Australians at War Film Archive

Okay, I was actually born in Victoria in Brighton. My parents were living at that stage in a place called Jordanville which is a suburb of Melbourne. I lived there till I was about six or seven and then my father joined the

Commonwealth Lighthouse Service so he was posted out to – the first lighthouse I went to was out at Wilsons Promontory, so we went out there by small boat and spent a couple of years there. Went to Deol Island, a couple of years there, went to Cape Everard which is now Point Hicks where Captain Cook first sighted Australia actually. From there we got sent to a place, Cape Shank Lighthouse which is actually only ten miles out of

Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula, so that’s the first time I actually went to a school as such. He got out of the lighthouse service while we were at Rosebud and I sort of did my high schooling at Rosebud High and when I was 17 I joined the Royal Australian Air Force, spent 20 years in the air force living in various states and places, overseas a couple of times, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Then I got out of the air force after 20 years and moved up to Queensland where for the first 12 months I was here I just did odd jobs like bar keeping, Jimboomba – we lived there, did bar keeping, drove a school bus for a little while, then I joined the State Government Security Service, spent 12 months in there and then I saw a job advertised for communications in the Queensland Fire Service.

I didn’t want to go back into communications again because that was my full time job in the air force but, I thought I’d give it a try so I joined the Fire Service which I’ve been in now for 15 years and that’s where I’m at now.

I was a telegraphist. Telegraphists are communications, all – does all facets

of communications including Morse code, radio telegraphy, tape relay telegraphy, cryptography, basically supporting air craft, ground troops etc. I was at a place called Phan Rang which is about halfway up between Saigon sand, the demilitarised zone as it was then, and going north on the coast.

Yeah, so basically I was communications. We were there to guide the communications for the aircraft and for the ground staff.

Well while I was there we lost the only two aircraft we lost – we had eight Canberra bombers our pilots were flying, B20s.

November I think it was, November 1970, I arrived there in June ’70. November ’70 was the first aircraft we lost, it just disappeared. We suspected it was hit with a SAM missile, surface to air missile, and disintegrated. We searched for that crew for several days, the Yanks [Americans] and the Australians. All the other aircraft searched for it. No wreckage of it was found and they still don’t know to this day what happened to the aircraft

or the crew, Herbert and Carver. Four months later we lost another aircraft which the commanding officer was actually flying. He was hit by SAM missiles, two, and bailed out, him and his navigator bailed out and they were picked up the next morning, or the next afternoon actually, the following day by the United States Rescue so they were lucky they got back. So we actually lost two aircraft and that was the most significant events in the

squadron while I was there.

I can remember, I can remember going – before we went to the lighthouse, I can actually remember Jordanville, but not much of it of course, I was only six when we left, but it was a big traumatic upheaval of the family,

my mother and father and six of us. I was the third in line, I’ve got three brothers and two sisters. And you can just imagine going on a – never been out and never seen the water before virtually and put on this fishing boat and out through, out from Port Albert out into the big ocean waves and we thought we were going to sink but anyway, we got out there to the lighthouse, arrived there sort of ten o’clock at night, pitch black with this light flashing around.

And it was just a big adventure really, you know, and then we spent the next eight to ten years on lighthouses. So it was an interesting life, very lonely life. I was lucky I had a lot of siblings. The situation there was on the lighthouse, some lighthouses there were three man stations and some were two. So other families also had children, various amounts of children. Some had none, some had

three or four, five, six, whatever. So yeah, it was a pretty lonely life but an interesting life too.

Well he – my father was in the army and he found trouble getting a job, he had no skills. He left school at 14 as a lot of them did in those days during the Depression, he left school. He joined the army and when he got out of the army, as I said, he had no skills so he just virtually did menial work. I can remember

him actually, he did various jobs, like at one stage he drove a truck for Peters Ice Cream which was pretty good because he used to bring the truck home and we used to get free ice creams occasionally. Rock-breaking and various hard tasks like that. So he saw a job advertised for a lighthouse keeper and I remember the criteria actually – he had to know how to ride a horse and row a boat were the two – I mean these days if you apply for a job, as you know, you go through all this

selection criteria. Well that was the selection criteria for that in those days, row a boat and ride a horse. Also they gave preference in that day, the government policy of ex-service personnel to get government jobs, so he had a bit of an advantage there and he applied and he got the job. There was a lot of ex-service persons in the lighthouse service, ex-army and ex-service, army, air force and navy blokes there. So it wasn’t unusual for that sort of job. But I mean

it was a very different sort of job as you can appreciate.

He served in the army. He actually joined up and got sent to Darwin. He arrived there about six days before the first attack on – which was on the 15th February ’42, he arrived there six days beforehand. He was on the ak-ak guns. They were absolutely amazed when they saw the Jap planes coming over

and they knew it was on, you know so, yeah, he spent a lot of time there during the air raids. Some people seem to think there was only one raid on Darwin but there was quite some over a couple of years there. He then joined the paratroopers. He hated Darwin mainly because of the heat, he was a red-head and he was skinny, didn’t like the heat at all, and they were sort of camped on the Darwin oval with their ack-ack [anti-aircraft guns] and tents and no air conditioning of course, extremely hot. So he,

to get out of Darwin virtually he joined the paratroopers and was sent down to the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] base at Richmond for his training so – he just finished his training actually when the Second World War ended. So their idea – actually they were briefed to – they were going to parachute them into Changi to protect the prisoners because they were afraid that the Japanese were going to execute all the prisoners in Changi before the ground troops could come and secure the place. So the idea was to put the paratroopers in

to secure the prison and hold them until the ground forces could come ashore. But the Japanese surrendered as we know from when the bombs were dropped and that never eventuated. He got out of the army not long after the war finished and from there that’s where he went.

Yes and no. Initially not a lot, he was – I think my father was embarrassed

in a way that he never left Australia because as we know a lot went to New Guinea and the 8th Division, I think it was, went to Singapore and most of them were captured there or killed. I think for years he felt he didn’t really contribute but I mean, you’ve got no choice of where you’re sent, you’re sent where you go and you’re sent there to do a job, and as I say he was on the ack-acks

in Darwin so I couldn’t see any problem with it. But I just got that impression over the years that he had some embarrassment about it, that they weren’t recognised as actually contributing to the war effort.

No not really. I never had any desire to join the army as

such and I don’t know why I wanted to join the air force. I think, one of the main things was when we were on Deol Island I remember, and they were talking about – this was our second lighthouse and this is about 1958, ’57 ’58, around there, and I remember seeing high up above aircraft flying and obviously they were flying from Melbourne over to Tasmania somewhere and I

mean it was unusual in those days, young people now’d think you were funny, but to see an aircraft actually flying, overhead, was unusual, especially when you were out, right out in the middle of Bass Strait. And I always wondered about what it’d be like to be up there so, I sort of got the idea I’d like to fly when I got older and that’s where the idea came from. My uncle was in the air force during the Second World War, on my mother’s side,

my mother’s, no it was my mother’s sister’s husband so it was my uncle by marriage, he was in the air force so he told me something about it. He didn’t actually go out of Australia with the air force but he told me things about it so I always had a preference to join the air force. I don’t think Dad’s army career had any influence over my military at all.

Just,

he was ground staff at, he used to tell me things about Laverton, mainly about the discipline and the officers, how you know, some of the funny instances that happened. I won’t say, he used to tell us how he used to wash the aircraft down and just stories like that, just general interest stories you know.

Well my mother was very young when she married and in actual fact

she was the first women in Australia to have five single births before she was 21 and so she made the papers in Melbourne and a few of the companies came good, like Persil and all those, and gave her some, you know 12 months’ supply of washing soap and nappies and that sort of thing, because there was a spread in the ‘Women’s Weekly’ and those magazines in those days. And when we went out in the lighthouse service I mean, our education was to do

correspondence which needs a lot of input from the parent. Now my mother virtually had no education at all either, well she’d had a little bit more than Dad. I think she left school about 14 or 15. So now she’s got six children on her hands, four of us I think were school age at that stage, and so she’s sort of got to be school teacher cum mother cum housewife on a lighthouse, so very unusual

occupation in those days. So yeah, she coped reasonably well. In the finish my two oldest brothers went to board with my aunty in Melbourne and went to school. So they actually went to school so I was actually the eldest at home at the time. So there was four of us and my brothers used to come home for the school holidays. So yeah, my mother was, she had a reasonably hard life bringing my family

up but did a fairly good job.

My brother Terry, he was born in – I was born in ’49 so he would’ve been born in ’46.

She was 15 when Terry was born. She had her fifth child the day before she turned 21, her sixth before she turned 22.

What do you mean?

Oh no, in those days the age of consent was 14 actually. They got married at 15. She was – I mean they were married when she had their first child. So yeah, 14 was it then and contraception wasn’t sort of

used, the pill wasn’t around then.

Yeah. My mother’s still got it I think at home. I’ve seen it in past years, I’ve seen it, every now and then I think, so I’m pretty sure she’s still got it because I have seen it. With all of us lined up and, you know, in our clothes sort of thing.

And some cases not even a year.

Like my second brother catches up with my eldest brother and my other brother catches up with me for a couple of weeks every year, and my younger sister catches up with my other sister. So the spread yeah, virtually is an average of a year but that varies slightly. Six years, six children, yeah.

I think, because of contraception in those days I think they had no choice if you know what I mean.

Yeah it was interesting. They varied a lot. I mean the first light we went to, Wilsons Promontory, you know is a promontory of course, and very barren type of place, very windy. So there was some days when you couldn’t actually go outside as children, you know, because

the wind was too strong. My father at that stage used to work – there were three light keepers and my father’s shift in those days, they had to actually wind the big – a big weight used to go down the middle of the lighthouse to actually turn the light, I mean it was all mechanical in those days. So every two hours this light had to be wound up, the light, so there was a shift and he used to do the ‘doggo’ [dog] shift, so to speak, from 2 o’clock in the morning till 6 in the morning so he used

to sleep during the day, well he used to do other work during the day and then he’d come home and have his sleep and front up again for work. Now that’s seven days a week we’re talking about, you don’t get a day off, naturally, because the light goes every night. So the three keepers did the three shifts and he did the doggo shift. So as far as we were concerned, because I had so many siblings we could play together or whatever. There was a lot of wildlife and heaps of

snakes, tiger snakes and that sort of thing, so you had to be a bit careful, but wombats, kangaroos and heaps of those. So we found things to do. There was fishing and exploring. So we used to roll up socks and kick them around as footies and that type of thing. It’s a place now, they’ve got a caretaker out there and there’s a lot of hikers come out there. Well in those days we used to get hikers out as well too but not very many. On weekends you’d get a couple of hikers so you would see other

people. We had a fishing boat used to come in, well supposedly come in every fortnight to bring our supplies in, food supplies. Depend on whether that used to happen. So sometimes we would go without supplies. I mean my mother of course used to stock up the pantry with as much stuff as she could but fresh food was the main problem, fresh bread, well my mother used to bake her own bread actually but fresh vegetables, fruit, that type of thing was the main

hassle. So they vary. Then we went to Deol Island which was an island out in the middle of Bass Strait, seven mile by three mile, so completely different, you know, a large island with two families living on the island. The fishing was good, the swimming was good. We had three beautiful beaches to ourselves although the Victorian waters were cold of course but I mean kids, you don’t worry about that too much, so it was interesting. My brother and I, I remember, this was when my two eldest brothers they went away to school then to Melbourne,

and my younger brother and myself we used to, we had a certain amount of school work to get done in a fortnight so we used to race through that in three days. We’d get up a 6 o’clock in the morning and work on that till 6 at night and do that for two or three days and then we’d take a few days off. And that was alright by my mother as long as we did our fortnight’s work, so yeah. I mean the life varied but it was more exploring and running around. Lot of fishing boats

used to come into, a lot of crayfishing boats and shark boats used to come into Deol Island, so we used to meet people occasionally, they used to drop off fish and crayfish to the light keepers. That was particularly interesting there actually because the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, a lot of the yachts on the way back when they were returning from Hobart after the race used to call in there. And we finished up forming our own cricket club called the Deol Island Cricket Club

which was of course my old man and the other light keeper and us virtually was the cricket, and we used to play the Sydney to Hobart Yachties on the way back from Hobart so it was quite an interesting life, yeah.

Well people rave today about whale watching but that was just the normal everyday, well not everyday occurrence but during the season

whales, I remember seeing the first, the first time I ever saw a whale born, a baby whale just over from the cliff top at the lighthouse just watching the whales and my father called us out and said, “Have a look at this, there’s a whale just been born.” A little baby whale. So interesting things like that. Killer whales attacking other whales that was very interesting. Migration, I’ll never forget the migration of the mutton bird, used to fly past migrating back to, they

used to go out and nest on the islands in Bass Strait and they would fly past. And for days it would just be a black cloud of birds flying past the lighthouse from between the light and the sea, and just a cloud, just unbelievable, never seen so many birds in all your life, and just going back to nest and then after the season had finished they’d fly back again. I think they go up to Japan, somewhere up that way, Manchuria. And every year they do

that migration and that was fascinating. As I said the fishing was good, there were a lot of fishing boats just come in and drop fish off for us. So, yeah.

I wouldn’t see unusual, just very playful, the same as dolphins. You’d see a lot of dolphins. The migration of whales, you know every year they’d go past and go up north which they do

and, yeah, that was quite interesting.

On one of the lights we had a beaching, we just come across it. We used to swim at this particular beach that was on Cape Everard, that’s Point Hicks now, that’s on the east side of Victoria going up towards Gabo Island and the border. We went down there one day and there was, I don’t know, there wasn’t

that many, probably 20, 25 whales had beached themselves and they were all dead at that stage. They may have been there a couple of days so yeah.

Well you can’t do anything, there was only the light keepers there so, they were virtually, the bodies were left there to rot.

Well several months. I mean first couple of weeks wasn’t too good but I mean

we just avoided that place. There were heaps of other places you’d go to swim so you’d just avoid where the carcases were, you know. That was our favourite beach but yeah, I mean we couldn’t do anything about it then.

Well the education system was set up as a sort of school of air, the school of air system. I used

to only talk to my teacher once a week on the radio. I can’t remember but it was only for half an hour once a week on the radio and other than that the teacher used to send out what they call a set of work, in other words they’d send it out with a fishing boat for each of us and you’d get a certain amount of work to do and, like spelling lists and multiplication, and arithmetic and reading and all that, and art and what have you, and then you used to send it back in.

That would be corrected by your teacher in Melbourne, Fitzroy it was actually, be corrected by the teacher and she would send it back out a couple of weeks later, with other work for you to do, marked, and so you’d see how you go. I only ever, in the time I did correspondence I only ever met my teacher once so that was interesting. I did correspondence for probably six years, and in that time I met my teacher once when my father used to get six weeks’

holiday a year and generally we used to go to Melbourne of course because that’s where our relatives were. So we’d go off the light, travel to Melbourne, they’d get a relief keeper out to the lighthouse. We’d go to Melbourne and spend six weeks in Melbourne and my mother took us into the education, School of the Air education place, in Fitzroy at the time, and I met my teacher for the first time and only time. So yeah that was a bit different. You couldn’t get disciplined, well you got disciplined, that was

by your parents not by your teacher.

Oh exciting. Fantastic because there we were out in this place with nothing around, I mean shops, just thinking, other children didn’t appreciate it but we couldn’t walk down the shop because there was no shop. There was no organised sport, that was one thing we missed, football teams, cricket teams.

Being able to just go down the shop, go and have a ride on the bus or the tram. They used to think we were mad you know ‘cause we just wanted to go for a ride on the train, we didn’t want to go anywhere, just to get on a train. And I remember on one of the holidays we went to Melbourne and we actually, my brother and I went to the state school and we used to hang over the fence, you know, watching the kids play in the playground. And one of the teachers actually saw us and said you know, “What are you doing?

Why aren’t you at school?” and we told him what the situation was. And they said, “Would you like to come and have a look?” and so we actually spent a couple of weeks at the school. This is on holidays so, you know, I mean normally kids’d say, “What? You’re mad.” But all we wanted to do was go and play with the other kids and be normal and go to a normal school like normal kids and it was just interesting to us you know. So yeah, that was the type of thing.

One of the drawbacks was that because we were so isolated out on the lighthouses is that we’d catch every cold or anything that was going around, we would catch it because no immunity, not playing with other kids all the time and all that. So we used to invariably all get colds and flus and whatever while we were away. I remember my mother was petrified of us catching polio because in those days polio was around. And when they first bought out injections and the Sabine [vaccine]

she made sure we were first in line to get those because, petrified of us going to Melbourne and having no immunity and getting polio. So you had to be careful with kids I suppose like that. I mean we were healthy too because we were out in the fresh air all the time. We were healthy on the islands and then we’d get crook and then we’d come back out again after the holiday and be fine again. So it had its drawbacks but it was a very exciting time to go on holidays.

Well it was harsh. The weather, weather-wise it was harsh because you used to have horrific winds. I can remember on Deol Island we actually lived in the middle of the island and the houses were interesting because they were actually, the walls were three foot thick stone built by convicts back in the eighteen hundreds. Most of the lighthouses around the Victorian

Tasmanian coast were built by convicts and the actual, the lighthouses themselves were nine foot thick walls, if you can imagine that, and you actually walked in a wall to go inside, and the houses were three foot thick stone. And I can remember storms we had one on Winston we had, which blew the windows in. So I remember one particular night that – woke up and the windows had – like an explosion and the wind was that strong that it blew the windows in and Mum and Dad got us all in

the middle of the house in one room and, that’s where we spent the night because it was like – I mean we didn’t have cyclones because it was so far south but the wind was that strong it was like a cyclone. So yeah, the weather was horrific but I mean we used to have nice summers out there as well, beautiful beaches all to ourselves. So yeah, it had its advantages as well.

I would say so. It’s hard to say because I was never brought up with any other family so I don’t really know, but we remained very close until we all sort of all got families and that and got married and now I’m very close to my oldest brother. My other two brothers live in Melbourne although I still keep in contact with them. One of my sisters lives up here. My other sister, younger sister,

she lives in Melbourne, but I mean we still, every time we go to Melbourne I still see her. My parents live here. So yeah we, I suppose, I mean you’re very close because you are so isolated and that’s who you got to play with is your siblings you know. So possibly it’s different but, you know, I don’t really know because that was the family I was brought up in.

Okay,

we went to the Cape Everard and then we went to Cape Shank which as I said was about ten miles out of Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula. That was where I first went to school, which was Rosebud High School. Well actually I did six weeks at primary school before I went to high school but I was that far in front, I found, the education was no problem really. I found I was about six

months in front of the, where the six grade was and I sort of didn’t have to do much in the time I did go to primary school. Then I went to high school and they graded the forms in those days, there was four form ones and I was put in the higher form, the highest, the professional type thing when you do your maths and your physics, where you build up to that, but yeah, my education was no problem, I was right up there.

That was interesting though going to school for the first time after isolation because interaction with other children, you sort of weren’t used to that, you got into a lot of fights initially, yeah, but it was good though because I took up the football. I loved the football and the cricket and so we got involved in the district. Me old man, my father, started coaching football and he was still playing cricket

so I remember at one stage there the local cricket side, at one stage the five of us, my father and my three brothers and myself played in the one team. So out of the 11 starters we had five of the side used to play. So one of us used to have to sit with the scorer when we were batting to let him know who was who, to make sure the right person was allocated with the right score if you know what I mean. So it was good, we got involved in the local community and the sport.

Then my father, they said, the lighthouse service said to him, “You’re going to get posted out again to remote places.” Well, my mother for sure had had enough of being out there, she was enjoying life where we were at school, she didn’t have to worry about teaching any more. No way in the world did she want to go out. My father had had enough, he didn’t really want to go out to remote places again, and we were at high school at that stage, you can’t go dragging kids out of high school and putting them out on an island again

and expect to teach them high school. As I said, my parents didn’t have much education so as we were starting to get up in forms they were lost completely about what we were doing. So that was it, he had to get out. And so he just, he became the local milkman and he worked as a powder monkey at the abattoirs, not the abattoirs, the mining place, the quarry where they used to mine, I don’t know what they used to mine, some sort of rock, and dynamite

sort of thing. So yeah, got our lighthouse service and we actually moved into Rosebud and we lived there ‘cause we were tied up with the local football team and cricket teams and whatever. So from there I virtually, when I left school, that’s when I joined the air force from, there virtually.

It’s hard to say. I don’t really know. Most of them were my fault

because I thought I was, I don’t know what it was. I think one of the problems, because my two elder brothers were away at school most of the time, they only came home on holidays, I was the boss of the kids so to speak. So you know, I bossed them around and I organised the games and they did what I said to them if you know what I mean. And then I get to high school

and you can’t sort of boss, you can’t sort of take over and start bossing kids around. So I think a lot of it was over that, where I’d want to be in charge again and they weren’t going to wear that of course. ‘Who was this young upstart, telling us what to do?’ So yeah, I had to work things out in a way that, you don’t benefit by getting into fights over it. So I got a lot of friends out of school, don’t get me wrong, I mean after a while

I settled down, it took me, it probably took six months to settle down but after that I was fine you know. I rarely got into fights after, say, third form, I grew up a bit and got a bit mature, so. Yes it was that initial thing, after coming from isolation I suspect.

Actually it was fantastic. Everyone talks about it but it was, I mean we thoroughly

enjoyed it. By that stage of course my two brothers were back home so there was four of us, four brothers and all teenagers, one year apart. We had some great times. You know the local dances, we used to go to the local dance and movies. There was beautiful beaches there you know and Christmas time Rosebud’s population used to swell because of the heap of people who would come and have their annual holidays down at Rosebud. Rosebud,

Dromana, all along the foreshore there and so there was plenty of teenage girls and yeah, it was a great time, great music and we thoroughly enjoyed it. My family never had, we never used to have any money but we all used to work during the holidays, we all had jobs so we used to support ourselves virtually on the holidays, used to actually help with our schooling so we’d give our mother most of

our money, she used to give us an allowance every week. All of us had jobs, like market gardens, we used to work at a market garden. I used to work in the post office, local post office. One of my brothers worked in the milk bar so we all had, yeah, summer holiday jobs. But when we weren’t working we enjoyed ourselves and, yeah. So yeah we had a great, have great memories of teenage years with the sport and with my brothers and friends.

My parents were and still are staunch Labor supporters, took a very big interest in politics, so that sort of rubbed off on all of us so we all take an interest in politics. My grandfather on my mother’s side, he was a very staunch apparently Labor, he

was actually at Gallipoli, my grandfather, so we’ve got a military history. He was wounded at Gallipoli and I can remember him, he actually died before, just before we went out on the lighthouse service, but my mother would say things like, “Oh if your grandfather could see what was going on he’d turn in his grave.” The old story, he’d turn in his grave if he could see what the Liberals were doing and all this. I remember we were in the area when actually Holt Harold Holt Australian Prime Minister 1966-1967] went missing at Portsea

and on that day, it was just an unbelievable day because the police and sirens and that going down the highway, going towards Portsea, and the media. The papers and the TV people came from everywhere so the place was inundated with people you know. So we took a big interest in politics, I still do.

They didn’t like him so much. I remember, actually when I got posted to Vietnam, I mean I was in the permanent air force, I’d joined up, I wasn’t a Nasho [National Service conscript], because my mother blamed Menzies for getting us into the Vietnam war, he had gone by the time I went to Vietnam. But she said, ‘If I get killed in Vietnam she’s going to go and kill Menzies. She’s going to go and

shoot him,’ so I’ll never forget it. “I’m going to shoot that Menzies.” It was his fault if I got killed you know. Although I was a volunteer, I mean I joined the permanent air force.

They were union, believed very strongly in unions but they were never a member of the Labor Party.

I don’t think my father was in a union because he did odd jobs, I think he would’ve been in a union if it had’ve been that situation but he never, I can’t remember him being in a union. He would’ve been, he was a unionist and so was my mother, they were very staunch Labor and believed in that type of thing but they weren’t actually members of the Labor Party, no.

