur Calwell.[post-war Immigraton Minister] So we came.

I do remember parts of it. I remember getting on the ship and what it all felt like. A six year old kid. I can remember going through the Straits of Gibraltar. We went through there just on first light and you could see Gibraltar in silhouette

and I thought “Oh yeah this is beaut”. I can remember Aden and the guys selling stuff and little carved wooden boats and stuff like that. and I can remember it being as rough as hell coming through the Great Australian Bight. And I can remember getting off the ship at Station Pier at Port Melbourne and my cousins were there. Oh beaut. We couldn’t understand each other, if you’ve ever spoken to a Geordie from that part of England,

before my mother died I could understand some two words out of three maybe. She spoke, continued to speak with that accent. When I started to go to school here, the kids were very cruel. This is before the Italians and the Greeks and it was “You Pommy [English] bastard.” So I learnt very quickly to say “G’day” and to fight because kids were quite merciless, they’d just biff you no problems at all.

So a childhood in Port Melbourne, Ross St State School, South Melbourne Tech College. I started a job with Frigrite in Port Melbourne in Graham St. Had been school cadets at South Melbourne Tech. Had been in the CMF [Citizens Military Force] and I thought “Ah, the military life’s not bad” and in 1962 joined the regular army.

1949. A very rough part of Melbourne. If you were chatting up girls, sort of in my teens, you’d tell them that you came from South Melbourne because Port Melbourne was the criminal area of Melbourne. It was the real rough area. These days you can’t buy a house here for under about half a million, and the luxury apartments where the Old Swallows [biscuit] factory used to be etc, they all go, two bedroom units down there

four hundred thousand dollars. It’s now the ‘in’ suburb to live in. And my father sold a house down there, a double storey terrace for eight thousand pounds.

We were lucky we had family here. They used to have a sponsored migration and people who sponsored you had to at the very least provide accommodation for

you because there was no accommodation here. And all the Italians and Greeks will tell you they went into the old army camps. Bonegilla and places like that where they were put into those camps for accommodation until they could find ordinary civilian accommodation. We were lucky, my mother’s sister had married an Australian during the war and they’d come out here a couple of three years before we had. So they lived in

Bay St, Port Melbourne and they had a big house there so we moved in with them and we were there for I s’pose twelve months until my father could get a job and we could find a place to rent. In those days nobody could afford to buy houses, later on things got a bit better, you could afford to buy a house. But initially it was all rentals and we lived in only two places before they eventually bought in Ross St.

Actually it was a single fronted double storey terrace and I can remember the stairs, up and down the stairs all the time.

Just my parents and myself, I was an only child. And my father had a job in Harpers [breakfast foods] down on the beachfront

which is now another block of luxury flats. He worked there in a variety of different positions, he’d been in an engineering side of things in the navy and so it was, they used to make cereals and starch and that sort of stuff and he was involved in making the boilers go and all that sort of stuff. It was all run on steam power in those days, and I think they even had their own electric generation

from the steam. I know they had a huge, I went down there a couple of times and the had a huge boiler, coal-fed boiler in there. Something that’d be in a museum these days.

Oh yeah, all the good weather. In those days kids down on the Port Melbourne beach, it was just choc-a-bloc full of kids.

The water was still relatively unpolluted compared with today. You could sit on Station Pier and catch fish. People used to go down at nights and spear flounder in the shallows. It was quite different then. The Australian way of life was very good, it was all short sleeved shirts and open neck and

the food. I mean coming from where we’d come from, the amount of food that was available here was a bit of a trip for a while. You could have anything you wanted whereas in England no. Particularly things like sugar, fruit, particularly tropical type fruit, whereas here there was no rationing, no restrictions on what you could get.

Oh yeah. I mean why stay somewhere where it snows for half a year and you can’t get work so you’re cold, you’re hungry and there’s an opportunity to come somewhere where there’s work, the sun shines. Melbourne, what does Melbourne get in weather changes. I can remember it snowing in Melbourne once in my lifetime and the snow was melting before it got to the ground.

It’s always relatively warm, it might get a bit wet now and then but a great place to live.

Just about everybody there had done time in gaol.

Just about every kid that I knew then, their dad would disappear for a few months for receiving or something like that and that was the way it was.

Probably not terribly much. As I got

into my teens, because I was going to the South Melbourne Tech which is over right next to Albert Park and Middle Park and there were kids from all over that area. And I tended to hang out with kids that lived over that way a bit more than in the Port Melbourne area. You were aware that there was activities going on, it was the old

story, you could walk into any pub and somebody would say “Would you like to buy an outboard motor? What about fifteen gallons of paint?” Or “Look, I’ve got some new silk shirts here, five bob each?” it was rife in those days and I suppose everything that was coming in to Melbourne being brought in from overseas, it wasn’t containerised like it is today it was all in crates. You could go down to Station Pier and watch the wharfies [wharf laborers]unload the stuff.

You could actually see the wharfies opening up cases of coffee or something and help themselves to some coffee to make a brew. And that sort of stuff just wouldn’t happen these days.

I wasn’t aware of that. But yeah there was a very strong, “You’re a Port Melbourne boy” sort of thing. That sort of culture pervaded quite a bit through most of it and particularly in the schools. It was fostered amongst the kids as we grew up and obviously it also filtered down from their parents and older siblings and the culture

kept on being generated and kept on going on. I doubt if you’d find that there now because I think all those people have now all moved out somewhere else. Probably couldn’t afford to live in Port Melbourne any more.

I’m not sure.

There was my aunt and uncle and they had four kids but the oldest was only my age, the rest were toddlers. The old houses down on Bay St, double storey places, they were four bedrooms and the bedroom was as big as this place put together. So there was plenty of room.

And there were three boys and two girls in total so we were bundled into two bedrooms. And there was still a spare bedroom over after the two groups of adults had bedrooms. And the kitchen was quite large. The piece of ground that these places were built on, they built right out to the boundaries on the front

etcetera, and the old... If you go down and have a look at Port Melbourne, some of those old houses down there, they were almost right out to the front boundary and there was a big yard at the back. There was never any crowding or cramping of people.

God, I can’t remember. I know we had gas cooking.

I think it might’ve still been open fireplaces. There was a guy, in fact just out the back of us there was a wood yard and this fellow had horses and he had a horse drawn wagon. During the summer months he’d get round selling ice from this insulated square box on wheels with his horse and during the winter months he go around selling firewood.

People used to heat their houses with that but it must’ve cost a fortune some of those big old places with just open fires. The gas came from, there used to be the old gasometer in Port Melbourne where they used to, before natural gas was discovered off the coast and they’d pipe it in there. That was a big landmark in Port Melbourne if you know the area.

Food was relatively cheap, we were never hungry when we came to Australia. Never been hungry since coming to Australia.

In Port Melbourne?

I can’t remember that but we used to go to Albert Park Lake. Kerosene tins, and that was another form of heating, kerosene which are now illegal,

those little kerosene stoves. Used to get a square kerosene tin, cut the top out and nail a piece of wood across as a handle. We’d go to the Albert Park Lake, we’d get a couple of pieces of liver on a piece of string, dunk it into the water, pull it up and have a little net thing and catch yabbies. Fill this four gallon tin full of yabbies, take that home and my aunt used to

boil them up. And we’d eat that. And the other thing at Albert Park Lake, right next to the golf course, the bottom of Albert Park Lake was littered with golf balls. So we’d be in the water, not many people realise but Albert Park Lake at its deepest is only about five foot deep, and we’d get in there and get a bucket full of golf balls and then stand beside the golf course “Golf balls, sixpence each.” And we’d sell them back to the golfers and they used to think it was beaut because I think they were probably paying about two or three

shillings a golf ball. And that’s how we made a little bit of extra money.

Yeah, they’d take them down to swim down on Port Melbourne beach, ah yeah. Because milk was also delivered by a horse drawn milkman. When we were living in Ross St, just around the corner on Bridge St was Woodruff’s Dairy. And I’ll always remember the two Woodruff brothers who owned the thing, they both drove black Mercedes Benz cars, 1940 something or other

model obviously the first made in Germany after the war, and they were the only people that you’d ever see around Melbourne driving these black Mercedes Benz, obviously a lot of money in the dairy industry. But all their deliveries were done with horse drawn wagons and most of it was bulk milk, you left a billy out with, I think it was a shilling, something a shilling, sixpence something like that, in the bottom of the billy and they’d fill the billy up with milk for you. And that’s the way you’d, there was no,

or you could buy bottled milk if you wanted to but that was a bit flash. It was I think a penny a pint cheaper or something like that to buy it in bulk and the milk was fresh every day. The big tankers would come in every day and you used to be able to get the best milkshake in Port Melbourne round at Woodruffs, it was good.

Yep. Princess Pier was not terribly much but

Station Pier was a very busy pier. Cargo would come off the ships and station, there was a railway station there at that time, trains would come down they’d load it on to trains and it would go to wherever it was going to. In between the piers was a petroleum tank farm. All the BP [British Petroleum] tanks holding storage for petrols and kerosenes and diesel and all that sort of stuff, that’s now the luxury area of

Port Melbourne. And in between was a great fishing spot, there was a tiny little foot walk pier that went out to a little lighthouse. I don’t know if that’s still there or not but we used to sit out there fishing. That was a good little fishing spot. But yeah, the harbour there was very busy. I’m not sure how it competed against the Melbourne Docks up in the Yarra River,

but certainly down there when the ships were coming in, it just doesn’t happen any more. It was extremely busy.

Oh yeah, hell yeah. And at one stage we had a shipwreck there just further past Princess Pier, a ship broke its moorings, there was a bit of a big storm and it beached. And it was lying basically

on its side and it was there must’ve been a couple of years and we used to swim out to it and clamber all over it. They had a watchman who’d say “Get off the boat, you kids aren’t supposed to be going…” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And we’d ransack through the thing and we used to dive off it. It was great fun.

Yeah, a freighter. It’d been anchored just off one of the piers and it broke its, waiting to get into the pier and

a storm came up and it either slipped its mooring or broke its mooring and washed ashore. I can’t remember the name of it.

Yeah, I would think so yeah. Probably an old American Liberty ship or something like that. I mean, as far as ships go these days, super tankers, this thing would’ve been almost like a lifeboat. But full sized ocean going freighter washed up on the

beach. It was like a huge beached whale and all the local kids from Port Melbourne and Garden City, we mobbed it. And it was washed ashore I think early one summer, it must’ve been early ’50s, washed ashore at the start of summer and what a Mecca for all the local kids. There was literally hundreds of kids swarming all over the ship.

Oh yeah, yeah. But you were walking on walls because the thing was lying on its side. And it, you could almost walk out to it, you had to swim only the last 20 or 30 metres to get to it.

They couldn’t get it afloat again and they ended up breaking it up. They had to break it into sections and drag it away by sections. They had big floating barges and things with cranes and they just

gradually, and it took them about two years to break this thing up. I guess it had just locked itself into the sand and they couldn’t, couldn’t right it, couldn’t get it off the sand and so. It was obviously an eyesore or they had to make their money back from salvage or something.

Yeah.

We used to, we quite often used to go fishing together. He used to prefer to go down and fish at night

because we, underneath one of the lights on the pier, you could see the fish and the fish were drawn to the light. And I was, it was (UNCLEAR) to go down by yourself at that age at night and he’d go down fishing and yeah beaut. We supplemented the household rations with fish. And in those days you could eat them out of the bay without worrying about heavy metal poisoning or something of that nature.

Yeah, as you go down, as you went down Williamstown Rd, there were mainly factories on the right hand side but sort of down towards the river from say Graham St in Port Melbourne, on the left all the way through, they were all brick places, most of them were double storey and that was Garden City.

And it was a Housing Commission or Housing Trust or whatever they call it in the main I think and as you say “Bank housing”. And that road was a fairly busy road then because there was no Westgate Bridge and there was a ferry that used to cross the Yarra, a cable ferry. And that was a popular place that place too for kids, you’d pushbike down all the way down along Williamstown Rd and basically

I can’t even remember paying I think we used to go across for free on the ferry over to Williamstown and get around there on your pushbike and come back rather than going all the way into the city, crossing a bridge and down through that way. And Garden City as it got closer and closer to the Yarra River, the land sort of got narrower and narrower so people were living closer and closer to the beach.

I don’t recall that.

Well, all the way through there was all working class. I mean down right through that area on the right hand side of the street, of Williamstown Rd was all factories

and there was plenty of work. Basically in those days if you had an argument with your boss you could say “Stick your job”, walk out the gate, turn left or right at the next gate that you came to and get another job. There was more work than there were people looking for work. There was complete 100% employment. If you were unemployed it was because you didn’t want a job. And even further back up Williamstown Rd which

was the thing called Normanby Rd was the tyre factories, Dunlop tyre factories and the old Port Melbourne Football Ground. A place you could get a beer on Sunday morning.

Mmm. Sly grog [illegal booze sales]. There used to be a game there, the old what do they call it, when it used to be the VFL [Victorian Football League], the VFA [Victorian Football Association], the Association. The used to play on Sundays and you could trot down there and get a quiet beer.

But remember this is six o’clock closing. No pubs open on Sundays, if you had a car you could drive out to a country town and become a bona fide traveller and sign in in the book and you could get a beer if you bought a meal to sit in front of you as well. Not like these days where you can buy a drink anywhere at any time and at any age it would appear. But things were considerably

different down there then. But there was lots of work and even though, I think Port Melbourne people gave the appearance of being poor, there was as time progressed, a lot of new cars appeared. And there was the whole, General Motors was down there and people were able to generate enough money from working to be able to buy cars and all those sort of items. Although still a lot of people,

my father used to go to work on a pushbike. I think the first car he bought would’ve been about 1965, something like that. But back in those days, he was only I suppose 2kms from work so he’d ride his pushbike there and back.

Oh yeah, huge employer. Used to be good too as a kid, swimming down on the Port Melbourne beach there, you used to trot up and they’d leave in the hot weather

obviously, you’re swimming, they’d leave the side doors open to get a bit of ventilation into the place because it got quite hot in there with the baking ovens and things, and ask the blokes “You got any broken biscuits?” They’d feed you well there, taking breakages off the production line and you could have a feed of broken biscuits, which was pretty good.

I went to Knott St State School.

On Knott St obviously, which was just south of Bridge St as I recall and when I finished there, across to for secondary education, South Melbourne Tech.

We did a multitude, it was all trade type, in those days you were either going to go into a trade or you were going to go into a clerical job and that was the basic division. My father who’d been

engineering on ships, said “Oh you’ve got to have a trade.” And I said “Yeah,” not that I really wanted one. But I ended up doing a refrigeration mechanic trade with Frigrite in Port Melbourne, in Graham St. Basically finished that and joined the army. Never practised it.

Well, I’d been told to get out and find a trade, and I’d thought

I wouldn’t mind being a motor mechanic. Because in those days all the kids, their big ambition in life was to get a car. And you couldn’t really afford to have a car and have someone else work on it so you had to know what you were doing so you could fix it and service it and all that yourself. Because cars in those days notoriously broke down every five minutes so I was actually initially looking for a job as a motor mechanic or a diesel mechanic at the least, and basically

you did the rounds and you knocked on doors and I ended up down in at the Frigrite place in Graham St. And Graham St in those days used to be a dead end where the freeway now goes through and Bridge St is on a fly over that goes over the top of the freeway. The foreman came out, a bloke by the name of Phil Hill, a great big tall bloke and he said “Yeah, waddya want?” And I said “I’m

looking for a job, an apprenticeship hopefully.” And he said, “What qualifications have you got?” I said “I’ve got my junior tech.” And he said, he had grease all over his hands, he said “Show me.” So I unrolled it and stuck it in front of his face, he said “Oh okay, start on Monday.” And that was it. I took up my apprenticeship just like that and over the period of the next couple of months all the documentation was raised and you had to sign your indenture and all that sort of stuff and I worked there for the next five years.

Local kids that maybe I’d been to school with, other kids that were apprentices in the same sort of age group. You used to go to, had to go up to the Melbourne Tech as it was called in those days, what’s it now the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Flash name same place. And you had to do a day a week study to complete your apprenticeship and you’d meet basically a lot of kids doing the same sort of job but for different companies and that’s how you sort of extended your group of friends. You tended to stick with people who were doing similar things, had similar interests.

In those days you couldn’t get into pubs and that sort of stuff, the only sort of social activities were town hall dances. Saturday nights every town hall in suburban Melbourne had a dance so you’d trot along there and you’d meet a variety of different people in those places. Apart from that I, I’d been in the school cadets at South Melbourne Tech

and discovered this was alright, you’d get to shoot guns and all that sort of stuff. I’d joined the CMF [Citizen Military Force] after I’d been out of school for a couple of years and I met a variety of people in that. The old national service [call up for 18 year olds] was still going at that time as well ad there were people, conscripts in the system and we, we’d go to a variety of activities.

Training activities and that got you out and you met different people and that, that was the sort of social contact you had.

Port Melbourne, around South Melbourne was a good one, what do they call it these days, Emerald Hill, the big old town hall there, they used to have stompers of dances. Fitzroy, we used to travel out to, out this way

Brunswick. Could get around, Melbourne’s always had a reasonable public transport system. They were fairly typical Australian dances, all the girls would be lined up on one side and all the boys lined up on the other side and you sort of had to trot over and “G’day. Would you like a dance?” “No.” “Okay,” and you’d work your way along the line until you found somebody who said “Yeah.” Rock ’n’ Roll was just really coming in.

They were very, very popular.

God they were, I think they were bands that used to basically make their money at doing pubs but it was, I can’t even remember. I don’t think they were any group special but it’d only be a guitar player,

a drummer and maybe a singer sort of thing and they would never do the complete lot. They’d fade out every now and then and they’d have I s’pose you’d call them a DJ [disc jockey], would start playing records, the old 78s or 45s. Away they’d go and that was the thing.

Yeah, Bill Haley stuff,

‘Rock Around the Clock’. All the very early stuff, in fact I’ve got some CDs [compact discs] now occasionally I put them on and think “God did I really listen to that garbage?” Some of it is so primitive but it was fairly primitive and I guess that’s right in some of the dances, they’d have

an older band with a piano, a bit of class, but they’d still have the drums etc and there’d be either a saxophone or a clarinet in it. And they’d play the slower music, the waltzes and all that sort of stuff, a pretty good variety I guess.

You’d sort of move around the floor hanging on to

the sheila [girl].

Pretty much, yeah.

Yes, we went through a variety of girls and sort of fell in and out of love three times a week. The usual stuff that teenage boys do.

All male, yeah. Except our

librarian, she was a female and we used to always love going to the library. “G’day,” married woman of probably 30, yeah she was a really old hag. But there was a girls’ school, what was it called, just down off Kerford Rd and occasionally we’d go down there and hang on the fence and shout promises or obscenities

or whatever to girls.

I don’t think this one was a Catholic school but there was a big Catholic school down there as well. In fact there was quite a variety of schools through that area. Not, certainly not as now, in fact I think the Catholic schools now are Hari Krishna place down in Albert Park. So it’s all changed but the, I suppose then there was a lot of kids

growing up in those suburbs. Now it’s all trendy and upwardly mobile young couples who are pulling in a hundred grand a year each and can afford to live in those areas. No children.

No not at all. But there was, there was a big Catholic school down near the end of Bay St in Port Melbourne, St Michael’s I think.

And I can remember the talk of the Catholic kids and they’d say “What’s it like at your school?” And I’d say “All right.” “Oh, what do the teachers do when you play up?” “You’d get a smack.” “The nuns are terrible, they get rulers and whack you behind the back of the legs with rulers.” And you’d go “Oh yeah, okay. Mmm.” Stay away from that one.

No, no. I’m from the other camp, high Church of England. Everything’s

exactly the same except our mass used to be in English and not Latin. That’s the one that [English King]Henry the Eighth started when he wanted a divorce.

Actually we did. My mother was a churchgoer, she used to take me along. But as with all those things it gradually faded out after a while. I do

believe in god but I’m not a churchgoer.

She had a variety of different jobs, mainly menial type things. She worked as a shop assistant for a reasonable amount of the time. Having only on child helped, there was no real requirement for her to stay home.

She was ill for quite a while, she died fairly young from lung cancer. Couldn’t give up the cigarettes and she died in her mid-50s, early 50s.

Yes to a degree.

Initially there was a lot of heartache, a lot of angst.

It just wasn’t what she’d been used to in England. Different social groupings but I think through church groups and that sort of thing she found a place but initially it was “it’s all so different here,” and there was even talk of going back to England for a while. My father would say “Oh yeah. You want to go back to the snow and the hardship and no work and trying to find work all the time,” and all that sort of stuff. And she’d very quickly say “Oh no, let’s stay here.”

Grandson. He’s a bit of an exhibitionist. Four years old.

Big lad for his age.

Yeah he’s going to be a giant of a man. Okay.

Yes.

From a more structured life I s’pose in England. There’s still a class system there etc and so forth, to Australia which is really quite a different sort of society. And it was really quite different then. I mean I can remember what Australia was like then. There were a lot of taboos, things you couldn’t talk about and things you couldn’t do etc. even only ten or 15 years ago,

how Australia’s changed today, you could honestly get away with blue murder today but then the wheel turns I s’pose. But back to my mother, yeah I guess she just found it a bit difficult. She was a bit homesick. In fact her mother and father came out and lived in Australia for a couple of years with us. I think my mother was really very close to her mother. In fact back in

the mid 70s she decided she was going to see her brother who lived in Rhodesia as it was called then, and she was going to spend a couple of weeks with him and six months in England with her mother because her mother was quite aged then. My grandmother was quite old and frail, and she thought it’ll probably be the last chance I get to see her. Anyway she ended up spending a couple of weeks in England and six months in Rhodesia because as soon

as she got back there she discovered the snow and that England really wasn’t the England that she’d known as a young woman, as a child and a young woman. So anyway going back to the original bit, she found it a bit difficult and I think a lot of other people did as well. But most of, well there were only two sorts of people living in Port Melbourne, they were the Australians and us Pommies. There were very few

other groups of people at that stage. With hindsight, I didn’t know at the time but most of the people who were displaced out of Europe were, who were coming to Australia at the same time, but they were going into the camps that they’d set up for them to live in because they didn’t have relatives here or unless they had relatives here. People tended to live in

specific suburbs, all the middle Europeans used to go and live down at places like Prahran, St Kilda, hence you’ve got all the coffee shops and things down there and that’s the way it used to be then. People were talking in Hungarian and all that sort of stuff, a little Europe in Melbourne. To a degree it still is now.

And then as time went on, after a couple of years we started seeing Italians and Greeks and they would settle in Port Melbourne. Basically straight off the ship and almost straight into the first house. But, and at that stage we were Australians, we’d integrated into the population and we were getting on the same as everyone else. Things were changing

through the ’50s, I think it was a real upheaval time for Australia, there was always something new going on. The newspapers, the Petrovs, [high ranking Soviet defectors] always that sort of stuff. There was always something different going on and Australia was involved, well we had troops in occupation force in Japan, troops in Korea, troops in Malaya, we are

almost going back to that situation now where we’ve got people all over the place. And people were interested in building a life after the Second World War and people were interested in keeping their jobs and buying their homes and buying new furniture and getting things set up to have a comfortable life.

I don’t know about big but there was a few. There were people who had the skills that they were looking for in the factories etc. For example there was a big English car

factory down just off the Williamstown Rd. The old Rootes Group of cars, Humbers [British sedans] and that sort of thing was down there. So I think they, there might’ve been a lot of people who came to Australia who’d come from that sort of background in the UK to similar jobs here. And the owners were obviously looking for somebody who had experience

in doing that sort of work. So yeah there was and I think Garden City probably had more Poms in it than Port Melbourne.

There was, well my father was involved with darts. He was a real good dart thrower, I mean when you’re on board a ship I suppose that about all you’ve got to do. And there was in the local

RSLs [Returned and Services League] and if you’ve ever seen the Port Melbourne RSL as it was, there was a huge dart green corrugated tin shed and they used to play darts. There was, they were all English in the main and they used to play these dart competitions and two and three nights a week they’d be down there playing darts and it was just across the other side of the railway line from where we lived so,

very convenient.

Dart playing, yeah dart playing and I don’t think they had it so much in the pubs then and certainly there were clubs. In England there are dart, it’s not like here where you wander into a pub and you might play darts or play cards or something, there you were organised into clubs and that’s the sort of tradition that they brought out here.

Certainly my old man used to play in a club in Port Melbourne. I think it was the RSL club or one of the RSL clubs, something of that nature.

Actually there was and in those days the police were on foot. They had vehicles as well but they would patrol on foot and on pushbikes. And if after dark you were out as a teenager

and the police would come up silently behind you on rubber tyres, on their pushbikes and it would be “What are you doing? Where have you been? Where are you going? Where do you live? What’s your name?” and the police kept tabs on people in those days. Not like now where they’re an extension of the government revenue earning thing, booking people for speeding and whatever.

They knew who lived in the suburb and I can remember some other kids who got into the old car stealing and that, the police picked them up really quick because they figured out who it was. And it was totally different than today. I s’pose it was more of a community thing where people knew who lived next door, knew their name, spoke to them on a regular basis.

These days, maybe that doesn’t happen so much. I mean here I know the people who live on either side of us and I regularly even if it’s only “G’day, how you going?” But in those days people, well all the people that lived around us would go down to this darts thing with my parents and they socialised like that. And another thing, an old English tradition that -

A couple of old English traditions, was the street party which you just never hear about, nobody has street parties any more but the entire street would come out and they’d party on the street rather than party in their house and mess it up or whatever. And the RSL picnics where they’d hire a furniture removal van, kit it out with seats in the back and off you’d go on a huge

trip down to Frankston maybe and you’d have a day on the beach. All those things are now gone but that’s the way the suburb would organise itself and even when I started work at Frigrite, Frigrite used to have a social club and every month or every two months there’d be a buss trip somewhere. We’ll go to the snow or we’ll go to the beach,

whatever. That doesn’t happen anymore but that’s the sort of social life.

Stupid I s’pose. I was, I’d just turned 20, I’d finished my apprenticeship, I was totally cheesed off with the mundane existence.

I mean it was fairly boring even though there were these activities. I decided I wanted to travel and do something else and the easy way was to join one of the armed forces. I’d had experience in school cadets and the CMF and I thought I’ll see if I can enlist in the army. And they took me on. My father was really upset.

“At least join the navy.” And I said “Well I don’t want to join the navy. I’m not keen on chugging around in boats. I’d rather join the army.” So off I went.

She wasn’t all that keen either but she accepted that I wanted to go so, when you’re an only child you can get away with a lot of things with your Mum.

They never complain.

Rotten. With, I mean whatever she could provide. It’s not as it, God these days, I gave my son a car, I gave my daughter a car and they both of them wrecked them. My mother couldn’t be that lavish but certainly I was fed before everyone else and she would

buy me nice clothes and all that sort of stuff. And little lollies and that sort of thing. Typical spoilt brat child, single child, yeah. Haven’t grown out of it yet.

Yeah maybe. I also had a couple of friends who were already in the army and initially I thought oh yeah, go to armoured corps in Puckapunyal, it’s close to Melbourne. That’ll be beaut. Drive around in tanks all day, terrific. Anyway, and I, I wasn’t really sure about where the army might send me, and in those days

there was sort of no real prospect of a war, even though we had troops in funny little places like Malaya and Korea was well over by then. Korea had been the early 50s and this was 1962. And it, when I finally got into my recruit training and they give you a form and they say “Write down your preferences for the corps you want to go to.

Number them one, two and three.” So I went armoured corps, something else, something else, I can’t remember. And I had a platoon Sergeant Tommy Tiege. Old Tommy was a real rough old diamond, Second World War veteran and he called me into the platoon office one day and he said “Law, what’s this about you applying for armoured corps?” I said “Oh yeah it’ll be beaut and Puckapunyal’ll be close to Melbourne

and home.” He said “Have you ever considered infantry?” And I said “Why? Walk around with a bag on your back.” He said “No look, do you know where the bulk of the Australian infantry is now?” I said “No.” He said “in Malaya.” And I said “Where’s that?” And he said “It’s a tropical paradise. You don’t pay tax, the grog’s cheap. There’s all these lovely dusky maidens,” etc. I said “You’d better give me that form back Sarg.”

Infantry, you know. He suckered me into it. I mean all the corps were vying to get people. I think they do it differently these days, I think you join up to go to a specific corps. Whereas then, you joined up as a general enlistment and then the military figured out what they wanted to do with you and sent you basically where they, to what corps. You might’ve joined up as a

motor mechanic and thought oh beaut I’ll go to transport or armour or something like that and you could end up three months later being an artilleryman or an infantryman or anything else.

I don’t think it was very hard pushing at that stage. Because I remember

the depot down in St Kilda Rd, what did they call it, Three Military District Recruitment Depot or something, I don’t even think it’s still there any more, it was down near St Kilda Junction. There were 50 of us turned up on the first day, you got a letter report at this location. So I fronted up down there and there were 50 of us as I recall and we then had to do all the series of tests.

We were there all day, in fact it was two days, we had to come back the next day and complete all these tests. Out of the 50 they took two of us, so either the other 48 were pretty rotten or their standards were such that ruled out a lot of people who were trying to enlist. The economy was good, there was plenty of jobs. Usually when the economy goes

bad that’s when you get a lot of people trying to enlist in the armed forces, what else is there?

I don’t think so, no. Because it was only three years later they introduced conscription. And we, we in the army always said “maybe if you improved the conditions of service and gave us some decent pay then you wouldn’t have to conscript.” What would we know.

All the psychological tests, the usual stuff. Do you hate your mother? No. And then later, 500 questions later: Why do you hate your mother? All the trick psychiatrist stuff. Medical tests. We had to be able to climb up and down a rope, physical tests. The usual medical

stuff, wee in the bottle, turn your head to one side and cough, all that sort of stuff they just check to make sure basically you’ve got both hands and both feet and everything else in between and you haven’t got consumption or the obvious medical problems. And a psych test to find out if you’re trainable. It’s pretty pointless hiring someone who you just can’t train and there are

quite a few people like that in the world.

Just couldn’t, there are some people, it doesn’t matter how many times you train them in a particular subject they forget it or they don’t want to apply it or something of that nature. And the army obviously spends a lot of money on each individual and they want someone who they can train to conform with what they

want you to do. So you do all these tests. If you don’t pass you don’t get in.

There’s that as well yeah.

And work together as a team and to be able to be trusted to do things that you’re supposed to do by yourself. So you’ve got to obviously fit their, what’s the correct term, their profile of someone they’re looking for to do that sort of work. Yeah.

I had a pretty good idea what to expect.

And in reality they’re not interested in all that past experience and training, they want you, in fact they told me “Okay you’ve been,” and I’d been down at Two Commando for nearly four years, I’d parachuted and scuba dived and all of that sort of stuff. And fired, in fact I’d fired the M60 machine gun which the regular army still didn’t have. And I was told, “Forget all that stuff, we’re going to reteach you.”

I went “Okay.”

Mates were doing it and they said “Come down and do this, it’s beaut fun.” Yada, yada, “And you get paid.” “Oh, okay.” So almost like a paying hobby. Fronted down to Ripponlea where they were at that stage and they were doing all sorts of

physically demanding things. We used to kayak across Pt Phillip Bay and scuba diving, parachute jumping, rock climbing, unarmed combat throwing knives at each other and all the stuff that young blokes like doing. And drinking copious quantities of mind altering substance.

Oh yes, some weekends. A night a fortnight or a night a week for a

couple of hours. And you’d go through a training cycle. I was relatively fit and I liked a bit of sport even though I didn’t play organised sport and I found that to be, I enjoyed the challenge of doing some of those things. We used to, they used to send you out to do 20 mile forced marches in six hours. You try going

cross country, 20 miles with a pack on your back and a rifle in six hours. It’s, you’ve basically got to run all the way and it, a sense of achievement I s’pose at the end of it. Things like they’d take you down to Half Moon Bay down at Black Rock. Take you out to the end of the pier with a pack, fully dressed, boots, a rifle, a pack with a couple of house bricks in it and throw you off the end of the pier. And you had to get yourself to the beach.

And when you’re young and fit and stupid, yeah it’s good fun.

Oh well yeah I s’pose at the time but the army’s always got a good safety record. They had swimmers there ready and watching every individual and if somebody is obviously in difficulty, they get them out. And the army has always

pushed all of their training with the highest possible safety.

Other CMF types. There’d be a regular army component but there’d only be a handful of them and all the rest were people who had started like me, enjoyed it and it really was, it’s a club, it’s a boys club.

In those days, I mean in infantry units and that sort of unit there was no females, so it was all boys and it was like the boy scouts sort of thing, except with guns. I s’pose I’m not supposed to say that but that’s exactly what it was like. I don’t know what it’s like now but.

That’s good.

For some reason

units like Two Commando and One Commando in Sydney, I mean before that we’d had the old magazine fed Bren Gun. Stoppage every 30 rounds, it runs out of ammunition, you’ve got to go through a drill to re-cock it, magazine off, magazine on, re-aim and go on. The M60 was an American weapon that we were purchasing, that we used right through Vietnam, belt fed and basically you could link up as many belts and

providing you could keep it cool enough, you could keep this thing going for ever and a day. And you could either carry it like a rifle and shoot it like a rifle, and it’s got a little stand on the front you can get on the ground and shoot it or mount it on a tripod. General purpose machine gun as they were called. So they were sort of filling the gap between a light machine gun and a medium or heavy machine gun. And the were issued to those units before the regular army.

I don’t know why, but we were shooting them and when I got into the regular army and we were still using Bren guns, I said “Well where’s the M60s?” And they said “Well, what are they?” It was a bit of a surprise. The Australian army’s got some funny ideas about equipping people with the latest technology or some technology. At one stage, you know the webbing that they wear,

the original webbing that we were wearing when I first joined was 37 patent. In other words it was introduced in 1937 and we reckoned we were going to be the first army on the moon wearing 37 patent webbing. Until finally in the ’60s we got the American 54 patent or whatever it was, pretty much like the German Army stuff: shoulder straps and a pack on your back and everything around the belt instead of the pack on your back.

And that’s the Australian Army did some quite strange things like that and I’ve got no idea why.

I’m sure some things were. I’ll give you an example that comes to mind right now. When you’re going on active service, you are supposed to be issued with brand new weapons. Anyway, ten days short of going to Vietnam a truck came around and said

“All rifles, Owen machine carbines, M60s on to the truck.” “Beaut.” And we’re thinking ah yes, the book says we’re going to get issued with brand new weapons. About two days before we’re due to go, back comes this truck with these brand new, brand new weapons. One of the guys looks at his rifle and says “Jeez this is pretty good, this rifle has got the same number as the one I handed in.” They’d taken them away, re-blued them

and re-issued them so they looked like new weapons. Pretty sad.

Worn out. Worn out. And we had, when we went I was a junior NCO [Non Commissioned Officer] and I was carrying an Owen Gun, it was 18 years old. The barrel was worn out. The ammunition was

the ammunition had been made the same year I was and I discovered standing knee deep in a paddy firing aimed bursts at people on a tree line about 100 metres away and I was watching the bullets dropping in the water about 40 metres in front of me. It was just worn out and the ammunition was just too old. The SLRs [self loading rifles] when we, the rifles, the issued rifles and the M60s, when we first got over there, when we ran out of the Australian

ammunition that we’d brought with us, which believe it or not is top ammunition, it’s really excellent on a world wide basis of military ammunition, is really good stuff, we started using American ammunition and our weapons were malfunctioning all the time. Slightly different power in them or whatever but we had difficulties with our weapons and eventually we, when we started getting

a regular supply of Australian ammunition we would avoid using American ammunition. We’d use it for test firing maybe, but we wouldn’t take it out on operations because it was just too risky that the stuff would, you’d be half way through in a dangerous situation shooting at someone and you’d get stoppage because of the ammunition. And there is an amount of time where you’ve got to clear the stoppage otherwise it doesn’t work any more. And in that time when you’re not shooting at them

it gives them a golden opportunity to get a good aimed off shot at you. So it’s in your best interests to make sure you’ve got the best stuff. But the Australian army in those days was a little bit shoddy in their equipment. We were issued with boots that were made in the 1940s, they’d been brown and we dyed them black. We very quickly got a hold of American boots.

I was wearing a uniform that had been khaki just the week before we went, that they dyed green. The 37 patent packs that we had, they actually turned up with a spray painting gun and outfit and spray painted the khaki packs green with this fabric paint of some sort. That’s fairly cheap Charlie when you think about it. I mean when we arrived, the Americans were there

in these really svelte jungle fatigues, pockets all over the place which was beaut, lightweight material, they’d breathe. We were wearing this sort of thick heavy material and stuff. Jungle boots that actually pumped the water out of them when you, I mean you’re going to get wet, but in the instep of the thing they had a little valve that would as you walked, would pump the water out of your boots. Ours, you took the boots off to get the water out or you put up with the wet boots.

The Americans had all this beaut webbing. They had these black plastic M16s, and we’re equipped with stuff that was left over from the Second World War and a couple of new editions but we’d been using them for so long they were worn out.

Right, okay. Well once they decided after a couple of days testing yes we will engage you, in those days you signed for three or six years. Now if you signed for three you really weren’t in the regular army, you were what they called RAASR, Royal Australian Army Special Reserve or something like that, that nature.

Six years was regular army. Anyway initially I was going to sign for three and this Staff Sergeant there said “Oh look you know you’ll get no promotion and they won’t send you on courses and all that unless you sign for six.” And I said “I’ll sign for six,” said he. So from there down in St Kilda Rd down near the junction, we were, a handful of us

who were accepted we were put into a truck, driven out to Watsonia and we spent about two or three weeks there. They gave us these sort of overall things and they used us as office cleaners and road sweepers and all this sort of stuff while you were waiting for sufficient people to group up to send off to Wagga, the recruit training battalion in Kapooka. So

three we were as a cheap labour force at Watsonia, no instructions or anything. An NCO would and usually I think the NCOs there were people waiting discharge, you know they’d been sent down to the depot for their last couple of weeks. And this corporal would front up each morning at about eight o’clock and say “right, you two you’ll mow lawns, you two you will sweep streets, you two will go down and report to the cook.”

And then he’d disappear for the rest of the day and so off, that was your day. At the end of the day you’d come back and “What are we going to do now?” “Oh let’s get into civvies [civilian clothes] and go down the boozer [hotel].” “Oh okay.” So off you’d go. There was no real control over you. But from there when there was sufficient people for what they call a draft, to go to 1RTB the recruit, First Recruit Training Battalion at

Kapooka, Wagga. We went by I can’t remember how we got to the railway but down to Spencer St Station, onto a train and we had this old geriatric old sergeant, probably 35 but in those days he was a geriatric, as our escort and there was sort of half a carriage load of us up to Wagga.

I can’t remember who picked us up up there either, but then out to the Recruit Training Battalion. Sort of get off the bus, and oh yeah we knew what was going on, we’d been in the army for three weeks. Anyway there’s all these smicked-up corporals and bombardiers, they were the mongrels the Artillery Corporals, we called them bombardiers and they’re all there in spit shined boots and starched up uniforms. And as soon as we stepped of the bus or the truck I can’t remember,

it was scream, scream “You sluggo over there, you idiot down…” and then it began. And we were there for I s’pose 12 weeks, something like that. And there were various companies there and I ended up in Charlie Company which was separate, the place was built on rigid lines and Charlie Company was called Tin City,

something like that. It was all tin sheds all those, the old Nissan hut, the half round huts. And we were organised into platoons and we got a platoon staffer, happened to be a young sub-lieutenant. In fact Porter was his name, old Tommy T the Platoon Sergeant and three or four corporals and bombardiers. And they would turn up every morning bashing and crashing and turning over beds, six o’clock

in the morning. “Out of bed! Out of bed!” You’d have to come out on parade and call your name. Invariably there’d be somebody who’d shot through, decided that soldiering was not for them and packed their bongos and nicked off in the middle of the night. Pretty rough old deal in those days. In fact later on I found out when I got to the battalion, NCOs it was my punishment or a charge. Your punishment, whack.

It would, a fist would go and you didn’t want to hit back. That would be assaulting an NCO. However, recruit training was a bit more under control.

Oh yeah. It was. I thought gee whiz I’ve made a mistake here. But still, after a period of time when

you did PT [physical training] every day, you ate three square meals a day and after we’d been there about a month they decided they were going to go on daylight saving because it was summer, I’d joined up in October and late November, early December the unit had decided they were going to do daylight saving. And daylight saving there was out of bed at 4am. You started training at 4.30 and they’d give you a big wad of cake and a cup of tea to

kick start you in the morning. You’d do two or three periods of training and the army organises into forty minute training periods and you’d do, you could probably do about a dozen training periods a day. That’s right up until night but you’d have breaks and you’d have a ten minute break in between each period. But this daylight saving thing, they’d stop at about eight o’clock and you’d go and have a proper breakfast. Sit down and real

gunfire breakfast, sausages, eggs, bacon, bubble and squeak all of that and they really packed the food into you to build up strength and all that sort of stuff. Anyway then we’d go to training until midday, then the training day would end because it was just too hot. People were passing out, you’d have people standing out in the sun all day and they’d fall over. Anyway then they’d give us lunch and

there was no swimming pool there then but they’d put on a bus and take you into Wagga and you could go swimming for a couple of hours. So it was beaut. Even though I s’pose I’ve never really regarded myself as a physically athletic type but I used to enjoy that sort of a life. And after you’ve been doing this for a couple of months, all of a sudden you’ve grown a couple of inches, you don’t stoop any more,

all your muscles are tight, you’ve got a washboard belly, you’ve got a good suntan and you’re fit as a fiddle and you’ve got money in your pocket. So it was good. Once we marched out, and they used to call it passing out, strange term I never got the grips of that, but you’d pass out of the unit and the process of selecting what corps you were going to.

You might have to hang around there for a while until the got a big enough draft again. Everything moves, WW2, WW1 idea, they couldn’t send an individual by themselves, you had to go in a controlled group. Anyway so after we finished there, infantry. And the infantry centre used to be in Ingleburn, just on the outskirts of Liverpool, Sydney. So off we went up there and

spent another three or four months there. We’d go into more specialised training. They’d start training you, I mean at recruit training you certainly did rifle but very little machine gun and you may get to throw a couple of grenades whereas you got to infantry training, you spent a lot of time out in the bush learning infantry tactics, you spent a lot of time on ranges, rifle, machine gun, even up to firing anti-

armour weapons. You’d learn navigation, radio telephone procedure, all of those skills that you’d need as a grunt. Then posted to a battalion. And I was posted to 1RAR [First Royal Australian regiment] which was basically just over the other side of the road from Ingleburn out to Holsworthy. And from there, at that stage I thought this was all right, I was in Sydney,

I enjoyed Sydney. I was posted. In those days 1RAR was huge. The normal battalion though has got about four or five hundred people in it. 1RAR then was under what they called then a pentropic establishment, and it was almost 2,000 strong. It was a huge organisation. We created another two battalions out of it in the following year. But got posted there.

You might not want to video this part but the drill used to be they’d take you on to the battalion parade ground and you’re standing there dressed, hat, rifle, kit bag, all the bits and pieces and on the edge of the parade ground are all the company sergeant majors [RSMs]. The Regiment Sergeant Major who I’d had an association, I was telling you about. He was

Well it was a bit of a culture shock I suppose. We were lined up on the parade ground and I s’pose there was a couple of dozen of us. We were all in our kit and standing there rigidly at attention. The RSM was, went down the line, gave us all our regiment hat badges

and the shoulder titles and our lanyards, the garter blue lanyard. Battalions are identified by the colour of their lanyards. And it was “Welcome to the regiment, welcome.” And I thought this was all right. He then read out names and he’d say “CSM, A Company.” “Sir.” And he’d march out on the parade ground and then the RSM would call out a list of names and those people would be taken under the control of that Company Sergeant Major and marched off down to their new company.

Anyway, so off I went B Company, there was myself and one other bloke. And off we trotted down, off we marched down the road. And we get down there and the battalion had been out on exercise and they were just getting back. So people are all over the place, they’re trying to hand in weapons, they’re filthy dirty, they’ve been out in the bush and we were allocated to Seven Platoon. In those days there was four platoons pentropic,

so Seven Platoon B Company. A lot of people pick you up on that because there’s only supposed to be three platoons so there wouldn’t be a Seven in B Company. Anyway we were allocated to this platoon, both of us and we’re taken under the command of a man called Dasher Wheatley. Dasher Weatley a couple of years later was killed in action and got a posthumous Victoria Cross. Anyway Dasher was a real

Tough looking individual. He really looked mean. And he’d just come out of the bush. He was a corporal but he was Acting Platoon Sergeant. Anyway the accommodation was the old tin sheds where there was barrack beds in the thing for ten blokes or whatever, and at each, at one end there’s a couple of little private rooms where NCOs can get a bit

of privacy. Because of their rank they get a bit of privacy. Anyway so Dasher Wheatley says “Oh,” Corporal Wheatley says, “Oh come in to, come into my room here I’ll get changed out of this stuff and I’ll tell you what’s going on.” Anyway he’s giving us a briefing on what he expected from us and the usual stuff he did. And we’re both standing there going “Yes Corporal. Yes Corporal.” And he’s getting undressed. Anyway he gets down to his underpants and off they come

and he’s got a woman’s suspender belt on and it’s holding a woman’s hygienic pad on his backside. And we’re standing there going, “Oh my god, what have we got”… and really, up against the wall. And we’re thinking “Oh crikey is this a camp full of transvestites or homosexuals or some bloody thing?” Anyway we finally got out of there and we’re talking to some of the other

guys that night and they said “Oh yeah, Dasher, his girlfriend down there in” wherever, somewhere in Sydney, “She had one of the old brass bed end beds. And he’d been a bit playful with her in bed and leapt on to her and she’d done the old foot in the belly and pushed him off and he’d impaled his backside on one of these knobby bits on the end of the bed. And it had split and bled.”

Anyway he’d got himself back to camp and the doctor said “The only dressing I can put on it is one of these sport.” And got the appropriate elastic stuff to hold it in place. Couldn’t believe it. And that was our introduction to the battalion. Anyway Dasher Wheatley went on to all sorts of things. We revised our thinking about this particular bloke but…

A real shock. A real shock.