Well yeah,

I mean they, it didn’t matter what the Liberals did, they were wrong, they were that type of, you wouldn’t call them swinging voters if you know what I mean. I mean you could, the Labor Party could count on their vote, they wouldn’t be the type of people they’d be trying to target to, for their vote because they knew it was there anyway so it didn’t really matter. So yeah, I mean, I can’t remember my parents ever having a good thing to say about any Liberal,

maybe John Gorton was the only one they sort of didn’t mind a little bit. But yeah, he was still a Liberal.

Well our favourites of course were Johnny O’Keefe and Elvis and the Beatles and all those type. I remember my brother and I saved up for, my eldest brother,

Terry, and I saved up and the first LP [long playing record] we ever bought was ‘The Wild One’ by Johnny O’Keefe and I’ve actually still got it. I mean yeah, all those great rock and roll, Chuck Berry and people like Ricky Nelson, Buddy Holly, all the great sixties’ singers.

I’ll never forget when Elvis first started,

my father was a typical father and said, “You know this bloke can’t sing and look at the way he carries on, he should be banned.” And exactly what I said, I can remember when my kids were teenagers and all that yelling and screaming music came out and I used to say, “This is just garbage, it’s not even music, you can’t understand what they’re singing.” So I think typical parents it was, yeah.

The Beatles: when the Beatles came out, “Look at their long hair, they’re bloody louts and they shouldn’t be allowed to get around like that,” and you know. After a while they come around and they appreciate the music. I actually always liked my parents’ music too and my children actually love the sixties. Actually my wife and I are going down tonight to see the Bachelors at Twin Towns and last time we went my daughter and second son wanted to come with us,

they wanted to come and see the Bachelors and a lot of young people would never have heard of the Bachelors you know. Yeah, so they were brought up with the sixties music ‘cause I kept playing it through the seventies and eighties of course, and they like it too.

Well I liked, my father’s favourite was Al Jolson and I quite liked him, and Frank Sinatra, although Frank Sinatra’s sort of into our era as well but, yeah, that sort

of era, Dean Martin. Not so much of the real old ones but the modern old ones if you know what I mean because they started with the jitterbug and pre-rock and roll so they had some reasonably good music as well.

Oh just unbelievable ‘cause

to us it was a lot of money. I remember we used to work in a market garden, picking up potatoes, I mean in those days it was all manual so you’d be picking up potatoes, picking up tomatoes all day, throwing cabbages on trucks and we would work all day for $2. So you’d do an eight hour day, eight to ten hour day, depending on how much had to be done, for $2, so to buy actually, the Johnny O’Keefe album cost us

$3, I think. Or it was 30 bob [30 shillings] actually because it was pre decimal currency, pre-’66. So yeah, it was a fair bit of money for us to, I mean we outlaid half a day to a day’s wages to buy an LP. So yeah, to us, to our wages, we used to get $2 for working in the market garden. We used to work every weekend actually. I mean we’d go to school all week, play footy on Saturdays. I used to work in the

post office Saturday morning, play footy Saturday afternoons, work in the market gardens Sunday and back to school on Monday so we virtually didn’t have a lot of leisure time. So we appreciated our money because we earned it, we worked for it you know.

Yeah, the sixties was a terrific era. The fashions

were, you know when the Beatles came out, I always hated the long hair, I never wanted to grow the long hair but some people started doing that. We used to wear the flare pants and go to the rock and roll and used to have side-boards down here and Brylcreem, smother your hair in Brylcreem, it’d be all greasy. Take the girls to the drive in and they wouldn’t want to rub their hands through your hair would they? So yeah, we enjoyed it but we didn’t see how funny the

fashions were. But I mean it’s the same with any era, fashions, people like it and other people hate it. I mean I can remember wearing flares even when I got posted in Butterworth in Malaysia, used to wear our flares around and they’d be, you know, big long flares out here and they’d look ridiculous. But that was the fashion so you wore it. Safari suits, I wore safari suits you know, that was later on of course, not in the sixties. But yeah the sixties, the old side-boards,

burns, and the Brylcreem in the hair, it was cool. The old cars I owned, the first car I had was an Austin A40 and then I had the old FE Holden so that was the go in those days, everyone had the old Ford or the old Holden.

Oh quite well, yeah. If you had a car you were sort of halfway there. Yeah it was good.

Well sort of, because you were at high school you know a lot of girls anyway so, and then you hang around in groups. It wasn’t virtually, it wasn’t more asking them out it was more actually going out in groups. Although from time to time you’d take one to a drive-in or a dance or whatever. I mean you’d meet them at dances too.

At Rosebud, as I said, because it was a holiday destination you used to get a lot of influx from the big city girls, so that was good. It used to make the locals jealous but it used to work the other way as well I might add because the local girls had the influx of city boys, so, there was a bit of rivalry there. I can remember there was a lot of strife raised about, over the time when, I don’t know whether you’ll remember the Sharpie

movement. There was the Sharpie movement, and the Jazzers and the Rockers and there was fights and whatever. If a Sharpie gang came down from Melbourne and there was blues with the local boys because, you know, these out of towners trying to come in and take over our town. So it was a bit, it wasn’t gang warfare but still there was fights, you know, because of the locals against the outsiders.

The Sharpies were a movement where they used to do the Sharpie Break [dance] and they used to all wear maroon, they used to all dress up in maroon, actually similar to this colour. They’d wear maroon shirts, maroon pants, maroon shoes, everything was maroon. And the whole lot of them’d wear that and that’s how they’d go around. And they all had very short cuts, similar to like what a lot of young people today, they wear the short hair cuts but it was called the Sharpie movement and actually my brother and I

had run-ins over it because he was a Sharpie, Terry. And so we didn’t see eye to eye there because I was one of the old sixties rockers or fifties, sixties cum rocker so, we didn’t see eye to eye on that.

Well it was just a club get together, belong to something, I suppose.

Not really. They used to have the odd songs but not a musical movement as such. People in Melbourne’d remember, I don’t know if they went to Sydney or not but it was a big movement in Melbourne, the Sharpies, at the time.

I don’t know, I don’t know where that came from but that was their colour, they wear – all maroon, that was it.

No, they come to cause trouble, yeah, most of the time. There was the local Sharpies as well which my brother was one of them. That was more, he got into it more when he moved up to Melbourne to work, when he left school. So he got into it there and then he’d sort of bring it back when he came home on weekends or whatever, or come down and play footy or whatever and so, yeah, he’d bring it back then.

Yes.

No I don’t think so. You were just part of the Sharpie group you know. They used to do what they call the Sharpie Break which is the predecessor to what, the Madison or whatever you call it, The Madison or boot scoot. It was a line up Sharpie Break type.

And then they used to have this dance where a couple used to do it and you used to do a certain, it was like a slow rock and roll but, yeah, it was a different, different type of dance.

No they didn’t wear the maroon, they wore, I can’t really, they used to wear skirts and that. There wasn’t strict dress rules for them as

like the blokes. They didn’t wear maroon all the time or anything like that. But they used to wear skirts and no specific uniform for them from what I can remember.

Yeah, Rockers and Jazzers. We used to hate the Jazzers because they were in la-la land, we thought. They used to like the jazz music, the old – we used to say it had no beat and no rhythm to it.

It was just all jumbled up and made up as they went along, that’s what we thought. So yeah, we used to have the Jazzers and we used to have the jazz in town, the local dance, we used to have the rock dance and the jazz dance and after the dance was finished there might be a meeting of the groups, have a bit of a barney, you know.

No, their main thing was long hair. They used to wear the old wavy long hair. Not like Beatles type, that was a bit different,

but the long hair and the, you know Jazzers, it’s hard to describe. Not specifically dance dress, as such, where the rockers had the pointy shoes and the, wear the pointy shoes and the side boards and, you know, the brushed back hair with Brylcreem you know.

Oh just a local, it was only every Friday night or Saturday night. I remember my mother used to give us so much money to get into the dance and so we used to go down, three of us used to go mainly, my eldest brother, my younger brother and myself. My second brother used to be a little bit

different, didn’t particularly like going to those type of things. So the three of us used to go down and with the money we’d buy a tall bottle of beer each and we’d go and sit on the beach and drink one bottle of beer, that’d be it, and then we’d climb over the back fence into the dance, over the barbed wire, and we used to do that and one bottle of beer’d give you a good feeling, send you a bit you know, so yeah.

Oh rock and roll. Well rock and roll, that was the days that started, where the separation came, where you used to dance apart, so when bopping came in, I suppose you could call it, I don’t know what you’d call it. Yeah, where separation of the sexes came.

Yeah, yeah well the twist went through that era. That was a slight deviation. So, yeah, we used to do the twist when it came out, Chubby Checker. But that was sort of, it was never a big movement in Australia, the twist, and then they used to come up with, various other things used to come in, the ‘mashed potato’ and these funny variations of things used to come in. But they’d only last, they’d be a flash in the pan, and then

came the disco go-go type stuff. The local girls used to get up and do the, maybe the go-go girls on the stage you know. So that was then that first started. It didn’t matter where you went you had girls up on stage doing go-go.

Oh just skirts and yeah it was quite good.

Well it was hard back in those days, like any era I think, where getting the knock-back is the frightening thing. You know, you ask a girl and she says, “Oh no.” So that was always, you were always a bit tentative. But we knew a lot of the girls, the local girls, so we didn’t have a lot of problems there.

Not really. Only the rivalry between the locals and the city-ites but not in the dresses or the dances or things because we weren’t that far from Melbourne anyway. I mean these days I think people would drive from Rosebud to work there because of all the freeways. But sixty miles, I think, we were from Melbourne so the trends used to, we used to get the trends come down anyway so it didn’t really matter,

there wasn’t a big difference.

We didn’t have TV for years and years because – I remember when TV first came in, what, ’56 or ’58 or around there wasn’t it? We didn’t have a TV until we went to Cape Shank which was the last lighthouse we were on which is the one ten mile out of Rosebud,

but the reception was still atrocious because the signal used to come from Melbourne and so I can remember sitting there watching TV of a night time with the family and there’d be that much snow that the picture’d be fading in and out and you virtually couldn’t see it or hear it, the sound’d be going in and out. So why, I mean you wouldn’t do it these days but we used to sit there and watch a movie like that

and you’d be losing five minutes every ten out of the movie so it was ridiculous really. So no, TV wasn’t a big thing, music was the thing.

Well when we were living in Rosebud we had a TV but again the reception wasn’t terrific. And I can remember watching things like ‘Six O’clock Rock’, I mean we used to religiously watch the music things like young people do,

but otherwise I wasn’t that interested in world affairs at that stage. I used to take note of the big events but not the nitty gritty. Politics I used to take notice of, you know, the big events, so I didn’t watch a lot of news or current affairs like I do now. But yeah, no it’d be mainly music and movies or whatever. But I mean we had plenty to do in a place like that anyway with all our sport and work, and schooling

and the beaches and things. We were outdoor kids really, well we used to be outdoors see.

My mother actually worked at the Drama – at that stage it was the Rosebud Telephone Exchange.

In those days it was the old plug in, ring up, cord plug in, put you through to the number, you know, and then if you wanted to ring Melbourne you’d have to go through the exchange and they’d put you through. So she first heard about it because naturally it was a big thing. And then the police started coming from everywhere down from Melbourne and whatever, and search teams, and so she, I think I was at home. she rang up or she might have come home and said that, “Holt’s disappeared and they’re looking for him at Portsea.”

Yeah we were at Cape Shank at the time, out at the lighthouse and I think she came home, she’d knocked off at two or three in the afternoon or something and come home and told us. As far as I remember that’s how we found out about it. But it went on for a week, a couple of weeks, searching for him and media all over the place.

Well only that – what went around,

that the Russians had come in with a submarine and taken him away. They were amazed they couldn’t find a body for a start although Cape – where we were was not far around the coast from where he disappeared. We were right on that coast as well. And we actually had people disappear off the rocks there, fishermen mainly, you know, where the waves come in and wash them off. We had a couple of traumatic events there where

one particular, there was three fishermen down and one bloke’s disappeared from the middle of them. They’ve spread out fifty yards apart or whatever and he’s just disappeared, the other two have just noticed him gone. There was two of their wives were with them I think, it was two. Anyway one of them’s come up to our house and said, “Oh my husband’s disappeared,” and so we rang the police and we went out and helped search for them.

They never found him, never found a body, never found anything. There’s another one where a bloke had fallen off one of the cliffs there and we went down, my brother and myself, and actually held him. The tide was coming in and we actually held him on the rocks until the police and the ambulance got there ‘cause they had to come from Rosebud which was ten mile away, so it took a little bit of time. Then we had to, my other brother showed the ambulance bloke how to get around there because we knew the rocks and the cliff like the back of our hand you know, we were climbing around them all the time, so we actually took them around and

they winched this bloke up the cliff. So you know, there were a couple of events like that which you forget about. I remember my mother sent – funny things that happen – my mother sent one of our real old rugs or something to put around this bloke and we got this back in a parcel a couple of months later, dry cleaned. I mean it was a scruffy old rug, it was worth nothing and this lady, the mother

of this, he was in his twenties or something, but the mother had parcelled this up, well, got it dry cleaned, parcelled it up and sent it back with a thank you note about helping her son out.

Oh yeah, we knew all that. I mean because we were brought up on light houses we were always warned about it. My parents were water-wise like that and

so were we. We got ourselves in some situations at times on cliffs which I’d never, ever go near ever again. It frightens me to think now some of the places we used to climb down and up but I mean, kids are kids, when you’re a kid you do it, you know. No fear, type of thing. But we respected, we saw what happened. We had people disappear so you see what happens so, yeah, we knew all about how you get yourself in strife around the sea.

Yeah, it wasn’t unusual but his was a bit different because he was out actually skin diving at the time so he was slightly different to the ones we’d seen going fishing off the rocks and just disappearing. But we weren’t surprised when they didn’t find a body because we’d seen that happen. And you know, obviously the sea, that takes the body out or a shark gets it or whatever happens. Yeah, so we weren’t surprised

when there was no body found and, as I said, there were the theories that went around about the Russian sub coming and taking him away. Who’d want to take Holt away, fair dinkum?

Not that one but others, yeah where fishermen’d go disappearing, we’d sort of scour around the cliff faces and rocks so we’d help, yeah.

Not a lot. Yeah, I didn’t take a lot of notice of that sort of thing until I, when I joined the air force and sort of the Yanks were coming out with the domino theory about, ‘The Russians are trying to take over the world,’ and that type of thing but again I wasn’t

really into it, didn’t take too much notice of it until I started getting involved myself. And then the moratorium marches started up and when LBJ [Lyndon B Johnson, American President, 1963-1969] came out and, ‘We’ll go all the way with LBJ,’ and that type of thing went around Melbourne especially and the moratorium started up where you had a big conflict, you had the two sides really of people who wanted us, didn’t want us to go to Vietnam for a start

and then wanted us and then the people who sort of supported the Americans and, yeah, but Communism itself – I was like everybody else I suppose. They told you it was evil so it was evil, you know, but you learnt later it’s another political system, you know.

Only the Petrov Affair when, you know, [Robert] Menzies used that to great political advantage at the time because his popularity was slipping. And then Petrov, I mean it was so dramatic with Petrov – what do you call it? – came over to our side, can’t

remember the term for it, where you swap sides you know. Asylum, political asylum, you know, took asylum and then his wife, and the two Russians trying to take his wife out of the country and actually got to Darwin and taken her back and, so yeah, that was a big thing at the time and Menzies used that to every political advantage he could to get re-elected so, yeah, so …

Oh you know, about the Russians, yeah, this is what they’re like.

You know, they’re dead-set dangerous. It was the old Russians under the bed thing. McCarthyism was going in America around the same sort of time where they were accusing people of being members of the Communist Party which wasn’t illegal. But if you were you know, I mean Hollywood copped it. They had the big black list there where they stopped people from actually working because they were, they’d been to a meeting or something, you know, where it was perceived to be a Communist meeting. So, yeah,

it was the big scare was on. ‘The Russians are bad and we’re good.’

I think they saw it for what it was. A political ploy to, I don’t know, keeping people in line.

For the government of the day to say, ‘Look what we’re doing, we’re fighting Communism. We’re not going to let it take over the world. We’re going to stop it and so we’re the best to rule you,’ and all this type of thing. I mean it’s gone for years with different types of things. But there they were using Communism in those days as their political football to stay in power like they do now.

I always wanted to, well I, it’s like a lot of young people, boys I suppose, as I wanted to be a pilot initially so the air force was the avenue to that. But at one stage there I actually went and enquired about joining the Fleet Air Arm, that stage where you had a carrier

the Melbourne, and, so I went up to do that. And I did actually, I did the tests up at the recruiting centre in St Kilda Road and the officer interviewed me after the test and said, “You need to get some more education, you just haven’t got the educational standards yet. So you’d better get back to school and get your education and come back in a couple of years.” I said, “Well I can’t really because I’ve got to leave school and get out and work ‘cause my parents can’t afford

to keep me at school too long. Is there any other way of doing it?” And he said, “No, that’s it.” So yes, then I did, I did fifth form, called ‘Victoria Leaving’ in those days, and left school and I went actually to work up in Melbourne, went to stay with my brother and my brother was living with my aunty in Box Hill, my mother’s sister, working at Coles’ head office in Burke Street in the city,

so through him I virtually got a job there and, but it was a mundane type of job. The old story, you started at the bottom, the mail boy, you do the mail and then you do the filing and I hated it, I absolutely hated it. I didn’t like living with at me aunty’s place for a starter and I didn’t like the job and I thought, “There’s got to be something better to do than this.” So then I inquired about joining the air force, not as a pilot but I thought, ‘If I get in the air force

then the avenues are there to later on, to maybe do air crew.’ I’d started doing night school again to further my education, which I had trouble with, the night school of actually settling down and doing it, but I was doing it. But yes, I enquired about joining the air force and did the test to do that and I didn’t hear from them for quite some time. I finished up leaving Coles

because I’d had enough of that and I actually went back to Rosebud and started living at home and I was just working for a bloke who owned the local caravan park and I was just doing rouseabout work for him, cutting trees down and clearing land and digging up things and whatever, so it was just menial work. I finished up ringing up the recruiting centre and said, “I applied,” this must’ve been three months later or so,

“I applied. You know what’s the story?” and they said, “Oh well yeah, we’ll get you in.” I got the impression, and years later it was the same, they see how keen you are, so they don’t actually contact you, they wait till you contact them to see if you’re keen to actually join up. So then I did hear from them. They said, “Oh here’s a starting date.” And that’s how I got in the air force.

Yeah there was a lot of pressure there because my parents, they couldn’t afford to keep, at that stage there, my parents virtually had six of us at high school. My eldest brother had left then, he had gone to Melbourne to work. My second eldest brother, he wanted to do his, he wanted to keep going with his schooling and so, because he wanted to become a teacher so he had to do his form six so they pushed him through. I mean all this

supposedly free education, it wasn’t because I mean you had to pay for books and we all had to have school uniforms, that was all hand-me-downs. Being third along I used to get the third hand down and I was sorry for my younger brother because he’d get the fourth hand down and all this sort of thing. So it was all hand-me-down stuff but I mean it still cost money for books and what-have-you, lunches and, you know, general things for school, so the pressure was on because my parents couldn’t afford to

keep us there. My second brother, as I said, he wanted to do his matriculation so he could go to teachers’ college, which he did, and he was a teacher all his life, he’s only just retired actually, at the end of last year he retired. So yeah, the pressure was on. “We can’t afford to keep you there.” I mean the two younger sisters were in high school plus me younger brother, he was at high school as well. I wasn’t particularly over worried about keeping going

at school I might add. I mean I, I didn’t particularly like school. I didn’t like the schooling part, I liked the sport part. And I didn’t particularly like the schooling part anyway.

Well living at my aunty’s place, she had a bungalow out the back, my brother and I used to live in that. My aunty’s husband was an

alcoholic so it wasn’t a good life. He wasn’t an abusive alcoholic but because of the tension all the time, years before that he’d been locked up in Coburg for stealing some money. He was actually a bank teller and they reckon he was very talented, he was the most intelligent man I ever come across, this bloke, he could sit in front of the TV and watch the quiz shows and answer every question, you know,

but because he’d gone to jail and he couldn’t get a job suitable in those days to his intellect he hit the booze. It finished up killing him so, sclerosis of the liver he died of. So the tension was there. He always had a job but it’d be a menial sort of job like a cleaner or storeman, well below his intellect where he had people telling him what to do who were, you know, who he could buy and sell as far as knowledge’d go,

and so he used to hate it. So he’d work till pay day and get his pay and out he’d go and disappear for a week, you know, on the booze, and finish up rolling back later at night with a taxi fare up and not being able to pay it and, you know, and disgraceful way, would have sold his overcoat and all this sort of stuff to get some more money. So those sort of things used to go on so I used to hate living there. They had three children

so they were there as well so it wasn’t a very good environment to be living at. Plus I didn’t like the job at Coles [supermarket] so it was a complete drain. I used to go home most weekends because, simply because of that situation, yeah.

Yeah he didn’t particularly like it either. He had a lot more friends up there than I did, you know, he was in with the Sharpie business so he was sort of, yeah, it didn’t worry him as much.

He stuck that out for quite some, for probably two years I think before he ever moved out into his own unit. So yeah, it didn’t seem to worry him as much as it worried me, I had to get out of there so I did.

Just mainly report to the recruiting office, I had to go down there and they put your through all this

psychology and whatever tests plus maths test and all that sort of stuff. Even in those days it wasn’t that easy to get in because I remember the day I went for me test there was 30 or something that actually went and there was only two of us got in. So it was still fairly, reasonably hard to get in the forces in those days because they could pick and choose. By the same token it wasn’t that hard to get a job in those days either, you know, ‘cause

there was a reasonable amount of work around. So yeah I did that and then they, as I said, I rang up several, three or four months later and by that time I was back down at Rosebud. They said, “Yeah, come in and you’ll have to do a medical and we’ll see how you go with that,” and no problems. So I just had to front up to the recruiting officer again, do a medical which was no problem …

Oh just basically test your eyesight, your hearing

bend over and touch your toes, the old story. Just a, I mean I was 17 and playing footy two times a week and so there was no problem with the medical side of it. Then you had an interview to make sure that, sort of, you’d be suited to that sort of life I suppose. And then a couple of weeks later, then they gave me a date to come in so

on the 26th June 1967 I had to front up at the recruiting office in St Kilda Road at 9 o’clock in the morning with my suitcase and all me gear. I remember my mother saying – she’d drop me off, drove up and dropped me off at the recruiting office at 9 o’clock – she said then I just disappeared, she never heard from me, which was true because what happened that day, you’d take the oath and sign on the dotted line and then they’d just say, “Right report to….”

We had to report to Spencer Street Railway Station at half past seven or eight that night to take the train over to Adelaide and they just said, “Shoot through for the day and just make sure you’re at the railway station.” There was actually about five or six of us, we didn’t know each other. So yeah, we just spent the day walking around Melbourne and fronted up the railway station at

seven, half past seven, eight o’clock, whatever time the train left. We got the train, overnight train over to Adelaide, arrived there early in the morning and a truck, we had to do our rookies over at Edinburgh RAAF Base, a truck met us at the station, picked us up. “Throw your gear in here, get in the truck.” Out to the base. And that’s where it all started, where they start yelling at you and you wonder what the hell you’ve done that for, you know.

You had to swear allegiance to the Queen. They’ve changed it now where I believe you swear allegiance to Australia but in those days you had to swear allegiance to the Queen. I can’t remember the exact wording but yeah that was virtually what it was. Actually I remember when I first arrived at rookies my father, being ex- military, ex-army, said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t volunteer for anything. That’s the first rule. You don’t do that, nothing.

Ask for volunteers just don’t do it.” So we’re there and our sort of first couple of hours they’ve given us a briefing about what, about this and that and that and the warrant officer comes in and says, “Who’d like to learn a musical instrument while they’re doing their training?” and I thought, I used to fool around with a guitar like a lot of young blokes used to do then with the sixties music, so I thought, ‘Oh that’ll be interesting.