We were at the boozer or in the mess hall or something that evening and we met some of the other blokes and said “Oh yeah, yeah.” We said “What’s he all about?” And they all had a bit of a laugh and said “This is what happened.” I mean if he had have told us I don’t know whether we would have

believed him or not, but it would’ve I think made things a lot easier. But at the time. And he, he was a horrible man. We used to go to a pub in, just across from Hyde Park and the Civic, the Civic Hotel. I think it’s all gone now, it’s high rise office buildings there now. But on pay, we were all weekend millionaires, every second weekend

when we got paid. And we’d go into town and have a few beers, yada yada yada the usual thing, get out of barracks and get into town and Dasher Wheatley used to make such a mess of himself, he’d crawl in behind the piano on the little stage in the beer lounge there and go to sleep. And he was that much of a fixture there, old Ma or whatever her name was, the woman who owned the pub, had a blanket in there for him. So he’d get sloshed

three o’clock in the afternoon, crawl in behind the piano and go to sleep and when the piano started up at eight o’clock at night, Dasher would wake up and crawl out, “Got another beer?” And out he’d come. But funny, the individuals like that, it’s like one of the other Corporals who just died about a month ago, Snow Morley, old Snow” have you got a smoke mate” Morley. He would get around

for the fortnight between paydays, “Mate you got a smoke?” “Oh mate you got a…?” He was smoking 20 cigarettes a day, he had sort of 40 people where he’d go around twice in a day and he’d get his cigarettes. Paydays, very cunning, he’d go out and buy two or three packets of cigarettes and then race around all the people he was bludging smokes off “Mate, I had a smoke off you the other day,” and give them back cigarettes. And he had a

packet a day habit and it was only costing him sort of two cigarettes a day that he had to actually buy. Blokes like that that these days if you tell someone a story like that they look at you and go “Yeah, really, er.” And don’t sort of understand it but at the time you’d see this bloke coming, Old Snow and you’d say “I’ll bet you I know what Snow’s going to say as soon as he

catches up with us.” And odds on “Oh g’day fellas, got a smoke?” Unreal.

Well if you weren’t in that sort of group and there’d be little groups of people who’d hang out together, and sometimes quite often

you’d have the entire platoon or the entire company would be drinking in one pub and that’s the way it was, if you didn’t then basically you were a social outcast. Very few of the people were married, we were all single. You might get a couple of the sergeants might be married and the CSM might be married, but all the diggers and the corporals, nobody was married in those days, it was just

one of those things. In fact I don’t think people could afford to have a family on the, I think I was being paid eleven pounds a fortnight, 22 dollars a fortnight. Yes they fed me three meals a day and yes they clothed me and gave me a bed but 22 bucks a fortnight? And that was the early ’60s I think the average wage outside was about 15 pounds a week so we were very poorly paid.

But anyway, yeah that was basically your entertainment and if you weren’t part of that you were looked at with a bit of a jaundiced eye. And I suppose it tended to be a bonding thing. I, personally I think I’m pretty lucky that when I went to Vietnam I went with 1RAR. We’d been living, training, working together for two or three years

and everybody knew everybody else. We knew each other’s failings, we knew our good points, the whole lot. We knew what to expect. And I reckon that kept our casualty rate down to a degree and our success rate up. B Company was the most highly decorated Australian Infantry Company for the entire war. And I think that was a lot to do with the fact that people worked together as an

oiled team.

Oh yeah. Soldiering, when you’re not at war you’re basically training for war. You know that’s all you do. Well you’re either doing duties, normal maintenance duties. You’ve got diggers in those days, these days it’s contracted out, but you’ve got diggers peeling potatoes and washing dishes.

You’ve got people keeping the area clean and gardens etc. or you’re training in weapon handling, or you’re training in radio telephone procedure, or you’re out in the bush practising all these things. And the army grades it into individual skills, weapon handling, shooting, that sort of thing; small team skills, as a group of ten as a section; and unit, so the whole unit. And they’d

practice in those sort of cycles. They reckoned when every individual knew his own individual job then you could practice that and practice higher level skills as a group and your junior NCOs would get practice commanding their troops and then you’d get up to the next level up where the whole thing would come into play and you could measure how successful or not a unit would be if it ever came under the stress of war.

Well there’d be set objectives. If it was, sometimes if you got to an exercise where you were actually competing against another unit they’d have umpires. And the umpires would walk around with coloured armbands on and they would take notes. And at the end of it all they’d correlate all the information and tell you who won and who didn’t. But as a general thing

when you weren’t doing that type of activity, you simply practiced what the drills were and most of the military procedures are what they called SOPs, Standard Operating Procedures. And you followed those SOPs without really forming habits, because if you practiced habits you’d end up being ambushed, so it was a matter of practising them.

Well if you for example, follow the same track all the time, you get a habit of, it’s the easiest way to travel. Eventually the opposition will pick up on this. Armies don’t win wars, it’s still the army that’s suffered the less at the end of it, that’s the one who comes out as the eventual winner. There’s no real winner.

But you need to practice navigation for example. Even though you’d be travelling on a different route every time, but you’re still practicing the navigation instead of going up and down the same path. There are certain drills that we would practise for our security. For example every time we stopped, say for the evening, the

Commander of the group, the Company Commander, the Platoon Commander, the Battalion Commander would go right around the perimeter and sight every machine gun and say “Your arc of fire is through there.” And he’d mark it up on his map and we’d have the whole perimeter marked. Once that was done we’d then send out a patrol that’d go right around and make sure there was no enemy observer or group or whatever outside the perimeter at a close enough distance where after

dark they could creep in on us or something. And we used to practice those sort of drills so that they became second nature. And even the private soldiers, if you did, if you missed something out they’d say “What about?” and they’d pick you up on it which was good. And I believe that’s why eventually when we did, started going into Vietnam our practices and our procedures

were different than the Americans and I believe that’s a major reason why we suffered fewer casualties and in some cases had better success.

‘62 I joined, I got to the battalion in ’63.

No, it, we’d

had troops in Malaya, we still had troops there. 1RAR had been in Malaya ’59 to ’61, it used to be a two year posting in those days. We knew that there was activity going on there, that there was shooting, I mean the Americans were in there. We also had a training team in there from ’62, so we knew, in fact one of the platoon sergeants in B Company had gone off to do all the courses and was going off to Vietnam so we knew

it was there. We didn’t know that we were going to be involved in it at that stage. In fact in ’64 we were in Papua New Guinea, B Company was in Papua New Guinea because the Indonesians had just invaded Irian Jaya as they called it then, Irian Jaya, Irian Barat, anyway West Papua, West New Guinea and they were talking about the Australian mandated territory as

the other half of their island basically. So we went up there to show the flag and we walked around all the border areas. We were showing the flag and because the last foreign troops these people had seen up there in the villages had been Japanese at the end of the Second World War. So we were up there in the middle of ’64, July, August, September getting around that area. We were discovering that the Indonesians were moving the border markers,

getting more land. We actually faced off to some of their patrols on the border, “Hello.” “Mmm.” Head nodding and they trundled off so there was no confrontation as such but we fully expected that that was where we were going to go for our next shooting match. Luckily that didn’t happen because that was a terrible place.

Do you remember a couple of years ago, the big tidal wave that wiped out? That’s the area that we were operating in and it was really rough country. The base we were operating out of was a place called Vanimo, an old Japanese airfield and administrative camp. We’d gone up, it was almost right on the border and we’d gone up into the mountains and, they were like that. You basically

had to carry everything with you, we had no helicopters, we had no variable pitched propeller planes to land on short strips. It was quite funny, we were being resupplied by TAA, [Trans Australian Airlines] in Cessnas [light single engined planes] and every village had an airstrip. Just a cleared patch of ground. And

these things used to get in okay and we’d get our rations off it. And at one stage one of the troops in the platoon, he was crook, he had gastro, he just couldn’t stop so they said “All right, we’ll medically evacuate you on the ration supply thing.” Anyway so get him down there and we’re all standing there waiting for the plane to take off and the entire village got out there

and they all hung on to the plane. The pilot flat chatted[opened the throttle] the engine then they all let go and fell on the ground. Zoom and off he went. And we all thought this is pretty good stuff. When we finally got back to Vanimo we said to this bloke “What was the flight like?” He said “Don’t ever talk to me about that again.” So things were fairly primitive there. If you had somebody seriously hurt, I’m really not sure what we would’ve done about it.

A lot of the patrols did go down the coast and I figure you could probably get a boat in but you’d probably have to come from Madang so hundreds of miles. Very isolated, no roads just foot tracks, no roads at all in the area. And everything was done on foot and we walked for days and days and days just along footpaths connecting villages. Every village we got to we’d do a little parade and put up the Australian

flag and present arms and all that sort of stuff. Obviously the message got along to the villages further down the track and they were putting the Australian flag up but they were putting it up upside down. And we were saying “Why?” And they said “Well the stars are in the sky, stars on the flag, they go up.” “Yes very good.” And occasionally one of the real old guys in the village, he’d see us coming, race inside, race out with his shirt on and his medals

that he’d won in World War II. It was an interesting trip. We were all issued with five pound in holey shillings, with holes in the centre of them and a little bag. That was your emergency kit, if you got lost you could buy your way back to the coast or whatever. So it was fairly primitive but all the same a good trip. But that’s where we thought we were going to go.

Yeah it was Papua New Guinea.

No, we were flown up in civilian airliners and they were the old Viscounts, propeller, turbo propeller things. Took forever from Sydney, it’s a long trip. But as I recall we did it in one lift.

Charter planes. When we arrived there and, actually it was a bit of a rehearsal for Vietnam, we arrived there, we were put into a bus and driven out to a place called Austen’s Crossing which is a paddock and we were told “Here’s it. Put your hoochies [pup tents] up and dig a trench.” Oh thankyou. You know you’ve just had eight hours flight or something and you were a bit cheesed off with it all. But that’s pretty

much what happened the following year in a different place. But it was just, we’re going to do an exercise in Papua New Guinea. But when we got up there we were issued with live ammunition, which in some cases we used on the crocodiles. Well whenever you gathered water you had to post sentries up fairly high so they could see down into the water. So whoever were filling the bottles wouldn’t have

a crocodile sneak up on them. Apparently the local natives, it happened on many occasions. But we had been issued as an exercise but no blank ammunition, it was all live ammunition we were issued with and we did this patrol. The army, the higher levels of the army

I don’t think told us everything and even later on, when we went to Vietnam, everybody, it was very obvious that this had been getting planned for several years. In fact I’ve since met a man, I was doing a job at a food additive plant in Altona, this was four or five years ago, Vietnamese man, and

spoke Australian accent. I said “You obviously came here when you were a kid.” He said “Oh yeah, I was only a babe in arms in 1958.” I said “Oh yeah.” He said “Yeah my Dad got a job at Pt Cook as a linguist teaching Australian Armed Forces personnel to speak Vietnamese.” 1958. I said “That’s interesting.” So mmm.

Quite well. Initially we’d go into a village and it’d be almost deserted and we found out later because the last time troops had been through, either our blokes or the Japanese, there’d been lots of bangs and flashes and flames and huts had fallen down, this is the way they described it and been a dangerous sort of a place. So when we turned up on the scene, they weren’t taking any chances

initially, but after three or four days they’d, you’d turn up at a village and they’d all be lined up there going “Yeah, you beaut, Australia, Australia.” At that stage it was part of the Australian mandated territory and we were administering it. There was the Pacific Island Regiment and we had some of those guys with us, indigenous guys, but they were run by the Australian Army.

All their warrant officers and officers at that time were, and senior NCOs, Sergeants were all Australians and then gradually as time went on, those jobs were handed over and then in ’75 as you know, the country was given independence. But we were relatively well received. In fact a lot of guys, well, my drum from them, I brought that home.

And some of the, and I found out later that some of the artefacts from there are worth huge amounts of money and we were sort of swapping a tin of bully beef for a bow or a carved wooden mask or something like that and we find out later it’s worth $3,000 on the international market or whatever. I mean these people had just, they were literally stone age.

You know, very little contact with the outside world. You’d go to a village and there was no radios, no telephones, three days walk from the next administrative centre. And that might be, an Australian ran it a little bit like the British Raj did in India, there’d be a man controlling an area half the size of Victoria sort of thing. And he just lived there and controlled

all the various people. Strange set up but it worked.

Well the Australian army people from PIR [Pacific Island Regiment], they all spoke pidgin. I’ve been led to believe there’s literally hundreds of languages there but they all unite under pidgin English and the only words I can remember is ‘pek pek’ or ‘puck puck’ and one means poo and the other means crocodile and

you don’t get the two mixed up. And the other funny one was “High sun dark time’ and that’s midnight. And that’s all I can remember but you pick up a smattering of pidgin. It’s not like learning a new language, it’s mostly in English with inserted local words that they’ll use. But still very primitive people. We watched them clearing an area of rocks and

they built a big fire around a rock and when the fire’s just about burned out throw water on the rock and the rock would split. And they’d continue doing that until it got down to manageable bits to get rid of. We thought crikey’s you’ve really got to be primitive to get down to that stage but it worked.

Probably not.

I don’t think we were there for long enough to do that. But the usual thing, all the kids, they’d come over and they’d want to touch you. And oh, not so much the hairy arms, later on in Asia it was the hairy arms, but the kids’d come along and they’d be looking to, and couldn’t understand that you were a different colour. Really quite strange, even though they’d

been told I guess, because there’d been a lot of Australian army activity along that coast at the end of the 2nd WW which at that stage was only about 18 or 19 years before. But still,

I think we did, but I mean communicating, it’s

not as if we could talk like you and I. I’ve since learned that many of them thought the Japanese were better. For example the Japanese used to pay them, our side used to expect them to work as part of their national interest and were unpaid. The Japanese paid them and I believe for quite some time after the war there were tourist groups of Japanese who came back to see these people that they’d made friendships with over the war. See

it depends which side wins what history you get to read. But I think at that stage there must’ve been a bit of unrest because they were pushing for independence and it’s only 11 years after that, they were independent. I think if they’d had better communications around the country, very few roads, that it probably would’ve come a bit earlier. Because they were such diverse groupings, later on

when I was down at Portsea, on the instructional staff at Portsea in the late ’60s, we used to get cadets from Papua New Guinea and very tribal. You’d have senior classmen cleaning the boots of junior classmen because the junior classman was from a higher caste in their hierarchy. They were quite strange that way and very hard to break their habits. And some of them, we had one

young man come down, nobody knew how old he was. They used to recruit up there for the PIR, if they wanted to join the army they’d get them in and check that both feet and both hands, they’d go physically and look under their arm. If they had hair under their arm they were old enough. Because there was no written records kept of births and deaths and whatever. And this young man who came down to Portsea, his official

year of birth was the year of the big wind that blew down the main hut. So I s’pose if you checked back at weather records you could say he was born in 1950 or whatever, but very very primitive.

Not really. We remained on the track, it was too dangerous to go off the track

in fact. Obviously somebody had read the information that was available about the Kokoda Trail where people had stepped off the Kokoda Trail during the war and never been seen again. They just got lost. The jungle could be really so thick. When we were doing patrols along the coastal plain, at nights you never slept on the ground, the place was alive with

crocodiles. We used to actually build platforms a couple of metres up in amongst the trees. You’d cut down some saplings and rope them against the trees and build a bit of a platform to sleep on so that you were up off the ground. And from dusk to dawn you stayed on that platform. You were told “You do not get off the platform. If you’ve got to urinate or defecate, off the edge of the platform. But don’t get off it.” And at night you could hear

the critters. You could hear these huge trees falling over. I mean this place was a real prime evil forest. Two, three, four hundred foot high jungle trees. Huge canopy trees and during the night you’d hear them crack, crack, crack, crack, cruncher. A big tree falling down. You’d think I hope the ones around here are a bit younger than that. But there could be, and

things like was our opening experience except for some of the more experienced blokes of wait a while. Your hat would disappear off your head and you’d go back and there it’d be hanging over the track on the bloody hooks on the end of the wait a while. Or Gympie bush. It’s like getting an electric shock you touch the thing and it’s all the chemicals come out of the thing, and we learnt that growing right beside is this little weed

and if you just chop that off and it used to bleed out a white sap, you’d just rub that on where it had stung and that would take the sting out of the thing. But oh, all that sort of stuff you had to be very careful of. But like I say it was a great bit of a preview to what was going to happen the next year.

Oh yeah yeah, without doubt. So we’re going are we?

Beauty. Yeah, honestly the vegetation, the flora and fauna was all or could be dangerous, the place was really bad

with leeches, you used to basically you’d drop three or four salt tablets down the leg of your trousers so that it’d gradually dissolve down to stop the leeches coming up and they’d get in your boot lace holes. You really had to, every evening when we built this little platform to sleep on, you’d strip right down and you’d check everywhere you could and you’d get someone else to check, and I mean really check, to make sure and these tiny little leeches would be

in some of the most unrewarding places. And you were quite scared that they might actually get internal. These damned things would really get into everywhere. Mosquitoes were bad, the place was very bad with malaria. Every time we went into the tropics we would go on to a drug called … I’ll

get back to it. Anyway.

Anti-malarial yep, you can’t stop malaria you can only suppress it. Once you catch it you’ve caught it. Anyway normally, under normal conditions we would take one pill a day. Up there we were on three a day, morning, middle of the day and last thing at night you had to take a pill. And to make sure the platoon sergeant used to come around with a roll book “Open your mouth,” pop the pill in and he observed that you consumed

it because they used to taste really bitter, and he’d tick in the roll book. Anyway and when we came back they gave us a whole series of pills that you had to take for about a fortnight afterwards and some of them were real horse pills. And a couple of guys didn’t take them. Now I took all of mine and I came down with malaria in ’65 and I reckon it came from there, not from Vietnam. And I suffered badly with malaria up until ’77

when I was back on, Paliadren , that’s the drug. But the malaria there was really virulent, I think just about everybody got a touch of something there and a lot of the local people, elephantitus and all of those real big seeping sores, health there, you had to spend

several hours a day looking after yourself. Making sure that socks were clean, if you chaffed your leg on a pair of rough trousers or something make sure that you put a bandaid on it or something so that it wouldn’t become infected, really bad stuff. And water, if we got rain and were there for part of a wet season you always put a mess tin at the corner of your hoochie and caught fresh rainwater, but if you had

to get it out of a river or somewhere else, out of a creek or even standing water, if you were really hard up you sort of put half a bottle of water purification tables in it because it was really, it stunk. It was bad. And a lot of people came down with stomach complaints and vomiting and diarrhoea and that sort of stuff just from the water.

If you got really crook you continued walking. Somebody else would carry your rifle, someone else would carry your pack. Then it was really quite primitive, like I was saying before, the one guy who was so ill that we had to have him flown out, he was the only one who got out that way. Considerably different than the following year with all the helicopters that were available. And you were very concerned that if I get crook,

well I might be three or four days away from a hospital or basic medical treatment, so you really looked after yourself. The NCOs, particularly the platoon sergeant, part of his job, he made sure that he went around and “Check your mate’s back to make sure he’s got no ticks or leeches stuck on his back and that sort of stuff.” From leeches you can pick up blood poisoning real easy and that was,

I used to wonder god how did these blokes in the 2nd WW get on? Some of them you’d see these pictures of these blokes walking down, the famous one, the bloke with the cape over his shoulders and bandages around his eyes and he’s walking down this muddy hillside and I thought, he’s sort of a week away from some where, he’s blind. And there’s another bloke guiding him, crikey. Not for me. No not for this little black duck.

No. No, rations in the Australian Army was either fresh, canned composite which sometimes when they ran out of combat rations they’d give you what they called canned equivalent. And I can remember going on an exercise with a ten pound tin of potatoes. That was my rations for the next three or four days. What you had to do was go around and find

somebody who had the ten pound tin of meat and somebody who had the tea, and somebody else who had the sugar and that’s how they fed us sometimes. But the combat rations, the one day, the one man combat rations and we used to get what they called the ten man pack, it would serve one man for ten days or ten men for one day, or variations, they were, they had a bit of everything in them. The one man combat ration was fairly light and we used to carry at least four

or five days worth of rations. Every time we took a ration resupply it was sort of four or five days. That wasn’t so bad. The big thing to carry of course was water or ammunition, that was the heavy item. Some people ended up, you carried a pack that was heavier than you were. That’s why I’ve got a stuffed back and stuffed hips and all that sort of business and everybody I know is in the same boat. I noticed on the newsreel recently in Afghanistan

the SAS [Special Air Service] before going out on patrols, they were weighing their packs. A guy there with a notebook and obviously when we get to the Department of Veterans Affairs, when they start arguing that they haven’t done this, we have a record of the weights that we carried. Took me ages arguing with them that, and they said “No, you couldn’t literally carry that amount.” And I said “Well four grenades, two belts of machine gun ammunition, refill, two refills

for my rifle, the rifle itself, two gallons of water, there’s twenty pounds in two gallons of water. Four or five days rations and and and, and you add it all up and it was heavier than I was. 90, 100, 110 pounds.

It was platoon yeah. And we were reasonably, well I mean, you know.

Sizes of groups.

In Papua New Guinea basically it was single file. They didn’t want us to go off the tracks for safety reasons so you’d basically single file it up the track. Ten metres apart, do the usual thing in single file, one section forward, two scouts up, Section Commander,

rest of the section behind him, machine gun fairly close behind him, platoon headquarters would then follow the lead section and then the two other sections coming up behind. Basic tactic, if we were contacted, you’ve got a section up the front that’s got all the firepower and they know the drills. Gun goes to high ground or to the left all the time and they can then start returning fire. The platoon commander’s right up close to where it is so that he can very quickly get the information and he’s got two thirds of his force

held back in reserve. And the deployment of that in that formation in jungle, takes all of about 20 seconds and then, what are we going to do?

No. Like I say, it started as an exercise but I think it was really something of a political exercise to show the local population that Australia was

prepared to come along and defend that part of the world. The Indonesians are still doing it, they’re doing what the European powers did 200 years ago, they’re migrating. Java’s so choc-a-block they’re moving into West New Guinea and there’s not much information coming out of there but occasionally you hear that little shooting things start, and so…

…Against Indonesia?

Oh no, that was about ’65, ’66. Confrontation? Yeah. I think, it could’ve been later that year because I got a reinforcement from I think it was Two Battalion who’d just come back from Malaya. This was after we’d come back from Papua New Guinea so there was only a year

before we went to Vietnam and he was, he was part of a group that had intercepted Indonesian marines that had actually gone ashore on mainland Malaya. Who were there ready to start shooting. And it was typical Indonesian, a bit of a fiasco. The guns didn’t work or the boat sunk or something.

Or the boat ran out of. That’s right they did and they got

lost in the swamp and they dumped their equipment because they were all sinking in the mangroves. Yeah I vaguely remember him telling me that. Yeah. And well, so confrontation must’ve started about that time because I know that I think it was 4RAR were then in Malaya so it would’ve been say ’64,

4RAR would’ve gone because they did two years in Malaya and then hardly came home, went straight to Vietnam and sort of had three years on active service straight. So I yeah, I think it would’ve been 2RAR because we very quickly went from three battalions to nine battalions in just a couple of years. And 1RAR created Four and Five Battalion, we were that big that they just sort of chunked people across and said “right, you’re forming

a new battalion,” and they topped them up with national servicemen. But yeah Papua New Guinea, that was that.

It could’ve been, I mean with hindsight, at the time, we didn’t even know where the hell Vietnam was or anything that was happening there apart from the fact that we knew

we had I think we had 20 people there on the training team. But as far as a commitment from us, no. No.

There was the jungle training centre at Canungra, now the Land Warfare Centre, I think they’ve moved it up to Innisfail, they ran out of jungle at Canungra, the

housing estates moved through it. But that was not used all that often. When Vietnam got going, that was part of the drill that, I think a company at a time would rotate through there for sort of two weeks prior, as their work up to going to Vietnam. And the only reason 1RAR didn’t is because we were the, what the called the sprinkler force, we were on standby to be deployed overseas and we each had a trunk as I was saying before,

packed with a couple of sets of uniforms and boots and all of that sort of stuff. Basically all you had to do was grab your weapon and your trunk and hop on the plane and you could sort of pull on your uniform half way there. Didn’t quite go like that but that was the idea behind it. And we didn’t go through jungle training prior to going. But the year before we went, we would’ve spent at least nine months of that year in the bush. We were going to the bush for two, three weeks,

come out, clean up all our gear, hand your rifles in, get paid and be given say a four day leave pass. Off you’d go, spend all your money, come back, get dressed, fill your back up full of rations and off again. And that’s what we did for almost the entire year preceding up to going to Vietnam because they knew, they’d had to have known for at least a year before. And in that period of time, all of a sudden we started flying around in helicopters

and what else happened? There was a couple, oh yeah we got claymore mines, we got M26 grenades, we started seeing M16 rifles. They knew.

Sprinkler force.

Yeah that was a code name. I don’t know who dreams these things up but that was the code name that was given to us.

In the trunk was basically a couple of changes of clothes, all just field stuff, nothing else. Socks, underwear, two or three sets of greens, a couple of pair of boots, a set of webbing, you had some hexamine [solid fuel burner], I think we had a day’s rations or a couple of days rations in rations packs. Every now and then we’d have to open those up and

rotate them through to keep them, they get past their use by date. Then basically all you had, you had everything that you needed at least to survive the first 24 hours on the battlefield providing they issued you with a rifle and live ammunition. That was it, that was all you needed and fill your water bottles up. Which like I say was a good idea but it didn’t quite work out like that.

August, September of ’64. We would’ve been in Papua New Guinea two, three months, I can’t recall now. We moved around several different areas. We were around the Port Moresby area first and then we were flown right up to the north coast.

We did most of our activities up there and different groups went to some of the different areas, we had, actually had another platoon that was down in the equivalent position to us but on the south coast. We were up on the north coast. There was another group went up into the highlands and the fourth group, I can’t remember off hand, I think they might’ve gone further down the coat. But just to sort of give a fairly big coverage and show the flag so the people could see Australian soldiers,

because there’d been as I was saying before, none there since the end of the Second World War apart from our commanders and warrant officers with the South Pacific, Pacific Islands Regiment.

Holsworthy.

Yeah, and we’d go, most of our training areas were

in NSW. I can’t ever recall going up to Queensland although that’s where they do it all the time these days I believe. We actually came down to Puckapunyal and do an infantry tank co-op, so obviously somebody knew we were going to be operating with tanks as well, which we eventually did but not terribly much. And we did a lot of range work shooting

work in that, particularly that preceding, from when people came back from that Christmas leave. Christmas ’64 and leading up to, because we departed in May, on the Sydney, so in that three or four working months we did a lot of activity. And you know, we found out, I was on a course at the infantry centre and one evening somebody came

in with a newspaper and said “Hey, Australia’s committing a battalion to Vietnam. Where’s that? Oh here it is, it’s north of Malaya.” And we sat down and we said “Well we’ve got four battalions,” at that stage we had four battalions, no five. We’d only just cast off 5RAR, 4RAR was still forming, 3RAR had just, was

just going to Malaya to relieve 2RAR, so we said “The numbers say it’s got to be 1RAR.” The next day the Administrator of the course trotted into the classroom and said “All those people from 1RAR, hand in the stores that you’ve been issued with here, pack your bags you’re returning to unit.” Got back to the unit, had all of the work up meetings that sort of stuff, given a ten day pre-embarkation leave and off we went.

Came back, put the bag on the back and went aboard the Sydney.

Oh I’m quite sure they did.

Oh yeah. Yeah, look I honestly think that apart from the fact

that the opposition in Vietnam didn’t really want to kill Australians, they wanted to kill Americans desperately, they, I believe they left us alone to a degree, but I believe we were also a better adversary than the Americans. We were like I was saying before, we lived, worked, played, whatever together for two or three years, even though

our equipment was in some cases a bit dodgy, the average Australian soldier’s a pretty good thief and we’d begged, borrowed and stolen equipment. You know at one time we were carrying Germany Smeizer sub-machine guns, Russian AK47s, we had a couple of the machine gun you were talking about before in [the movie] Saving Private Ryan, we had a couple of those. Rechambered the 762 from 792, the German calibre.

All the stuff had obviously come from Russia down through the system, been captured at Stalingrad or somewhere, Stalingrad had only been 23 years before, 22 years before. And we were going all right, the only thing we were ever concerned about was if we ever ran out of ammunition for some of the exotic things that we had, the resupply system wouldn’t be able to catch up with us. So we were told 9mm, 762, 5.56

and that’s it. But it’s still, even the Company Commander used to carry a shot gun. You know all these exotic things and our tactics, we were still following the stuff that, I mean most of our NCOs had had experience in Malaya.[during the anti-British Insurgency 1950s] Certainly all our senior NCOs and senior officers were WW2 and Korean veterans, they knew what they were doing. And we used to,

we would go out in section-sized patrols and platoon patrols and we practiced proper field craft. Whereas unfortunately our American cousins would not do that in many cases, and don’t get me wrong, some American units were extremely professional but others were extremely the other end of the scale. And we had transcripts from captured

enemy that said that they were in a particular area and we were there at the same time and we figured we must’ve walked within about ten metres of then. We used to walk through the, we’d move through the scrub, we didn’t smoke, we didn’t shave, we didn’t wash, we didn’t clean our teeth, we didn’t talk. And all our equipment was strapped down so that it didn’t rattle. We didn’t wear bloody great big helmets that you couldn’t hear from, we used to wear bush hats. Every alternate fellow used to watch

his arc. If you were right handed it was beaut, you were looking out there and your rifle was pointing, if you were that way you had to learn to squeeze off a couple of rounds left handed. And we used to practise those things and you got a real good kicking if you didn’t. if your boss sprang you not following those sort of skills, you were in big trouble because if you mucked up other people could cop it.

Yeah, and they were still practising those when I left the army. And they work.

Oh yeah with the Infa-Tank Co-op yeah.

Well tanks basically can’t operate by themselves without infantry. They just become big targets for the opposition’s infantry with all the shoulder

fired anti-armour weapons that are available these days. Some guy with basically a piece of pipe can kill the biggest known tank. So you’ve got to have infantry moving with you and they either walk with you with the tanks, and the old Centurion could chug along at five miles an hour all day. The new Leopard can’t, it’s got to go faster so that’s why we’ve got all the armoured personnel carriers now, put the troops in those so when they need the troops the troops can get out of

the armour. But we, in Pucka [Puckapunyal] we would ride down into the battle on the backs of the tanks. That was good fun, a couple of guys would fall off but. And we would practise all those things that, the Australian army I think had last had armour in battle in North Africa. They’d rarely used them in the Pacific campaigns during the Second World War.

And I think Australian Armoured Corps in Korea had been used as dug in infantry, as dug in artillery. Hadn’t been used in the role of armour so there was very little practise of those skills. But all of a sudden from army headquarters it was deemed that we needed to practise those skills. And the Americans did have quite a bit of armour in Vietnam and on occasion we operated with their armour.

But the whole, I s’pose the whole idea was that we could coordinate who was going to do what and we found out some things that they did that we didn’t like or thought was stupid. We used to sort of cringe when they’d stop in - what do they call it – a lager by night and they’d be hammering away. And we’d be going ‘Oh jeez, you’re going to draw the crabs right out.’ That’s the way they do it though.

How do you make a tank quiet? But we found out a few things like that.

They’d usually be a build up. They were usually a, an advanced, what we called an advance to contact. They’d find some access, usually be the grottiest bit of country they could find that was usually as rocky as buggery

and there’d be a major ridge line along it. And the company or the battalion would advance along this ridge line until you came into contact with the enemy. And they’d have brought some people down from one of the other battalions. And you’d start striking individuals or small groups and then you’d start following up and chasing up and it would end up as you’d find the enemy camp. And it would then go into an attack on the enemy camp. After that you’d go into defence

and you’d go through god, let me remember, the five phases of war. The advance, the attack, the defence, I’ve missed one somewhere and the withdrawal. That’s only four. A long time, it’s a long time. But you’d practise all those things and all your, I mean for the infantry it was walking or not walking. But for the other people attached to you, the artillery,

your transport, mortars, all of that they’d have to keep on moving so that they could be in a position to support you and it can get quite a coordination effort, even down to resupplying people in the field. It was quite often for those parts of the group, for them to practise more than really for the infantry to practise. But we’d go

through all our processes for, somebody comes back, patrol comes back and “We found the enemy camp.” They’d have to then be debriefed. The commander would then have to make up his plan of attack. He would then have to brief all the junior leaders. We would then have to move the troops to the forming up place, move them up to the start line, coordinate supporting fire, move the troops up, attack. Who’s going to follow through and clean up? Move to the next feature, go into defence. It’s not just “Yahoo,” up the hill.

No I was the dizzy rank of lance corporal by then.

Just after we came back actually, straight after we came back. My platoon sergeant, old Harry Smith, H.E. Smith. High Explosives Smith, he said “Well son, your days of work are over, you are

now an NCO.” And I’m going “Oh beauty.” And later on I thought you lying old hoon. Harry had fibbed to be a bit. Anyway.

It meant I think an extra sixpence a day and you’re the last person in the management chain so you take the abuse from

the management chain and you take the abuse from and quite often they’d promote you amongst people you’d been a digger with and that was really hard. A couple of times I had people saying “Listen Arth, whose side are you on?” I’d say “Hang on a minute sport, I’m not on any side. I’m an NCO now so you will do what I say.” “Oh…” grumble, grumble, you know. It makes it difficult. The best plot of course is when you promote somebody, move them into another group,

so they arrive nice and fresh and pristine and not known.

No. I believe that that’s supposedly the plan but I don’t think it happens all that often. Not at that rank, I mean as you get higher up in the chain then for example, when you go from say sergeant to warrant officer they will post you to another unit, sort of two states away. And you almost get a brand new start in life.

That happens from I s’pose sergeant up. And certainly with the commissioned ranks as well where on every promotion you get a posting. And it’s not a bad idea, it’s like when the army posts you they like to do it at the end of the year, the calendar year. Because if you’ve got children they can leave the old school and start in the new school and they’re not a couple of strange kids who’ve arrived in the middle of the year and get beaten up by the other kids.

So somebody’s put a little bit of thought into it somewhere.

I mean there was a bit of a map on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald or whatever it was. And we said “Oh yeah.” And somebody said “Oh yeah that’s where the French used to be.” And within a couple of days a team from the intelligence corps turned up and

they gave us historical briefings and what the French had done, what the Americans had done, what the situation was and we were briefed that we were specifically going to protect the Bien Hoa Airfield. It’s a huge airfield complex. Largest airfield in South East Asia, 10,000 feet long. So it’s a pretty big strip. Big four engine B52s [bombers] used to land there, they never were based there but they’d

come in with engine pods missing and tails shot off and all that sort of stuff and land there. And it was also a big administrative centre, been started by the Japanese, the French had used it as a big regional administrative centre and then the Americans had taken it over because of the facilities for their aircraft. And thank god for that. Plenty of air support made all the difference.

Had we no air support it would’ve been over in the first couple of days I reckon.

Yeah they even did, I mean they brought along examples of the equipment the enemy was using and wearing, they even did a little play with this guy all tarted up to look like a Viet, sort of came in with an AK [Avtomat Kalshnikov Russian automatic rifle] and they got blanks from somewhere and bang, bang and everybody’s going

“Whoa…” and did this big thing and he walked around saying “You people are fools, when you arrive up there we will kill you all, you are too soft and you can’t live in the swamps and the jungles.” A big play acting thing. But they showed us films of things that had happened, the big deal then was Dien Biên Phu, that’d only been ten years before, ’54 I think. [Final battle that sounded the end of French colonialism in Vietnam]Something like that, ten or eleven years before.

And they said, or the major point about it all was these people are quite determined, they’ll move artillery and bits and pieces or they’ll drag it, they’ll cut roads through the jungle and all this. Yeah, okay. None of us realised of course at that point we were going to fight communists and when we got there we realised they were nationalised. No way known you can beat nationalists on their own soil. But…

Oh yeah, we were going

To go, we were going to save Australia from the Yellow Peril. No doubt about it and that was what was pushed into us all the time. If we don’t stop them there the next thing we knew we’ll be fighting them in Darwin. Oh yeah, okay. It’s amazing how gullible you can make people, without a drink even.

Yeah they did, as we were, in fact that happened going over on the ship. We had a I forget what corps he was, an army warrant officer anyway, he’d been living in Vietnam with the training team and they issued us with a little handbook and all that sort of stuff of what nots to do, ranks of the Vietnamese

armed forces and who they were so you wouldn’t start screaming and yelling at some major or half colonel or something somewhere and calling him a stupid dink or something and wonder why you ended up in gaol. And phrases that you could use, but very tricky language. It’s a six tonal language and one word can mean six different things. If you haven’t got the right inflection or tone and there is a word that is a crossover between church and

brothel so you can imagine the disasters that can occur with that. The thing was though as we went through the entire thing there for that first year, you had very little contact with the Vietnamese people. You were either chasing them, shooting at them or they were chasing you and shooting at you in the bush. Or you were on leave and you weren’t really interested in learning Vietnamese anyway, it was give me a beer, make sure it’s cold.

Here’s the money, that sort of stuff. When we were in the field we had interpreters with us. We had a Vietnamese sergeant, Vietnamese Army sergeant with us, Sergeant Dean but on the, we did a lot of training going over on the Sydney, we trained every day a normal workday on the ship. We’d do physical training up on the flight deck. The flight deck was parked out with trucks and armoured personnel carriers

and stuff. No aeroplanes on it of course. Actually there was, there was one Cessna with its wings taken off and one little bubble Sioux helicopter with its rotor blades folded up and that was it. We even practised drill, marching around whatever on the flight deck, for the military maniacs. We had a beaut little accident, practising going, we were going to be hand to hand with these guys so one bloke would have a rifle with a bayonet

on the end. And they said “That’s a bit dangerous, we’d better put a scabbard on the bayonet.” So… put a scabbard on the bayonet and Johnny Smails grabbed the scabbard as the bloke was trying to thrust, the bayonet thrust and pushed it over to one side, the scabbard came off, the bayonet went straight back and straight through his arm. The bloke on the other end of the rifle went “Ahhh,” and dropped the rifle and it went slash all the way down to his wrist. So young Johnny Smails spent the first

two months I s’pose of his tour, lolligagging around cafes in Saigon while his arm healed up and sleeping in the hospital. What a great start to your tour. Because we went ashore over the beach, camouflaged helmets and ready to fight. And the Americans were standing on the beach going “Well done lads, well done.” Or whatever in American, in their dress uniforms.

Pre-embarkation, you’re entitled to ten days before you go on active service. The idea is to get all your affairs in order.

I did. The army will give you free return air to your place of enlistment, or the place of your next of kin, which ever is closer I think was the trick. So I flew down to Melbourne.

Went around seeing all my mates “Oh I’m going off to Vietnam.” “Oh yeah, where’s that?” “Oh somewhere up there.” “Oh yeah, that’ll be good. I s’pose the accommodation will be good if you going with the Americans I s’pose you’ll be in beaut barracks and all.” “Oh yeah, no worries, it’ll be terrific yeah.” Yeah, in a pig’s eye. And swanned around and saw everybody and caught the plane back ten days later, hung over.

We were very confident young men. Individually and collectively. We were world beaters. We’d been told so often how we were the best. We arrived. When we arrived in Vietnam, the Americans were almost scared of us and we found out that General Williams,

Williamson? Williams, the Brigade Commander of the 173rd who’d served in Papua New Guinea with Australian troops as a Captain in the Second World War lined up all his troops and said “Right, the Australians are coming to help us. Now just be careful, these blokes are killers. They are the biggest and best jungle fighters in the world.” Nah, nah nah nah. So we had that reputation before we arrived.

All true of course.

I think it probably did for a while. I mean we held up our end of the bargain. I think we spent more time in the field than the American units did. We made up the third, a brigade has got three battalions, there was the first 503rd and the second 503rd parachute battalions and we were the 3rd battalion in

That mix. The 3rd, their proper third battalion was back in the States, that was their reinforcement thing. Because the Americans put a unit into the country and the unit stays. They rotate people through. We do the opposite. We send a unit, after they’ve done their prescribed service another unit comes and replaces them so we stay together as a unit. And I think that also helps them in the cohesion of, you knew all the people there.

It’s not like you get up in the morning, you have two new people. “Who are you blokes?” “Oh we’ve just been… Bloggs and Jones have just been rotated home.” “Oh yeah, champion.”

Yeah, we’d I suppose, I mean I marched in the battalion’63, about two years. And very little movement except for the people who’d

Moved out to form Four and Five RAR and so we’d down, what’s the modern term downsized? We’d downsized a bit. So that, our establishment had to suit the American establishment. The aim is if you’ve got to rein – or if you’ve got to replace a unit in the field, you’ve got to be able to sort of fit into their holes in the ground. If you’re bigger then somebody’s going to be standing out, there’s no hole sort to thing. It’s so that they’re compatible operations.

And yeah, well we, we’d worked, played whatever together for the couple of years prior. We only had one or two people in the company who’d been recently posted in. One guy had just been to, a fellow who the Indonesians in the swamps, he’d just come down from and he wanted to go back on active service so they said “Okay you can go to Waria.”

He’d just come back from Malaya, he’d sort of been home for a couple or three months and then was posted into us. God I can’t even remember his name, he was killed the year after we came home. Got out of the army, became a Victorian policeman, was killed in a road accident in Shepparton less than a year after we got home. Can’t figure it. But

Outside of the army?

Oh once we were in Vietnam you really didn’t get to see people outside the company area. On average, if you were to take a fortnight block of 14 days, we were in the field for 12 days. You’d come in for two days and basically you got in,

You had a feed, you had a shower, you cleaned your weapons, you went and got rid of your old worn out boots and got new ones, went and got some new greens, re-packed all of your webbing and stuff so that it was ready to go straight away again, refilled up with ammunition, and then if you could manage it you put your head down and you went to sleep. Time in the field,

A section is supposed to be ten men, if you had five or six, you were lucky. You’ve got to have two men awake at any one time right through the night. If you’re not, this is not doing patrols this is just doing your security. Two guys sitting behind a machine gun all night. If you’ve got six people you might get, you might get four hours a night sleep in two hours and two hours. So after ten or twelve days

You’re pretty tired. So basically all you wanted to do was sleep and after repetitions of these fortnights, people were really starting to get worn out and it’s not so bad when you’re a young man and you’re fit. The army fostered all of that. And you bounced back fairly quickly but sometimes all you really, I’ve seen blokes being offered leave, “You can go to Saigon for the day, have a bit of I and I.”

“No thanks, I’ll stay here and have a sleep.” A bit amazed after a couple of months no leave in the whole time there, people would’ve averaged maybe ten days leave in the year, that was it. And you worked seven days a week and you basically could be called out 24 hours a day.

I and I, intoxication and intercourse.

Better than R and R.

Rest and recuperation, no hardly. No, yeah but the guys, well we still, in B Company we have a reunion every second year. In fact in June, the Queen’s Birthday weekend I’ll be in Coff’s Harbour or just north of Coff’s Harbour at

Woolgoolga and we meet there for the Queen’s Birthday weekend and talk rubbish and ingest copious quantities of mind altering substance. But the scary thing is that in between every, that 24 months, on average about three of them are dying. There’s a lot of them coming down with bone marrow cancer. A lot of them have died,

have already quite some years ago have died from alcoholism. There was a number of them who were just chronic alcoholics, just couldn’t stay off it. There was a couple of them died in strange circumstances, like one fell off a train and a couple of them, one car crashes. You know and you sort of wonder. Peter Thompson closed the garage door and sat in the car with a bottle of scotch and just left the car engine running. Yeah.

Look it’s it’s said that it goes back to Agent Orange [herbicide used widely in jungle] but you know that the Australian Government doesn’t recognise, the Americans have said “Yeah okay, there’s probably a connection.” But a lot of them are dying form the same disease and we were sprayed

With this stuff. They used to have the helicopter crop dusters would fly over and the area around to the north of us and the big, the bend in the Dong Nai River and they just defoliated that area. That was all rubber plantation, they just flew over it and sprayed it. The other side of the Dong Nai River in War Zone D, they used to fly over in Hercules [transports]. There’d be half a dozen Hercules, wing tip to wing tip spraying the place. These big four engine crop dusters.

And if you weren’t directly sprayed you’d be going through the bush and it’d be dripping off the shrubs and you’re covered in it. And it used to stink and you’d smell it for days. If you were lucky it was the wet season and you got a downpour that afternoon, you could get rid of most of it. But if it was the dry season. So yeah. A bit of a worry.

They’re different people from what I can see. I actually went to the Mount School of Infantry at Singleton, they’ve all got little private bed spaces and the biggest problems that NCOs have got with the diggers is they’ve all got mobile phones and they’ve got to take them off them. You’ll be halfway through an exercise and they’ll be getting calls from their girlfriends and stopping and having a chat, you know.

Could be disaster. Okay so we’re on board HMAS Sydney.

Sydney. Yeah. Very disappointing actually. We literally snuck out of the harbour at one o’clock in the morning. There was no fanfare, we didn’t even know we were sailing. We’d been on the ship, we’d come aboard earlier that morning, 25th I think of May.

24th of May something like that. We’d been sort of given a room twice as big as this for thirty guys to live in and there’s all these metal posts where you slung your hammock, they lived in hammocks in those days. The smart ones like me raced up to the forecastle and slung our hammocks where it was fresh air and where you’d be able to see the water and all that sort of stuff. And then that evening we’d been

given the navy ration of two cans of beer per man. Big. You ever seen the big cans, like long neck cans? They hold a full sized bottle of beer. Two of those per man per day perhaps. We’d been shown a movie I think and off to be at ten o’clock and then at one o’clock in the morning people were going around shaking people awake, “We’re bloody moving.” And we’d actually gone out, we were out through the [Harbour] Heads.

Gone. Next morning we’re somewhere off the South Queensland coast, chug-a-lugging up to, as I was saying before we had to go right up past Papua New Guinea and Indonesia and right sort of half way up the Philippine archipelago and then turn left, turn west and straight across the South China sea because the Indonesians weren’t too choofed about us coming through Indonesia,

The short way. But on board ship it was, I enjoyed it. Sit in the sun, read a book, it was nice and relaxing.

Yes, we did a lot of physical training, we were given lessons on Vietnamese history, we did tactical mock up things, we learnt a bit of Vietnamese language.

We learnt what the navy calls a goffa, a cold can of drink. We discovered that the navy ate considerably better than the army and we were really cheesed about that. They really do eat well. What else did we do on Sydney? Basically we got all our gear – oh and we used to do range practices off the back end of the flight deck. We’d let a big heap of balloons go and then bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

A lot of balloons still drifting around in the South China Sea that didn’t get, and we actually tried a grenade throwing practice and they threw one grenade over and by the time it got into the water we didn’t even hear it go bang. It’d gone that far down so they said “Isn’t this really just a waste of throwing grenades over board?” So yeah, we forgot that. But

And the physical training was really part of our acclimatisation too because it very quickly, I mean it was winter in Sydney and we very quickly got up into the north and got the jumpers off and into shorts and t-shirts and things to get acclimatised in the tropics. Usually when you went to places like Malaya, you sort of did nothing for the first fortnight until you got acclimatised to the tropics. This way you could do it on the way on the ship.

It was good.

It was yes. I think we had one night where we had a bit of a blow or it was a bit dodgy hammocked up underneath the fo’c’sl, underneath the forward end of the flight deck. A bit of spray was coming in but pull the blanket over the head and it went away very shortly. So a nice, what you’d imagine was

The nice tropical, the big moon on the horizon and warm breezes blowing through the ship. Wonderful.

We, on the morning that we arrived, we were told okay we’ll be coming up on the coast of Vietnam just about first light, just on about dawn. And the boat must’ve been just about sinking at the front

Because everybody on the boat was standing up at the front end of the flight deck and it was all misty. And out of the mist came this mountain, Cap St Jacques at dawn where the task force eventually set up and after our tour, and they set up the support base in the R&R Centre down there at Vung Tau.