No I wouldn’t mind doing that.’ So up goes the hand, broke the first rule, ‘don’t volunteer’, so up goes the hand. I said, “Oh yeah I’ll be in that,” and so the musical instrument was a side drum you had to play on the morning parade every morning. Not only, that wasn’t the bad part, the bad part was you had to, all the other mates of you, the trainees, used to get an hour for lunch, you used to get 15 minutes to eat your lunch and then 45 minutes band practise every day, so yeah, that was

terrific. So number one lesson right down the drain.

It was fairly traumatic. We got picked up from the station by a truck and taken out and then, sort of from the minute you get on the base and they take you to the orderly room for a start and do the paper work

you start getting yelled at. You know, ‘Get that stuff off the truck and line up here and do this and do that.’ You expect something ‘cause you sort of know military is going to be disciplined and that. But then I remember this particular corporal he says, “Right, what’s your service number?” and they’ve allocated you a service number the day before. Now a service number is something you never forget ever in your life ever again because it’s something you use every day and even

after you get out. I mean it still, the pension I get through the air force, it’s still under me service number so, - but naturally because you got it the day before you’ve never even thought about it, none of us could remember what it was. Well didn’t you get abused for that, not knowing your service number? So little things like that. And then they issue you with equipment, you know you get all your, you start getting your uniforms and it was funny actually lining up to get our uniforms and they’d

give you these underpants which were like bloomer shorts. One of the Queenslanders with us said, “Oh look at this, six pairs of footy shorts,” he thought he was getting six pairs of footy shorts, so little things like that sort of break it up a bit. But yeah, they issue you with the gear. But everything’s go, go, go. You’ve got five minutes to do this, you got two minutes to do that. So get your gear, up to your block where you’re going to live, there’s your bed, you get it made, get your gear stowed

away, do it right. Do this and then they come in and start, “What did you put this here for?” They’ve sort of got diagrams of where everything’s got to go, everything’s got to be in its place down to your toothbrush and your comb and everything’s got to go where it goes. And you can’t, you just can’t go in and start putting things in a drawer, everything goes in a certain place and you get hell blown out of you if you’re not doing it. It’s all the start and you realise later, what were they,

couldn’t they just say, “Well this is …, do this,” but it’s all yell, yell, yell. And five minutes to do this, get ready, get your uniform and do this. So yeah it’s full on. There is a method in it you realise later but you don’t realise that at the time. So yeah, and then you get put on what they call a pool flight. When they get the rookies, the personnel over there to go on rookies, they have to wait till they get a certain amount to make up a

a course, a rookies’ course and so before you’re put on course which can take up to a week or two weeks, you’re put into this working pool they call it, in other words a pool of personnel that they allocate jobs to and menial tasks. So you might get like mowing the lawns around the base or as I copped, you get the mess duty which is one of the worse because you have to go down the kitchen and all day

you’re washing huge tubs of whatever the food is. The potatoes cooked up in huge tubs and they come into the kitchen and you’ve got to wash them, and you’ve just finished scrubbing everything out and then the next meal’s on and so it’s continually, you spend from six in the morning till nine o’clock at night washing plates and huge saucepans and what have you. So yeah, a lot of those jobs and then it’s all basic cleaning up and then you’re allocated onto a course. They give you a course

number and you’re going to go onto this course number. I think it was approximately 30 of you I think it was, 30 to 35 roughly to a course. Two courses started at the same time when I was there and so, then you’re shifted again from the block you were originally allocated into, what they call the course block. In other words they put you all together so that you’re a tied unit and that’s the idea, to work as a team. Then your,

you meet your course corporal, he’s in charge of that course for the whole duration, the three months you’re at rookies, he’s your instructor. You do get other instructors instructing you in different, in different procedures and weapons training etc etc but he actually runs the course. He’s your course mother so to speak. He does all your drill, takes you for all your lectures, although some

other people do your lectures, he’s with you all the time. So from morning to night he’s with you. So you’re always hoping to get a good one of those because everyone’s seen the movies where you get, they call them drill sergeants in America but we have field corporals. Our bloke was not a bad bloke. He was hard but he was, I met him years later, he actually was a member of our bowls club up here at Algester so it was funny actually meeting him years later. But he was a nice enough bloke, ex-Pommie [British] Army

bloke, knew his job very well, and he was God virtually. You learn later the rank structure a corporal’s, although it’s a non-commissioned officer, it’s the lowest non-commissioned officer and so it’s not very high in the structure as things go but he’s God while you’re on course there. Quite interesting time in the rookies, it’s full on.

You get as fit as you’ll ever be in your life and they teach you a lot of good skills and mainly working as a team and you learn all about air force law and discipline and, you know, weapons and what-have-you, so I quite enjoyed rookies, I really liked it. Being 17 and fit would’ve helped of course.

Well the purpose

is as that you’ll obey orders instantaneously without thinking about them. Because if you get in a situation like a war situation you haven’t got time to discuss things because if you don’t do certain things straight away, it can mean either you get killed or someone else gets killed. So I mean it teaches you to obey orders without question.

Sort of ask questions after, don’t ask them at the time, you know what I mean. It’s about getting people to think of the team not the individual so it’s team work because you’ve got to rely, they teach you to rely on each other so that you go through all those sort of things where you’ve got to help each other work things out and rely on each other instead of using your own, doing things individually if you know what I mean. You do a lot of team things.

I took to it fairly well, I thought. However I was one of the youngest ones on the course. There was, our ages ranged up, we had a 34 year old bloke on the course and to us he was old. I mean 34, ‘Gees that’s getting old you know,’ and he had a lot of trouble with the physical sort of side of it, side of the course. Again it was helping each other out. Where you used to

have to do, you used to have to do runs with full kits and that type of thing, where you might do a ten kilometre run with full kit and it’s reasonably hard because you’ve got a rifle and pack and what-have-you, but everyone’s got to do it at the same time so you’ve got to, you’ve got to help people get through. So it’s more or less carrying people to help them out if they’re struggling with their rifle, carry it for them you know and that sort of thing. So it’s not an individual thing.

Yeah it was, as I said, being 17 and fit was a help because I thought I was fit and then when I was actually finished after the three months I was actually jumping out of my skin. You’re virtually that fit you’re sort of jumping as you’re walking, it’s an amazing feeling to be that fit, you never get it ever again. So I can imagine that’s what these athletes must feel like, you know these swimmers and the footballers and that type of thing, but yeah it was good, I enjoyed it.

It was full on. I mean it was all day, every day from six o’clock until ten o’clock at night you were on the go. You’re not allowed off the base I think for the first four weeks. After that, weekends you were allowed off the base to go into Adelaide if you weren’t working. Some weekends you’d be rostered to guard duty so, yeah. So yeah, it was full on but I really enjoyed it.

Well you learn - you learn about your air force law, your discipline. They do, they give you a certain amount, they try to get everyone up to a certain academic standard so you do some English, you do some mathematics, you do some physics. You know, you do fire training,

first-aid training, things that you may need. A heap of it’s drill of course because, you know, everyone’s got to be doing the same sort of drill, you’ve got parades every day. Yeah, I mean they take you out on bivouacs where you actually spend a night out in the bush because Vietnam had been on then. I joined in ’67 and we’ve been involved

in Vietnam for oh, since about ’64. They were sort of, it was geared around, ‘If you do go to war this is …,’ you know, so you’d go out on bivouacs and you’d, they’d put you under attack and that sort of thing, simulated attacks and how to set up ambushes and that, so it was quite interesting work.

I didn’t actually, I never thought about it to be quite honest. Although it was one, there wasn’t a lot of air force involved, it was mainly sort of an army type of involvement so to be quite honest I never considered it. I was, when I joined up, when you join the air force you join to do a certain trade or

mustering as they call it. I joined up originally to become a radio technician. So you sort of, you know you’ve got to do your rookies and then you’ve got to go and do your radio text course. That didn’t eventuate because of my, because of my education standard they said, ‘You can do it but you’ve got to go, we’ve got to send you on a pre radio text course at Wagga, New South Wales for three months,’ to do what they call

a trainee mechanics course they called it. They put a heap of, the majority actually went there to do this trainee mechanics course. From there then they fanned you out into whatever trade they needed at the time and you were suited to. So there were two factors came into it. So yeah, after the rookies that’s what happened, I was posted to Wagga to do this three months’ next course.

I actually hated Wagga, mainly I think because I was in the situation I’d come off rookies, which I’d thoroughly enjoyed, I went into Wagga, it was a barren windy sort of place. It’s out at Forrest Hill, north of Wagga. The barracks were old, Second World War wooden barracks with holes in them, the accommodation was sub- standard to say the least. Things like

your dormitory there would be, there’d be 16 blokes in the dormitory. We had a wire bed and a locker and that was it, oh, and a side set of drawers. As I said, wooden blocks. And when I first arrived there it was, I finished my rookies in September, so when I first arrived there they, the first day they issued me with six blankets and I said, “Six blankets?”

six blankets and a counterpane. “Why would you ever need six blankets?” Well I found out when winter came to Wagga, why you need six blankets. It was stinking hot in summer time and freezing cold in winter and these blocks, they were just wooden blocks with no heating or cooling systems. Things like the toilets didn’t have any doors on them. You know it was just very primitive accommodation, Second World War stuff and so I hated that. The trainee mechanics’ course was, some of it

was okay. I mean they again, they gave you a lot of maths and English and physics again. But a lot of it too was hands on stuff with metal work, fitting and turning and that type of thing which I hated. I never liked it at school, never liked working with my hands, so I didn’t like that part of it. At the end of that, as I said, they decided where

everyone was going. They gave you preferences to where you wanted to go, what courses you wanted to do, and a few things come into that, how you went on your TM [Trainee Mechanics] course, your previous education plus what they needed at the time of course. I put in for radio which I’d initially signed up to do as first preference, instrument fitter as a second preference and I can’t remember, armoured or air frames or something as a third. I finished up getting the second preference, instruments,

which the radio training was actually at Laverton in Victoria. The instruments training was at Wagga so I had to stay at Wagga which didn’t impress me at all, but anyway. So I was put on an instrument course which was a 12 month course which I didn’t take to at all because it was, that was all hands on sort of stuff. Not all hands, there was some mathematics and physics in it but not a lot. It was mainly hands on type stuff.

I’d met my, what’s now my current wife, Ray, the Christmas after I’d finished my TMs’ course, I went home for Christmas and I met her that Christmas. Although I’d known her previously at Coles where I worked with my brother before joining the air force, I’d known her but just to say g’day to her. So anyway we started going out so she was in Melbourne and I was at Wagga. So every weekend I was, after we’d finish work on Friday afternoon I’d drive from

Wagga to Melbourne. I’d stay in Melbourne the weekend with her until I’d leave there 10, 12 o’clock at night on a Sunday night. Get back to the base, 5, 6 o’clock in the morning to start work, be on the parade ground at 7 o’clock, so without any sleep virtually. Consequently I wasn’t too happy about the situation. The further consequence was I wasn’t doing too good on me course so I started failing

exams. They give you exams every couple of weeks or whatever, started failing them. They’d give me repeats, night duties to catch up which I did from time to time, but the overall situation was I did about, I think it was about 4 months of the total 12 months’ course and finished up I got thrown off the course for failing too many exams.

So then you go before psychologists and whatever to decide what they’re going to do with you from there. You do all these tests, aptitude tests etc etc. In the meantime where I’m working is just tasks around the base, again back on the pool duty type of things, sweeping roads, cleaning up bins, what-have-you.

They then said, “We’ve got …” Sort of when I went before the psychs you know personal relationships come in and they said, “We’ve got a course down at Laverton as a telegraphist course down there if you want to go down there and do that. We need them at the moment and you’ve got the qualifications to do that.” So didn’t know what a telegraphist was so I did, went to the library and found out and thought, ‘Oh that sounds interesting. Radio operator.’ Come do Morse code,

etc etc. And I thought, ‘Oh well that sounds better and it’s also at Laverton where my girlfriend is.’ At that stage we’d got engaged actually so, ‘That’s where me fiancée is.’ So I put in for that and I was sent down to Laverton to do my telegraphists’ course so I was a lot happier then. So that was my stint at Wagga, I spent 11 months in total at Wagga and was eventually sent down to Laverton.

Well Laverton was a lot better. I was put on, again after a couple of weeks I was put on my course. One of the drawbacks of doing this type of thing was every time, when I was sent down to Laverton I’ve left all my mates that I have made in the air force back at Wagga and I’ve, and the people,

because I’d been out of rookies for 11 months, been at Wagga, the people who were starting this course had just gone through the rookies and they sort of knew each other, were mates. So again I had to make friends again, to get into the groove of another course. It was quite good though, I’ve still got mates to this day that I went through that course with. So yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed that course, it was more to my liking. In fact I did quite well on that

and in a lot of areas I got, I topped the course in a lot of areas. There was some I didn’t but overall I was right up at the high end. After failing my course in Wagga it was a complete change around. So yeah, I did 12 months on that telegraphers’ course. We did Morse code, radio training, had to learn how to type, things like that, cryptography. So I enjoyed all of it. Then it come to the stage

where you got to get, you put in for your posting. I graduated. The course was split up into two parts where you did your training before your Morse code. Your Morse code was your last six months. It was very difficult, Morse code, to do. So everyone started and did their communications training, then everyone started their Morse code training. It had a high failure rate but the reason they did it that way is so that the people who failed their Morse code and then went out

just as a radio operator and that was no problem at all. They just didn’t have the Morse code side of it. So I really knuckled down and got stuck into the Morse code and so finished up passing that, and it was about half the course, finished up passing the whole lot of the course. So some passed, went out after six months and about half of us went out after 12 months. So I was quite pleased with that. Then came the time where you put in for your posting, where you actually want

to go, and being in communications was another advantage, you could go anywhere in Australia. You could put in for anywhere, there was vacancies, well there was positions anywhere in Australia and also overseas. So I put in for Darwin initially, that was actually through my old man. He told me about when he was there during the Second World War, sounded like an interesting place to be, a frontier type place. This was 196-,

this was ’69 by now. So I put in for Darwin first preference and I can’t remember the others, Perth or Amberley or whatever. I got posted to Werribee Receivers which is five mile from Laverton from where I was already so I wasn’t too happy about that but that was one of the things. So I actually got posted to Frognille and

Canterbury was the actual base but I got posted to Werribee Receivers, that was my parent base but I went to Werribee Remote Receiving Station because that’s where I was a telegraphist ‘cause they had Morse code, that’s where they sent the telegs [telegraphists] in Melbourne, and there we did, we were receiving, well we tuned the receivers and set them up to receive the messages from all around, different places around the world

like Tokyo, Ghan, Vancouver, all different places like that. So it was quite interesting there although really at that stage I wanted to get posted out of Melbourne. I’d married Ray by that stage so I was married. I spent seven months there. It was interesting because we had a bloke there that had been to Vietnam and he told me all about it, you know.

I had put Vietnam down on my preferences I think. Yeah, I had put it down I remember because I had put Darwin, I think I’d either put Vietnam down second or third on the preferences and I spent seven months at Werribee Receiving Station and then posting come through to go to 2 Squadron in Vietnam. So I hadn’t been out of radio school that long, seven or eight months out of radio school to get posted over to an

overseas posting, especially going over to a war zone which was fairly unusual at the time.

I suppose adventure at that stage ‘cause I was, then I was 19 when I actually put in for it.

Yeah you sort of, this bloke had told me about it you know and said, “Something you’ll never forget in your life.” Yeah. Just something, you know, an adventure type thing. When the actual posting come through I had second thoughts because then, by that stage then Ray was pregnant with Adam, our first child, due five weeks before I was due to go which is what happened, I mean Adam was five weeks when I went over. So I had

sort of second thoughts about it then. She was in the married quarter just over from the base, just 300 yards from the base. However her parents lived in Melbourne, they lived over the other side of Greensborough, or Plenty, just near Greensborough so I wasn’t too worried about her there. I remember when my posting come through the flight lieutenant who was the boss out there he called me in and said, “I can get you out of this posting if you want to, if you want to go

over to Western Australia we’ll send you over to Sigs [Signals] Office to signals training,” which was another branch of communications, and he said, “That’s quite interesting, you’ll like that.” The only problem with Sigs Ops [Operations] was there was only two postings for Sigs Ops and one was in Western Australia and the other one was Hong Kong. Well Hong Kong was fine. What you used to do was go backwards and forwards, two years Hong Kong, two years Western Australia and do it that way. So that was okay but you couldn’t go anywhere else, that was it.

I thought about it. He said, “I’ll give you a couple of days to think about it,” and I talked it over with Ray and I said, “No no I’ll go. It’s something that may never ever come up again.” So yeah, I decided to go.

Yeah,

I knew her just to say g’day to her at Coles because my brother knew her. She worked a floor up from where I worked and so she used to occasionally go out, her girlfriend there my brother used to take out for a little while but I just knew her to say g’day to and when I went to Wagga in September and I got Christmas leave after my trainee mechanics course, and so I came, I was going to go home at Christmas. My parents at that stage were living down at

Dromana, they’d shifted from Rosebud to Dromana which was only next door and so I decided to go home for Christmas naturally. So Terry was still living at my aunty’s place at Box Hill so I called in to see him on the way down and he said, “Oh we’ve got the Coles Christmas party on tonight so do you want to go to that?” and I said, “No I want to get home.” So he said, “Well I’m taking Ray, you know, you remember Ray from the office,” and I said, “Oh yeah vaguely.” He said, “Well I’m taking her,” and I said,

“Oh yeah.” Anyway, I said, “No I’ll go home.” He had this old rover of a car and what happened was we tried to start it and it wouldn’t start and to cut a long story short he said, “Well can you go to the party and drive me and Ray?” and I said, “No I don’t want to go.” So he said, “Can you run me up to the phone box,” no phones in the house in those days, “and I’ll give her a ring.” So up we go and he goes in the phone box and he says, “Oh her number’s engaged.” In the meantime I’m thinking, ‘Oh I feel a bit,’ you know,

‘bad about this ‘cause he’s already told her he’s going to take her out.’ I said, “No, okay I’ll drive yous out there.” So we finished up going to the party so Terry, meself, actually me cousin went with us as well, me aunty’s son, went to this party. So Terry took her to the party and I took her home from the party so that’s how Ray and I sort of started going out together.

Oh that was fine. I mean he was only just picking her up and taking her, they weren’t going

out together or anything so that was fine. Yeah it just sounds funny you know, my brother takes a girl to a party and I bring her home. So yeah, we started going out together then and decided to get engaged and we got engaged and when I got posted down to Laverton we got married in the August, actually I’d only just got down there.

What’s there to

attract anyone’s wife? I suppose it’s just, I don’t know, had the same interests sort of. We’ve been married for 35 years so there must’ve been something there.

Yeah I was, you’re quite right there. I was 18 when I got married, Ray was 19, she was, she was only, she’s nine months older

than me. So yeah, she was 19 and I was 18 so we were very young. Our parents sort of, they didn’t try to talk us out of it but I don’t think they were too keen on it because of the ages, especially her parents. I mean I always got on well with her parents but yeah, we said, “We’re going to do it and that’s it.” So we got married. I mean, I had a good job, I was in the air force getting good money. She was still working at Coles at that stage. So after we got married I went to Laverton to do me course and she stayed, just kept working at Coles. We moved

out to Sunshine near the RAAF base and so we lived there until I got posted to Werribee and when I went to Vietnam she went and, back and lived with her parents again at Greensborough at Plenty with, we had, Adam was five months old so she had the baby.

Yeah, I think it was very hard on her because you know she’d just had a new baby, five months old. She was by that stage, she was

20 I suppose, yeah she’d turned 20, yeah. I think she coped very well you know but she’s like that. She’s a great mother and so yeah it was, it was pretty hard to say goodbye because it was an unknown thing I was going into you know. So in the 12 months,

you know, you’re only going to go home once in the 12 months and that’s for five days and that’s it so yeah.

Yes. It was mainly, social things, see I was married, I was the only, actually there was two of us on our courses that were married.

My mate Ray, he lived at Geelong, I lived at Sunshine. But we’d see the single blokes, I mean we’d only just been married too, and so the single blokes, they’d be sort of, they were doing their courses but they’d be out drinking, carrying on. We could only do that to a degree and the only two married blokes on the course but we got on well with the single blokes. I mean a lot of times they would come around to our places on weekend. We all played football together.

So they would come, we’d have a party on Saturday nights, invariably after football, we’d have a party somewhere. During the week we had a lot of study to do. On course it was a full on type thing although during the day you’re doing your course from say 8 in the morning till 5 at night. You still had work to do at home, you know, two or three hours’ work you’d be doing, but weekends we’d party. It was good but I,

I felt I had more responsibility than the other blokes. They were young, carefree and they lived on the base so all their meals, they’d front up to the mess where they’d have their meals. Ray and I struggled initially for that period of time while I was training because your training wage is far below your normal, you know, wages after you get out of training. So I can remember actually, for us to,

our luxury was to buy a bottle of coke once a week, that was the big thing for the week. So yeah.

Well at the receiving station there was, virtually it was

tuning in what they call frequency shift key receivers, FSK Receivers. They’re huge receiving halls. If you can imagine these receiving machines, back in those days like computers went from room size to as we know this size. In those days the receivers were massive machines and we had a whole what we call a receiver hall. So it was a huge room with all these receivers down

the sides of this room and your job or my job was to tune these in. What was happening is messages are being sent from say, just for an example, from say London to Melbourne. The messages get transmitted through the atmosphere and on high frequency, on HF, and comes over on a certain frequency. That frequency’s got to be tuned in, a transmitter sends it,

a receiver receives it naturally, that’s why it’s called a receiver. The receiver’s got to be tuned in to that signal coming over. There’s a lot of things in the field, atmospherics, sun spots, magnetic storms, whatever and so we’ve got these from all over the world coming into there. During the day the frequency’s got to be changed because of atmospheric change during the night time. For instance you’ll get a low, bring your frequencies all down

because the ozone layer comes down. Your frequencies change. You’ve got to do that so you’ve got to re-tune all your receivers continually so you’ve virtually got to, you’re babysitting the receivers, you’re making sure the message traffic is getting through and you can lose it. If you lose it you’ve got to do a certain lost contact procedure you’ve got to go through. So it’s all that sort of stuff without going into too technical part of it.

It’s passing military message traffic from various countries and various states into Melbourne is what we were doing. And that was a 24 job naturally, it went 24 hours.

No, no, no, that was, that’s a different job altogether. That was the Sigs Ops part where they said I could go over and do that if I wanted to. Yeah.

Well you’re not actually receiving the message, you’re receiving the carrier or the message signal that’s coming through that the message actually gets carried on. It’s a bit hard to explain. You’re tuning those to make sure the frequency’s on because if the frequency’s off the message starts getting lost, bits and pieces of it. It’s like your television reception. In the old days if you didn’t

tune your TV properly you’re losing some of your signal. That’s a good way to put it actually, you’re losing some of your signal so you’re losing some of it. So you had to tune it in so you didn’t lose any of it if you know what I mean.

Well you had certain frequencies. All military services are allocated certain frequencies and so you had certain frequencies you could go to.

The idea was the receiving station, you’d tell, if you’re starting to lose the signal for instance you could tell them to change frequency, ‘Change to so and so,’ you’d give them a frequency to change to. They would change, they’d put the transmitter up on the new frequency, you would then tune the receiver into that. It was all skill to tune these receivers. I had a couple of old, the old stagers as you call them, the old blokes who’d been doing it for years and years and

you had certain ways of tuning these things but they used to do it by ear. Because they’d say you can do it by ear better than you can do it, you had a visual thing used to help you. You also had these meters that’d help you, show you when you’re getting close to getting this thing correct you know, but they showed you how to do it by ear, just by listening to it you could hear it drop, they’d call it ‘drop in’, in other words get perfect. And so you did that and in the finish you’d do that yourself. That might take six months to learn, to

tune your ear how to do that but you could do that. So the old blokes were good to listen to, to teach you how to do it. And that’s what they should’ve, that’s what they did too, they taught you how to do it right.