And we gradually moved up on it, the mist cleared, a lot of people don’t understand that in the tropics quite often you’ve got fog up until about eleven o’clock in the morning. It’s so moist and as soon as the sun comes up all this mist is created and you get quite thick fogs. Anyway, that cleared away and all sorts of American aircraft started flying around us, they were all having a good look at us. The Vietnamese army came out, the brown water fleet.

All these patrol boats, they all came out and they all had a look at us and they’re all yelling “Oop ta lie Australian” and we’re all going “Yeah, g’day cobber, how ya goin?” And we all sort of hung around, typical army thing. I think we sat there until the middle of the afternoon until they actually did something about getting us off the boat.

It’s a sheltered anchorage.

There’s no wharves or anything. The Sydney was anchored off the coast and to get us ashore as I recall, you’ve got everything you own and you’re getting out of a little hatch on the side of the boat and stepping on to an amphibious truck and it’s going up and down and people are falling all over the place. Then they took us a couple of metres and

I mean a couple of metres, we had to get off the amphibious truck and on to a landing barge. And we’re all going mutter, mutter, mutter, mutter, it really was poorly organised. Anyway the landing barge then went into shore and it docked on what was essentially a boat ramp, dropped the front thing and we walked ashore. And there was a bunch of Americans there

Who said “Glad to see you guys,” yada, yada and we said “Oh yeah.” And we’re eyeballing them and they’re all in these brand new and really flash looking green fatigue uniforms and combat boots, jungle combat boots. They weighed about the same as a glove each. These little caps and shoulder holstered 45s and real, exotic patches all over them. We thought oh yeah, and here we are in this really drab looking

scungy looking old uniform the Australian Army wears or used to wear. Anyway,

Yeah, been dyed green yeah. And everything the Americans had was new and we were in all this old equipment. So they took us to these trucks and said we’re going to put you on these trucks and take you to the airfield here and we’re going to fly you up to Bien Hoa. Because it

Would be about 60 miles I s’pose by road if you were going to go by road and too risky to, you don’t travel by road there or you didn’t travel by road there. Anyway they put us in these trucks, these brand new diesel trucks, in Australia we were getting around in these clapped out old WW2 things and drove us to the airport and the driver, I can remember this bloke, he hopped in and these really flash sunglasses and he said “You know we’re really glad

to see you blokes, things are pretty desperate here.” And I thought there’s about 800 of us all up, that’s everybody, how desperate are these people. We figured out there’s only about 10,000 of these troops in country there, we were the first ground force unit it country. When we started realising that we thought oh, uh-huh, this could get a bit iffy. But he drove us to the airfield, we hopped on these

Twin-engine transport planes and they flew us up to Bien Hoa. At the other end same sort of trucks took us out to this rubber plantation where the grass was that high and all the rubber trees had been cut down and the stumps were that high. So you walked around in the grass barking your shins on these stumps all over. And they said “This is your area, dig in.” So there we were, it was the start of the wet season, we’d no sooner arrived there

Plonked your kit bag on the ground when the platoon sergeant said “You two, that’s your hole, all you’ve got to do is get the dirt out of it. That’s the direction we’re expecting the enemy from, dig in.” Basically as soon as he’d said that it started raining. And it bucketed down. And that was our introduction to the place. Sopping wet, we spent the first night in a half dug hole in the ground that was half full of water.

Expecting ten foot tall Asian monsters to come out of the scrub and chop us into little bits and eat us.

Not a thing. Not a thing, just open paddocks where they’d cut down all the trees so that there was clear fields of fire, that was all. We’d basically for the first week we were there, we dug in and we put up wire fences.

Put up barbed wire fences to keep them out. We had the Americans over on one side, they were about a kilometre away and another American unit to our left about 500 metres. And we were sort of filling in a gap. That was our prime role was to protect the airfield, to stop them from coming across the river, across the Dong Nai River and having a go at the airfield because that was our line of support. Basically all the aircraft came from there

From Mickey Mouse airlines up to C130 Herc [Hercules] transports all came from that one big airfield complex. In the first week we were there they rocketed the airfield and destroyed about 30 aircraft parked on the, in the parking area. And all they did, they’d just dig holes put the rockets in, light the fuse as the end and they’d zoom, off they’d go. I mean you’re shooting at a target the

size of the central business district in Melbourne and all they had to do was land, and these were big rockets as long as this room and that round, all they had to do was hit the ground and throw off a bit of shrapnel and usually most modern aircraft take a bit of shrapnel like that and they’re a lot of repairs to fix up. Very quickly the Americans built reinforced walls all around the place to park their aircraft in.

So it was all fun.

Just a harassment thing. We were concerned about people on the ground coming in. I mean the Viets had conducted and did conduct while we were there and after our tour, some very major assaults. The old human wave attacks and they’d do them

Three o’clock in the morning in the bucketing down rain. What do you want to do if you’re hoochied up somewhere in the bucketing down rain at three o’clock in the morning? You want to stay warm and dry and underneath your shelter. That’s when they attack. Besides that at three o’clock in the morning it’s a bit hard for the aircraft to find the enemy. Or in those days it was, these days they’ve got infra-red and night vision, passive night vision aids but then we didn’t.

We had some starlight scopes but they were fairly ineffective, so by night, Mr Charles had the run of the place. And all you could, the best you could do was to have your defences so that you could keep him out of the area that you wanted to hold over night.

Well every unit and basically right around the airfield area with the exception of more to the rear of that was the township of Bien Hoa which was a fairly big provincial town. Each unit would dig its series of weapon pits where people could fight from if we were attacked. Out the front of us we had multiple barbed wire fencing, that took a long time to set up. The Americans had mine fields in front of them, we didn’t have

Any mines out in front of us. We deemed that we didn’t want to put mines in front of us. And we used to put standing patrols out. The Americans sometimes did and sometimes didn’t. Part of our tactics is to put small patrols, say a kilometre out, three men, four men, five men maybe and they’d sit on a likely approach route to your area and the idea is that if somebody does approach and it is the enemy, you can

Fire your 20 rounds and then run away, back in and get on the radio and tell them. It causes the enemy to deploy and if their navigation’s not all that good they might think they’ve actually bumped your position when they’re still a kilometre away. And they might deploy and start doing the full attack, it just confuses them. You also set up artillery and mortar defensive fire missions where you’ll fire a couple of rounds during daytime and make sure

That they land in the area that you want. And then if you’re out there with a standing patrol for example, you’ve got a radio and if things really get where there’s a lot of enemy activity you can get on the radio and simply say “fire mission one, two, three” or whatever it is. It’s already coded up, you don’t have to give any instructions on how to aim at it or whatever, they just fire that mission on to that position that you’ve, that that numeral target coding that you’ve given them.

And it’s all to do with prior planning and preparation. And if you do all of that and you think about if I was him, how would I want to get in here? And do something about it so that he can’t, or so that it slows him down. For example people think that barbed wire fences and minefields will stop them, they don’t and they’re not intended to stop the enemy, they’re intended to channel him into areas where

You can deal with him with other weapons. And one of the big mistakes is people putting in minefields. For example the Australian army put in a big minefield down at Nui Dat and then didn’t observe it. You’ve got to have people observing things like that and the enemy just came along, maybe somebody stood on a mine. They said “There’s obviously a minefield here,” so they probed, lifted the mines, then used them themselves somewhere else. So you’ve got to have over obstacles,

You must have somebody observing. And if the enemy is, I mean a barbed wire fence, you can always cut through it, you can always put an explosive charge in it and blow it out of away, you could always call artillery or mortar fire down on to it and blow it out of the way. So you’ve got to have people observing these things. We did, quite often the Americans didn’t. the American camp was built like an old Roman camp, they got a bulldozer and bulldozed up earth all around it like a big burn around it.

So small arms fire from outside. And we could see the volley ball going up and down while they were playing volley ball late in the afternoon. And we did things like we, an hour, half an hour before last light until half an hour after last light, we stood to. You put your webbing on and you got your loaded weapon in your hands and you got in your pit and you waited. It’s an ideal time for somebody to attack you. It also changes the routine from day to night in that case,

Because you different things by day and night. By day you might only have one sentry, by night you have two. And in the morning, half an hour before first light, you do the same. A great time for an attack to happen, they attack while it’s still dark, just as the sun’s coming up they’ve got light to reorganise and finish off the job with the rising sun. They don’t have to fire flares or whatever. So they’re the dangerous times, it might go back to the Zulu Wars but it still works.

Now we used to do that, the Americans quite often didn’t. We used to do clearing patrols at the end of, in the morning at the end of stand, or just before the end of stand to, we would send a patrol out that would sweep right out in front in case somebody was lying doggo [still] in the long grass or behind a tree or something close to our fence. So send a patrol around to clear it out. Sorry. Yeah.

We were attached to the 173rd Airborne Brigade which was an elite unit. But from recruit to trained paratrooper, 12 weeks. They’re full from civilian to paratrooper in 12 weeks. Then they were zotted off overseas. Our guys had better, I believe better training. Simple things

like all our soldiers loved knowing where they were. They wanted to be informed. They wanted to know what was happening and as a consequence, most of the soldiers had a map. Usually they’re only issued to NCOs, NCOs and officers. And most of our troops had a map and they would practise their navigation. They all wanted to be NCOs eventually so they practised their navigation and we often would take an American out with us and in one case he said, saw this

one of the diggers checking his map and he said “You can read a map can you?” “Yeah.” He said “really?” He said “Yeah.” He said “Are you some sort of special forces trained…” he couldn’t believe that, and I mean crikeys you can learn map reading in a day, you really can. A bit more experience to make it work properly but that’s the way they were.

I saw them destroy a truck because the truck was a diesel truck and they sent out a mechanic to fix it, it had broken down and he said “I don’t know anything about diesel, I’m a petrol engine man.” And they put a couple of pounds of PE [plastic explosive] on it and blew it in situ because they couldn’t get it out before dark. So rather than let Mr Charles scavenge bits off it or take the whole truck, they blew it up. But the difference between them and us in that regard is

equipment was equipment. Helicopters, they’d almost crash land helicopters to get troops on to a position. They’d chop their way down through the trees with the rotor blades to take wounded out. Not the Royal Australian Air Force. You’d get on the radio and say “Fetch dust off, get a medical evacuation,” and if it was the Australian Air Force

they’d say “Is the area clear?” And while you’re talking they can hear small arms fire over the radio, say “No but we’re pushing them back.” “No, no we won’t come in until it’s clear.” And you’d say “Listen spider, I’ve got a man bleeding to death down here.” And quite often an American would come up and say “I’ll go and get him out.” And that was a bit, a bit nasty I reckon, a bit iffy. The

Americans had a totally different approach to equip, if a piece of equipment got destroyed, eh, get another one. Certainly they had an accounting system and if it had been lost or destroyed because of neglect or bad usage or something like that, then the person responsible would be punished for it the same as in our army. But they didn’t reserve equipment at the cost of maybe someone’s life.

Whereas we seemed to be very equipment conscious and I thought that that’s a stupid way to go about it.

Sometimes they would, yeah. It would depend on how much in contact the ground people were.

Obviously the helicopter, I mean the helicopter is an extremely vulnerable aircraft, particularly when it’s almost on the ground and hovering or it’s stopped and it’s actually landed on the ground. It is very vulnerable and they don’t like doing it, but they will take the risk to save people’s lives. They’ll take the risk to get ammunition in to people who are desperately in need of ammunition. They won’t,

they wouldn’t fly in to deliver rations or something, that can wait, but getting wounded out, getting reinforcements in, getting ammunition in or getting equipment in that’s desperately needed, they would fly those sort of missions.

Oh yeah. Yeah you’ve got to trade off for that sort of luxury, you’ve got to trade off some security.

Yeah, we were, it would depend on the area and the type of operation we were on. If we were on a battalion sized operation, the enemy knew you were there. It had to be down to a company or smaller and you might get away with the enemy not knowing you were

there. But pretty rare. Quite often they’d know you were in an area but they might not know exactly where you were in that area, but they’d know that you were in there. Whereas with a battalion or bigger operation, it’s a lot of people on the ground, they know where you are. So flying in helicopters doesn’t really matter all that much and when we got to operations like that, the Americans would fly in a hot meal for us every day. You’d get a hot meal

every day rather than living on combat rations every time. Some of the operations lasted for 30 days, you were out in the bush, bashing around in the bush and it was a real pleasant change. And out of that 30 days you may only get for say five days, where you’d get a hot meal each day, they’d fly in hot boxes and you could send up half your section at a time and they’d et a hot meal or they’d take two mess tins

and bring them back for the – you’d keep 50% of your troops in their positions. Why not? How else are you going to resupply people on the ground when you need everything, batteries, rations, ammunition, water. We were forbidden to drink the local water, you weren’t supposed to drink any water that was in creeks, in paddies, out of taps, anything.

You were supposed to only drink the water that was supplied through the system they purified it all. So that had to be choppered [helicoptered] in. Each man was consuming two gallons a day, so that’s one of those big jerricans for two blokes every day. That’s a big logistic supply – demand. They couldn’t bring it in by roads in the areas that we were in, either the road was (a) non-existent or

(b) you were just flaunting with disaster trying to use a road through an area that the enemy controlled. There were a couple of cases while we were there of that sort of thing happening where they thought roads were secure and they weren’t, there’d been some sort of explosive device buried under the middle of the road and somebody sitting on hillside with an old car battery and as soon as a truck or an armoured personnel carrier went over it, touched the two things and bang. Blow it up.

There were two safe ways to move there, on foot and by helicopter and anything else was a bit iffy.

Yeah we were. In reality I guess we were loaned to the American army for the tour. Not many people know there was a battalion in Vietnam before the task force down at Nui Dat was established.

The young fellow who comes here and does the plumbing work for me, ex-army apprentice, nine years in the army. The army does its history lessons to these kids, the army apprentice joins at sort of fifteen, he was, he said to me “You’re ex-army,” and I said “Yes I am.” He said “Did you go to Vietnam?” I said “Yes, with 1RAR on the first tour.” He said “What, at Nui Dat?” I said “No, up at Bien Hoa.”

He said “The army never told us about that one.” We were the first ground combat force in country. And it’s, you’d be surprised how many people don’t know, never heard of it.

I don’t know.

No. In fact we acquitted ourselves, how does it go, what’s the catch phrase? We were winning when I left.

So, yeah. I really don’t know why. Could be maybe we were the only regular army battalion that went to Vietnam. Every other unit that came after us was combination regular army and conscript. We had no conscripts.

We operated as a battalion, part of the brigade and normally what would happen is that the brigade commander would be directed or devise that he was going to do an operation somewhere. He would call his battalion commanders in

and say “Okay, we are going to conduct an operation, intelligence says that there is an enemy regiment or whatever operating in this map area. What I want is for your battalion Jack to put a cordon around there. Joe I want your battalion to heli-land in this area and assault through and push them into the thing. And Joe or Fred, I want your battalion to come in second heli-borne and secure that area with the helicopter pads.

If we get in trouble we’ve got somewhere to withdraw back through. A secured thing.” The battalion commanders would go away, nut out what it is that they really had in detail, what they had to do, they’d call their company commanders in: Fred, Joe, Mick, give them all what they were going to do. They would go back, call in their platoon commanders, “This is what we’re going to do.” That works all the times. It’s called an O-Group, an Orders Group. And that works right down to private soldier.

The Platoon Commander, then me as a junior NCO, the platoon commander would instruct me what I was going to do. I would then go back and tell all the soldiers in my group what we were going to do so that they all knew. And we used to use a system called SMEAC, Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration, Logistics and Supply something – all you had to do was follow

the form and fill in the detail. That way it covered all the information that you needed to know to do it. And we used to do that about twice a day. You have orders, and even if you might sit there and say “Situation enemy forces?” “No change.” “Friendly forces?” “A Company is going to play football with them this afternoon.” “Mission?” “To sit here and hold this piece of ground for the next two days.” Easy.

And you’d do that usually straight after stand down in the mornings, after you’d received your orders, and just before you stood to at night. “Tonight there’ll be a patrol. Joe your section again. You’ve got to go out and do a standing patrol at grid reference 123456,” whatever. And it’s an amazing, wonderful way for information to go up and down. And at the end of it, “Any questions?” And Private Jones will say

“I’ve got a sore foot.” “Yeah? Well what are you going to do about it?” “I’ll talk to the Doc.” And so the next time you went up to Company Headquarters we had a Corporal Medic with each company and say, “My handicap has got a sore foot. What can you do about it?” “Oh I’ll come down and have a look at it.” Or “Leave him here for when you go out that next patrol otherwise he’s just going to be limping along. The CSM [Company Sergeant Major]

will just keep him here painting tents or something until you get back.” And it all works, it really does. If we used that methodology in business in Australia today, we would be world beaters. And I know a couple of companies who tried it, couldn’t get people to stick with it. But it works. Everybody knows what’s happening. Everybody knows what they’ve got to do and knows what their group’s doing and knows

what the next big group and the next bigger group is doing. They know where the enemy are. They know what to expect. All invented by the Australian army.

They have a similar system, yeah. Theirs, I’ve heard theirs, I found it was a bit too broad based. You couldn’t get

down to each individual. It was almost “We’re going to do such and such” and the troops would sort of drag along. Ours even went down to “When we go through this thick scrub we’ll have to break into single file. As soon as we come out the scrub on the other side, we’ll move out in an extended line because we’ve got to cover 50m of open ground and then maybe we’ll be on the other side. If we’re in single file we’re too much of a target.” That sort of detail, and you’d sit and

sometimes you might even make a dirt model on the ground and say “There’s a village here, we’re going to come through here, we’re going to travel on this side of the road, down through here. Then we’re going to set up a little firm base on this cross roads here and then you Joe and your slovenly mate Harry are going to nick around the back there and make sure nobody escapes out of the back when we sweep through this little hamlet.” You do it all on a thing on the ground. Or you’ve got a map and you say

“Check this and grid reference…” and all the junior people, all the diggers if they’ve got maps, they’ll have a look at it on their map and mark it up. And it’s, I guess it’s very much like today, everybody wants to be on the internet to find out what’s going on. Information. These days the armies have got maybe better methods where they’ve got everybody wearing a helmet with a little radio in the helmet. They’re actually

Looking at a little vision thing that sits in front of your eye and you can look around it so that it doesn’t interfere with your normal vision, but it can superimpose information so you can read it and of course it’s got an audio coming through your helmet so that you can actually ask for information. All of that sort of stuff. They’re just better methods or more complicated methods of sending and receiving information. The only problem with all of that modern

Technology is what do you do when the batteries go flat?

But, no that all worked. And it’s surprising how you can move large bodies of people with a great deal of control, through a hostile landscape.

It was really quite overpowering yeah. We were quite small wheels in a big machine really. When we first, the first couple of weeks we

localised and got used to the ground is hard and watch out for these clumps of leaves stuck together in the bushes because they’re full of bloody red ants and they’ll eat the hell out of you. Learning all those little nitty gritty things. Watch out for the little snakes that have got coloured bands around them because they’ve got enough poison to kill an elephant.

Yeah, once you get through the little nitty gritties and Australian soldiers tend not to wear

the issue equipment so you find out what’s comfortable and what’s not. So within the first few weeks we’re all wearing American boots that we’d borrowed, stolen, whatever. Not through the official system, you just go hold of them, you went and found a Yank and said “What sized feet have you got?” He’d say “Oh, eights.” You’d say “Beauty, you got a spare pair of boots?” “Oh sure guy.” “Beauty, thank you.” And things like our

issue sleeping gear. They’d issued us with these blow up air beds. Bloody hopeless because they’d make a noise, they’d go flat all of the time, so one of the prized possessions was to get a North Vietnamese Army hammock. To get an American poncho liner, light weight poncho liner, it’s like a quilty blanket thing, lightweight, very good. An Australian mosquito net, they were the best. And a Vietnamese hoochie, they didn’t rattle.

So you’d have a Vietnamese hoochie, Australian mosquito net, American blanket and an NVA [North Vietnamese Army] hammock and people would, you’d accumulate that stuff fairly quickly because any mug can sleep rough in the bush. If you don’t get as much rest as you can it’s your fault. So you do those sort of things to accumulate that sort of equipment and know what to avoid, the local

critters and that sort of stuff.

Well it’s risky. Every night I dug a shell scrape. A shell scrape is basically starting a grave. It’s your length, it’s maybe a foot deep, it’s maybe a couple of feet wide and if you did it in the right place there might be a tree at each end and you could

string your hammock at ground level and when you hopped in it you were off the ground but just below ground level because the enemy had a nasty habit of firing two or three rounds of mortar fire into your position at night. Just two or three rounds, bang, bang, bang and where they landed? If you’re just below the ground it’s going to miss you. Part of our tactics, we would, by day, we’d walk past where we were going to hoochie that night. Out patrolling an area, keeping an area clear and the word

would come down the line, “That’s where we’re going to hoochie up tonight.” “Oh yeah, okay.” Then we’d go to another place and we’d hoochie up. Stop, clean weapons, have a meal, late in the afternoon about an hour and a half before last light, make all, go through all the appearances of staying there the night but after dark we would move back to this other position and stay there the night. On a couple of occasions that positions that we’d stop by daylight, would take a couple of 60mm

mortar rounds. And just to really deceive them, we would come out before first light and go into that position so that they didn’t know we were swapping positions. Simple enough tactics and maybe you’d only moved a hundred metres, but it was enough to keep that sort of problem away. And if they came trying to probe your position which was one of their tactics, they’d come and start throwing rocks and things and making a noise,

trying to get you to fire and at night it’s very difficult to hit someone, you can’t see them. Just to try and find out where your weapons are. They were very brave and very ingenious at doing that sort of thing.

Not to fire. Unless you had them right on the end of the – sorry, you and me. Bang, bang. If you knew there was somebody really close out the front you threw a grenade. They …

This guy said that he was in an ambushing party and they’d had this group of Australians in the killing ground but they hadn’t opened fire because they were a bit concerned these blokes just looked too professional. And you know, they were watching their arcs of fire and the, they thought we might take on too, might grab the tiger by the tail with this lot so they let them go through. And it’s all to do with simple things like

in the field we rolled our sleeves down. We didn’t like wearing green face paint like they do these days, but we kept all our buttons done up. We had our, our equipment looked neat and tidy. We cleaned our weapons at least twice a day. When you were moving you moved cautiously and you looked, wherever you looked your weapon pointed. Our American allies unfortunately, some of them would be wandering along with the thing over their shoulder

smoking cigarettes. I’ve even seen them come out of the scrub with a trannie radio, not an ear plug a trannie radio elastic banded to the side of the helmet playing rock ‘n’ roll music. It’s a recipe for disaster. It’s probably, you can do that sort of stuff on the European battlefield when you’re being attacked by hordes of Soviet tanks, but going through

the jungle, no. And I think we were very lucky. Our company commander was ex-SAS [Special Air Service] and he, he was a smoker etc, but he would insist “You will not smoke in the field unless you are told you can. Nobody will wash using American soap,” we even got Vietnamese soap. Toothpaste, the Viets surprisingly had very good oral hygiene. Every time you found a cache of their equipment,

every pack had a tube of Hynos toothpaste and a brand new toothbrush in it. They were big on that. So we used to use Hynos which was a local brand, I think it was Colgate in reality but it was a local brand of toothpaste. We even got to the stage where we, in some areas we were eating local food, dried fish and that sort of stuff because all those things can really be

smelled. You know 100 metres away you can smell that someone has used aftershave or has washed with soap. And it really can give you away. He was good on that sort of stuff. The battalion policy was that you shaved every day but as soon as you broke away from the battalion, no shaving. We’d carry one razor per section, per ten men and just before we married up with the battalion again,

we’d stop, do an administrative stop and everybody would have a quick, so that he wouldn’t get a kicking from the battalion commander for letting his troops go scruffy. But it’s great camouflage and people are using, it doesn’t matter what sort of shaving soap you use, it’s got to smell. And it used to give you away.