Well you had, what you call lost contact procedures so that if it dropped out, that didn’t happen often but from time to time it’d just drop out completely and you’d lose it completely.

Well after a non-contact period of 15, 20 minutes, half an hour type thing, there was a laid out procedure where the transmitting station would say, ‘Okay, at such and such a time of day this is the frequency we’ve got to go to if we’ve lost contact,’ so he would automatically change his transmitter and he might be in Vancouver, change his transmitter to this lost contact frequency. After this

time and during the same time of the day, I mean it’s all worked in Zulu time which is Greenwich mean time, not local time, you would tune your receiver into that frequency and hopefully enough you’d hear his signal come through on your receiver and so that was just lost contact procedure. You had all those type of things. You had to predict things, like you had magnetic storms and sun spot activity. Those prediction charts

used to come in to you, and you would have to sort of, you would map out, it’s like planning a trip on a road, you’d plan out what frequencies you should go to because they’d vary, and experience came into it in the finish too, you’d know what frequency were better than others anyway and this type of thing. You also had a huge aerial farm where you had to, it wasn’t just a matter of tuning these receivers, you had to put the right aerials into the right receivers and, depending

on where the signal was coming from, to what area you used. And you had like these huge aerials, like they were 200 foot, 300 foot in the air where you could turn them around by a push of a button inside. You could turn the aerial around to point at, at a transmitter where it was coming from, whether it be in Tokyo, I mean I’m talking about Werribee in Victoria, you were pointing an aerial at Tokyo to pick up that, to get the best radio path for

that message to come through on you know. So there was that type of thing too, you had to work all those out.

Well the army did nothing but the air force …

Yeah that was interesting. When the posting come through and they gave me

probably three months’ notice I think it was and a posting date, what date I was going to go. Then I had to go and do more weapons training because I hadn’t done any weapons training since, well you don’t really after you leave rookies. So I had and go and do that out at Point Cook.

Well virtually just your SLR [self-loading rifle] again, we used SLRs in those days. That was virtually it.

A bit different when I arrived in Vietnam but I’ll tell you about that later. So yeah, down do me re weapons training and then they don’t tell you anything about it really which surprised me. They sort of gave me a briefing sheet that said, “You’re posted to Vietnam. This is what’ll happen on the day you go, like you’ll be flown up to Sydney and then you’ll get a charter flight

and a charter flight’ll fly you to Saigon.” They gave me a clothing allowance, which I thought was a bit funny, I’d never had one of those before, a civilian clothing allowance, all your uniforms are provided, and I said, “What’s this for?” And they said, “That’s for, because you’re going outside Australia and representing Australian forces, if you have an occasion to be dressed in civilian clothes

you’ve got to be neat and tidy and dress properly. So we give you an allowance so there’s no excuse for you not to be dressed correctly.” So yeah, ‘Because you’re representing Australia.’ Same thing happened when I got posted in Malaysia, the same thing, you get a civilian clothing allowance.

Oh decent slacks and shirts and not, you know, stubbies and thongs type thing, don’t be an ocker. You’re representing

Australia and the air force. That was a bit different. Injections: I had to have a heap of inoculations of course, a lot of different diseases over in Vietnam that weren’t in Australia at that stage, I even had a polio booster I think, so had a heap of those to do. Other than that, not a lot of preparation at all really.

I think going, I had this bloke working with me at Werribee Remote Receiving Station and had been to, he’d actually been to 2 Squadron which was the squadron I was going to. There was three places in the air force I could have gone to in Vietnam, 2 Squadron was a bit unusual because that was our, that was where the less RAAF personnel were and we had no army with us there. It was only Australian Air Force where there was no army at all, no Australian Army. So yeah,

that was the prep.

Nothing, I knew nothing about the history of the 2 Squadron itself. Communications, it was unique in communications to be posted to a squadron because that never happened, and that in fact was the only place it had ever happened where communications personnel and others, I mean administration people, were posted to

a squadron because usually you’re, when you’re on an air force base where there are squadrons the communications comes under either headquarters or base squadron as they call it. So you might be on, say you’re on Amberley RAAF base for instance out here, if they’ve got three squadrons on the base of aircraft, communications centre will come under a base squadron not under any of the squadrons as such. So it was unique and it was good. That was one of the aspects I really loved about 2 Squadron, was the only

time I’d ever served as a flying squadron in my 20 years in the air force, and not many communication personnel got that opportunity so that was interesting, very good. Unfortunately as well, which annoyed me in later years and still annoys me, is the air force told me nothing and I mean nothing about the culture of

the country I was going to, the history of the country I was going to or indeed why we were in the country I was going to, why the air force was involved. So, being 20 years old when I went there it was one of those things that I regretted a hell of a lot and still do that I knew nothing about the place and the culture of the people and the history. I’ve learnt a hell of a lot since and made sure

I did you know.

Well it’s the first time I ever had to have a passport so, yeah, I had to go and get a passport but no visa because naturally I was in a war zone, didn’t need a visa. The only thing is that on our visas which is, on our passports which is interesting was stamped ‘Not valid for North Vietnam’

which I thought was quite interesting. Well we were at war with North Vietnam so I don’t suppose it would be valid for North Vietnam but yeah, I’ve still got that, I’ve got a new passport these days because it eventually ran out of course but I’ve still got me old passport with ‘not valid for North Vietnam’ stamped in it so I’ll keep that for prosperity.

Yeah, my mother wasn’t that happy about it. As I said, that’s when she used to say, if I get killed she’s going to go and shoot Menzies. So she wasn’t, I had a big blue with my eldest brother about it. We had a big falling out, he’s probably the closest one I’m to today and even back then

we had a brother in between us but I was a lot closer to me eldest brother Terry than ever the other one, and we had a big falling out because he was in the moratorium marches at the time and I remember his wife’s 21st birthday party which was only, it was in the May and I went in the June. We had a big blue. Didn’t actually come to fisticuffs but it came close.

We didn’t talk to each other for several years which I regretted because as I said he was in, the moratorium marches were going on in Melbourne at the time, I didn’t agree with them and I was angry about it. I don’t know what I was angry for because it wasn’t, you know, when I thought about it later, well I’m starting to think about it now actually, when you learn something about it, we should never have been there, in later years and now I consider we should never have been in Vietnam anyway.

But in those days I was in the air force, I was 20 years old, I’d been posted to Vietnam and that, I accepted that, I was in the military and that’s what you did. You went where you were told to go.

He was uneducated like all of us were and he was saying things like, “Oh yeah, we’re over there and we’re shooting people who have got pitchforks,” and I’ll never forget that actually.

“They’re fighting us with pitch forks and brooms and what have you,” and when we first come under rocket and mortar attack I thought about him actually. ‘Come over here and have a look at this and see what they’re fighting with, they’re not throwing pitchforks at us.’ So you know it was a funny sort of side to it. But yeah, people were uneducated, they didn’t realise, know what was going on. They thought the Vietnamese were a primitive race who

we’d gone over there to annihilate which was far from, I mean they’re not a primitive race at all, they were far superior to us in a lot of ways and they knew what they were doing militarily. It was only America’s fire power that was keeping the Americans anywhere in the game. I mean the Vietnamese had it all over them with tactics and so forth. The uneducation of people is just astounding,

because I didn’t know that then, I know it now, I didn’t know it then. So he was saying things like, “Oh yeah, our blokes are over there killing babies,” and doing this and doing that. Well he didn’t know. Neither did I. But he didn’t know that and neither did a lot of people. Until you’ve actually been there how would you know?

Well as I said we didn’t talk to

each other for quite some time after I got back. We more or less apologised to each other in later years because he saw my side of it and I saw his side of it, so we were both in the wrong. We’re sort of, I mean we’re the best of friends now.

Not before I went, no,

that happened after I come back, but no. I didn’t really associate with the general public as such though either because I was in the air force and that’s what you do, you associate with military and I was part of the air force football team then so even sporting teams you’re more or less, only your family is virtually all you’re associating with civilian wise. So yeah, I didn’t have contact with the general public as such.

No, only to tell us to keep out of the city in uniform ‘cause the sort of moratorium marches, the majority from what I can remember, were pre-planned because they had to get marching permits anyway. So they were pre- planned so we were just told, ‘If you’re going into the city

and the moratorium march is on, do not wear uniform.’ In fact they discouraged you in those days to wear uniform out anyway, you wore them on the base and that was it. If you were going out anywhere just wear civilian clothes so no-one knows you’re in the forces.

Ah, yes and no.

Being my wife she supported me and my opinions. I don’t, I couldn’t really tell you if she had a different opinion or not because she never told me if she did. I mean we had a five month old baby, I’m being posted to a war zone. She supported me you know.

Well yeah, I just fronted up at, they just gave me a flight from, they were terrific the way they used to organise things actually. They just told me to report out at Tullamarine such and such a time. Every airport in Australia at that stage had a military – what do you call it? – travel office, yeah, military travel office.

So I just went to Tullamarine, they give you this air ticket and they say, “Right you’re on this flight going out of here.” So you say hooray to everyone, hop on the aircraft and fly to Sydney where they transfer you over, you’re met there by the movement controller officer, MCO, movement controller officer air force, they just say, “Yep, you’re Lance Highfield.” They tick you off and say, “Okay you’re on the Qantas [Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services] charter, it’s leaving at such and such a time. Be at gateway so and so at

three or four hours time.” I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly but it was about that. “In the meantime do what you like, have a few drinks. Don’t get drunk. Have a few drinks. Be at the gate at boarding time, 20 minutes before we’re going.” So that was okay. I met a, I did that and I went in the bar in the terminal like you do and there’s heaps of blokes sitting around. These charter flights, these aircraft were chartered from Qantas but they were for

military to go to Vietnam. The majority of course were army. I mean on our flight I think there was probably five air force on the whole flight. In the bar of course, I mean we’re in our uniform, the army’s in their uniform, we’re in RAAF uniform so naturally you know who the RAAF blokes are so I got talking to this other RAAF bloke and we started having a few drinks. I met up with him, hadn’t met him before. He was going to Vung Tau in Vietnam, I was going to Phan Rang,

2 Squadron. So yeah, we met up and then we got on the flight when we were due. That was a funny episode actually because then we flew from Sydney to, we landed in Darwin for refuel on the Qantas charter, remember this is full of military, we landed there and my brother at that stage, Nick, my younger brother, he was in the air force at Darwin which I was actually dirty about because he actually got posted to Darwin, that was the posting I wanted.

So anyway I was transiting through on my way to Vietnam and he and a couple of my other mates met me, who had been on my telegraphists with me, met me there and we said g’day. We only had half an hour or something on the ground while we were refuelling, had one quick beer I think and then we took off and that was about ten o’clock at night I think, around that time. I remember my mates told me a few years later that

Nick stood there and watched that aircraft for about, he stood there just watching out of the window for about an hour after the aircraft had left. So yeah so he must’ve felt it as well.

He didn’t no, he didn’t. So when I said Terry and I were close in those days, him and I were fairly, pretty close too. We used to play footy together and he was in the air force as well so, yeah, we were pretty close. But yeah, I was surprised when they told me that years

later. So anyway we flew to Singapore and I’ll never forget it because they told us to bring a civilian shirt with us on the, as hand luggage on the aircraft, not, as cabin luggage, not in the hold. We all wondered about that but before we landed in Singapore they made an announcement that everyone had to put their civilian shirts on. The purpose of it was, as we found out, was that Singapore was not involved in the Vietnam War

and politically could not be seen to have troops transiting through Singapore on the way to Vietnam. So the idea of, was we all put civilian shirts on while we’re refuelling in Singapore, and we had about an hour there or something. I thought it was quite hilarious though and so did all of us because we were all trooping off this aircraft and in those days you actually went down on the tarmac, trooped across to the terminal and went in, and so here’s all these blokes and we all had khaki pants on because

the army wore khaki pants and we wore khakis as well but all these leery Hawaiian type shirts on or whatever. You know whatever shirt you wanted, all blokes, all treading across the tarmac into the Singapore terminal off this Qantas aircraft. So as if people wouldn’t know that they’re a mob of troops, I mean it didn’t look military did it, everyone in boots and khaki pants and different coloured shirts. It was,

it was hilarious. And it was funny actually, we went into the terminal and the first thing these army blokes started was a two-up game, I’ll never forget that either, I mean this was six o’clock in the morning and we’d been flying all night from Darwin. Everyone was pretty tired and we had a bit of breakfast on the aircraft before we come in, and so these army blokes are playing two up you know, I couldn’t believe it. But anyway, so yeah, we took off from Singapore, stayed there about an hour or something and flew into Saigon

and landed there.

Quiet. It was a dry flight, there was no drink. We were allowed to have drinks before we went on at Sydney, and at Darwin you could have a quick drink, as I said about half an hour there, and Singapore an hour, it was six o’clock in the morning, I don’t think too many had a drink anyway but you could if you wanted one, and then yeah, it was a dry flight and so it was quiet.

Yeah, everyone had their own thoughts I suppose.

No, no weapons. You were issued weapons when you arrived.

Only, as I said the majority of the aircraft were army. One of the warrant officers got up and gave them

a briefing about what was going to happen when they landed in Saigon because, it’s a funny situation, Saigon was, here we are arriving from Australia in a war zone, Saigon, that airport was something, you had no idea unless you’d seen anything like it. It was the biggest airport in the world at the time. They had a take off and landing every three minutes, 24 hours a day. They had aircraft lined up

and there was occasions at Tan Son Nhut where they had to have aircraft turn around and go and refuel because they’d been in the line too long because, you know, it was that type of place, and we landed there and there, you land there and you’re taxiing down into where our place was, where we’re getting off, and there’s all these revetments where you’ve got, aircraft slot into revetments, revetments are where they stop

if you come under attack, shrapnel hitting aircraft so they’re walls, they’re steel walls type things, so they slot aircraft into them and so, so you see all these revetments, and then you get off the aircraft and everyone’s running around with rifles and pistols and everyone’s armed and that’s the first thing that strikes you. It’s just unbelievable.

Yeah, it’s just where they slot aircraft into so that if an attack happens, say you get rockets or mortar attacks, you get shrapnel

they don’t, like they go sideways, it doesn’t, it hits these steel revetments and stops damaging the aircraft type of thing. So for them to actually destroy an aircraft the mortar or rocket’s got to actually land on top of the aircraft. So it can’t do damage from anywhere around, you know what I mean, it’s a protection thing, it’s like sand bags. Yeah so they’re all over the place with aircraft slotted into them and different types of aircraft. I mean there’s everything, there’s fighters, there’s bombers,

there’s military transport aircraft, there’s civilian aircraft, there’s the Qantas we’ve just landed on, you know. It’s just, you had to see it to believe it and all these people running around armed, you come from Australia into that situation and it’s just, just unbelievable, you can’t believe it you know. And then you pile off the aircraft and it’s not a terminal, it’s just tin sheds if you know what I mean. And they get you,

you stand out in the hot sun and they’re saying, the army are starting to organise their blokes. They’re getting the baggage off the aircraft and they’re starting to load the trucks up and they’re yelling at these army infantry who have just arrived and they’re yelling at them and you know, ‘Get this done and do that and do this.’ You know the air force blokes, our movement bloke has come out and said, “Yeah right,” ticks off your names. As I said, there was five or something, there was two of us going to Phan Rang, there was me and this officer,

Flower his name was, flying officer. He said, “Right you two are going up to Phan Rang. We have trouble getting yous on aircraft to go up there because …,” this was up country, most of, well, all of the army were going out to Vung Tau and then to Nui Dat where the army was based. The Australian task force was out at Nui Dat. The other air force, three air force blokes were going

to Vung Tau which was normal. Phan Rang was a bit different so no Australian aircraft were going up there because our blokes didn’t fly up there very often so we had to go and sit around all day. I think I just sat around for five or six hours, it was just shocking, couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t do anything ‘cause they didn’t know what aircraft. We could be put on the aircraft right at the last minute. They couldn’t say, “Right,

we’ve got an aircraft going for yous in five hours’ time, go and have a drink or go and have a look at something,” or whatever, so just sat around and virtually trying to find some shade near these aircraft revetments waiting for them to come out of their tin shed and say, “Right we’ve got a flight for you,” which is exactly what happened. They said, “Right there’s a C123 aircraft,” which is a United States Air Force, C123 they’re called, they’re a baby Herc –

You know a Hercules aircraft? – well they’re called a baby Herc, they’ve only got two motors instead of four. They used to fly, they used to be their main transport aircraft in Vietnam, highly dangerous the Yanks flying them. They were just, we hated them.

Well, as I later found, I mean we had a couple of crashes, we had three crash off our base, just off the base. They used to go down all the time those things. They were just, I mean I didn’t know that at this stage, I’ve just arrived

and sat around for five hours and they’ve put me on this C123 with this officer. We were the only two Australians on it, all the rest were in Yankee air force or infantry or whatever. We take off and we fly up to Phan Rang.

Oh just aircraft coming and going basically. As I said, it’s a pity they couldn’t give us a time for a flight

or something, we could have done something. We couldn’t do anything, we just had to sit there because at five minutes notice we were put on an aircraft which is what happened.

Well mainly actually not landing them but taking them off. I mean, landing they do, they put them in a circuit, what they call a circuit, so they stack them up in a circuit and they just come down and then you get

your allocated time to come in, but it’s mainly the outgoing aircraft. I mean, to taxi out onto the main airstrip there was a line of aircraft and one behind the other. I mean, you’ve seen that at airports but you might see two or three. This, I’m talking about forty or fifty aircraft at any given time lined up ready to try to get out, to try to take off, and all types, that’s the thing, they’re all different types, you might have fighters behind a

commercial airliner waiting to take off you know, just unbelievable.

It was amazing, just a different world, it just hit you. It was the first time, actually a good mate of mine now, John Richards, the first time I met him he was down from Phan Rang in Saigon and he actually met me,

and he, I mean he’s met me out there and he’s fully armed and – but that’s what it was you know, but you weren’t used to that you know, it was just unusual, and he said, “I’ll see you back up there.” He had a couple of days in Saigon for some liaison or something, he was a corporal, and he said, “I’ll see you back up there.” He told me a little bit of what it was like. I was only actually talking to him for about five or ten minutes.

Actually I can’t remember really. Just, “It’s okay,” or something. I really can’t remember. As I said, it was only five or ten minutes and he said, “I’ll see you when I get back in a couple of days anyway.”

Lonely. Oh you mean that physical. It was hot. Yeah it was hot. It was steamy, humid,

and it was stinking hot, that was the first impression, hard to breathe type hot, that type. Yeah, and Yanks, I’d never seen an American in my life before and they’re everywhere, and they’re all in these, what they call fatigues, fully armed and running around the place and just it just hits you.

Oh you sit along the side. It’s very similar to a Herc is your little Herc. They’re just, all they are is strap seats so they’re all just along the side. You just sit down and you hop on the tail board, hop in and sit in the seat and just strap yourself in. And hang on.

No. No not a lot at all. Even military-wise I’d only – remembering I’d only joined

in ’67 and this was June ’77 so I’d been in three years and in that three years I hadn’t actually been on a military aircraft at that stage. Had I? No I hadn’t been on a military aircraft at that stage. I mean I was on hundreds of them after that of course but so, yeah, and I hadn’t done a lot of commercial flying either. I’d flown to Canberra once, I think that was it. I think that was my second, I think it was my second flight

actually, the one I went from Melbourne to Sydney to pick up the charter, yeah. So yeah, I hadn’t been on a military.

Pretty bumpy. It was bumpy because Vietnam’s very hilly, especially where we went into – Phan Rang was surrounded by hills. The flight was about three hours I think, two or three hours. Three hours I think. We got there

late in the afternoon. It was just starting to get dark actually and that was a bit annoying because we landed and then we taxied over and everyone – I mean they drop the tail board and everyone piles out. I was lucky because I had this officer there with me, this Flower. And a car, a 2 Squadron

vehicle, knew he was coming in, they’d been advised from Saigon that he was coming in. No-one had been advised that I was coming in which was great, isn’t it? You arrive in a war zone on your base and no-one knows you’re there. And anyway, I just hitched a lift with him up to the 2 Squadron area which was a fair way away. And you know you’re arriving on a, in this strip in the middle of this strip in the middle of Vietnam. Anyway, so I was lucky he was there. So I arrived up with domestic air, they just dropped me off, and at that stage

it was about six at night, six or seven. I just had to – here’s these Australians there and they’re boozing on in the boozer and I just had to go and I said – they’re sort of saying, “Who are you?” And I said, “I’m Lance Highfield, I’ve been posted up here. I’m a telegraphist in communications.” And they said, “Oh, he’s a communicator over there, go and see him.” This was my welcome to Vietnam. So I went over to this bloke and introduced meself. He said, “Oh you’re coming in today are you?” and I said, “Yeah,

I’m here.” He said, “Oh okay, we’ll see if we can find you a bed somewhere,” I mean this was unbelievable. So after scrambling around they found me a bed in one of the blocks. The unit blocks were just basic huts, wooden huts, and it was a double bed and I was on the top bunk of this double bed. Naturally there was a bloke below me on the other bed and so there was no room. That was it, there were two beds,

I had nowhere to put anything at all. You know, I mean it was just a shambles really.

Well I only had one suitcase because you didn’t take much with you anyway. You didn’t take that many civilian clothes with you, only your uniforms and that was it. So you haven’t got a lot but what you had got you didn’t have anywhere to put.

Nothing much,

just a couple of photos of Ray and the baby and nothing much at all other than that.

Oh I think I cried – no I didn’t actually but I felt like it. No I sort of, this communications bloke who sorted me out with a bed – and that was – I mean even trying to find a bed, here’s a bloke’s been posted from Australia and they haven’t got a bed for you, I mean just unbelievable, but

anyway, we finished up going to the boozer and having a couple of drinks. He said, “Well come down to Com Sig [Communications and Signals] in the morning,” he said, “I’ll come and – come down with me.” So that’s what I did. I got up in the morning and went to breakfast like everybody else. Went with him down to the Communications Centre where they were a good mob of blokes, I might add, that were there, I really enjoyed them, and then I had to

go and do all my briefings. So I had to go and see the warrant officer who was in charge of the unit and then he gave me the actual briefing then. He said, “I’m sorry no-one met you last night, we always do.” Which I found out they do too. Usually there’s somewhere there to go and pick them up, show them around, show them, ‘This is what’s set up for you,’ make sure they get something to eat, all this sort of stuff. He said, “We’re just – we didn’t know you were coming in.” So just a slip down in communications but anyway, yeah,

he said, “It doesn’t normally happen and we apologise for it,” so that was okay. And then he gave me a briefing about our situation you know, what to expect.

Yeah, that was interesting. He just told me what we were there doing.

We were part of the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing of the United States Air Force, flew 8 Canberras out of there. I’d already had a look at the Communications Centre. We were down in the administrations building which was right opposite the airstrip where our aircraft used to operate from, so that was quite interesting. A couple of the interesting things he said, “Be careful here of the Yanks.” He said, “Don’t worry too much about the VC,” or the Viet Cong, “your biggest worry

here is getting killed by the Americans,” and he was right.

Well he was right. They were just, the way they ran things they just – very unprofessional and stupid really, the easiest thing I could say about it. He said, “They’ll get killed you know ‘cause they’re just mad.” He said, “They’ve got no common sense.” He told me about the attacks.

They used to get mortar and rocket attack, at that stage it varied a hell of a lot, at that stage an average of twice a week but you mightn’t get attacked for three weeks, you might get attacked every night for three nights. So that was random, not specifically aimed at anything, it was just random harassment attacks, that’s what it was. And then I had to,

he said, “We’re going to send you out on the range.” So what they did was they piled you into these couple of trucks and there was about half a dozen went out, although there was only two of us that arrived the day before, there was about half a dozen there when we went out on the range so the other ones must have arrived a week before, I don’t know. So we went out on a range and out there they offloaded everything and there was boxes and boxes of ammunition and weapons and they said, “These are, any weapon here

that you’ll ever seen in Vietnam, and you use them all and get used to using them.” So that was very interesting.

Oh, grenade launchers and machine guns and just anything you might come across: actual grenades themselves. So it was quite interesting because these Yanks – when I say a range – right at the back end of part of the base was, they just had a bush area

where they had these old tanks and trucks and whatever and they just offloaded everything off the trucks and then they’d say, “Well, there’s all the ammunition, there’s the weapons, you know you can blow up those things, hit that tank, hit that truck over there.” And these are all spread around over five hundred yards type of thing. “Just use any weapon, use as much ammunition as you like, you use any weapon you like, just don’t point it this way, point it that way,” was virtually what the instruction was.

So we spent, it was good because it took, to expend all this ammunition that we took with us took four hours I suppose. Just continually having a go at weapons and, you know, it was quite good because you never – the comparison was in Australia, when you went to the rifle range in Australia, you got issued with say 20 rounds of ammunition, that was the issue and you had to count them. You then had to load them in the magazine and then fire them off, you then had to pick up the shells

to account for the shells, the brass, and that all used to be accounted for, all signed for, and that was the difference. Out there, this place was knee-deep in brass. There was – it was just unbelievable. You know, use as much as you like and then you actually, when you got back from there they issued you with your personal weapon, your SLR. They issued you with your SLR and said, “There’s the ammunition box, just take as much as you like. Grenades,

take as many as you like.” I mean that was unheard of in Australia, that never happened. So you could take – you just took as much as you like, as many magazines, took them back and in the domestic area that’s what you had, as I said, unheard of in Australia. Everything’s accounted for and you never, ever have any ammunition anywhere near a domestic area because they worry about blokes going off their ‘nana’[banana, going crazy] on the booze and shooting someone, you know. So it was a completely different attitude and

completely different air force to what I was used to. And so, yeah, that was the introduction day.

Oh you did that on rookies basically. As you’re using different weapons you get to know that anyway. There was blokes – I mean the warrant officer was there and there was a couple of sergeants there, a couple of adjies [adjutants] there to show you anyway if you didn’t know anything about a weapon,

they’d say, “Oh have you used one of these before?” “No.” “Well this is how you do it. Away you go.” No they were there to show you how to use them. They also had interesting things like the AK47 [Avtomat Kalashnikova, 1947 model rifle] which was the enemy’s main weapon to use as well. They captured AK47s so that – in case you ever come across that and have to use one of those, so that was quite good too, they were good weapons.

It was great.

It was – yeah it was good, it was completely different. I was amazed, you’re throwing grenades and doing whatever you like. You let any 20 year old go in a situation like that and you’re going to enjoy it aren’t you? Yeah, yeah it was good. But that’s your introduction day.

You wouldn’t say a bonding opportunity because

you didn’t work with those people. My job was communications so I worked in the Communication Centre. However, having said that, the whole squadron was bonded and that was encouraged as well because you were all there in the same boat. There was 280 of us, you’re all there in the same boat. Vietnam was a funny war as well, not only did we do this but the Yanks did as well, is when you got posted there you were posted there

for 12 months to the day so that your day to return home to Australia was 12 months from the day you arrived in Vietnam, and everyone knew that so, I mean that’s what you were told so everyone had this – what they called ‘Figmos’ going, where they were counting down, used to count down in days how many days they had to go, had left, and everyone, you know, and you get to the boozer of a night time and someone’d say, “Five!” just yell it out because they had five days to go.

Or they’d say, “Next,” and someone’d yell out, “Next!” In other words, you’re going the next day. And then of course when you first arrived there, “How many days do you have to go?” is the big question everyone asks you because they know how many days you’ve got to go, you’ve got the whole bloody 12 months to go. So that’s the question, “How many days you got to go?” You get sick to death of them asking you that because after a while - they’re only asking you ‘cause they’ve got less you know. So yeah that was a funny situation. And that’s where they had trouble with the infantry with the Yanks so much

‘cause they were allocated – they were 12 months to the day in the country. Naturally after they’ve been there six months and they’re on the, what they call the wind down, only six months to go, they’re not going to put themselves in any danger or they’re going to put themselves in as less danger as they can if you know what I mean because they want to get home.

Well coming in at that time of night, well from the air it looked, it was a fairly barren sort of place, lot of buildings, lot of aircraft and revetments. The domestic area when I went up there was very

unusual, our domestic area was about, oh two kilometres from our working area I suppose. We were sort of up on a hill or up on a rise you’d call it, more than a hill, and we had two kilometres down to our working area where the Com Centre was and the aircraft, it was near the airstrip, the Communications Centre.

It was a large base. There was,

the perimeter fence was about 20 kilometres. If you actually walked around the whole perimeter it was 20 ks [kilometres], so a fairly big base. There was 280 odd of us, around 280, and at any given time there’d be between 5 to 10,000 Americans there, just depending on what was going on at the time you know, mainly United States Air Force. We also had United States Army

and Republic of Korea Army Infantry used to work there, used to come out there. They were mainly for base security. We had our own security, aerial defence guards, ADGs their name is.

Not as such. We were in, we were part of the base. We were inside the internal area of the base but we had our own defensive area set up

so that if we came under ground assault we’d have to take up these defensive positions behind sand bags type things and we’d have fire zones, you know.

Yeah, the living quarters

were actually double storey wooden huts which weren’t very good for defence and for protection. But in-between each hut we had what we call a bunker set-up where, if we come under attack everyone’d come out and you’d go out of your block if you were in your block and into these bunkers which were fortified with sand bags etc etc from – I mean they’d really have to take a direct hit to

do any injury to you in the bunkers so they were quite good. But the blocks themselves, that’s the first thing you did if you come under attack was get out of them you know. Yeah all around the base it didn’t matter where you went, there was always a bunker type or even a big hole in the ground with sand bags around it you could jump into. So they were strategically placed so that – I mean the rockets

and mortar attacks you used to get were random which would happen any time of night or day and you might be walking around the base so all you did was go to, jump in the nearest sort of fox hole type thing for protection.

They had watch towers, there was 70 odd watch towers around the perimeter. You see the perimeter’s about 20 k along and they were manned 24 hours a day, naturally.

They also had, air patrols used to go out as well, patrols used to go out and it was a sort of no man’s, no-go area outside the base, I think for about 3 k there was – 3 kilometres – any part of the wire, near any part of the wire people weren’t allowed in. That was a free fire zone, so to speak, so if you were in there and if you got shot, well, it’s your look out.

So patrols used to go out there and make sure that, because the VCs used to come along and set these mortars up, mortar and rocket bases up, to fire ordinance into the base. So they tried to prevent them from doing that.

Well the adjuts [adjutants] used to do the patrols. It was basically up to us to go with the adjuts’ patrol voluntarily.

I did go out with the Americans on two occasions, I went out with them on the tanks once, one night, and went out with a mortar crew one night as well. The mortar crew, they used to set them up all around the base virtually and fire mortars off randomly just to keep people away from the perimeter virtually. That’s all they were there for, they weren’t specifically, they didn’t have any

intelligence, like if anyone was in a certain area, and actually fire at them. It was just to, yeah, keep them away from the perimeter. The night I went out with the American tanks, that was – they’d had intelligent reports apparently about possible infiltrators in a certain area so they just went out and blasted hell out of the area. Just all fire power. It was actually quite good fun because

it gave, there was a mate and meself went out and they gave us a go of a 50 calibre machine gun on top of the tank. You’d just blast away into the jungle and the bush and every fifth round is a tracer and it’s very spectacular of a night time you know, with all these tanks blasting away with their main guns plus their 50 cals [calibres]. Yeah, so it’s just to blast hell out of a specific area, that’s all that was designed for,

and you’d have, you’d be crashing trees down and Christ knows what, so it was quite interesting.

Yeah, yeah they were just, you could just request to go out on one if you wanted to.

Boredom’d be one of the main things. One thing about being in a situation like that, like our base was virtually closed the whole time I was there,

there was only the odd occasions that you were allowed out off the base itself because of the security situation. So they had to do various alert situations, you know, red alert, orange alert, yellow etc etc. So red alert was when you’re actually under attack and anything down from that was – where we were at the time. So a lot of the time we were there, I was there, we were on orange alert so it means that

restricted movement, no-one’s allowed on or off the base, expecting an attack at any time you know. So yeah, it was a closed up base so you got bored really. You know, you’re doing your own job, your communication job, so it was just to break the monotony of doing something else. It’s amazing when you’re away from home how slow the time goes because, especially, you’re counting off the days you’re due to go back. Twelve months

is a long time. You can see how those people in jail suffer because it must take a hell of a long time to get three years by or five years or whatever they get. That 12 months, just every day seems a week. So it’s just to stop the boredom really.

The Americans: I mean, very ignorant people in such that they didn’t really know anything about anywhere else. The country they were in Vietnam, I said it ourselves, we weren’t told much about it either before you went, you endeavoured to learn a bit about it, they weren’t introduced in any other country than America really. They knew nothing about Australia, England, Europe, nothing. It was all America what they were taught.

They were sort of, they, the troops appeared to be brainwashed you know, ‘America is the greatest, this, that and the other,’ but as far as their training and discipline and that stuff went, well that was a completely different story. I mean on our base, I mean there wasn’t hardly any you come across didn’t use marijuana. There was a high percentage of them used heavy drugs.

Those were in the days in the sixties where they were really into it and, I mean, they were getting heroin at something like 80% pure heroin, they were getting it at cheap rates and I think that’s where a lot of them got into strife when they went back to America. On the street they were getting an 8, 10% or something like that so it caused a lot of hassles. Marijuana was cheaper than tobacco. At our base it used to amuse me because

the American military police used to sell the marijuana at the front gate for $1 a tobacco pouch. Have you seen a tobacco pouch full of tobacco? Well a pouch full of marijuana was $1 American. So you know, I mean, it was cheaper than smoking cigarettes virtually.

Off the local people, used to grow it, they’d sell it to the military police who’d

sell it on to the troops. So it used to always amaze me.

Yeah, mainly of a night time, not so much during the day, night time later on. We were warned again when they were briefing about no drugs. That’s, you know, ‘Keep away from drugs. If you’re offered any just refuse.’

I mean you’re offered them all the time virtually so the one or two blokes that were caught of our mob using drugs, they were straight home, that was it, gone. I mean it didn’t sound like a bad thing to go home I suppose but you’re sort of going home in disgrace as well you know, so it wasn’t the done thing for our troops.

Yeah

I think most of the young blokes tried the marijuana, that’s the first place I ever came across it, yeah, and I did yeah. But nothing, just an experiment to see what it was like you know.

It was okay. I mean it was just the same as drinking. No I thought it was okay. It was beautiful smelling stuff. It was that cheap that it was,

you could just roll up and you could waste it, it just didn’t matter. You could roll a whole fat cigarette and just smoke it like that, didn’t matter that much. Didn’t do great things for me but I can see why people smoke them.

Yeah, mainly in their boozers and, I mean, where I first came across

it was we worked in with the Yanks, with communications. Their communications centre was also on the base but both our and the American Communications Centre used to work through this, used to be called the Double E. It was a huge hill on the base. The actual name of it was, Nui Dat was the name of the hill, means ‘small hill’ in Vietnamese. We used to call it the Double E but that’s only because the unit up there was the Double E, which stood for something I can’t remember.

That was our unit designation and they used to do all the technical, used to carry the communications. In other words everything went up there and either went from land line down to Saigon or went via high frequency, HF, down to Saigon. So we got to know them fairly well because if anything went wrong with our coms, that’s who we’d have to liaise with to sort it out, sort out the problems. We had our own radio

transmitters and receivers but that was very, I mean that way then you had to encrypt everything, you know, put everything in code which was a very slow process. So our secure communications went through the American network so yeah, we got to know them but consequently would socialise with them quite often, especially up in their unit up at what we called the Double E. They had their own sort of private boozer up there so to speak,

their barracks or blocks were up there. So that’s where I first came across it where they start offering it to you because they’d all be into it you know.

Yeah well, it was nil tolerance on our side. With the Americans they seemed to, it seemed to be tolerated. I mean they didn’t do it openly at

work or during the day or whatever, it’d only be when their rec [recreation] time was on, their relaxing time. By the same token it wasn’t, there was no, the military police as I said were the ones that were, the only time I went down with them and they actually bought it was to the front gate where the military police sold it to them. I was amazed. So it was just an accepted thing. I think because there was so many of them doing it,

it was just, to us, it was like us just smoking cigarettes. To them it was, there was no stigma or anything.

No, mainly cigarettes. The first thing I heard about bongs and all that was back in Australia, never came across that. So basically it was just smoking, it was straight marijuana in cigarettes not mixed with tobacco or anything,

just straight marijuana.

Didn’t see that no. Not that I know of.

Oh it was just a rec room basically where, there were so many units spread around the base, I mean this was a fairly huge complex. We had our own boozer as well

which you stuck mainly to. There wasn’t many American boozers you went to because they were a different race of people, I mean they are completely different to us. And so every sort of unit had a rec place where they’d get in and drinks, they’d have fridges and drinks, where they just generally relaxed you know. Played cards, they were right into the cards all the time. I used to enjoy playing cards with them actually, it was good.

Or just, there wasn’t that many that had pool tables but some of them did. There are official clubs, they also had their official clubs on the base like the Officers’ Club and the NCOs’ [Non-Commissioned Officers’] Club, they were actually official. And that’s the first time I ever saw poker machines actually was in the – no, no I’d seen them in New South Wales before that. But coming from Victoria, I’d never seen them there but I had seen them in New South Wales. But yeah they had poker machines in their clubs and that but they had their official clubs as well.

A few of us used to work in their club, the NCOs’ Club for a little while. Just to, again boredom and get a little bit of extra money, you know.

Oh typical Yanks’ poker, seven card stud and they used to come out with all these funny rules you know. Two are wild and seven, if you got seven you’re out and all this, they make up the rules as they go along. But it was quite interesting,

I used to enjoy it.

No we never, I did see some big games but I never got into them. Yeah there was definitely some big games there with thousands of dollars sort of being bet in the middle of the table but our games we’d play, if you won a big hand you might win $20, although $20 was a fair bit of money then

‘cause we were paying, at that stage we were paying 10 cents American for a can of beer, which was seven cents Australian, and 10 cents for a packet of cigarettes. So you could go to the boozer of a night and you could buy say, if you wanted to, you could buy 19 cans of beer and a packet of cigarettes for $2 so you’d have a good night out for $2, so $20 is fairly good.

Oh we were lucky

because they used to bring our own beer, our Australian beer up. I didn’t mind the Yank beer actually. They used to love our beer. As an Australian unit we were unrestricted in how much alcohol we were allowed whereas our army blokes serving in Vietnam they were restricted, I believe, to two cans a day on most days and a certain amount if they were on stand down,

all this type of thing, but we were virtually restricted. Interesting when I was up there and they, the wharfies refused to load the Jeparit with the stores to come up and there was booze, all the cans of booze, coming up as part of the stores. And it was getting near Christmas time and the air force just flew two Herc loads of, all they had on board virtually was Australian beer for us for our Christmas. We weren’t going to miss out, that was one of the advantages

of being in the air force. They just flew two Hercs in just full of grog [alcohol]. Yeah we weren’t too happy about the wharfies.

Because it became political and they refused to load the Jeparit because they said we shouldn’t be involved in Vietnam but what they’re affecting is the actual troops there who didn’t post themselves over there. The troops themselves didn’t get us involved there, it was the politicians. If they’re going to boycott anything they should

just stop the booze going into Parliament House or something, not going overseas. It’s the same, the same thing happened, the posties at one stage refused to send the mail on to the troops in Vietnam. So signs went up all over the air base, and I know the same thing happened there with the army there, ‘Punch a postie when you get home’ you know, there were all these signs around, ‘Punch a postie’ because there was so much dissention. I mean you look forward to your mail, it’s one of those few things

that …, and as it was we were only getting mail through sometimes once every three weeks so we weren’t very happy with the posties stopping our mail coming through. But again they should have boycotted the politicians’ mail, not the troops’ mail.

Oh very important because that’s your only contact from home you know.

Yeah well sometimes Ray used to write to me a lot and sometimes you’d get three or four letters at the same time so you’d have to put them in chronological order, read them in order. I mean you really looked forward to getting your mail from home, and I used to get Ray to actually send the ‘Sun’ newspaper up, Monday’s edition so I could get all the football results and not only the results but the news as well

but sort of I’d be a month behind, I mightn’t get it for a month so I’d be a month behind the football results. It’s interesting now when we have troops in Iraq and now they can ring, you know they can even see them, they’ve got these phones where they can even talk to them face to face on phones and they can email them and they can do, you know, you’ve got your internet working. We couldn’t even phone our rellies [relations],

like I never talked to Ray from, for 12 months, except for the five days that I was home of course, but other than that we had no contact other than mail, that was it. We had no, couldn’t pick up a phone and just ring up. The Americans while we were there, they finished up putting a phone system in to the States [United States of America] so their troops could ring back through the radio network actually, and so they were allocated five minutes a week or something where they could actually ring up their relatives, but we had nothing like that

so, yeah. The mail was the only contact with home so if any news, if anything happened, if anything drastic happened it’d come through the military network, they’d naturally get in touch with you, but anything else, it might be a month behind before you hear something you know.

Oh seven times, that was your only contact with people from home.

Yeah we sort of, to a degree. It was like interests here, the blokes who were interested in the Aussie Rules would talk about it, the blokes who were interested in the League would talk about it, and you’d sort of, I became very good friends with an Western Australian bloke who was the only sigs op [Signals Operator] we had there actually,

and he was an Aussie Rules bloke, and his family, and through him I got to know, he had three daughters and so I met up with him years later and because of the situation, I didn’t know him before I went. But yeah, you come to know peoples’ families because they talk about it and, you know, yeah, you share things around like that.

Oh just what he was up to at that stage, when he was starting to

roll over, he was starting to walk, I missed all that. He was five weeks when I went so when I got back he was, I did 13 months so he was virtually 15 months old you know.

Oh yeah it’s – it’s one of those things you savour sort of thing. It’s funny,

you don’t want to read it because then you’ve read it and yet you want to read it to find out the news. It’s a funny sort of feeling. Yeah, as I said, you might get three or four letters all in the one go. Ray used to do the right thing and try to write every couple of days or so. I got odd letters from my mother, odd letters from my sister, my sisters, you know, and you used to get odd

other letters but it was mainly the closest relative you used to look forward to.

Oh Footscray, yeah, I’ve always been a Footscray supporter. Well they’re known as the Western Bulldogs now but I was brought up, well me old man was always Collingwood but since I was about four or five I followed Footscray

but I was interested in all of it. And it was good to read just the general news of what was going on and what was going on back there, back in Australia. You didn’t get any news either, the only news you got was the Americans used to have, the US Air Force newspaper used to come out and that was full of America of course so nothing about Australia in it.

Well it’s hard to say because, anything you had personal knowledge of was never reported right, but that’s not unusual as far as I’ve seen with journalism really because they don’t seem to get things right very often, you know, exactly right, they get things around about right.

But there’s a lot of things. Being in communications you, it’s an interesting job because you’re right up to date with all the intelligence and stuff that’s going on because everything goes through communications. For instance, at 12 o’clock every night, we used to work on our own on a night shift, it was all rotating shiftwork but of a night time you’d be on your own and 12 o’clock every night a situation report used to have to go to

Canberra, an immediate situation report, in other words detailing exactly the strength of personnel, aircraft, the service abilities, all of that, all of the missions that had been flown, what the result was, how many had been killed, wounded, all that type of thing. So being in communications you would see that whereas the normal run of the mill squadron member would not see that sort of,

that stuff. He only knows his little part of, like the bloke services the aircraft, that’s what he does, he services the aircraft, he doesn’t see any intelligence results of anything whereas in communications you see everything because everything’s got to go through there. It’s the same on the incoming part of it too, you had a lot of mates in the boozer because they’d want to know, when they were coming up to get posted they’d want to know if their posting message was in because the first place it comes through is communications. You would know before anyone else, even the

commanding officer, about anything. Of course it was a secure job so you don’t divulge any information you’re not allowed to, well you’re not allowed to divulge anything actually so yeah, but you had a lot of mates trying to find out information off you, especially where they were going to when they left Vietnam.

No, it wasn’t worth your job. It was a serious offence, a chargeable offence. You wouldn’t,

military’s, being locked up in the military’s was bad enough but you wouldn’t want to be locked up in a war zone in the military I can tell you ‘cause that was run by the army down in Saigon and yeah, it wasn’t a very good place to be, or wouldn’t be, I didn’t go there. Knowing what the military prisons are like in Australia imagine what one in the war zone was like. So yeah, it was a serious offence to divulge anything.

Not serious enough to get locked up or serious enough to get charged.

Well they’d vary but at least – well when you say ‘how long’, you used to type them up in a tape form but actual pages coming in

I’d say there’d be five pages of writing, A4 type pages. It’d take up to an hour to type a message out, you’d transmit the message down to Canberra.

Yeah, every night it’d go out.

Well both. It was a daily update plus the overall

situation cum intelligence situation for a starter, local situation, whereas I mean it used, the local situation used to vary from day to day. In security-wise, in threat-wise, in enemy troop movement-wise, where they used to pick up enemy troops going through the area or something, may not necessarily mean any threat to us but any movement of enemy troops is

vital in case they’re mounting a build up or attack on any other place south of us or north of us because Vietnam was a situation where all these bases spread around this country but anywhere, virtually anywhere, outside these bases is enemy territory. It was a completely different world, there was no front line as such. Whereas normal war

you’ve got a front line, you’re there the enemy’s there and there’s the front line, you hold that territory and they hold that territory, well Vietnam was completely different, you hold a lump in the middle of enemy ground so to speak. I mean, it’s not naturally all enemy but it’s treated as such because it can be so it’s a unique situation. That’s how the Americans never, were never going to win it because that’s exactly the way they fought it and you can’t do that. A

guerrilla force is going to beat you every time doing that. Well the Vietnamese proved it you know.

It’s very interesting really. It’s a unique feeling because you are surrounded by the enemy virtually. The only thing is you know they haven’t got any air power so that, your way out is by air, and I was in the air force,

so all these bases have got, you’re virtually reasonably safe to transit in the air between the bases. I mean, yes, there was aircraft shot down by ground fire and missiles but there was no, there was no air threat, no fighter or bomber threat from the other side because they didn’t have any. They had a minor air force in North Vietnam but not

South. They couldn’t really come down south because they’d be blown out of the air because the Yanks had so many, so much numerical numbers over them in the air that they had no chance. So there was no threat from the air, yeah it was a different sort of war but by the same token normally you’ve got a threat from the air from the other side but in this case you didn’t.

Yeah.

It is a besieged sort of feeling because as I said to you, we were virtually a closed up base. You’re sort of in a prison in a way because, and the guards are the enemy outside, not letting you do anything, not letting you out. That changed from time to time. I mean we had a beach about, it was about 10 to 40 kilometres away, which we used to go to when it wasn’t restricted. So maybe once a fortnight

they would say, “Okay, we can send a convoy down the beach,” but it’d go, you’d go fully armed, fully escorted and you’d go from Phan Rang, our base, in trucks down to the beach and the Yanks had the beach also perimetered off, what we called our section of the beach, and watch towers, so they were manned all the time too by the Yanks and so it was a secure area outside our base. So you’d arrive at the beach inside this wire

again, with the Yanks on the towers, and you’d spend the day at the beach swimming. We had our own little yachts and a couple of speed boats which you used to do a bit of skiing. There was a fence that went out into the water, halfway down the beach and went out in the water some 500 yards, and the other side was the threat side again, it was the enemy side virtually.