Well there was that as well, yeah.

Obviously the enemy didn’t have to worry too much, they don’t have the facial hair that we have. And that was the thing before, all the kids, there was a village out the back in between us and the Dong Nai River. The first time we went down there all the kids came out and they all couldn’t believe the hair. “Get away kid.” They were quite funny.

You could buy it in town. Surprisingly we used to get a lot of gear, cigarettes would come in the ration packs. You’d get five or six little cigarette, little like sampler packs in the rations. The American rations, there was a ration pack for every meal, not a day, every meal. And you’d get three of these for a day’s ration and you’d throw most of it away before you put it in

your pack. If you were out in the field you’d cut the top off a tin, you used to get these ham and lima beans, uggh ppt. So you’d cut the top off and empty the tin out into a refuse pit so that the enemy couldn’t come and dig it up and salvage the stuff. Cigarettes you’d keep but sometimes you could only smoke sort of two cigarettes a day maybe. But every ten days we’d get these bloody cardboard boxes from the American Red Cross and they’d have a carton of cigarettes

and they’d have shaving cream and all that. A sup pack for the soldiers in the field. Bloody lovely but I mean I can remember there with the machete chopping up cartons of cigarettes and burying them. What are you going to do with them? You couldn’t smoke them, you just couldn’t smoke that many cigarettes and no space in your pack to put them in so you’d cut them up and bury them so that they were, the enemy couldn’t get a hold of them because

every bit of unturned or turned over ground, if we found a bit of turned over ground, it had to be dug up and investigated. And it could either be a cache, a rubbish pit, a grave or a toilet. So we developed a drill with a long stick and poked it down and sniffed the end of the stick and you could figure out “Oh it’s a dunny,” or “Ohh, methinks it might be a body at least, under there.” And if it was bodies you had to dig them up, try and figure out how many bodies there were if they

were in bits, and try and identify if there was any uniform with them, what units they were from or what the insignia looked like if they had any insignia on them. Big deal body counting. The Americans always wanted those statistics. It was a measure of how they were winning the war. So that was a bit of an unsavoury job.

Sometimes you’d find beaut stuff like packs full of bits and pieces and you might find weapons and all that sort of stuff. But one, on one operation we actually in the Cu Chi Tunnels, we found a 50 bed hospital, eight tons of ammunition, two truckloads of weapons, sort of a battalions worth of documentation, their orderly room. At one stage I was

carrying around with me a French typewriter, a big twelve by six communist flag and a bundle of fountain pens made in Hanoi I was going to use as trading goods. Whenever you found something like that you’d trade it off to the Americans for something.

The, I believe the official story is that our engineers found it. But in fact a guy by the name of

Ron Sloane, who was one of our forward scouts, we were hooching [settling down for the night] up for the night and we were in sort of, you’d get in the jungle, you’d get these like islands of open space, a clearing. And we had to hoochy up and we’d hoochy up just inside the jungle around the edge of this thing. And it was beaut because if we needed it, you could get a helicopter in to do whatever we did with helicopters. Anyway the platoon commander was going around

saying “Okay you hooch up there, that’s your arc of fire.” Make sure the arcs of fire were interlocking so there was no opening where the enemy could come through. That’s part of the job. And poor old Pissy, he liked a drink so his nickname was Pissy. The platoon commander had put him down basically right on top of what appeared to be an ants’ nest. Anyway, Ronny said “Bugger this, I’ll have these…” and big bloody

termite ants would come out and they’d half eat the butt off your rifle. These things are real voracious eaters. And he thought bugger this, and he started kicking the dirt into the hole in the side and out poked this muzzle of an M1 Carbine. Bang, bang, bang, shooting at his feet. It was a bunker, it was a camouflaged bunker. The Viets engineering and camouflage couldn’t be beat, it was superb. Anyway, Ronny jumped up on top of the bloody thing. He reckoned

the best way to get away from their shooting was to leap up on top of it and he’s sort of stuck there, “Help get me out of here.” Anyway, got the machine gun over to one side and the gunner said “You run off that way and as soon as you step off I’ll start shooting.” So “Give you some cover.” So we did that. then I got a short range anti-armour weapon that had a little tube thing you pull out the back and it’s got a rocket inside. I aimed it at this thing and

bang. And lifted the lid off of it and it was concrete. A concrete lid on the thing. And there’s this oh - the enemy bloke, he shot through [ran away]. He obviously saw me aiming up at this thing and yelling out “Get your heads out.” There’s a great sheet of flame and back blast out the back of these things, bazooka-type thing. So got the top off it and somebody raced over and threw a grenade down it and the grenade was a dud. Didn’t go off. So we thought aaah.

And it’s getting just before dark. So we ended up doing a sentry with a machine gun poked down the hole all night and somebody on the gun ready to – as soon as they heard something going down it was to let drive with sort of a 50 round burst. The next day we started having a look down this tunnel and there’s this grenade that hadn’t gone off lying down there. A couple of us had a go and got about five or six metres down the tunnel, came back out and said “No, no, no, no.”

Anyway we were there for about four or five days, the Americans brought in engineers, our engineers came in and they found thousands of metres of tunnel. And all these caches, a hospital fully equipped underneath. The engineering, these cunning people, most tunnels you need to have timber for shoring, otherwise they collapse. The earth there was like a sandy clay sort of soil.

In the dry season it used to set like concrete on the surface but down below was fairly moist. These buggers’d dig the tunnel or part of the tunnel, then they’d put in or pour in a mix of petrol and dieseline and set fire to it. It would burn and bake the inside of the tunnel so you don’t need shoring. All you had to worry about was getting rid of the dirt and they’d carry it down to the river or something, throw it in the river to get it washed down stream. Don’t have to worry about

hiding the dirt. And really rat cunning with that sort of thing. You had to be careful when you found, and some of the trap doors, we probed down there and you’d find a concrete trap door that when it was wet they’d sort of stuck leaves to it and you just could not see it. And you’d be probing around with a bayonet all of a sudden, ‘clunk’ and you’d think I wonder if this goes bang. And you’d probe around and say “Oh no it’s a trap door.” Lift it up and see if there was any

wires or strings or anything attacked underneath. Booby traps. But their booby trap quite often, their thing would go straight down and then there’d be a vertical tunnel would go off from it, down five or six feet down. Down in the bottom often there was a sump and that would accommodate when it was raining heavily instead of the water going down the tunnel, well these buggers would put things like scorpions in the sump.

And a big tropical scorpion folded out, that long, either black or dark emerald green colour. Oh they looked particularly nasty. And I don’t think, I’ve never heard of anybody being stung by one but just the look of them used to scare you so you’d, we used to carry a, like a grappling hook type thing and a piece of rope so when you found one of these things you’d drop that down and because there’d be a little wooden frame work thing

with dirt over the top of it and “Ah-huh.” And this thing would hiss, a big tail would come up. Hmmm, so you had to be careful of all that sort of thing. But the Viets, their ingenuity really was quite cunning. One thing that we found that really stunned me, when helicopters, particularly when there’s a mass of helicopters, you can hear them but it’s very difficult to figure out which direction they’re coming from.

In this area we found this, what appeared to be an ants nest. It had holes north, south, east and west; four holes in it. We found a little crawl tunnel entrance that went in underneath and that had an air sentry sitting inside of this thing. They, it wasn’t an ant’s nest, man made. They’d hear helicopters and he’d put his ear to each of the four holes and he’d be able to pick up which one was the loudest. So if it was the west one,

they’re coming from the west; so they’d all nick off to the east or whatever. And I thought, talk about low-tech ingenuity to be able to, somebody to think that through to be able to build that. And we discovered those sort of things all the time. Simple things like if we were probing for mines, you’d use a bayonet and you’d find a mine, scrape the dirt away, make sure it didn’t

Have a pressure release thing underneath and you’d get it out and or blow it in situ; put an explosive charge on it and blow it. So Mr Charles started putting mosquito, metal mosquito netting with a piece of plastic in between and a connected up to a battery so when the bayonet went through it, it would create an electrical circuit and there’d be a booby-trap somewhere that’d go off.

Well our blokes started using non-conductive plastic probes. Then Mr Charles rigged it all up with a plastic bag with some water in it so when the probe went through it the water would leak between and create the – rat cunning with junk. With bits that they could pick up. They used to get their explosives from un-exploded 500 pound and 1,000 pound bombs.

Find them, dig them out of the ground and they’d get there with a coal chisel and cut them open and heat up the explosives, and it goes liquid, and pour it out and then take it away and reuse it on whatever they wanted to. Can you imagine?

Yeah.

We’d found a variety of tunnels. Every village had bunkers underneath the houses and a lot of people thought ‘oh the enemy hide in there.’ They weren’t, they were bloody air-raid shelters. People, because the Americans were a bit indiscriminate in who they dropped bombs on. If

War Zone D for example was a free fire zone, you could shoot at anything. And I think they probably, fairly primitive agrarian population, I think some of the, they were sellers, they’d store extra rice and keep their rice wine cool and all that. but of course everybody

“Oh you know, they’ve got to be VC [Viet Cong], they’ve got these bunkers and stuff under their houses.” A bit of rubbish really. But the Cu Chi tunnels, they’d been there for a long time. There’s a number of books on the subject, they reckon they came right from Cambodia. Some of them, the whole systems was a hundred and fifty kilometres coming almost all the way down to Saigon. That’d been dug while the French were there,

while the Japanese were there, after the French came back and there were whole, if you think about it, it was probably the only thing they could do to get themselves some sort of respite from all these aircraft flying around. For the whole duration of the tour there, you could hear an aircraft 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There was always a patrolling aircraft flying around.

Little Mickey Mouse airlines but they were flying around, they’d pick up some sort of movement and they knew where troops should be or shouldn’t be and they’d call in air attack or they’d call in artillery. It was very much like, you know the soldiers back in the fort and they’d sort of go out and hunt the Indians? It was that sort of a thing. So Mr Charles had to do something.

Of course there was large bodies of troops, so they dug them underground. And I reckon it was a logical solution so they could hide by day, come out at night, do what they wanted to do and go back to the tunnels by day. And as I was saying, they’re engineering and their camouflage was outstanding.

We were told before

actually going there that that was one of their practises so unless you were physically going along and probing the ground all the time you just wouldn’t know where tunnels were and where they weren’t. The entrances were so hard to find, although I haven’t see it, we were told that some entrances, they’d jump into a creek, hold your breath and underwater entrance into the thing.

Who cares about getting wet when somebody’s dropping napalm onto you. All of those sort of things and if you really were trying to find them you’d almost have to get everybody shoulder to shoulder and prod your way from the southern tip of the country all the way through. And even then you’d probably not find them all. And I’m sure there’s still hundreds of tunnels there. One of the American ways of countering those

tunnels was to do arc-like bombing raids where they’d get nine or eleven aircraft each carrying 32 tons of bombs, big 500 pounder and 1,000 pounder bombs and in that softish earth, the bombs would bury themselves 20 metres underground, explode and just cave in everything. And that was, and they’d do a map square, 1,000m by 1,000m.

Like the central business district of Melbourne having 300 tons of bombs dumped on it. I suppose it was a bit heavy handed but if there were any tunnels in there I don’t think they’d survive that. And I’m sure there was a lot of them caved in with that sort of bombing, that sort of action. On the ground, the Americans had a fabulous method. They used to get a guy come in, an engineer bloke with this little compressor on a backpack.

And they’d bring in bottles of acetylene and they’d fill the tunnel, they’d find a junction in the tunnel because they’d always like a road system, they’d find a cross road if you will and they’d dig a hole down and they’d pump acetylene into this thing and then they’d off an explosive charge and collapse all the tunnels that the acetylene got to. That was reasonably effective. And any poor bugger that was in there, they sort of went with it too, I suppose. But we had a number of people killed in the tunnels.

We had one guy he was only in up to his shoulders and he got stuck and he had a breathing outfit, and he crimped the pipe. Couldn’t get him out. And he kicked and, he tap-danced to death trying to get out of this hole. And that was the day after we found the tunnels.

Yeah. We never found anyone in there. We found all this equipment, we found this hospital, we found all this documentation and ammunition. But we didn’t find any people, they’d nicked off, gone.

I’m a little bit claustrophobic, I’d never survive

in a submarine. You’d sort of go down a vertical shaft and it would be maybe just over head height and you had to sort of wiggle yourself down. It was really designed for little people. And then you’re on your hands and knees. You could only go through these things on your hands and knees and once your body’s in the entrance way it’s pitch black and if there’s somebody with a gun down there, you might have a torch in one hand and a

pistol in the other hand and at one stage I thought if I’m shining this torch I’m giving them a pretty good aiming mark. You didn’t know what was in the tunnel, there could be snakes, there’d be all sorts of insects in there. There could be something really venomous that could do you in and at one stage I thought, now if I fire this pistol in here I’ll be deaf for the rest of me life. The noise in this thing. And I suppose I crawled a couple of body lengths and then thought

this really isn’t the job I was trained for. So I backed out and a couple of guys tried it and no.

That was the next morning after we’d sat all night with this machine gun poking down this hole.

That’s when the engineers came along. They had, they had guys, they had tunnel rats who would go down in them and these blokes were

crazy. You know you’d have to be crazy to go down in these things. There’s nowhere to go. If somebody starts shooting at you or there’s an explosive device or there’s a snake what do you do?

You know if somebody’s really twitchy you think this bloke’s either consuming something that’s not really good for him or he’s got a job that’s got him a buttoned up too tight.

Anyway.

Both. And engineers. Anyway, sometimes they’d deem a tunnel to be too dangerous for them and they wouldn’t go down them. But there are stories that he Americans would have, running, crawling gun battles down along these tunnels. And I mean my psyche as I said I’m a bit claustrophobic and I would

be going crazy in there. There’s no way known. But they used to, by stamping on the ground and pushing rods down and they had mine detectors, they’d be able to sometimes track down to find tunnel, these joints in the tunnel or if they couldn’t they’d just pack as much explosives as they could get down in the entrance and just blow it. And see what happened. Or coloured smoke grenade,

throw it down there, close that entrance off and watch for where the smoke come up because there had to be breather holes in the thing and see where the smoke comes up and see what sort of pattern. It was a long and tedious job and you’re never quite sure, have I got them all or have I not. And that particular tunnel there, we were there for four or five days and it, we never found the end of it, we just withdrew.

I mean you can go to Vietnam now and get the guided tour down those same tunnels and I believe they’ve enlarged them by four times to accommodate the western body, so obviously you can walk through them now rather than crawl on your hands and knees or on your belly using your elbows.

Oh yeah. The Viets are great writers.

Basically every time we found a cache of packs, there might be a group that was coming down from the north, they would hide their packs in a tunnel or something and they’d go into town the Vietnamese, put on a set of civvies. They all carried a set of civvies, off they’d go into town. If you found a cache of these packs or down in the tunnels you’d find a cache of packs or in the case of those tunnels, we found an orderly room, an office.

And they were great record keepers. They’d keep diaries which is really quite forbidden in military circle. They’d keep letters from their girlfriends and mums and sort of stuff, just like our guys, because a lot of them would come from other parts of the country or come from the north. And the orderly room bit that we found, it basically had the service records

of all the people in this particular unit and the unit wasn’t home, it was away somewhere. And the intelligence people came in and they apparently got quite a bit of advantage out of all the, I mean they had photographs. It’s a bit hard to get away with it so I guess every suspect there was pulled in and every suspect was a young man or a young woman,

they’d check through the photos. And that got them a long way to rounding up a lot of opposing forces in that area. And that was, Cu Chi is north of Bien Hoa north of Saigon, up towards the Parrot Beak, Cambodian border near Bien HoaI think. That area was, it was a reasonable commercial area.

I mean if there was no shots being fired it would probably be a fairly wealthy area. Probably is now.

As I recall there might’ve been the odd little probe at night but nothing serious. Obviously the unit that had occupied this thing was

away doing something else or our force was too big. I mean we ended up with the entire brigade and more there. This thing was so big, they were finding tunnel entrances and popping smoke grenades and my god where does this bloody thing go? And it was going on and on and on. And I read a book a couple of years ago and it described just how far this thing went and we’d hardly

touched it. Maybe they just withdrew further down the tunnels, who knows. But when you think about it, the determination to be able to do what they wanted to do without being interfered with. Can you imagine the work that must’ve gone into that sort of stuff? And the time it would’ve taken? Really quite huge. And they were like that the Viets, but

they couldn’t navigate.

They used to use local guides. Troops coming down from the north or troops moving around in areas they didn’t know, they used to have local guides showing them where to go. The concept of navigation and grid references and all that sort was apparently a bit beyond them. And we used to have a bit of success doing what we called track squats. We’d set up a little triangle, one leg of the triangle next to

a track, a machine gun on each end and occasionally a couple of people would walk down it, bang bang. And it was successful, almost an ambush but not a set ambush as such. Stop for a, had been stopped, it’d be quiet you’d have sentries out and occasionally people’d come down the track because they, and surprisingly we found out that

the Vietnamese as we know it, is not a native of Vietnam. The natives are like aboriginals, the Montagnards and that who live up in the mountains. What we know as Vietnamese come down from southern China ‘x’ centuries ago. And these people, their mythology says that the moy , the monsters live in the forest and they were a bit superstitious. They didn’t like going off the tracks into the forest all that much.

Which used to make me wonder about their discipline to get their troops to do those sort of things and move at night, but they did move on tracks quite often. Rarely would they go through the jungle unless they had done a reconnaissance by day, marked out a track and so they could move through it at night, move their troops through at night. If we found that we could ambush them.

Sometimes they were dressed as civilians, but they were armed. That was the nature of the war where crikeys while we were going there we were told “These people wear black pyjamas.” When we got there we thought Christ the place is alive with them. Everybody

wears black pyjamas, that’s the national dress. The NVA would wear a really yucky looking green uniform and those old British Army pith helmets. They’d wear those and you’d certainly be able to know those guys but if we were squatting on a track we would report back

and we would say “We’re doing a track squat at grid…” doodly, doodly, doodley. “Is there any known friendly movement down this track?” because it might be local indigenous forces on our side who might be use – obviously you don’t want to shoot up people on your side. And if you got a report back saying “No, there is no friendly movement on that track,” if somebody came down the track and they’re armed, sorry about that.

And to the best of my knowledge there was not any mistakes, well I mean those sort of things do happen occasionally, but not under those sort of circumstances. I mean you’d check. The Australian army has got what they call the rules of engagement, if in doubt don’t shoot. So you’ve got to be absolutely sure what you’re shooting at is

opposing forces and that way it keeps you out of trouble. You don’t go shooting up some farmer going off to work his buffalo in the paddies or mum and a couple of kids going down to get water from the well or something like that. You’ve got to be able to see your target, you’ve got to be able to identify your target before you engage it, because if you don’t do that, well these days certainly you can get into serious trouble. It’s a war crime.

And even though that sort of stuff wasn’t being practiced then, I would imagine you’d still be in a hell of a lot of trouble if you fired indiscriminately. So you had to be sure.

Move around.

Not really. They tended to sleep by day and move by night. There’s been a couple of occasions when I’ve been out in a standing patrol when

you can hear them going past. There was one case in Charlie Company 1RAR when there was a standing patrol on a track and it was so close to things that you had a radio but you never spoke into it. You know the mush that comes over a radio, your pressle switch you could press once – it’s okay; press twice – we’re in trouble;

press three times – fire the mission, fire the artillery mission. That was, and then maybe while you’re running away you’re on the radio, “There’s thousands of the mongrels.” But this particular patrol, they were a standing patrol, four, five blokes, they were on next to this track and they stopped counting at about 400 and these guys were moving through with torches and they were talking and all this sort of stuff and the section

commander withdrew so they could get on the radio and they fired artillery missions on them, but he got into trouble. His company commander said “You should’ve opened fire.” He said “for Christ sake’s sir, there’s only five of us. We stopped counting at 400, a big NVA unit moving.” Where we were up in the north of Saigon was one of the exits from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and they would come down into that area.

And that was, that was part of the problem, you never knew, when the forward scout first fired his first shot, contact front, the thought would go through your mind – is it two blokes and a muzzle loading bloody musket or is it a completely equipped regular north Vietnamese regiment? Because you never knew until you started getting into it a little bit and sometimes we had to pull back. You just couldn’t take on the size

of the force. So you’d work your way back and call in artillery and mortars and try and disengage. Get a clean break.

Yeah. I didn’t have to do that personally, but I was with a platoon and we had to pull back. The force was too big. You don’t attack battalions with platoons, or if you do you’re dead or stupid or

both. You’re supposed to take on a group with odds of at least three to one. It’s not Marquis of Queensbury Rules - it’s not professional boxing, gentleman’s boxing, it’s you’re there to kill the bastards. And if, you don’t take on a larger force because you’ll get done, you’ll get badly mauled.

So discretion is the better part of valour. Pull back. Get out of there. Call for bigger forces. That was the beauty of being there, it was all in a fairly small place and you could get fire support. We used to actually get fire support from ships at sea. The Americans used to have a couple of battleships chugging up and down the coast and they couldn’t cover the entire country but if you could get naval gunfire, it was spot-on accurate.

It was so accurate, with 16 inch guns. They were bloody big guns.

30 or 40 miles. These are whacking great big guns. They can’t put guns that big on land because it would rip the carriage or the truck or whatever it was on to bits. But at sea, the ship moves when they fired them, the recoil is so savage and they were really very good.

Spot on. They were the most accurate fire apart from an aircraft being able to physically see the target on the ground. If you gave it a grid reference, an eight figure grid reference down to a ten metre square, they would put their fire into that ten metre square. No problems. Every time. And this is in the days of no satellite navigation.

But the system of the, we had one here in Victoria down in Gippsland. They had the big tower. I forget the name of the system but it was before satellites, the last step before the satellites and they used to use that system to make sure that once you know where your ship is then you can shoot the gun to where you want to put the artillery shell. And that was good. Helicopters were probably

the shot because they never had to over-fly targets. That’s the beauty of a helicopter, it can stand back and shoot at a target, a fixed wing plane’s got to overfly the target and while it’s overflying it can get shot at. And simple things like you’ve got to make sure the aircraft attack across your front, you never have them coming from behind or advance onto you because their guns are electrically fired, their bombs are electrically

released and sometimes there’s a glitch and the bomb drops too late or too soon and you could wear it. So you have them coming across and that way if it turns to worms it’s not going to collect you. And only on one occasion we had a sky raider attack a position, a big single engine propeller, WW2, and they’re quite large aeroplanes, they carry 14 tons of bomb load. They’ve got four or six 20mm cannon and a couple of hundred rounds for it.

Well, the official terms for

patrols are fairly limited. There’s a fighting patrol which, you go out and you’re spoiling for a fight and you’re looking for someone to have a shot at. We never really did any of that, that was a Korea thing where there was fixed lines and you’d go over and get close to them and shoot them up. We did a lot of ambushing, a favourite tactic, ours and theirs and we did a lot of search and destroy where you’d, and the patrols could go from

basically platoon up to brigade size where you’d just sweep through an area and you might cordon it off or you might not. Just be looking for the enemy. You might’ve had intelligence reports that say there are enemy forces in that area, estimated at 1,000 people. So we’d sort of muster together 3,000 people and go looking for them. Sometimes that was

successful sometimes it wasn’t, or in varying degrees. The only other sort of patrolling that you would do and that was the mundane boring stuff is what we used to call standing patrols, and in reality early warning, where you’d go and you’d sit at a location and your sole job was to observe a particular approach to your main unit,

wherever that was. That could be by night, it could be by day depending on the situation. But everybody talks about “We go out on patrol.” You didn’t do all that much of that, you went out on operation with an entire unit. Went out on operation. And the bulk of them in Vietnam were search and destroy. You basically swanned round the countryside looking for the enemy

on reasonable information that there was an enemy force in a particular area. And once you found him you would bring him as quickly as possible, and whatever weapons and equipment that you had to either destroy him or capture him as quickly as possible bring that to bear, and you win the battle. Theoretically you win the war. Doesn’t quite work that way sometimes

but there you go.

Okay. Basically, this might go on for days where you’re moving through the scrub and you’re trying to avoid moving in single file because

obviously you’re not covering very much ground in single file but control is a bit difficult having people in the extended file. We often used to use an arrowhead formation which was a bit easier to control and depending on the thickness of the scrub you could get through. And you had good deployment of fire to the front and to either flank. So it’s a nice, it’s a good formation to use. Sometimes you might be walking for days.

you’re observing, silence, you’re not cooking, you’re not smoking, all of those things. And you’re really getting quite on edge because you don’t know whether it’s round behind the next tree or it’s never or it’s next week or whatever. So people are a bit keener. In fact one of the funny things I observed as soon as we used to get into contact, everybody would start whistling

and singing and yelling out to each other as that release of having been for days without talking. Without making any sort of noise. But the usual thing was you’d, there’d be a bang, bang, bang and usually we would be walking into them. I suppose only slightly more to our favour that we would initiate the contact than them initiating the contact. Our guy

would see them first and shoot first. What would usually happen in that case, depending again on the country, the Australian army drill is that in that sort of contact, that first section of that contact, the machine gun will whiz around to the left flank, the idea to fire across the front. That’s the best employment of machine gun fire and the troops will line up and you can sweep forward and over run them and all that. That’s beaut if you’re dealing with a couple of blokes.

We even devised, in thicker jungle when we had to really walk in single file, we devised a separate tactic; the forward scout would bang, bang, bang, everybody would go to ground, everyone except the machine gunner who’d have a 50 round belt on the gun and he’d just go brrpppt and shoot a big arc. He might not hit anything but it’d chop the scrub down a bit so you could see a bit and it would make the opposition get their heads down.

When that was done, he’d go to ground and reload the weapon. The section commander would take over and you’d go from there. But you always had some sort of a drill worked out for that initial contact. The aim of the drill is that you take back the initiative, particularly if they’ve shot first. The American tactic when we first arrived there, was as soon as they contacted an enemy and started shooting, because of

their terrific fire power they would pull back 100m so that they could employ their artillery and all that sort of stuff. The enemy very quickly realised this and would move forward with them, if you’re up close you can’t use those sort of weapons so it was down to pistols and rifles and machine guns. And initially when we were having contacts we were getting quite a few kills because they were moving forward on us, until they realised that the blokes in the bush hats aren’t

Americans, so we went back to the tactic of the contact drill. It’s a very basic thing, in fact Australians learnt it off the Japanese in New Guinea during the Second World War, it was a Japanese tactic. It works. So we would use that sort of thing but once, and that would only take 20 or 30 seconds, maybe a minute, once the drill’s done it’s done. Then the commander

has to take over, he has to find out what it is, what, where, how many? He’s got to get information back from the scout and in that particular style of warfare, you never knew whether it was two blokes with a muzzle loading musket or a well trained, well equipped regular north Vietnamese regiment. So it was important that there was

some very quick finding out just who the enemy was and then obviously if it was bigger than a section, half a dozen people, the forward section commander would have to be talking back to the platoon commander, who’d have to be talking back to the company commander because you might, just too big for the first group. If the first group said “it’s only two blokes, I can handle this,” then they would follow through and

they might quite often, I mean in the jungle, if contacted like that quite often if you realised, if you know that you’re two people and you’ve run into a group and you can see movement you think uh-oh, you’ll turn around and run like crazy and just get the hell out of there. What else can you do? So sometimes there’d be a bit of a chase: people running through the scrub trying to catch these people. That could be dangerous because they might run back into

the regiment’s position and you’re running straight into it. So there was a, it’s a risky deal, I mean, it’s soldiering, but as a general thing, if it settled down to a shootout… if the enemy stayed and started trading shots with you, you could safely assume it’s a reasonable sized force and they’re pretty confident that they can have a go at us.

So at that stage, and we were lucky, we all had radios, every section had a radio. Usual Australian army establishment in those days used to be just one radio with each platoon, but we got to the stage where we had four radios in each platoon. One with each section and one with platoon headquarters. So the section commanders, instead of having to yell through the noise of small arms fire or crawl back and tell the

platoon commander and the platoon commander the company commander, just get on the radio and “it’s section plus, there’s a machine gun.” And that used to be difficult too. I mean one assumes, it’s the old Japanese tactic, everybody in the group had either single shot bolt action rifles or semi-automatic rifles and one machine gun so you could figure out fairly quickly from the fire if it’s a section, if it’s a platoon, it’s two blokes, whatever.

In late January, early February ’66, we captured the first AK-47 and everything changed. Within a fortnight all opposing forces were carrying AK-47s. So it was very hard to, before that it was SKSs [Samozariadnyia Karabina Simonova Russian military carbines], they used to like American M-1 and M-2 carbines, little pigmy rifles because they suited the

Vietnamese stature, the big American Garands were just too big for them, used to knock them over. But the little carbines which couldn’t really, well they could but it was hard to kill a man with one, they were really two handed pistols. That sort of weaponry captured stuff, and semiautomatic SKS Russian and Chinese stuff. But then when these AK-47s appeared and I don’t know if you know, an

AK-47, it’s got a change lever on the side and you thumb it from safe down to the first click it goes straight to burst. Which is a great idea because when do you need burst? In a hurry. You push it a big further to get single shots. Anyway, all of a sudden there’d be a hail of fire. One of the advantages was, because the Viets were relatively small in stature and light in weight, if the first couple of rounds missed you the rest were going to go way over your head because they,

like the drive taxis, the finger on the trigger, brrrrrrrr. But quite scary and quite deafening. What have we struck here? They used to drag around in the scrub with them anti-aircraft guns, big heavy calibre machine guns on like a wheelbarrow. And they’d wheel these things around and if an aircraft started bothering them, they’d start shooting at the air with anti aircraft guns. Could be

they started bringing those, 50 calibre machine gun and they chopped trees down, big trees with those things. They’d start shooting around you with those. So it was difficult to figure what it was on the other side of the shooting. As a general thing you’d settle down to trading shots and usually at that stage if it was that sort of size and there was a platoon facing it, the company commander would then start

swinging platoons to one or the other flank to try and out-flank this group. Or they’d call in air support or call in artillery, mortars and get them down to a danger close, you can bring those in to about ten metres and start using those weapons to see if you could break them up. And see if you can push forward and find, obviously if it’s a bigger force than you think, then you’ve got problems.

That happened at Long Tan where a company basically opposed I think it was two and a half regiments. And they ended up being attacked on three sides and it rained. Maps, the position on the map was probably in the corner of four maps and it was probably up hill, I don’t know I wasn’t there. That’s where usually the worst battles are, the corner of four maps, up hill in the bloody rain. And they ran out of ammo and

all that. A rifle company, if they start panic firing, have got about three minutes worth of fire power then, with the proper issue of ammunition. Then they start running out of ammo. One of our big fears was running out of ammunition so people used to carry as much ammo as they could. You’d throw away rations and go hungry to carry more ammunition. But as a general thing that’s usually what happened

with those. It’d settle down to trading shots, artillery mortars, maybe tactical air support to break them up and then, if you were down the back end of this thing, it might be over the other side of the ridge line, you’d almost sit down and basically have a cigarette and watch your arc and wait until something happened. So there could be a lot of waiting and doing nothing

except observing and keeping your wits about yourself because if we can go around a flank, he can go around a flank too. And just in case somebody did come around.

Yeah, I ended up commanding a section as a lance corporal, a section of about five blokes, six blokes yeah, including me.

Oh yeah. Troops would argue with you and you’d almost have to present your case sometimes. It depended on how dicey the situation was. I mean blokes didn’t want to get killed and I certainly didn’t want to get killed either. If you couldn’t get for – if you couldn’t crawl forward, if the firepower

was that heavy then basically you stayed where you were, conserved your ammunition, fired at muzzle flashes and if you saw movement there you fired at that. And you knew somebody behind you was doing something, either a flanking manoeuvre or calling in artillery or air support. But some guys would go to ground basically and not return fire and you had to “Get off your arse and move forward and find out what’s going on.”

Or “You watch your arc and get your bloody, get your rifle from underneath you and get it out in front of you and start looking at your arc of responsibility and if any enemy troops appear, you fire at them.” “Oh, oh, oh yeah, okay.”

You could put a couple of rounds over their head. That’s happened on occasion.

Otherwise, people would lie there and get killed. When you can hear these things snapping over your head an you know that they’re only about six inches above your head and you’re sprawled flat on the ground, and you know that if you get up a little too high you’ll cop it, and you know that there’s this bloke over there, they might roll over the top of him but you’re next, but if he slows them down that’s good

for you so, “You, you mongrel, keep looking out.” At the end of some fire fights there’s been some almost fist fights. Emotions can run really high. There was actually some paying off at the big reunion we had in ’91, there was a couple of people paid off, whack, whack, whack for things deemed to have been or actually done or deemed to have been done

some 20 odd years before.

Oh yeah. And everybody’s scared. Let me tell you everybody is really scared. Nobody wants to die, particularly you’re feeling a bit grotty, you’re lying on the ground, you haven’t had a tub for weeks, you’re really cheesed off, you’re tired, the mail hasn’t come

and you think, “I’d really like to die a bit better than this”. That’s the sorts of thoughts that goes through your mind. Or if bullets are hitting things around you and digging up the dirt in front of you, that’s when you start getting to “Dear God not me, not now. Dear God not me, not now.” And “I promise I’ll be a good boy in the future,” all stupid stuff. But yo are really so excited and so

hyped up you actually carry on and perform your job. There’s not many people who were so terrified that they just froze up. Some did but it was a rare occurrence and quite often a guy might do that after, he hasn’t done that in 20 contacts before, does it in that one and then never does it again. And ho knows what goes through peoples’ minds.

Just had a bad feeling about something or whatever. The morning that I was wounded, I had this bloody terrible itchy rash on my backside and I had a real bad feeling about the day. And I went to the company aid post and I said “Look I don’t think I can go out on this operation, I’ve got this and…” yada, yada, yada, and the company commander said “Bullshit you’re going,” and I got shot that day.

And I had this really bad feeling about that day. Some people get premonitions.

I mean even these days, you’ll get a bad feeling you wake up in the morning and think this’ll be a good day to stay in bed and nothing works. Everything turns to worms. You have a car prang or some idiot cuts you off and

you say “You’re a dickhead.” Next thing he’s out of the car and he’s about 15 foot tall and you think this bloke’s going to kill me. We all get those sort of things I suppose. I mean do you? I do on occasion.

Did you? I mean maybe in that situation maybe your senses are finer tuned so that when you, and you know that

you’ve seen blokes who’ve been badly ripped up by bullets or killed and you think oh gee whiz. We had a couple of guys lost limbs and I think I’d rather have been killed than lose a limb. So what do you do?

No I didn’t.

There was always a niggle of fear that, well first of all I think anybody who says that he wasn’t scared is either so insensitive as to be strange, something wrong with them psychologically or they’re bullshitting you. And when the shooting started, one of the beauties of the drills is that you actually get into a position to do something without thinking about it. If you didn’t have that

I reckon most people would probably drop to the ground and say “Hello, what do I do now?” and it really would be a disaster. But quite often you are more scared about what, if you hold back and lie there, you’re terrified about what your mates are going to say after the fire fight when you come out of it unscathed, and somebody says “Where were you you gutless bastard?”

That type of thing, that motivates people to move on. Some people think that they probably can’t live with themselves if they let other people down. I don’t know, there’s – I’m too much of a coward to suicide but some of the people that I went to war with have suicided. Three or four of them have suicided. I don’t know, was it something to do with that.

That’s been drilling away in the back of their mind for years? I don’t know.

Oh no, they very quickly died. People would let fly with what’s in them. They, “You stupid mongrel, if …

you almost got me killed. Next time you do that I’ll bloody well shoot you.” And it would, they might not talk to each other for a couple of days, but under those circumstances. A couple of weeks later they’d be at a pub somewhere getting drunk together. Most times. Most times.

Yeah, we had two guys wounded, Errol Weatherall. It was the very first contact that we had, we’d been bashing through the scrub, people were getting a bit cheesed off. We’d been there a few weeks, three or four weeks and Errol Weatherall who was the tail end Charlie [rearguard] turned around as says “people are following us.” So old Errol brought his trusty SLR up to his shoulder, bang,

fired a shot and missed and the rifle had a stoppage. Errol stood there instead of going to ground, started carrying out the drill to clear his weapon. The opposing forces gentleman [VC] put his rifle up and didn’t miss and got Errol right in the face and ripped the side of his face out. So Errol’s on the ground screaming blue murder. Dave Mundy one of the other lance corporals, he’d been, he should’ve been down the

tail end, that’s right, because he had an Owen gun, but he’d been talking to somebody a bit further up the line. We were getting a bit lax with no contact. He raced back and he’s sort of firing 25 round bursts from his Owen gun, we used to only put 25 rounds in because any more and it used to bugger the spring, you could put 30 in but we’d only put 25 in so they wouldn’t jam. And he’s firing 25 round bursts, he got hit right there.

And it amputated his leg, ripped it right off. It was hanging by a bit of skin at the back. Went down, he continued shooting, he got shot through the right shoulder and his arm was wrecked so he picked it up with his left hand, continued shooting. Meantime the rest of us are coming back around, I’m up with the forward section, we come back around and we’re firing into these, there was, I think there was five of them originally.

And one of them got away and we got four. And we came and started shooting and it was really exciting, “Oh beauty the enemy,” rack, rack, rack until we sort of got back and saw Errol and Dave and then everybody – blokes were wandering off into the scrub and having a big spew. It’s very, you never anticipate your blokes are going to get hit. It’s just

you know it but you don’t expect it. You know it could happen but you, you’re hoping against hope that it won’t. And then of course when we actually got the bodies of these dead guys that we’d killed, we were very quiet, sheepish little soldiers and we buried these people, we got the dust off helicopter [medivac] came and took Dave and Errol away. We buried these people

and we went into a harbour right close to it for the night and I don’t know that anybody slept that night. And it was, and we buried them fairly shallowly and the next morning, pigs or something must’ve been around the bodies were half uncovered and … yeah. And that sort of took away the cowboys and Indians feeling about it all.

Actually in those days no, you didn’t talk about it. You might talk about “Oh did you see the way that bloke took those bloody 15 hits in the chest?” or “Shit did you see Dave’s leg? Oh Christ, I hope that doesn’t happen to me.”

But apart from that, no you wouldn’t get there and say “This is how I feel about it.” They’d start looking a bit sideways at you. This was back in the days when men were men and women were glad of it. So they say.

Yeah, whenever we had enough information to say that there was, ambushes are linear things as a general thing. So it’s a track. So if we had pretty solid information that this track was being used, we’d set up an ambush. An ambush is a very intricate operation and requires a lot of planning and preparation.

And it’s not just a line lying down. You’ve got to have depth to it, you’ve got to have people behind you, got to put sentries out. You’ve got to do this by daylight. It’s difficult, almost impossible to do it by night so you’ve got to set it up in daylight. And you’ve got to do it in such a way so that people can’t see you and it’ a really dodgy sort of a thing to do. And you’ve, again on the intelligence information you’ve

got, you’ve got to figure out what sort of group will I contact in this ambush. If it’s going to be a regiment it’s bloody stupid setting up a platoon ambush because you could get into all – anti-ambush drills, our anti-ambush drill is to turn into the fire and head straight into the fire shooting back. It’ll get you out of the killing ground in the shortest possible time. If you survive that you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting to your 60th birthday sort of thing.

If you run away from the firing, you’re in the killing ground maybe hundreds of metres. If you try to move through, they’re going to catch you because there’s usually a machine gun sighted at each end, most ambushes regardless of what army that’s what they sight them. The enemy put a little dodge on it, you’ve seen them carrying these RPGs [rocket-propelled grenade], these shoulder fired rocket launchers? These days they’re all RPG-7s, the later model,

but those days they were RPG-2s. Very similar but same sort of thing. Every third or fourth bloke would have one of these bloody RPGs loaded and ready to go and if you ambushed them, they would turn into the ambush and fire these things and hit the trees. And you’ve got a fairly big explosion, you’ve got bits of shrapnel, you’ve got half a tree falling down, that was part of their anti-ambush drill. And there was a couple of

Australian ambushes that almost came to grief over those sort of things. Often we would prefer to do mechanical ambushes, that’s with claymore mines. You understand what a Claymore is? A direction mine? It’s set in the ground, it’s aimed, it’s electrically fired, command fired. And you might set up a dozen of these mines along the track, the enemy comes along, you’ve got to have some sort of method of figuring out when they’re in there because you’ve got to be back

sort of 90 feet from these mines and you’ve got a little hand held electric generator and you fire all these mines and usually there’s not much in the way of bodies left, it just minces everything up. That was a popular way of doing it, so if you hit a larger group you’d get some of them and if they became angry and had a go, all they’d find is all these sites of exploded mines and you’d be back from that and you’re gone out of there.

So that was a popular way of doing ambushes with mechanic mines, the mechanical ambushes with claymores.

In the company I s’pose we would probably have done a dozen over the time. Successfully. You might only get one or two and like I was saying before that what we used to call

a track squad which wasn’t really an organised ambush where you’d stop for an admin stop. And because you’ve got three guns in a section you put a gun at each point so it’s almost triangular in shape. That gives it depth and you can fire down the front of the legs and that is the correct use of machine guns. And you prop off one of these legs on the side of a track somewhere, depending on the scrub you’re in off the track a bit, and quite often you’d get somebody walking down a track.

One particular day we had a local tax collector come down the track, there were two guys and a woman. Two of them were armed and one of the men and the woman were armed with AKs and the tax collector had a big bag full of money. And they walked down the track and we fired at them. They shot back and actually hit one of the machine gunners, only slightly wounding him,

but we killed all of them and got this big bag of money. And that was just from a track squad, an admin stop, four o’clock in the afternoon sort of thing. Usually by day the temperature was such, the tropical humidity was such, the enemy rarely moved between eleven in the morning and three or four o’clock in the afternoon. They were in their hammocks resting. We were the only silly

sods walking through the jungle. A bit of a waste of time in reality. We would’ve been better off operations just after first light and operations just before last light. The rest of the day sit, be quiet and wait. And there was a lot of that going on, sitting, being quiet and just waiting to see who came down a track or something of that nature.

Yeah. It can be very difficult. You tend to, you plan your next holiday in your head. You think what you’re going to do when you get home. You plan, you know that you’ve got a day in Saigon coming up and you think oh… and you start thinking about what you’re going to do on your day off. Just to keep the brain

going. I mean if you’ve been out in the scrub for a week or so, you’ve been getting if you’re lucky four hours in 24 sleep, and that’s sleeping on the ground. It’s pretty, and it’s warm, it’s pretty hard to stay awake. You can’t move too much, you’ve got to keep quiet. You can’t smoke. So it’s, it is difficult to keep concentration going.

I’m told that the average human can concentrate on something for about 12 minutes. After that it’s drifting away into dreamtime. So you try and move yourself a bit. All those little tricks about lying an ambush so you don’t go to sleep. Stretch one leg, then stretch the other leg. Wet your finger and across the top of your eyelids

tends to keep your eyes open. All that sort of stuff. Yeah it can be difficult. Probably the only thing you could really do was have a drink of water and try and keep your, maybe water in your face to keep you a bit more alert. But very difficult.

Not really.

Once in the field we got a can of beer each. It had been a really nasty day. Rossy Mangano had both his legs blown off when he stood on a mine. We’d walked into a minefield. Terry Loftus had got shrapnel up through his legs. Everybody was really, and the place was littered with these bloody booby-traps, they were everywhere. Grenades with

fishing line attached, you couldn’t see the bloody fishing line and if you tripped one, chink, instantaneous fuse. These Chinese bloody spud mashing grenades. And we finally got out of that patch of forest into a cleared area and the Americans actually issued us with a can of beer each. A cold can of beer. One per man. And that was the only time we ever got grog in the field. Only time. But boy you sat there, “Oh… thank you God.”

A real rotten day.

We, well when Rossy, and his legs were literally blown off. Ripped right off, both his legs. Blood everywhere and the screaming. To get him out, we were in thick scrub, we had to get an armoured personnel carrier to come in. And as it

came in it was triggering booby-traps and things so basically we sort of moved out a bit and let this thing come in and load him and Loftus onto it and then get out. And then the rest of us tried to get back sort of, we’re fire and movement because we knew that they didn’t set these things up and then just leave them without sentries or people observing and we knew that there had to be some of them around. So we’re trying to go back along the

turned up earth that the track vehicle had come in and done and being fairly sure that if there was a mine in there it would’ve gone off by now, to try and get back out of this thing. And it was just a matter of one man at a time and you’re watching your arcs and you’d move back ten paces and it took us an hour or two hours or whatever. I can’t remember the time to get back out of this particular patch of scrub that was really

crappy. When we got back immediately called in artillery or air strikes or whatever to try and get rid of the mines or vent the spleen or whatever. And everybody’s sitting around, I think just about everybody in the forward section had been splashed with Rossy’s blood. He’s still alive too I might add. Saw him, in fact I’ll be seeing him in June. He gets around on two tin legs, the mongrel owns half of

Sydney, he’s a multi-millionaire I think by now. Smart lad. Smart lad. But yeah that was a really nasty day. Really nasty. 12th of October. The day before my birthday it was. I remember it quite clearly. A real shit of a day. Apart from that the rest were diamonds.

Well yeah. Have you drunk much American beer have you? You know the comment we had before about there’s no such thing as a bad beer? Well there is.

Oh Bud [Buidweiser] wasn’t bad actually, I didn’t mind Bud. But we used to get mainly Heineken, that wasn’t bad. Some of the American beer though: Hans and Schlitz. Puhh. San Miguel we used to get a bit of too, that was okay.

Like I say I didn’t mind Bud but it took about six months before we started getting regular supplies of Australian beer. And then if you didn’t mind it you could do sort of two for one trades with the Americans. Double your beers.

Hell yes. Oh yes. Yes indeed. Or the local brew. They had 33, the label was

33. Bah Moy Bah - Vietnamese for 33. That was more like embalming fluid. And there was another beer called Beer La Rue and nobody used to drink that because it was, we would get medical reports saying whatever you drink, drink spit out of the gutter but don’t drink Beer La Rue. You know a bot…

Grog was, the country was awash in grog, quite literally. The only place you didn’t have it was out on operations. The Americans were absolutely forbidden. It’s like an American ship at sea,

there’s no alcohol on an American warship. That’s their rules. I think that’s probably a bit iffy, but none of our guys would bother with grog out in the field and we had some chronic drunks. And as soon as we got back into the base camp at Bien Hoa, wahoo, anything went. We would get a ration of I think it was four cans per day and they were 15 cents a can

Or something like that. And eventually we actually built our own pub out of packing cases. We made this and we called it the Etamoggah Pub.[named after pub near Albury] And it was all just, we had the hot box meal keepers, we had those with ice and used them as eskies [ice boxes] with beer in them. There was no tap beer or anything exotic like that and somebody would be detailed to be the

bartender and sell the grog. One of the most sort after tools and you were like a god if you had one, was a church key. And this was in the day before zip top cans. And short of stabbing it with a bayonet or biting it with your teeth, you had to have a church key to get into the beer. So most guys on their id tags, had a church key hanging. And that could be painful if you leapt to the ground and the thing dug into you. Anyway.