From time to time that beach came under fire so everything, you were in pockets. If you’ve got to go from somewhere to somewhere it’s all, you go in strength. So yeah, it was a siege mentality type thing, you do find that. I had to go on a medivac [medical evacuation] escort up to Kam Ron Bay. Kam Ron Bay was the real major American

base about 50 kilometres north of us and I went on a medical escort up there. That was interesting because that was the same sort of thing. You go in, they wanted a few to go as you know so they’ve got enough troops to handle anything that might happen, and this bloke had to go up there, couldn’t take him up by air because of his medical condition so he had to go by road, and so I just went up for the day because it gave me something to do. So we went up to Kam Ron Bay

and they treated him at the big American hospital and came back that afternoon. So yeah, again it’s, you’re going through enemy territory but it’s not, well it is and it isn’t, it can be, anywhere outside the base was, you were in danger but to what degree you never knew.

Well yeah it, well depends on what you mean. Yeah it was, it was more not being able to do anything. You know it was a funny sort of situation. Very rarely did you go into Phan Rang town itself

because it was, 95% of the time I was there it was off limits because of the threat but I remember on one particular day that I did go in there, there was four of us and I remember this young bloke in there just offered me a cigarette, a young Vietnamese, well teenager, he would’ve been 18 or 19, that sort of age, and he offered me a cigarette but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t take it because I wasn’t game enough to sort of

take it because you don’t know who’s a threat and who’s not. It was a funny sort of war because you don’t know who’s the enemy and who’s not. We had workers on the base, like used to do washing and ironing and used to do the garden, whatever gardening there was, there wasn’t much of that, but used to do the general clean up stuff you know, and they always had to vet them pretty

thoroughly because they always suspected there’d be an enemy trying to infiltrate workers in there because then they could see exactly what the layout was of everything, so they were scrutinised fairly heavily if they got a job. And that was a great job to them because it was good money compared to what they could get anywhere else. So yeah.

No, I never ever thought about that actually, I never thought about a threat from the sea itself. Again the North Vietnamese weren’t, didn’t have any navy so to speak or anything like that that they could’ve launched anything down in that area because the Yanks controlled the seas as well as the sky. No, never entered our heads, a threat from there. We had,

as I said, the beach was fired on a few times from, there was hills around, hills everywhere so there was hills around there, but more harassment firing again you know. They closed the beach down several times because of that. It was a great outlet for us because it was somewhere where you could get down and relax and be away from the base and, you know, have a barbecue and have a few beers. It was good. One of our boats – an interesting story. You know I said the Americans liked our beer? Well we bought

a speed boat for four dozen cans so we called it Four Dozen, it cost us five dollars to be exact. Five dollars American we got a speed boat off them, I mean we’re talking about a speed boat with a motor and everything, set up, ready to go. So we called that Four Dozen.

Well we only had the one type, the Canberra bomber, B20s. We had 8 of those on strength. I think I mentioned before, we were part of the 35th Tactical Fighter

Wing of the USAF [United States Air Force]. They used to fly three squadrons of F100 fighters off our base. Plus, they had, originally they had a squadron of Canberras as well which were slightly different to ours, they were B57s, but they pulled them out, in fact they were gone by the time I got there. See 2 Squadron was there from about April or May ’67,

we started there and I got there in June ’70, so they’d been there three years by the time I got there. Yeah, so we flew 8 Canberras.

In two different ways. They used to do high level bombing and did that a lot initially. When I was there they did some high level bombing but not a lot,

I’m talking about from say 26,000, 25, 26,000 feet, and a lot of low level stuff in support of ground troops. What would happen is they were doing what they called sorties, so they did eight sorties a day so each aircraft would do virtually one sortie every day. So they’d take off from our base and be given a specific area to go to where a forward air controller would take them over,

what we called a FAC, forward air controller, in a light aircraft which were mainly United States Air Force. We did have some FAC pilots. They would take them over and they would give them a target and the forward air controller would fly his aircraft in, they were called bird dogs or small aircraft and they’d fly in and drop flares on the target where they wanted the bomber to hit

and then the Canberra’d come in on his run. Now he’d either come through, drop all his bombs at once or do, drop one, come around and do another run, come around and drop another one, you know, and do runs like that, if they were in support of ground troops for instance where they were trying to keep an enemy back. At times it was vital stuff because there was a couple of times where there was a threat of ground troops being overrun so we had Canberras sort of pulling them up, stop them.

Fairly good, I mean we had a great reputation for accuracy. At one stage there in a couple of months the wing, the damage the wing did, I mean we had 8 aircraft and the rest of the wing, I don’t know

how many in each squadron, F100s there was but, you know, possibly 20 or 30 in each squadron, so the rest of the wing would be 100 aircraft. We did actually 50% of the damage for the wing, in a couple of months. We were always well above the figures in that we were doing more damage than missions were given so percentage way, yeah, extremely accurate. Yeah when the Canberras first went to Vietnam they were a bit worried about them

being sort of end of Second World War aircraft, being a bit slow and everything but because the other side didn’t have any air power as such they were terrific in that role.

Oh mainly the surface to air missiles, the SAM missiles, which was extremely dangerous, I mean the

Yanks lost heaps of aircraft. The other thing was normal ground fire where, because you’re flying so low, at times the Canberras were coming in at 1,000 feet, you’ve got ground fire getting up to 3,000 feet so, yeah, that was always a threat. Oh it’s one of those things. But mainly the surface to air missiles was the major threat to aircraft.

Well with reconnaissance and intelligence of Americans would, they’d sort of photograph an area and they’d discover bunker complexes and fortified positions, troop concentrations,

those sort of things, or supply routes, like you’ve heard of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and that was one of their main supply routes that used to come down through Cambodia and Laos actually. But even in Vietnam itself there’d be supply trails so those had to be, they were targets, especially fortified positions. So the Canberras would go out and they’d be given the co-ordinates of the target and whatever and bomb hell

out of whatever needed to be bombed. There was some, the estimate of the damage done by our squadron was 4,000 enemy killed by the squadron, something like 8,000 fortified bunkers destroyed and various roads and bridges and other things, infrastructure.

No,

our Canberras operated solely in South Vietnam. Politically we weren’t supposed to go into Laos or North Vietnam, however that happened accidentally at times. But the brief was to operate solely in South Vietnam whereas the Yanks used to fly in the North and bomb Hanoi and places like that as well. But we never actually flew up there, that far.

North Vietnam? It was a politically, I don’t, I haven’t really gone into why North Vietnam was off, I think the main reason North Vietnam was off the list was because of the threat to our Canberras more than anything else. Because in North Vietnam they did have some air force, not much,

plus they had a heap more missile sites to bring an aircraft down. I mean the Yanks lost numerous, even B52s, lost a heap of aircraft in the north. Laos was a different matter, it was definitely a political decision. We weren’t at war with Laos so the Yanks made a decision that they didn’t care, they would go in, and because the Vietnamese were coming down through Laos, using that as a supply line,

the Yanks said, “Well if they’re using that, that’s a fair target. We’ll bomb it.” But a decision was made not for Australia to do that. So yeah, basically operated, a full military zone set-up in Vietnam and we used to operate in the full military zones. So various targets and …

Well the same sort of set up. I mean the Ho Chi Minh Trail used to run down from North Vietnam through Cambodia, Laos and into South Vietnam. The reason was obvious

why the North Vietnamese did that because when they initially set it up it was a safe way to come. And the Yanks said, “You’re not going to get away with that. You know you’re not going to have a safe route into South Vietnam where you bring all your troops down and your munitions and whatever.” So they started bombing hell out of the Ho Chi Minh Trail but that was in fact in two other countries. That was the thing there.

Not officially.

The Canberras were fairly good because, that’s where the Americans had a problem when they, with the forward air controls where they used to control, the Yank aircraft could really only stay over a target for some 15 to 20 minutes

because of the fuel whereas the Canberras, they had a four hour time. So any target in Vietnam you virtually could get there in an hour and so you’ve got plenty of time over a target. So at times they would hold a Canberra in an area just on the chance of another target coming up if you know what I mean, so they would just fly them around for two hours and say, “Okay we’ve got a target for you, go and hit that.”

Or if they had Yankee aircraft coming over let them go in first and let them hit the target, 15, 20 minutes, because they only had 15 to 20 minutes over the target, and then they could go and then the Canberras could go and finish it off type thing. So they were good for that type of thing. With bomb loads it used to vary because they used to have, I think, 500 pound bombs or 750 pound bombs, both pretty devastating sort of stuff.

With the 500s. I think they could carry eight 500, it was either six or eight 500. It was about 6,000 pound of bomb load they could carry so I think they used to carry six though, no sorry, eight, which was 4,000, something like that. So yeah, a fairly formidable load they used to take with them.

I’m not sure on that one. I know you wouldn’t, they never brought the munitions back because it was too dangerous to land with them. The only instance they had was, which was documented, was where one of them came back with a bomb which hadn’t released properly in the bomb bay

and when they closed the doors up it was still in the bomb bay which they didn’t know and when they landed and when they land they open the bomb bay doors up to re-bomb, to re-arm, and the thing fell out on the tarmac. So it was a bit hairy. So after that they used to inspect, they put a little window or something in the bomb bay so you could have a look inside before they opened the bomb bay up so that they had no hang-ups. But I can’t remember instances of them coming back with a bomb load. I mean

they use it, sometimes the primary target’d be clouded, for instance by the time they got to the target the cloud’d be too low. If FAC couldn’t get in there and drop the flares, well even if he could you wouldn’t be able to see the smoke, so they’d be sent to a secondary target. Now the secondary target may be insignificant but they’d still go and, so they’d drop the ordnance you know.

No no they were fully, that was

all, the Canberras never had any personal defence so to speak, never had any machine guns or anything like, during the Second World War, like the Lancasters did have their machine guns, but the Canberras didn’t have any, all they had was the bomb load, yeah. So in a situation where you’d have Canberras fighting against a force with aircraft against you, you’d have to have them with fighters, fighters’d have to go with them.

No. No.

500 pound bombs. No napalm. The Australian Government, I believe, then had a policy of no, nothing like that.

There was a lot of

reasons for it. You know one reason was the training, the other reason, they were a good aircraft to, because they were straight, they used to come in straight and level on their bombing runs whereas the F100s they used to use in the others, the B52s of course were high, very high altitude and so you’re subject to a lot of error rate. However it didn’t really matter, with their saturation bombing it didn’t matter if half the bombs

missed where they were supposed to be going, what’s the difference? You know if you got half of them going roughly where they are supposed to be going it doesn’t matter. With the F100s there they were a dive bomber type aircraft so not as accurate. As I said, probably better trained, better pilot.

A crew of two. You had the pilot, navigator cum bombardier, he used to do two jobs. Quite a

confined aircraft, the pilot and your navigator used to sit next to your pilot. Before you get to a target, once they get to a target well then the navigator used to have to climb out of his chair and go down into the so-called bombing bay, the perspex where the bomb aim instruments are, and he would lay there while they were doing the bombing runs. Quite

dangerous really if you got hit while you were out of your chair, so yeah, a crew of two.

No, not so much. In North Vietnam they had that, that ack-ack, but not in South because they

were too exposed. If they set up an ack-ack position they’d just be wiped out as soon as the Yanks found it and it wouldn’t take much to find. As soon as an ack-ack started firing at any aircraft they’d just come over and take them out you know. So no, there was no sort of ack-ack, it was just SAM missiles which you could set up a missile site in the middle of the bush and very hard to detect where the actual missiles come from. The Yanks did have

radar sights set up even in Thailand to sort of track, try to track where SAM missiles were coming from but if they suspected SAM missile area, but the Vietnamese used to move them around too all the time for exactly that reason, because if the Yanks detected an area of where they may be then the area’d be bomb saturated to try to wipe them out as well. So yeah it was virtually

the threat from SAMs but they’re a fairly big threat.

Well I used to do the situation reports every night. Not every night but when I was on duty I did them. It wasn’t very often they didn’t operate where they were supposed to be operating.

It wasn’t up to me, I was only a communicator, I just did what I was told.

Well in the situation report. It would go out and it would be information about targets hit, enemy killed, killed in action, believed killed,

bridges had been taken out, virtual targets had been destroyed because once one of our Canberras had done a bombing mission the area’d be over flown by an American reconnaissance to photograph the area to see what damage had been done. So it was all intelligence gathering and that would go in the situation report to Canberra.

The situation reports were a classified secret by the way.

Well yeah, I mean that was the situation report. They had to brief the hierarchy air force in Canberra what was happening.

I assume so, yeah, you would assume that, yeah.

Actually on a mission, not a lot. They used to mainly work through the Americans because they would give them the targets. We used to work when they were just on normal operations and when I say that, normal flight following. They always used UHF which was ultra high frequency

which is the normal thing for air to ground short range whereas we used to work high frequency, HF, communications mainly. But they tried them out with the Canberras while I was there, where we used to flight follow them, in other words we would talk to the aircraft and they would give what they call ‘operations normal’ so every 20 minutes they would give what they call OPN, operations normal. In other words,

where we are, where we’re supposed to be, we’re on track and we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing, if you know what I mean. Then on the next 20 minute skeg they would give you their position report, encoded. So we didn’t do a lot of that either because it was too awkward to do that with those type of aircraft.

I mean the Yanks had a system, I mean you don’t give your position away to the enemy. I mean all these radio message, all this radio traffic is open to eavesdropping and interception. So the Yanks used to use a system where you use a ‘do not answer’. If they had an aircraft going to a mission and they wanted to change his mission for instance they would radio up, say, ‘Do not answer, do not answer,’ give him the new target in

a pre-set code type thing and give him an authentication. In other words they’d give them an authentication that would be, say, two letters or something used to say that, ‘I am who I am. I’m telling you to do this,’ because without authenticating anyone could tell him to go and do something couldn’t they, so all that was sort of done. So yeah we didn’t, operational they used, the Yanks used to work them because

the Yanks used to allocate them the targets. We were mainly involved after mission, pre-mission type thing as well because you had to know what aircraft are going, what area they’re going to, virtually all that sort of information you know.

Oh I’d have to go into real detail. It’s like encoded messages, it’s where you put something in code. It’s like, you know, you’ve heard of, well it’s an encryption. You encrypt a message so that no-one else can read it so that you and the receiver are the only ones that have got the code. So you encrypt something and then they decrypt it the other end.

Well for instance, okay, you get a secret message. You encrypt it using an encryption machine and they vary, the one that we used are obsolete now. You encrypt the message in a certain code for the day and transmit the message. Now the message can be encrypted,

which we used to encrypt a lot of messages, then you would then put on what you would call a secure line which we used to send down to Saigon through the Americans and that would be encrypted again by a machine. So we were hand encrypting it, this message. And then it goes, we transmit and then it gets machine encrypted so it’s virtually double encrypted. Down the other end a machine decrypts that part of it but it’s only

decrypted into an encryption. Then someone’s actually got to physically decrypt that message again. There’s various encryption systems and, which I couldn’t go into because of security but I mean all those systems we used are all gone and buried by now. My last job in the air force was actually encryption, I was in charge of the radio school cryptography section where we used to actually teach people how to encrypt messages.

So yeah, that was my section just before I got out after my 20 years, interesting work.

It’s too technical. You’ve got your message and have you ever seen the movie about the Enigma,

Bletchley Park and Enigma machines [encryption machines]? Well we were using a version of the Enigma machine only a couple of generations on. In other words, a more refined better machine but the principle was the same, using rotors so it randomly encrypts. Okay so you get your message, I gather what you might be trying, okay so you get your message, what you do is you actually type your message into this machine. Every time you hit a letter, say your letter’s, say your word for instance

is ‘the’, t.h.e., you hit the ‘t’ and it will give you a different letter, these rotors spin and they go to a certain letter, it’s like a computer, it’s the first sort of computer, and for the ‘t’ it might give you a ‘z’, but if you did that ‘t’ again it won’t give you a ‘z’, it’ll give you a different letter. That was a big problem with encryption, used to be years back because for common words it was easy to break it, an encryption, because common words

you just go through a whole message and you’ve got a lot of ‘the’ and ‘and’ and your common letter like ‘e’. You know if every time you encrypt an ‘e’ and it comes out a ‘z’ you’re going to pick that up pretty easy because you just count how many ‘z’s are there and, ‘Oh that’s got to be the ‘e’,’ and just substitute your ‘z’ for your ‘e’, you can do that and it’s a piece of cake. With this system is where the rotors and they will randomly give a different letter every time, every time you do it. And so you type it in and it comes out in a tape,

in a tape form and then you stick the tape down onto another message and all it is is five letters of nothing, it means nothing. It might be a,q,z,w,p as one group and then there’s these five-letter groups and you’ve got hundreds of them, all five letter groups. So you can either send that in Morse code which is, that’s an easy way to do Morse code, send it out in Morse code or you type that up again on a machine and you

get a tape out with that on and you feed that into another, an encryption machine which automatically encrypts it. You don’t actually have to do it, the machine encrypts the machine. Not so secure as the other method but then it’s doubly encrypted. And the person the other end gets it out and all they do is, in the finish they get this message with five letter codes so it means nothing. I could give it to you and you, it means nothing, it’s just a jumble of letters, but a person who uses the same

key is the person who encrypted the machine and you’ve got it and they’ve got it. So the transmitter’s got the key and the receiver’s got the key. You can sit down and once you’ve put that key in your machine so your machine, what it does is, you put that key in and what it does is it sets the rotors up exactly the same as the transmitter’s rotors and then you can type those letters in and it will, all of a sudden, ‘Oh goodness,’ and it starts coming out in words, so it does the reverse.

Do you follow that? That’s the easy version.

There’s various methods. That’s one method.

You’d need the key, you’ve got to have the key. The keys are randomly changed as to

stop that sort of thing. I mean, you can have the same machine no problem at all and they have, all countries do it, it goes on every day of the week. Computers these days, they’ve got computers to try to decrypt your traffic which can be done but it takes time.

Well it’s only, it’s how you set your rotors up. You can take each of these individual rotors

out of your machine and you can set them up in a different way. So you’ve got, on your rows you’ve got three rings and you set the rings up in different ways but it tells you how to set each rotor up, your key for the day tells you how to set your rotors up. You put the rotors back in the machine and now at the other end they’ve done the same thing, say at midnight, you might change your rotors and they’ve done that but that’s not where it finishes. Then you actually type a key into it as well to reset the rotors

in a different configuration. Now you and that other person are the only ones that have got that key. The transmitter and the receiver are the only ones who have got that key. So anyone who’s got a machine can’t just get your message and type it out because they’ve got to know how you set your rotors up because they can be set up several thousand different ways. And they’ve got to have, type this key in which can be millions of combinations before they’ll hit on the key that you’ve used. As I said, computers

can do that sort of thing now because they’re so quick and all that but it takes time, so eventually you can crack a code like that. It’s a code you can’t crack but you can crack a code like that but it’s going to take time. So say it takes you a week to crack that code, you’re going to be a week behind that traffic so where do you start and where do you finish you know what I mean? So every time you fall a week behind, so in the finish you’re going to be years behind. You understand what I’m saying then

‘cause you’re going to be a week behind cracking each message.

A good question. That’s a good question actually isn’t it? That’s carried by safe hand, what they call safe hand. From the time it’s generated by the

generating authority, it is then fanned out to who needs it. So they’re going to think that I need to send you a message. You might be situated in Washington. I might be situated in Canberra. From time to time I’ll need to send messages to you and you need to send messages to me that are sensitive so we need an encryption system between each other. So they will give me a key, in other words someone takes it from that building by safe hand gives it

to me and I sign for that key and someone flies over to America and hands you that key and they’re the only people that ever physically handle that. It’s called safe hand and that’s the reason, because it never leaves someone’s hands. And that goes on the whole time.

Same thing, we used to get our, what happens – we used to get Hercs, Hercules aircraft, up in Australia every,

about twice a week roughly. It didn’t always work that way but usually Tuesdays and Thursdays a Herc would come in and so any, they didn’t want you holding too much cryptographic material in a war zone because it was susceptible to enemy capture, we had precautions for that as well, so the key generated in Canberra, they would send the key by safe hand courier

up on the Hercules. One of our people from the Communications Centre where I worked would meet the Hercules, sign for that material off him, bring it into the Communications Centre, open it up and you would have your crypto material. As I said, in a war zone you had a very limited amount because of subject to capture and we used to have what we called emergency destruction procedures so

being in communications and night time you’d be on you own. We had a big red bucket type thing with incendiary grenades so if the base came under attack and it looked like we were going to be overrun it was your job as the communicator in the centre to throw this sensitive crypto material into the red bin and throw incendiary grenades in with it and up she’d go in smoke because everything’d burn, that was the idea. The same with, that’s why troops going out

on patrol or in the field take very, very limited cryptography material with them and if they come under attack and look like they’re being overrun, you know, it’s the old story about eat the codes, well they’re supposed to actually burn the codes so they can’t be captured but the thing is if they are captured there’s no problem. There’s no problem with anything being captured as long as you know it’s been captured because then you don’t use it any more. That’s no hassles. It’s where you don’t know something’s been captured that’s the problem. So yeah, if you’re out in the field

and you’ve got crypto stuff with you, you burn it. If you don’t, the enemy gets it, that’s just not used as long as everyone knows it’s been captured.

In a very secure, in a secure room that no-one but the communications staff was allowed into. No-one in the squadron except for the commanding officer, the

radio officer and the communications staff are actually allowed into the communications centre which was only, there was only five or six of us, roughly six whatever. And you’ve also got a room inside the room, inside the communications centre, which is called your cryptographic room, which no-one is allowed into except the cleared staff and in some instances you can have communications staff that are not actually cleared to go into that room either. But in cases in Vietnam you’ve got to all be cleared because you’ve all got to

have access to the gear and you’re doing night shift and you might have to destroy it. So yeah.

It doesn’t really work like that. It works, every message is, was what we call on-line encrypted, in other words automatically

machine encrypted which is not as secure but is still encrypted. Every message it doesn’t matter, whether it’s a run of the mill administration message about posting or whatever, it’s just easier to do it that way because if you send everything through your machine no problem. Sensitive messages, they are then what is called off-line encryption, in other words they’re taken into this room, encrypted and then put through the message. So anything virtually of

secret, top secret. It’d depend on what the situation is, depends on where you are. Confidential can be too, anything sensitive or top secret virtually is encrypted.

Yeah, you

use a different system with aircraft because you can’t have a pilot sitting there having to do that stuff so they use – what would you call them? – buzz words or things like that, phrases for aircraft, it’s hard to describe. A pilot can virtually sit there with what they call a knee pad and they can work on a knee

pad but it’s got to be pretty basic and pretty easy. So that the way it works I mean with military aircraft is, if you need to, the best thing is not to need to, you should have all the briefing before he actually takes that aircraft in the air, but if you’ve got to communicate with him by radio and give him some instruction that you don’t want anyone else to know about, well then it’s got to be encrypted and it’s got to be a very basic encryption but the thing is it’s only used

once, you only use it once and everything is authenticated. When I say authenticated you’ve got these tables and he only takes, say his mission’s for four hours, he’ll only take enough authentication for six hours for instance and it can be a two letter authentication, so if I send you a message and it’s just a basic message about, ‘Change the secondary target,’ and that buzz word might be Zulu Delta or something like that.