In the base camp area it was mainly just beer. We did have a little PX [American Canteen Unit] shop in the battalion area, a little tin shed, but it was really frowned upon to drink spirits. Wine was unheard of. If you really wanted wine the only place you could get that, and it would be French wine, would be in a restaurant in town. And Saigon was running just like a

normal city, except that most people had green suits on and were armed. But still, restaurants were running and movie theatres and all that sort of stuff. The only place where you really could get into the ran tan was if you had a day off in Saigon. We used to go to Saigon. I believe the troops down at Nui Dat never got into Saigon, poor buggers, but Saigon was a great place. It really was, but to

get there from Bien Hoa, there was two convoys a day. One or two convoys twice a day. One leaving Saigon eight o’clock in the morning, one leaving Bien Hoa eight o’clock in the morning; and the road was like a giant road, divided high – big divided carriageway road, and they would cross going the other way. It was so dangerous they’d have tanks escorting them, they’d have herds of helicopters, armed gunship helicopters escorting them

in case somebody shot at them. In the afternoon at four o’clock it would be the same, the convoys from Bien Hoa, Saigon. And of course coming back from Saigon would really be dangerous because all the occupants of the trucks were pissed. And they used to give them back their weapons when they got on the truck so there’s all these Australian soldiers coming back from leave and didn’t really want to come back from leave, armed and full of bad manners.

That used to be quite an amazing and amusing thing to see, the convoy going into town. In the city of Saigon or Cho Lon the big suburb right next to it, where it’s supposed to be a very dangerous place to go but most of us used to go into Cho Lon, there was at least 15 bars on every block and you could get any amount of grog or whatever. Usually local grog.

The big deal, the Viets wanted US dollars. And we were being paid in US dollars when we first arrived, in cash. US dollars, which was highly unusual actually. And for $20 bills you could exchange it for piasta and treble or quadruple your money and a lot of people did of course. You could go to the PX and buy six cartons of cigarettes, six bottles of Johnny Walker [whisky] and the whole thing cost you less than

$20. Go to the nearest bar, plonk these two big supermarket bags on the counter, walk a couple of seats down, sit down “Wont bar me bar,” get a beer. By the time you finished the beer the two parcels would be gone and there’d be a stack of piasta that high, that you couldn’t jump over. 15,000 piasta whatever, and that would be your play money for the rest of the day. So it was good fun.

And a day off was such a relief. In town, to get away from, and you were unarmed. In civvies, unarmed. Short sleeve shirt, pair of daks, pair of shoes, and the locals all they were interested in was parting you from your money. And it was beaut. You had this stack of money and your intention was not to come back with any of it. So everything was pretty sweet. The only really amusing thing about this that

I know about was that the, if you missed the convoy that left outside the Metropole Hotel in, right in the guts of Saigon to go back to Bien Nua, if you didn’t get back you were in real trouble. But if you could get out to Tan Son Nhut, to the big airbase, there was the air taxi which used to fly you, a ten minute flight. It was an old goony bird [Dakota,DC3 transport]. It had no perspex in the windows.

It had no doors. It had no seats and it had straps like in a tram. And they reckoned the funniest sight you could see was 30 drunks in this plane that would take off, it was such a short flight wouldn’t even bother pulling the wheels up and it would get down there, land and all the drunks would sort of fall out the back. Technology being used to, yeah.

Yeah, the last plane home.

But yeah it, you could, you could have a really good time, quite safe. Actually while we were there, when we were first there, you know there was tourists coming to Saigon. I was in a bar with a couple of blokes and there was this bloke there with his wife and his kids, a Pom [English]. And he said “You Aussies have got these Americans fooled.” We found out they were there on a holiday.

They’d gone to the local travel agent in, I don’t know where, Manchester or wherever and said “We’d like an overseas holiday in the tropics.” And the bloke had said “Oh, have you ever thought about Saigon, the Paris of the orient?” “No.” “Well, cheap rates going at the moment.” He said they didn’t even realise there was a war going on. And they arrived and there’s all these aircraft with things hanging under the wings and all that sort of stuff. I mean Ton Son Nhat

looked like one of these air shows, there’s all these military aircraft and it’s the international, Saigon International Airport and there’s all these fighter bombers and helicopters and troops marching up and down. You name it, it was there. Anyway there they are in this bar, this guy, his wife and I think from memory they had a couple of teenage kids with them and they’re propped in the bar/restaurant having a meal or a drink, whatever.

So we had a yarn with them and found out that they were there as tourists and I thought gee whiz, you paid to come here, so we’re not the biggest dills. Of course I don’t think there were too many tourists going there after the first six months sort of thing, but I thought that was really strange. The real flash getting into the grog and having a wow of a time was going on R&R out of country. I went to

Bangkok. Hadn’t been to Bangkok before and there was a group of three of us and when we’re together, when we have these bi-annual meetings, when I’m there with Tonya and Bill, all you’ve got to say is “Bangkok,” and we all burst out laughing. It was such a hilarious five days we had. We had the time of our lives. I won’ say any more.

You wouldn’t believe it. You would not believe what we got up.

I wouldn’t really like to put it on tape. Talk about plunging the depths of our lusts and appetites. We had a great time. We toured

around the country too, we went up and saw the stumps of the old bridge over the River Kwai and we went to, I forget the name of the town, the largest reclining Buddha in the world. Went there and put some money into the box, just to cover yourself you know. You’ve gotta make … it’s just another deity of the one god they tell me. We went to the snake farm and had our pictures taken on a bloody great big python wrapped around your neck and all of that sort of stuff.

And we just about drank the hotel, we were in the Crown Hotel, we just about drank the bar dry. We used to almost bath in it. Great.

You’d only get a one day and you never got an over night. You’d arrive in there sort of nine o’clock in the morning and you had to be on the vehicle to leave at four in the afternoon.

Before, so if anything happened you still had a couple of hours of daylight to sort stuff out before, because when it got dark the boogie man would come out.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Nah. I think I got into Saigon three days in a year. The rest of my, I think I had ten

days all up, the rest of my time was five days in Bangkok and you had to go in, actually you got a night in Saigon because you had to go in on the morning convoy. We had a hotel, the Australian Armed Forces had a hotel, the Duk Pah in Cho Lin, right next door to Australian Military Headquarters in Saigon. You had to stay there overnight because the flight out to go on R&R used to leave at

six o’clock in the morning. So you got a freebie day in Saigon, you had an overnight, but you didn’t want to get too out there because if you missed the six o’clock flight to go on R&R in the morning they’d probably send you back to the field. So you didn’t want to miss your R&R. And then when you came back, you’d get back sort of early in the afternoon, but you couldn’t go back until - you didn’t connect up with the return truck in the afternoon, you had

to have another night in Saigon to catch the convoy back in the morning. And if you could work it you could get another day, make sure you had some sort of business to attend to in Army Headquarters, and you’d get another day in Saigon. But at that stage you were probably suffering so badly from alcoholic poisoning that you didn’t really care whether you stayed in town or went back out to Bien Nua.

We had an ARVN [South Vietnamese] Sergeant posted with us, to the company. Sergeant Nein he was supposed to be our interpreter etc but his English was pretty crook. And we were lucky that we had, we had a journo with us, his name I can’t quite remember, he was fluent in French and we used to go to him, he would speak in French to Nein, who would speak in Vietnamese to whoever we wanted to in Vietnamese and it’d come back via that route.

And we eventually ended up with a couple of Australian guys, interpreters, who would if you needed, you could get them there fairly quickly. Obviously on leave, you had a fair contact but our base area, we didn’t let Viets in there. We washed our own dishes, we washed our own clothes, all that sort of thing. The Americans had cheap labour but I mean these people must’ve been gathering information. We never let

them inside our wire. That was it, full stop. Out, if we were doing an operation in a fairly large rural town, a lot of people don’t understand, we would take the doctor, we would take the dentist, we would set up a doctor’s surgery and people would come for free and “I’ve got a boil on me leg,” or pregnant women or whatever, and they’d look after them. Dentists, and

the dentist, old – Christ what’s his name, he lives up in, lives up with my son now in Bateman’s Bay, god I forget his name off hand now – he wasn’t quite sure whether these people were really locals or the local VC or NVA coming to get their teeth fixed. And we used to provide those services. A lot of people don’t understand, those things were put on for the locals. The old hearts and minds thing.

You’d have contact with the Viets under those circumstances where you weren’t exchanging shots with them out in the scrub somewhere. There were operations where we operated in built up areas, in towns. And basically you had to be careful but, anybody who, if a Vietnamese appeared on the scene who was armed, you would “Stop right there sunshine,” and get the interpreter. “Oh, he’s an ARVN or

he’s a policeman,” or something of that nature. But you had to be very careful. In fact I reckon you had to be more careful in the towns than you had to be out in the scrub. Anybody who moved out thee, outside your perimeter was pretty much fair game. Particularly in War Zone D, even though we still followed our rule of if in doubt don’t shoot, but you’d see people

coming towards you and you could see, you can pick someone who’s holding a weapon in the ready position. The attitude of the body, the way an elbow kicks out, you know they’re armed.

Never had all that much trouble with that sort of thing.

I know that one of the programs was to try and open up the roads to get the roads operating. It was a pretty good road network but people were afraid to use it. To get the roads opened up again, and the engineers would do road rebuilding operations and we’d provide protection for them. And the Americans at one stage reckoned they were being sniped at from this big tree down the road. And the Americans had these weapons called SPATs, Self Propelling

Anti-Tank Guns, and they were a 90mm gun a pretty big gun, almost as big as that cartridge case there the gun itself, on a tractor. On a track, open just with a front plate on it and it actually had a steering wheel not sticks like a normal tracked vehicle. And these things could do 60 miles an hour and they used to roar up, they’d call these things in, they’d roar up, zit, zit, zit, bang. And this

huge bang, it’s like a big, bloody tank gun. “Did you get that sniper?” “Well the tree’s gone.” And that was the only thing that I ever recall about snipers. I don’t think that was their method of operating, I mean they weren’t into tying themselves in trees and suiciding and all that sort of stuff like you see in the old movies about the Japanese. They were there to win their war.

Infantry minor tactics, yeah.

Well yeah they could’ve. I mean the Japanese occupied Vietnam during the Second World War. I don’t know that the Vietnamese put up all that much resistance to the Japanese, it was another Asian and they kicked the

French out. And I think the Vietnamese hated the French more than they hated the Japanese. But I also think that the Japanese occupied the coast, occupied the towns, the major towns, and they didn’t really want to go into the scrub. Apart from the fact that I don’t think they had the manpower at that stage to do that. And a lot of people don’t understand. Do you know who took the surrender from the Japanese in both Hanoi and Saigon? The British Army. British parachutists.

They took the surrender of the Japanese and they actually ran the country with Ho Chi Minh for two years till the French came back. And the British, when they took the surrender, lined up all the Japanese, gave them all their rifles back and said “You are now the police force.” I thought that was pretty good. The old Brits. A lot more rat cunning than our American cousins I think.

No, no. We had operations with them. Quite often we would have Americans with us, a couple or three with us to observe our way of doing it. Sometimes we’d go out and operate with them, a couple of us would go over to their area and go out on operations with them. They’re the same as people in any other large

organisation. Some were good, some were not so good. Same as our guys. They were quite brave people in so far as, when we got shot at everybody was on their guts on the ground looking for where the shot was coming from and trying to return fire. The Americans would trade shots, they’d run forward and real cowboy sort of stuff. Some of them had quite

strange ideas about it all. You’d see them wearing cowboy six guns. And you’d say “They look pretty flash, where’d you get a hold of those?” “These were Grandpappies.” They were genuine from the old west, six guns. And I used to, they got a different approach to life and they’ve certainly got a different approach to soldiering.

Our outlook was we’re here as professional soldiers to do a job. Boom, boom. If we can have a good time and survive it all along the way, well and good. Americans had and I’m not sure what it was but a lot of people seem to think that we’re the same as Americans, badly mistaken. Badly mistaken. They’ve got a different outlook completely about life.

But most of them are good guys, good blokes. They liked us, we liked them and if we couldn’t get an item of equipment or some grog or cigarettes or whatever an American always could. They just had that over, over supply of equipment and of everything.

They even, the called America the land of the big PX. That was their slang. Taking the silver bird back to the land of the big PX. The tour’s up, going home. They were just different. There was a couple of very strange things, racism in the US army was really rife. This was in the mid-60s and you know what was happening in the United States.

Continental United States. The 173rd had a large percentage of negroes in it. There were some racial clashes and shooting at each other. It’s a bit sad but that happened on occasion that we know and I don’t know how many other occasions that they kept quiet. But the US Army had been supposedly

desegregated by Harry Truman in 1954, but here in 1965 they operated in the field as a desegregated unit. When they came back to Bien Hoa, all the coons as they called them would go down and live down at that end of the camp and all the red necks would live up that end of the camp. We thought that was really quite strange. But we would get visits from

both and we got along with all of them. It just wasn’t in our thing. We had some aborigines in the unit. We had a couple of Chinese guys in the unit. Australians. It just never worried us.

Oh okay.

I can even remember the name, Operation Silver City, because it’s on that thing somewhere. A big operation. The whole brigade in this particular area, a big search and destroy operation. It was against NVA,

North Viet Regular Army and we’d found, well actually one of our companies had found these large caches of rice. They’d built wooden platforms and sacks and sacks, hundreds of tons of rice hidden in the jungle. So our operation was, we moved in on foot, it was fairly thick scrub but rather than destroy this rice,

we wanted to get it out and redistribute it back to the local people. It had been flogged. That was the tax they’d collected in lieu of money. Anyway, we’d been going out, my particular platoon had been going out for 2 days and we’d had a contact each day going out, hitting their sentries and that. A fairly fluid amount of movement. To carry

out chainsaws and that to cut down the trees because it was, we tried getting it out. Have you ever seen these mechanical mules? It’s like a little platform kind of like a beach buggy type thing. And it can carry about half a ton and it’s just got a steering wheel on the front, there’s no seat or anything and you can actually walk behind it and steer it. And Charlie Company had been ambushed and got a couple of guys killed trying to get it out down at the track, using these mechanical mules. So they said “Okay, we’ll helicopter it out.”

And so this location’s a couple of clicks [kilometres] away from our main brigade base. So we went out on this particular day and the idea was that the helicopter was going to arrive with chainsaws so that engi – and we had an engineer splinter team with us, a section of guys who were going to go out, cut down the trees and clear a helipad and we could get this rice out. Anyway, we got there, we cleared the area and

we’re waiting for the helicopter, the helicopter arrived and it’s just off-loading the stuff and I’ve sort of walked around. I was talking to one of my blokes and the next thing, shooting starts. And I’m down on my face on the ground and I’ve been shot through the leg and there’s blood spraying everywhere. Shit, you know. So I’m firing back, I’m starting to get a bit woozy, I’m losing a lot of blood, I’m starting

to think I’m going to pass out shortly. The fellow I was with, Smithy, he got a field dressing on my leg and it stopped the blood a bit. We started running out of ammo and I’m firing an M-16 and like a dill I’m firing it in full bursts and it’s overheating and starting to jam. Anyway. And then I get hit again and I’m thinking, from behind,

and as I was saying this morning I’m thinking “They’re starting to get around behind us, this is not a real good situation”. But I’ve since as I’ve told you, found that it was one of our bullets that was dug out of me so, because I was right up forward so some of our fellows a bit further back were a bit overzealous it would appear. Anyway, the platoon commander finally got mortars in on the position in front of us.

And these guys left the scene. Luckily there was an American helicopter down at the pad, the brigade headquarters. They couldn’t get a dust off helicopter but this bloke said “I’ll go and get him.” There was still sporadic shooting going on. They came and they got me onto the helicopter and the entire platoon was there and I’m saying “I’m going home. Nya, nya, nya, nya, nya.”

“Mongrel, mongrel.” And it ended up that was our second last operation. Typical luck you know, go right through and get zapped on the second last operation. The battalion actually beat me home. I went from there to a casualty clearing station and if you’ve ever seen MASH on television [Korean War based series], just like that. There’s sort of four operations going on in the one room and while you’re lying there waiting for the Pentothal and your eyes wide and oh my god,

what are they doing to that poor bugger? Into the, and that was the 83rd Evac [Evacuation] Hospital. I was there for I s’pose a week. They put me, I had to go back into surgery a couple of times. I got, when they did this leg, some of the tendons had been ripped out so they joined them up and I ended up with drop foot. And my foot goes down like that and you just can’t, you can’t bring it up. And I’ve got a plaster cast from

my ankle to my knee. Anyway this great hulking Negro medic comes in and he’s got, you’ve seen, it looks like a circular saw to cut plaster off and actually it vibrates but I thought it was a circular saw and he said “Hi guy, I’m here to cut your plaster off. They’re going to put you back into surgery and fix up the things that’s wrong in your leg. They’re going to extend your tendons or whatever.” I said “Not with that you’re not.” He said “What do you mean?” I said

“How can you judge the depth of the plaster and not cut me.” And he’s saying “No, no.” It took about ten minutes and he’s showing me on his hand, he’s saying “Look, it vibrates.” I finally let him cut it off and off they went. So I went into surgery and came out and they put a bigger plaster on to keep my foot sticking out the way it’s supposed to and all that sort of stuff. So and, the other funny thing was the Australian Ambassador and his wife visited

me in hospital. And there was, in this huge ward, it was like a big tented ward, there was three or four Australians, I can’t remember. But one of them was in there with venereal disease. Anyway, they came and saw me after the Ambassador and his wife visited and she was an absolute darling. When they got to me I thought it was a bit strange, they looked really flushed and I’m there

with my leg up in traction and bandages all around me and the Ambassador said “It’s easy to see what’s wrong with you.” I said “Well yeah.” And I guess you can see what’s coming. And they nattered on for a while and this bloke around the corner, they’d said “Well, I can’t see any bandages, what’s wrong with you?” “Oh, I’ve got the clap.” At which point they both blushed, “Well we’ve got to see some other people further up the ward, see you later.”

So there’s a bit of humour in everything isn’t there? But I’m eternally thankful to the American evacuation system, their hospital system which I reckon you could probably not get anywhere else in the world. The level of professional surgery, given that it was done almost on a dirt floor, and their whole

medical evacuation system. You knew that if you were wounded and they could get you out before it really got bad, your chances of survival were almost 100%. From there I went into Saigon and the big hospital in Saigon, I was there for three or four weeks. They sort of like to get you cleaned up and the wound basically healed before you got home. That was the, they didn’t, it was

a bit touchy politically to have soldiers coming home sort of still bleeding. So the evacuation train was pretty slow. From there we went to Malaysia which at that stage was sort of forbidden. Malaysia wasn’t involved in the war and the hospital at Butterworth was Royal Air Force, and there was Royal Air Force doctors looking after me and Royal Australian Air Force

Nursing staff. So I was there for another couple or three weeks until finally I got down to Sydney and then down to Melbourne. And the battalion had got home about two days before me.

No, we didn’t know… No. The Americans knew that we were doing a twelve month tour but our latest experience had been two years

in Malaya or we’re thinking it could be like a WW2 situation where you’re there until the war finishes. And we really didn’t know. In fact it was just on that operation that information had started coming out that we would be relieved in June.

It was a big relief of course, to get home. The girlfriend I’d had when I went away wasn’t there when I came back, the bitch.

Not from me. But, the, we didn’t realise the depth of feeling about what was

happening here. And from Sydney to Melbourne, I’m basically dressed on crutches and hopping on, getting the ticket to hop on the plane, civilian plane to come home down to Melbourne. There’s a couple of us and we had a nurse, was actually escorting us, making sure that we were okay. And there was a little old lady there who said “Oh you two are murderers from Vietnam.”

“Bugger off little old lady,” sort of thing. And I didn’t realise until after a couple of days just how strong the feelings were. In fact for years after and I mean I was only at year three in the army and I stayed for another 17 years. For years after I’d go out socialising somewhere and people’d say “What do you do?” I’d say “I’m a public servant.” Because you’d go to a party

or something, someone would say “What do you do?” “Oh in the army.” “I s’pose you’re one of those mongrel…” you’d have somebody starting a fight with you. A bit sad but there you go. Some you win some you don’t.

Ah-huh.

Yeah. Well later on when I was at 2RTB , Puckapunyal, bashing nashos,[training national servicemen] that was my first posting when I got back. I was there for a year

and a half, we used to come down every quarter to pick up drafts from Swan St, the old engineer depot down in Swan St, Richmond and there’d be all these people outside ‘Save Our Sons’ the big banners. And they’d, you’d get heckled and jostled. The civilian police would have a guard on the gate to stop them getting in and it used to get a bit hairy.

You’d pick up a draft of conscripts and on a couple of occasions on the bus you’d be, you’d be there by yourself, the only guy in a uniform with all these conscripts on a bus that you’ve got to get from Melbourne to Pucka and it’s a two hour drive, and you’d get somebody “I don’t want to be here.” And your response would be “Well guess what sport, neither do I.” “What do you mean? It’s you army blokes.”

“No, no. It’s the government who’s conscripting you. We don’t want you people.” “What do you mean you don’t want us? Aren’t we good enough?” “Well I don’t know but I’d rather just get a bigger pay packet and get people who want to volunteer.” “Oh…” mutter, mutter, mutter. But as a general thing the conscripts weren’t bad blokes. They were easier to train than regular army people in most cases. But

yeah. And later on I wanted to go back to Vietnam, I actually went on the advisors course in 1970, had a posting order and I got an 80% hearing loss, high frequency hearing loss in one ear so I couldn’t pass to top fitness on the hearing test. I got over the gun shots and all that sort of stuff and

I was ready to go, I was two days short of going on pre-embarkation leave and this bloke on the training team died from a heart attack. He was overweight. So that caused a big flurry and they cancelled all posting orders of people who weren’t FEs [?] they used to call them. My wife was greatly relieved. I was a bit cheesed off, I’d done all these courses, I’d done a Vietnamese language course, I could speak Vietnamese then.

I’ve still got somewhere, the piece of paper, the cancellation of the posting order. It really cheesed me. However.

I was going back to command a company of indigenous troops as a Warrant Officer. Very exciting. But maybe it was for the best.

Because you never know. There was a lot of advisors. Dasher Wheatley I was talking to you about before, he was on the training team, he came down to visit us at Christmas in ’65. He was a real monster but everybody loved him. And only a week or ten days later we found out he was dead. He’d been with his mate Swanson, they used to always, they never sent you out by yourself. You were always teamed up with someone else

whether Australian or another American so at least you could back to back it if it ever got to that situation. And Swanson had been wounded so badly he was dying and Wheatley wouldn’t leave him. And he was killed. Got the VC [Victoria Cross] for it. Doesn’t do you much good when you’re dead though.

I didn’t want the hassle.

It never really worried me terribly much because I was still in the army and we talked about it openly all the time. And I think that’s, I know some people who did sort of six years, got out of the army and some of them were in a bit of a bad way and, I mean I’ve discussed this with my wife on occasion and it’s her opinion too that it’s probably lucky that I was still in the army, and you had that comfort zone if you will. Whereas a lot of blokes out, civilians, and they were ostracised. Poor buggers, the conscripts, I really feel sorry for them being drafted. But a lot of people don’t understand, no conscript was sent to Vietnam. They all volunteered. The government conscripted them but the army would say to them “do you want to go to Vietnam or do you want a posting in Australia to do out your two years?” And most of them said “I’ll go on active service. So… TAPE ENDS