So you just look up, ‘Oh Zulu Delta means: change to secondary target.’ Now before you’ve taken off you’ve been given a secondary target. So it means don’t go to your first one now, go to your second one. However, you don’t know it’s me that’s telling you to do that ‘cause it’s just on the radio so I’ve got to make sure that I tell you who I am, so then I’ll authenticate that so you send a two letter authentication so I might say Alpha Delta and give a time. ‘The time is so and so Alpha Delta.’ He looks up that time, what the

authentication should be and it’s Alpha Delta, ‘Okay, I’m going to do that.’ If he looks it up and it says, authentication of that time should be Echo Oscar he will then ask you to repeat the authentication. If you still give the Alpha Delta you might have made a blue and you say, ‘Well he asked me to repeat it.’ It should twig straight away to say, ‘I might have made a blue, look it up properly.’ But if you give the same authentication he won’t do it because there’s no guarantee that you’re who you say you are. There was cases in Vietnam, there was

a famous one, when we used to teach down at the radio school we used to run the tapes of this, where there was Vietnamese troops in the area, Viet Cong, and they came up on the radio in broad Australian accent. These Yanks were going to bomb hell out of this area and they come up with broad Australian accent and the Americans telling them they were these Australian troops in this area. ‘We are so and so,’ and made all this up and got this Yank talking and because it was such a broad accent and this Yank

was sort of, he held off on his mission and so he had to radio back to his base and say, “Is there any known Australians in this area?” and they said, “No.” And they said, “Well there’s this bloke you know he’s got a broad Australian accent telling me who they are and whatever.” And so he had to ask him to authenticate. ‘Authenticate such and such a time.’ In other words give me authentication that should be in force at this moment and of course this voice couldn’t do it because he hadn’t got the table.

But he had them talking long enough for those troops to get out of the area, and that’s what happened, they got out of the area because he held this Yank up 15, 20 minutes, just enough time for these troops to get out. So it goes on. And broad Australian accent, I heard the tape. We used to teach it. ‘Listen to this.’ You know, ‘They can speak Australian.’

Yeah. One of the things when we went there is the Australian Government stipulated that we were to keep our own identity so we were self-sufficient

and as much as possible. We did come under the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing as an identity and we were mainly given targets by the Americans although we did support Australian ground troops from time to time but as far as support went we had all our things, that’s why we had our own communications, our own –

I mean down to the painter, the unit, administration staff. We had our own cooks, we even had our own protection in the aerial defence guards, ADGs, were there. So we were self-sufficient, in fact so self-sufficient at one stage the Americans offered to pay us the same allowance as they were paying their troops which was a lot more than what we were getting. We used to get $2 a day extra for being in Vietnam

whereas the Americans used to get a stack, I don’t exactly know how much but they offered to pay us the same allowance which the Australian Government knocked back much to our disappointment. So yeah we were self sufficient.

To maintain that self-sufficiency and to maintain our own identity – ‘We will support our own troops and we will look after ourselves,’ virtually. We’re there except for being a member of the US Air Force in

designation as such. We were our unit and stuck to ourselves in the main and we were encouraged to stick to ourselves, we were encouraged to stick to ourselves in the main. We were encouraged to stay in our area and, ‘Don’t associate with the Americans, if possible.’

That was right out of my area so I couldn’t exactly tell you who would make those bottom-line decisions. I would say it would be made from 35th Tactical Fighter Wing Operations in consultation with our commanding officer because the Canberras had a certain role to play. In fact the Yanks used them in that role in the finish

because they were so good at it. So I think, I believe that’d be in consultation we made those decisions.

Well naturally I wouldn’t be involved in that because of my position but I would imagine the CO [Commanding Officer] would be involved in briefings all the time.

The COs of 2 Squadron were wing commanders.

The bloke we had when I first got there, Jack Boast, Wing Commander Boast, he was a gentleman, terrific bloke. We had a little bit to do with the commanding officers in that before they went on their mission every morning, he’d call into the Communication Centre. As I said, it was a restricted area, only the commanding officer was allowed in there plus the radio officer, that was it, and us, and he would call in to have a look at the message traffic,

just read anything he needed to read, always friendly. You’d be on your own and it’d be after doing a night shift, you’d be dead tired, this might be five o’clock in the morning he’d come in and say, “G’day,” and have a little chat to you, “How’s your family?” and whatever, just a friendly chat and then read the message traffic and away he’d go on his mission. He was terrific, very popular bloke. We got Wing Commander Downing after that, who wasn’t, he was quite a nice bloke,

not so friendly as Jack Boast but a nice bloke, he was the bloke that got shot down and got hurt so he was sent back to Australia, and the other CO was Wing Commander Thorpe who was quite a nice bloke too. We didn’t have him for long because we pulled out in July so I think he only did four months before we went.

Yeah that was in November ’70, very popular members of the squadron. Being a member of a squadron like that it was a very friendly, everyone, as I said to you, was in the same boat. Those two blokes, Michael Herbert and Robert Carver, they were actually having a drink with us in the airmen’s boozer the night before the mission where they disappeared.

They went on their mission and disappeared, after their bombing run, just after the bombing run they just disappeared off the radar and they never exactly found out what happened to them. The suspicion is they were hit with SAM missiles and disintegrated in the air because our other aircraft or other seven aircraft and the Yanks searched for them for days and didn’t, usually you expect to find some wreckage or something, they knew what area they were, in the

Da Nang area they were bombing in so they knew the area they were in. They knew when they disappeared off the radar, the time, so they had a pretty good idea of exactly where they were really and no not a trace was found and to this day they haven’t found anything, very unusual. If an aircraft crashes, like gets hit and crashes, the villagers somewhere will find it

or whatever and so there’ll be someone who knows about it, but nothing. So we suspected it just disintegrated in the air. Unfortunate for the squadron, everyone feels it ‘cause there’s 280 of yous and you’ve just lost two of your air crew. Plus everyone, when we were searching for it for days, observers were going up with the aircraft and helping in the search and all this. It was quite

a traumatic time for everybody. After, they decided to give the search away and things got back to normal but it was sort of never the same really, it was the first aircraft we’d lost and the first crew we’d lost.

Well before that we’d never lost an aircraft and we’d had a couple hit with ground fire and two

collided over the base there one day but did minor damage and both landed okay. Other than that we had nothing really too much and so to lose one, and it wasn’t so much losing it but it was not knowing what happened to them. And I’ll never forget meeting Michael Herbert’s sister in Canberra several years later, this is only, oh, six, seven years ago now,

and I sort of, ‘cause I was one of the ones that talked to him, being a radio operator you know, and sort of she asked me, “Do you know what happened?” because the family really tried to find out. I can remember Michael Herbert’s mother writing to the papers, they came from Adelaide, and going crook about the Australian Government not searching enough for her son to find out if he’s a prisoner of war for instance,

that was one of the big worries. So yeah, meeting his sister was very traumatic several years later, asking me if I knew what happened because I would have been one of the last people to speak to him I suppose, you know, on the radio, so it is traumatic. She was still cut up about it then and this was quite a few years after he’d been killed or he’d gone missing.

Oh it was just operations, you know, operations normal, just normal run of the mill. The same when the last message he gave the Yanks after he did his bombing mission. Just was a normal bomb run complete. I think the forward air controller from memory gave him a bomb assessment, said, “Yeah, that was great,” they were right where they were supposed to be and that was it and supposedly he was climbing up to his return altitude

to come back to us. He was about two hours away, an hour and a half to two hours away, and he didn’t return. Nothing was sort of, nothing was sort of done until they didn’t turn up when they were supposed to, back at the base, and then they contacted the Yanks to see if they knew anything and the radar in Thailand apparently said, ‘Oh yeah they checked their radar and he disappeared off the radar at such and

such a time,’ which was only a few minutes after the bombing run had been done. So yeah, I was amazed that nothing had been instigated before that. So yeah, we lost that and four months later our CO got shot, shot down. Luckily they both got out. They’d finished their bombing run and were climbing

and were hit by one SAM missile and the aircraft got fairly heavy damage and then they got hit again. They had that much damage that the CO decided that the aircraft was not going to fly too much longer, ‘We’d better get out of here,’ and so he told the nav [navigator] to go, Pinchers his name was, he told him to get out so he ejected and the CO went. Pinchers hurt his back on

going out on ejection out of the aircraft, he seriously hurt his disc in his back. They both landed and Downing hurt his knees on landing, broke a knee cap or something, broke one of his knee caps. And it was late afternoon when they went down. They had radios with them, distress radios, and they were right in the middle of the jungle near the Laotian border actually, and the Yanks finished up picking them up in the morning

on their radios and getting a chopper out through the jungle canopy and hoist them back up. So they were medevaced to Da Nang and then down to Vung Tau and then back to Australia. So they were lucky ‘cause if those missiles had’ve hit the aircraft in a different position they would’ve been gone as well.

Not really.

Not myself. I think the ops, operations officer, Squadron Leader Barnes, I think he had, he went to see them when they were in hospital in Vung Tau I think and had a chat to them. Well there was an inquest anyway into what happened to the aircraft which there always is, not an inquest an inquiry, a court of inquiry set up to ascertain what happens, you know, whenever they have anything like that. But yeah, no they were virtually medevaced back to Australia because they were too seriously injured to keep, to come back,

you know, so we got another CO then.

Well it would’ve been pretty traumatic you know, out in the jungle. From what I know about the story, it rained most of the night and they got pretty wet and cold and they were injured. They weren’t together because they’d, when they’d parachuted down through the jungle they landed in different places.

They made contact with each other on the radio apparently in the next morning and that was okay because it made them feel better because they knew each other was in the area. They never actually met up. The chopper [helicopter] was, when they hoisted Downing out then Pinchers guided the chopper over to where he was and they hoisted him out. Apparently they were about half a kilometre apart in the jungle which was, in the jungle and it was up on escarpments in cliffs and all that sort of stuff,

but lucky we didn’t lose any of them.

No, I wasn’t actually working when they went but there wasn’t any messages back to the squadron as far as I know. I’m not sure about that but I don’t think there was.

Oh it was dead set low. It was, I mean at first it’s unbelievable, you expect them to turn up. I mean when they don’t turn up, they were due in about 10 o’clock at night, when they didn’t turn up for the first half hour you think, ‘Oh well they’re just running late,’ which is unusual anyway, but you know after an hour or so the worry starts to come so, and sort of the words are going around the squadron, ‘We’ve lost the crew, what’s happened to them?’ and everyone’s talking about it.

Yeah it makes everyone down. And then the next three, four days or whatever, the other seven aircraft are 24 hours a day virtually out looking for them, just coming back to refuel and change crew and out they’d go again. There was heaps of missions flown to try to find them, coming back empty handed with no positive sighting. What the problem was in that area, it’d had been bombed fairly extensively and there was

bits of parachute and what have you that had been off flares that had been dropped and supplies had been dropped to ground troops and all that, so there was bits of parachute picked up on top of the jungle canopy. Well every one of those bits of parachute had to be investigated because that may have been one of their parachutes. So that was fairly traumatic for everybody but nothing, when nothing was found it was even worse because you still

expect something to be found, even months, a couple of months after. But yeah everyone was down.

Oh of course, yeah, we had a – we had a – what do you call it? – the Padre held a memorial service, can’t remember exactly. That might have been about four or five days later I think, yeah I’m pretty sure it was, four or five days later a memorial

service was held in the hangar and there was only skeleton staff that were working that didn’t attend, everyone else attended that.

Oh pretty moving yeah. Everyone was down. Yeah big event losing a couple of well-liked, well-liked blokes too.

Well that varied because I did shift work. I either, I was either on a day shift or a night shift, or an evening shift or a day off. We had one day off a week which sometimes you’d be rostered for guard duty so that didn’t always, a night guard duty. But say a typical –

typical day would be down in the Coms Centre, work in the Coms Centre all day. That was seven o’clock you’d change, you’d come down and relieve the night shift bloke. During the day there was myself, one other operator and the warrant officer and the flight sergeant in the Com Centre so there was four of yous there. You did your message traffic, general run of the mill. You go up to lunch to the domestic area.

They bus you up for lunch, bus you back. Night time you’d finish. Everyone’s ritual, you’d sort of go up to the boozer and then everyone sitting around having a few drinks. It was funny actually because six o’clock every night they used to test the red alert siren which was, ‘We’re under attack,’ siren, used to be tested and it was up on a hill behind us

and at six o’clock they’d test it every night to make sure it was working okay. So all the new blokes, you always used to get it where you had any new ones in, you know, they’d just come in that day, everyone’d sort of get up and make out to run as though we’re under attack and it was the six o’clock and that was just one of those little jokes, don’t know why it’s funny now. So you’d have a few drinks and have some tea and then you had options.

I mean we had our own little picture theatre set up which we called Sydney Opera House but it was just a screen out on the lawn and we used to just take our chairs out from the boozer and sit out there and have a few drinks and watch a movie which’d be run on one of those big reel to reels. There might be an infantry engagement off the base which you could watch. From our

strategic position on these rises you could overlook if there was a fire fight going on because you could see all the tracers going backwards and forward. So depended on what was going on. We had an ack-ack – sorry, not an ack-ack, an artillery unit up behind us, and it used to fire, if there was something going on it’d fire the artillery and the shells used to go straight over our heads, straight over our area and so they’re thirty, forty feet in the air whatever they were and you could hear them whistling

as they’re going over. It was just unbelievable. So yeah, things like that all make life interesting.

Well it was just part of the thing you know. It was just part, that was it.

Not really because it was called outgoing not incoming. Then you might come under attack, every day varied of course. So you might go to bed that night at 11 o’clock and

then two o’clock in the morning you come under attack so you’re out of bed, into the bunkers, whatever. So yeah, every day was different. If you were on night shift you might be sleeping in and every morning, I’ll never forget every morning, where you’re trying to get to sleep ‘cause you’ve got to work night shift that night, there used to be an aircraft that used to fly up and down the base, about ten foot off the top of the buildings spraying insecticide because they were worried about mosquitoes spreading malaria

and that but, just imagine, you’ve either come off night shift, so you’ve been up all night and you’re trying to lay down and get some sleep. And you used to wait for this aircraft because you could hear it coming from, you know, it used to run up and down the base backwards and forwards. So it’d do a pattern, so it’d cover all the base. And you could hear it coming from its run right up the other end, right over and then it’d over fly your roof and you’d think, ‘One of these days it’s going to go into our,’ – one day it did go in and thank Christ it missed us

but it went in alright. So yeah, mornings there, you’re trying to sleep and on night shift this’d go on and you’d wait for it, wait for it and then it’d go over the roof. ‘Well that’s okay, it missed.’ And often doggo’s [‘dog’s watch’, late night shift] would be the same thing, you’d wait for it and wait for it and, oh yeah. Anyway, they put it in one day in one of its turns. So things like that. So there wasn’t any typical day as such really. Your day off, you might, if the beach was open you might go on the

convoy down to the beach and spend the day down there. Yeah it’s, of a night time you couldn’t do much if you were on night shift because you started at 11 o’clock at night so you couldn’t do much before that, you’d either walk down to the Coms Centre and relieve the bloke on evening shift, he’d be on his own, or they used to put a little van on for you, get in the van and

it’d take you down there. So at night time there was only two of yous down there, there’d be you in the Coms Centre and the operations operator upstairs and that’d be it, just two of you so it was a fairly lonely existence down there away from the rest of the blokes sort of thing in the domestic area. That was a little bit off-putting at times, especially when you’re walking down in the middle of the night, you know, at 11 o’clock at night, pitch black and you had to walk through bushes, you’d just be a bit apprehensive you know.

And if you came under attack at night while you were actually working, I mean then you had to prepare to sort of defend the position if need be and all this. I mean it was, chances of it were pretty slim, you were in the, fairly well in the middle of the base but you sort of didn’t know what was going, just hear the red alert siren going off and being on your own was a bit off-putting in those circumstances. You had the responsibility to destroy the crypto gear if anything happened.

So yeah every day was different.

Used to, everyone was rostered to do guard duty and that was guard duty around our domestic area of a night time. You used to get that, oh, every couple of weeks to

every month or something, I can’t remember exactly, but you’d spend, sort of that’d be on top of your other duties so you’d have to patrol around with your rifle to make sure, one of the main problems was, believe it or not, was the North Koreans breaking into our amenities area and pinching stuff. So that was one of the major problems, they did that for quite some time, so the idea was to bail them up with your SLR

and hold them there until the sort of American MPs [Military Police] come along or we had two of our own military police to arrest them, you know, so don’t know whether that would’ve worked or not. I’m glad I didn’t come across any breaking in any night.

No these are the ROKs, these are the Republic of Korea, our side blokes breaking into our area to knock stuff off basically. So

that was, I mean that was part of the reason you were there, the other reason was to make sure the area was secure in case you got any enemy coming in but by the same token you’d be pre-warned about that because the sirens’d go off because before they got to us they had a reasonable area to go through before they actually got to our area if you know what I mean.

No.

Maintenance, what do you mean?

No, no, no. We would send out requests, all the messages went through us to request equipment and all that stuff but no, that wasn’t our domain to do that. We were there to maintain communications with Australia

and Saigon plus we had our own HF radio circuits as a back-up back to Butterworth, there was a RAAF base at Butterworth. Plus we used to work the Hercs coming up. From time to time the Caribous used to fly up from Vung Tau so we used to work them.

Work them on the radio. They’d come up on the radio and we’d work them. You know, whatever requests. You might have a Herc coming in from Butterworth and it’d

need so much fuel and he had passengers, he’d have to give you his details and, or he might have, the aircraft might have unserviceabilities on it so you’d have to take them, tell the ground crew, pass them to the ground crew so they could go and service him when he got in. Just general sort of stuff like that, yeah, a lot of general communications.

Oh it was extremely busy, yeah

it was busy. I mean it was slow of a night time of course. You used to do a fair bit of work up until 12 o’clock and you got the situation report, sit rep, had gone out. After that a bit of message traffic’d come through, not much. You’re on your own, as I said, of a night time but yeah, so you’d sort of try to read a book or something if you could.

It could be. It had its moments. Things like losing an aircraft, you can imagine the message traffic that that would generate, and if you had someone injured or something like that or heavy enemy activity or something. There’d be a hell of a lot of message traffic generated and things going backwards and forwards and, if you lose your equipment,

trying, I mean you had to do basically your own replacement type stuff. We had technicians that worked during the day and you could call them out but I mean you did that reluctantly. You’d try to fix things yourself before you got them out of bed because they’d been working all day anyway. So yeah things like that. It could be stressful, you had your stressful times.

Yeah,

R&R you had choices. You could either go to Hong Kong, you could go to Tokyo, you could go to Butterworth or you could go back to Australia. I chose to go back to Australia because Ray and, I had young Adam, ‘cause at that stage Adam was six months, seven months old. And how the R&R worked is, you could take R&R after being in country six months so, and that’s what used to happen.

With mine it actually fell on New Year’s Day, was the day to leave 2 Squadron and come back to Australia. So I had to go on the milk run, what they call the milk run. The Caribou came up from Vung Tau which was one of our Caribous, a RAAF Caribou, which suited me, I didn’t want to go with the Yanks so we picked the Caribou. The trouble with that was as we call it, the milk run, it used to go around all these strips, all these jungle strips, picking up

mainly South Vietnamese troops and dropping them off at various places. So that was quite funny because being New Year’s Day we had a big night the night before and this was, we took off about 8 o’clock in the morning from there and instead of being a normal two, three hour flight to Saigon it took us all day, landing at these strips and dropping troops off and picking troops up. The problem with the Vietnamese is they’re

not very good air travellers and they’d more or less start being sick before the aircraft even gets in the air you know. And being New Year’s Day there was three of us and we were all hung over, we were going on R&R, we were all hung over because we’d had a big night, you know, I think we got to bed about three or something, and here we are at 8 o’clock going around these, and we’re landing on these jungle strips and taking off.

So you’re going down every 20 minutes, half an hour, and taking off again back to Saigon. There was a funny incident on that one actually because the Caribous don’t carry any toilet on them like the Hercs do and after a period of time I felt like I needed to relieve myself so I said to the loadie, the load master, I said, “I need to get out at the next stop and relieve myself,” and he said,

“We can’t stop here it’s a bad place,” and I said, “Well I’ve got to go.” When you’ve got to go you’ve got to go. And he said to the pilot, the pilot was just there, the flight deck’s there on the Caribou and the pilot says, “Yeah he can get out but I’m not waiting for him. I’ll let him off as soon as we finish our landing run and when I come around to take off he can jump back on board,” you know. Well that’s exactly what happened. So we landed on the side of this hill on this jungle strip on these iron

tiles sort of things they are, iron matting they put down, and we landed there and he come to the end of his landing which is not very long anyway. What they’re frightened of is these strips were subject to mortar fire when they saw an aircraft, when an enemy saw an aircraft land they fired mortars in and tried to hit them and so as soon as the aircraft come to a rolling, slow enough I could jump off, which I did, I jumped off the tail board, relieved myself, and

he, in the meantime he’d taxied around still going and dropped a couple of troops off and taxied back around again and then he just gunned it just where I was to start his take off run, he wasn’t stopping that’s for sure, that’s what he said. So I had to run after the Caribou and jump on the tail board and, oh yeah, he was going. I was there, if I didn’t get on I was stuck in the middle of nowhere. Yeah that was quite funny actually. So yeah little things like that happen. So yeah,

I went to Saigon that night, the three of us, two other blokes and myself going on R&R got on a Pan Am flight, Pan American flight, and flew to Sydney. It was full of Yanks of course, we were the only Australians on – oh there was a couple, there was, we picked up some Australian army blokes as well in Saigon, but it was probably, there was only a dozen of us altogether I suppose. When we got off there in Sydney they said, “Any Australians

come up the front of the queue,” the big queue at the customs, and the bloke was really nice to us. He said, “We’ve got to body search you because we’ve got to body search all these clowns,” which is the exact expression he used, “because last week we found one of them coming through with a loaded pistol in his jocks and they try and carry drugs through and Christ knows what.” Before we landed everyone had to throw their cigarettes in this big bag they took around, no cigarettes, everyone’s got to

throw their cigarettes in, because what the Yanks were doing was replacing all the cigarettes with tobacco with marijuana and carrying them in, so all the cigarettes were gone. So he said, “We’ve got to search you but it’s only because we’ve got to do them so don’t worry about it.” They just patted us down and let us, we had connecting flights, I mean that was Sydney, I had to get down to Melbourne. It was really well organised because you were more or less on a flight as soon as they could get you on one and away you went. But five days you had

from the time your foot touched ground in Sydney till you had to be back again. So that was a traumatic time really, leaving again after doing six months, having five days at home and then having to actually leave again, that was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in me life because you knew what it was all about then. It had sort of lost its adventure spirit so to speak and all you wanted to do – and you’d had enough of Vietnam,

you wanted just to come home and carry on with life but you had to go back and do your other six months. So yeah, it was a pretty traumatic situation.

Oh you can’t, I mean you’re in the military, that doesn’t enter your head really. There’s no future in doing that. I mean you’ve got to face up to your responsibilities so that’s what you do.

Oh pretty sad, you know, you get back and you’re very depressed for about a week or so until you got back into the routine of things. Nothing had changed. You’d only been away five days anyway so nothing had changed in five days. That was January so it was the wet season. It was pouring with rain every day and so it was a pretty depressing sort of place. Yeah you got on with it. I think I told you earlier that you’re supposed

to do 12 months to the day, that was it, that was the rule. In the finish I was there. The rumours started going around, we were pulling out of Vietnam. The Squadron was going back to Australia in about March was the rumours started, that proved to be correct, and the out date was going to be July. Now I was due back, due out of there on the 10th of June so the CO called me in and said,

“We want you to do a month extra than normal because we’re going to bring a bloke up from Australia fresh, knows nothing of what’s going on just for a month. Will you do it? You don’t have to, you can go if you want to because you’re entitled to do that.” So I did the right thing, I said, “Yeah okay I’ll stay. I’ll do the extra month.” The hardest thing about that was that Ray was expecting me, this is only, this was only two weeks before I was due to go, maybe two

three weeks before I was due to go, and the hardest part about that is you can’t pick up the phone and ring her and say, “I’m not coming home for another month.” I had to write her a letter which, Christ knows, didn’t know when the hell she was going to get it. So that, it wasn’t too bad actually, she got that in about two weeks. She got that just before I was due back. I’m glad she got it before I was due back because she’d be wondering where I was otherwise. So I spent the

extra month there which was, it was okay in a way but it just seemed to go forever. And we came under a fairly heavy attack on the last week I was there and this was two o’clock in the morning and it was fairly, reasonably serious and I thought, ‘What the hell, I’m not even supposed to be here.’ And that’s the only time I thought

I was in danger to be quite – oh well, not thought I was in danger, you always had some danger there, but the only time that I thought that something was going to happen to me, premonition that something was going to happen to me. No didn’t, but I thought, ‘I’m not supposed to be here, this is a sign,’ you know. So yeah, yeah it was pretty traumatic. But it was interesting, the wind down of the squadron because the aircraft flew out, they went about six weeks

before we actually went and the last people to go naturally are your communications ‘cause you need them right up till the end. There was only a handful of us left in the finish so, a few ADGs for security, a couple of cooks, you know, for food, so there’s only a handful of yous left. The day we went there was our Herc load going out and there was only communications, again that was a bit of a benefit because you got your crypto,

all your cryptos got to go, no other personnel are allowed on the aircraft except the crew of the aircraft and the communications staff because you’ve got all your crypto stuff on board so that was an advantage, so we had a Herc with plenty of room on it you know. Most of them were going back fully loaded and eight hour flight to Darwin where you’ve got a big load on and you haven’t got any room to walk around or anything like that, you’ve got a load right up to your knees sort of thing. So that was one advantage of being coms.

But the wind down, the last month, the CO, the commanding officer said to us, with our bar situation and the boozer set up up there he said, “There’s so much money in the kitty, so to speak, if it goes back to Australia it goes in the consolidated revenue. The Government just gets it because the squadron’s disbanded from Vietnam you know so it all goes into consolidated revenue. So you’ve got to spend it,” and the only thing you could spend it on was booze

you know. So for the last month the booze was free. Instead of 10 cents a can it was nothing for a can. So it did have some benefits but you can only drink so much beer can’t you. It was a good time. Once we’d packed up there was nothing to do so we just generally messed about and drank and, you know, played music and played cards. So yeah,

as an afterthought they didn’t really need me there for that month anyway really, they didn’t have to send another bloke up. They wouldn’t have needed one because once we’d packed the gear that was it. We just had one radio circuit going and that was about it so they could have cut the staff back anyway.

Yeah it was, yeah. In fact I used to front up to work,

natural habit. Used to front up to work on your day shift and the warrant officer’d say, “Well I don’t need all of yous here. Go away. Go.” So you used to go back up and you had nothing to do so you’d have a few beers and play cards or whatever but the trouble was the time would drag then. Because you had nothing to do the time would go real slow.

Oh, my 21st, that was fairly traumatic as well because I was, I went over there in June and my 21st was in September, on September 12th. Spending your 21st away from home is not the

best of times. I thought I’d been forgotten virtually because there was no mail but anyway that’s beside the point but I was on evening shift as it turned out on my birthday and we had this nice bloke in the Coms Centre, Tex Bouch his name is. He was on the doggo’s [dog’s watch] and he came down early, he came down about, they’re supposed to relieve you at 11 o’clock at night. He came down about

nine and he said, “Oh, you know I thought I’d come down early ‘cause I’ve got nothing to do so do you want to go home early?” and I said, “Oh yeah fair enough.” He said, “A couple of them are having a drink at the Double E,” that American communications unit I was telling you about up on this hill, “There’s a jeep outside if you want to go up and have a drink with them.” So I thought, ‘Oh may as well.’ So this Yank drove me up there and I walk into the Double E, into the boozer there, and

there’s all the communications staff and, you know, me boss and quite a few others as well. ‘Happy 21st.’ And they’d all got us a cake and a 21st key and everything, you know, so it was unbelievable. So yeah we had a few quieties,

yeah, so we kicked on all night actually and one funny incident, if you’ve got time, was on that night is, there’s a couple of the blokes who were working in that NCO club I think I told you, in the kitchen. So we decided, we got a bit hungry later on about five o’clock at night so we went down there and they raided the fridges and they got this big bag of steak out of the fridge and knocked it off, off the Yanks,

bought it back up and we had a big barbecue with the Yanks’ steaks. So yeah, it was just very thoughtful and no-one had mentioned anything to me about it. I hadn’t mentioned it but obviously someone, you’ve got an orderly room and they’ve got all your records there and you know these things are flagged probably and so they probably told me boss and he said, “Oh we’ll have a bit of a booze up for him.” So yeah, no it was good and my sister got married in

Melbourne on that same day, picked that date because it was my 21st and because I was away in Vietnam so they were telling me about it later how after the wedding there were a few tears flowing from Ray and me two sisters and my mother and what have you, yeah different.

I didn’t really get any presents as such but I finished up getting the mail. The mail

was very spasmodic and I hadn’t had any and when I did get the mail it was wishing me a happy 21st from Ray and my mother and whatever and then I got letters about the wedding and how that went and everything. So that was a lot better, it wasn’t getting anything, it was just hearing from people you know.

They were from time to time, they were very good actually. The entertainers would give their time and come to Vietnam, I don’t think they even got paid for it, there was no cost to them of course but I don’t think they even got paid for it, and they would go around all the units. We used to miss out a lot because we were in a more, less secure area if you can understand that. So they could only come up to our

unit when it was assessed as being reasonable security. So we used to get, about half the concerts used to come, they were terrific. One of the problems of being in communications is half the time you’re working so you miss half of them as well but the ones you got was just, it was great. And they would come and entertain us. And it was amazing when they did come too ‘cause the Yanks’d come down and want to come in and have a look too

but we couldn’t have that because it’d be overwhelmed with Yanks ‘cause we only had our small bar area so we just kept them out. Just had a couple of odd mates of the Yanks we used to have so we let them in of course and turned the others away. So yeah, no they were good.

Yeah on the Herc, on the

Herc, the communications, there was five of us on the Herc. There was a couple that hadn’t been with the squadron long so they actually got sent down to Vung Tau to do the rest of their time so there were actually five communications personnel on the Herc. The pilot was good, he said, “If you want to bring an esky on with you it’s no problem at all, I don’t care, bring a few beers.” Which was unheard of on, you know, normally there’s no drinking on military aircraft

but he said, “You’ve just served 12 months in Vietnam, if you want a few beers go for it you know.” So yeah we flew into Darwin. My brother was still in Darwin so by the time we got into there it was about ten to twelve, between ten at night and twelve at night and I went and knocked him up. He was working actually in the Coms, you know, Communications Centre so I went and knocked him up and said, “Come out for a beer.” So we went and saw his sergeant and he said, “Yeah fine.”

So we went over to the terminal, the airport terminal which was the only bar open at that time and had a few beers. So we actually never went to bed that night. We were allocated beds but we never went to bed and then we got the Herc the next day down to Amberley. From Amberley, that same Herc flew us from Darwin to Amberley, from Amberley same Herc had to fly down to Richmond so I ended up down at Richmond, had to spend overnight in Richmond, it was very annoying

to be so close to home and yet so far, and so the next morning a car picked me up and took me out to Sydney airport and I flew into Tullamarine on a commercial flight. That was the first time I ever got abused by a civilian so to speak and it was an air hostess on the, it wasn’t, I don’t think it was Qantas I think it was Ansett,

I’m pretty sure it was Ansett, and this air hostess, ‘cause I’m in uniform, I had my Vietnam ribbons on, abused me. The purser come up and actually apologised to me ‘cause he saw what happened. Yeah, very uncalled for I thought and I was amazed. I just sat there dumbfounded ‘cause it sort of come out of the blue. She said, “Oh you’re a disgrace going to Vietnam and killing those people,” and I’m

sort of sitting there, ‘What’s going on here?’ you know. But I think because of that, there was so much publicity in Australia, you know, about the moratorium marches and, yeah, the purser came down, or the chief steward came down and did apologise for her.

He just said, “Oh I’m sorry, she’s a bit upset about this type of thing.” I’m 21, I didn’t really say anything. It just amazed me. But yeah that was the first time I ever got it and that was

the day after I got back. So anyway I met Ray at the airport and it was good. I was posted over to Western Australian so I had, I think I had about six weeks’ leave up in Melbourne and stayed with Ray’s parents then went over to Western Australia.

Oh it wasn’t just that six weeks, it was the next

several years, possibly up to six years before, you just couldn’t, you couldn’t settle in. I mean it was just, I used to, I went through a lot of anger for some reason I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. It’s hard to put a, put your finger on what it was but it was just something, you were just angry at the world. Get into a lot

of arguments, a lot of fights, and it took a lot of years before that went away. Why? I don’t know.

It wouldn’t affect you every day but you’d just get angry over little things. Lucky I had a very supportive family and wife

so eventually as I said it just, it slowly diminished but it took a lot of years for it to go away.

Yeah. Well it’s, yeah it’s, I don’t know. I used to get annoyed about things, about people complaining about minor things when you think, well there’s a lot more people worse off than you are in this world,

you know, you want to go overseas and have a look at some of these, what’s going on, and the political situation and why we ever went over there and all this, and people having a go at you anyway, you copped a lot of that. You’d go to parties and people, and they’d have a go at you about being in Vietnam and about, as if you posted yourself there, which was very hard to explain. You don’t post yourself to those places you get sent you know.

That probably wasn’t for a few years after. When I, we went from Western Australia to Butterworth. We had two and a half years in Malaysia there and there I started reading a lot, a lot more than I ever used to read, I never used to read much at all, but because

the TV was rubbish there, virtually nothing, so I used to do a lot of reading and that’s where I started getting interested in the politics of it and the history of it, and just not in Vietnam but in a lot of wars, what causes them and what happens and the politics and what goes on. So yeah, you have your doubts. And after I learnt everything that went on about

how Australia got involved in Vietnam and how the politicians lied about it and, you know, it’s just ridiculous, we should never have been there. And after seeing how the people were there anyway, they didn’t want us there and after ’75 when Vietnam did fall to North Vietnamese and they were far better off anyway, a lot of them, because of what happened in the past because a lot of them got

executed and what have you, but in the long run the country’s far better off. I mean look at it today, it’s far better off today than what it would’ve been. Just took a lot of people’s lives to do that, that’s all.

Yeah probably the, probably the mateship and the

the boozing. I mean that sounds a bit bad but being used to be able to just go and have a booze up when you felt like that but you had to sort of get back into the family responsibilities and that was a bit hard you know, things like that. You’d drink far too much. Yeah just things like that. The camaraderie, that’s happened a few times, another couple of times to me. I got sent up to Darwin

after the cyclone for instance and that was unaccompanied. And you get used to being in that situation where you’re with the boys and, you know, although you’ve got a family, I mean you’ll have a family and everything but you’re with the boys and so you’re out on the booze every night and it’s a different lifestyle altogether. Then when your family, you get back with your family it’s very hard to, you want the best of both worlds if you know what I mean, if you think it’s the best of both worlds but it usually isn’t. But so yeah, I’ve had that

happen since then.

Yeah. The main thing was not knowing anything about the history or the culture of the people and the little things.

I can remember going into a village one day and I’m 20 years old, 21, whatever I was when I actually walked into this village, and we’re fully armed and gone into this village and here’s a bloke in his front yard, so to speak, I mean they don’t have front yards like we’ve got front yards but he’s got his little garden and he must’ve been 80 years old and he’s bowing to me. And here I am in his country, he’s 80 years old, I’m 20 years old but because I’m with the military

and armed and we’re an armed patrol type thing, he’s bowing to me. It should’ve been the other way around, and that sort of affected me you know. The kids, they affect you ‘cause they don’t know what’s going on. They, the kids are always the innocence of any conflict you know, and that used to, I used to,

it gets to everyone, kids always get to you because they’re so innocent you know and then they’re traumatised. To see kids traumatised is one of the worse things you can see because it’s not their fault. So yeah, those memories are hard.

Having a good wife, a good family support and time, basically I suppose, and the realisation that whatever went on wasn’t your fault anyway. I mean, and not knowing the history of it isn’t your fault because, hey, no-one told you and you find out about it yourself which is good. You learn so much more

from an experience like that and it makes you learn things too which is good, so it has its positives as well. So yeah, time heals things but only to a degree.

Yeah, well that was one of the big things as we had, I mean you’ve probably heard it before. One day you’re in the jungle fighting a war, well we weren’t

virtually in the jungle fighting a war but we were in a war zone getting, you’re under attack every now or then, whatever, but anyway the next day you’re back in Australia. When I got posted to Pearce, there wasn’t any, there was no debrief, there was no nothing. Nothing’s ever said about it. In fact even amongst your own air force colleagues, the ones that never went, there was some jealousy there, there seemed to be

jealousy there, because they never went they sort of, they ridiculed it as well. So not only didn’t you get their support, you got, you had as much trouble with them as you did civilians, not quite as much trouble but some trouble because they ridiculed and I had that a couple of times which was traumatic in itself because there’s your supposedly, they could have been in the same boat as you and the only reason

they didn’t go is because they didn’t go, because they weren’t posted there, but could’ve. And they’re going to give you a hard time, so that was very surprising and traumatic.

Yeah well that had been coming for some while. Even to a person as young as me then, you know,

at 21, it was obvious that it was unwinnable. You were never going to beat them because they just, that was their country and they were going to fight forever and the way the Yanks were conducting it, the strategy was just totally wrong. I mean you’ve only got to watch, they’re still making films now that show you how stupid they were. The Ashaw Valley – ‘We were Soldiers’. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, it’s only been out in the last couple of years, Mel Gibson in it,

where they take, where they fight this battle in the valley and then they pull out. It’s got no strategic value, all it did was kill a heap of blokes for no value. It was a war of attrition, they were never going to win it because there was more Vietnamese than there was Yanks. So if that, I mean you can’t fight a war like that, there was no strategy to it. It became politically where they, virtually the military leaders who did know, the ones who did

know something about warfare and how to go about it weren’t allowed to anyway. So the writing was on the wall. It’s a pity we didn’t pull out earlier. I mean we lost 504 blokes over there, good Australians. It’s a pity we didn’t pull out earlier to save a few of those lives isn’t it? It was unwinnable.

Well that was an interesting episode too

because I was actually in Butterworth when Saigon fell and I was sent up to Bangkok to set up a radio, we set up a radio network, Butterworth, Bangkok, Saigon. I was actually put on the list to go to Saigon because they wanted someone who’d been in Vietnam before but one of my best mates said to him, “Oh Lance has been there before, it’s about time I had a go.” So they agreed with him and he went and that was fine in the finish. So he finished up going to the Saigon embassy, I finished up in the Bangkok

leg and we were at Butterworth’s. So we were actually working the Hercs, flying people out in the evacuation. So it had a postscript so to speak of me being in Vietnam because I was there when it fell as well but I was in Bangkok when it fell and we were getting the Hercs coming through. So it was an interesting stage too because I was meeting Hercs coming out of Vietnam and giving pilots lists of about, ‘These

are messages coming up from Australia. These are who you’re allowed to bring and who you’re not allowed to bring,’ and virtually that was it you know, and these pilots were flying into Saigon and picking up loads and saying, “You can come, you can’t come,” and all this, and that became political as well. So that was very interesting. That’d be another story altogether you know.

Well I was sent up to, I was sent up to Bangkok. We set up a radio network.

There was myself there, we had two ADGs and a load master. So I was working the radio naturally and aircraft’d come into Vietnam with a load of refugees on board. They would offload some in Thailand, was taking some of them, some of them, the others would fly back with the Herc, back to Australia. Hercs were coming from Butterworth. I’d have to meet pilots and given them a briefing about whatever you know,

about who they were allowed to bring out and when they were coming into Ghana. I’d get messages through, messages are being transmitted up to Australia by Butterworth. So it was very interesting work and my mate, John Booth, who went to the Saigon leg, he’s doing the other leg at the other end there. A couple of instances. A Herc came in there, we were at Domuang Airport, that’s the main Thai airport, but we were on the American military side,

like they gave a little office there to run a radio out of. I met this Herc. I had to give this message to this pilot and I climbed up into the flight deck of the Herc and he was as white as a ghost, this young pilot. He would’ve been 22, 23, whatever and he was white, and I said, “Are you alright sir, what’s the matter?” and he said, “I was coming in on short finals.” So he’s five minutes, ten minutes about to come. He said, “Four Thai fighters have

gone across me nose, missed me by about 30 feet,” and he was, and then he was shaking and then he got angry and he said, “Take me to the tour I’m going to have them.” So yeah, things like that happen which you never hear about you know. He said, “Four Thai fighters straight across me nose,” and he’s got 70 people on board you know. Oh just a tour mess up, they’re fighters probably doing whatever exercises in the area and just nearly collided with him.

You can just imagine, it would’ve been horrendous.

Yeah, well that was more at the Saigon end of course. Oh yeah, they had a lot of trouble with people trying to stampede the aircraft and virtually, not take over the aircraft but yeah, to get

out of the country. I mean that’s why they had the ADGs to virtually police who was getting on and who was not getting on you know. There was an incident where one of the aircraft went up to Phan Rang, my old base, which was no, which was starting to be overrun by the North Vietnamese coming down, and they loaded up the Herc and then parked two tankers across the airstrip in front of the Herc to stop him from taking off.

Till they got an assurance off the pilot that he would come back and get another load of them, they wouldn’t move the tankers, and although he knew he wasn’t coming back ‘cause it’s too dangerous but they got an assurance off him, he lied to them to get the tankers out of the way so he could take the Herc off. That was what the situation was getting to. You know, and they would come into Bangkok and tell you about blokes hanging onto the tailboard, trying to hang on while they’re taking

off and this sort of stuff. Oh just horrendous. It’s a story unto itself really. But yeah, I wasn’t over there, I was just going by the stories they were telling you when they come back.

Oh it wasn’t panic. It was sort of apprehensive for our

blokes, you know, the crews that are going in there plus my mates in Saigon. You know we had a handful at the embassy there that were actually co-ordinating the pull out. It was a hectic time, you’ve only got to watch the newsreels of it, on the American side, you know. A lot of people don’t realise we were in there actually doing it as well. It was an exciting time. I mean it was one of those things you’re a part of history. The politics are just unbelievable, you can’t believe how politics become

involved but they do and virtually politicians dictate what happens. The military sort of, our officer commanding, Peter Raw at Butterworth, he was sort of controlling the military effort but being dictated to by the politicians in Canberra about what was going to happen, who was, what was what you know. So yeah, you don’t realise how politics become involved in everything like that.

It virtually happened over a period of months but it got more hectic and more hectic as it went so the last couple of weeks was just unbelievable. Our last Herc flew out of Saigon on Anzac Day, April 25th, and the North Vietnamese walked into Saigon on the 30th so yeah, we were virtually almost there right up to the last day almost, yeah.

Oh I don’t know. Heaps. I don’t really know. They were running about, probably six on a shuttle sort of service. It’s hard to estimate. It was going all the time. Night time they didn’t do it because it was too dangerous, daytime, yeah, daylight hours they were doing. I wouldn’t really know. There’s probably a figure somewhere.

Only that in a couple of incidences, high ranking South Vietnamese people were allowed to bring their pets out in place of animals,

oh sorry, in place of people, you know what I mean. So their pets were given precedence over – which would be unfortunate wouldn’t it? But that was the case in a couple of incidences. Again, politics get into it.

Oh, it’s not up to you to respond

really, I mean you don’t, you do your job. That might sound a bit funny but it’s, you don’t, it’s not your decisions to make and you don’t sort of start questioning things like that until you get older, I found anyway. As you get older you start thinking, ‘Well that was …,’ you know, in later years you think, ‘That wasn’t right.’

Yeah so, I mean it’s the same with Australia didn’t pull a lot of the staff that helped us out up there, didn’t evacuate them. Whereas we should’ve because they were dead set going to be a target for either execution or to be ‘re-educated’ as the North Vietnamese like to put it, in other words put out in farms

and made to work several years out in farms because they assisted us during the war. There was a lot of them left behind.

Not really. They were more or less doing that at Saigon which, they’d registered people, people who wanted to get out,

they’d registered and then, people, if they thought should come out, the lists were more about who can’t come, not who can come, if you know what I mean. People that put their names down that they wanted to come out for whatever reason, “I assisted the Australian troops during the Vietnam war – I may be subject to whatever. I want to get out as a refugee.” So the lists were more

about, more or less about saying ‘no’ to people.

Well I mean they evacuated Australians, Australian embassy staff for instance, wives and families and all that, previously, naturally. They were, you know, gone.

More or less in the finish it was trying to get orphaned children out, I mean we did a great job of that, we had a heap of them evacuated out.

Well I’m not sure about the criteria but there was a lot of orphaned children up there and there was a hell of a lot the Yanks took out too that had been fathered by American servicemen. Now it was

the same with the Australian, with the orphans from the Australian servicemen plus ones that we’d supported when we were up there. I mean the Australian troops did a great job of supporting orphanages, kids where the parents had been killed in the war, you know. So we wanted, the Australian Government did the right thing and took a lot of them out, evacuated a lot of them and the Yanks did a lot of that too. But as far as, as I said, a lot of the Saigon staff

were left behind that had supported our troops and were dead set under threat if they stayed, and a lot of them were left behind.

I don’t really know. As I said, it was history and you were part of it and you’re living it at the

time. I mean it’s got more of an impact on me in later years where you see it and I’ve read a bit about it since then too. When it’s actually going on, because the history’s being made then, you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. And I read a couple of books later on about our intelligence bloke, our bloke who was attached to the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] up there for instance, his book,

and a couple of American books by the CIA blokes, and exactly what was going on behind the scenes and, you know, and so they opened me eyes up to what was happening. At the time you don’t really know what’s going on, I’m just doing my job as a radio operator you know. So you don’t learn about it till later anyway.

Not really. That was sort of, that didn’t worry me really. Except to be able to say, ‘I told you so,’ in me own mind to the Australian Government, it was unwinnable and that’s what was eventually going to happen. It’s a pity we didn’t get out earlier and save a few of our blokes who got killed, lives, you know, could have lived full lives. It’s a pity we stayed so long. So

it’s just in your own mind you think, ‘Yeah, I told you so.’ Anyone could see that that was going to eventually, that Vietnam was finally going to fall to the North because they were more dedicated than the South. So yeah, that was the feeling about it.

It taught me to question things, not believe the politicians, what they say, because it is politics. It taught me to learn about something before you get into it. You know about, as I said, the history, the culture and whatever about it. Yeah, it opened up me eyes to reading and learning things I suppose. Yeah. I think you do that as you get older anyway, don’t you?

I’m not sure. It gave me a definite interest in history, military history.

It’s a question I’ve been asked. Did you regret going? And the answer’s, “No.” I never regretted ever going. It was a life experience you never, ever come across ever again and never will and not a lot of people get that chance to do that experience.

There was a lot of down-side to it but there was, you know there was, well there wasn’t a lot of up-side to it but the thing about it is that it’s a life experience that you’ve had. It gets better as the years go by, I might add, because people now they tend to respect people that went to Vietnam. They understand that finally, after a few years, that it wasn’t the individuals’ fault that actually went.

If it was anyone’s fault it was the government and the politics of the day. So they stopped blaming the actual person that went and those receptions we had, the one in Sydney and the one in Canberra were just fantastic because people …, I mean Anzac Day, I still get people saying, “Sorry,” to me and I say, “Don’t be silly.” But I do, I get young people saying sorry, so, you know, for not recognising us earlier you know, and that’s been for

quite a few years now. I still get it now and so, yeah.

It means a lot anyway, even without Vietnam, because I have drinks with a couple of mates of mine, I mean a big mob of us get together but in particular a couple of younger mates who have never been to war, but I love having a drink with them on Anzac Day because they like the military history

and they’d be the type that, if they were told to go and do their duty, they’d go and do it. It’s that type of situation, and Anzac Day should never be forgotten for the older blokes. I mean I had, me grandfather got wounded in Gallipoli and my father was in the Second World War and I was in Vietnam. One of my sons was in the army and so we’ve got a military hand-down tradition. Now I think Anzac Day should never die and I think that it won’t because

it gets bigger and bigger every year. It’s for the young people really to remember the older blokes, the blokes that really went through some times, especially prisoners of war. They were never recognised as such and I mean they went through hell. Three and a half years of being locked up at Changi and then on the railway and then half of them sent to Japan, just horrendous things they went through, and so they shouldn’t be forgotten. So Anzac Day’s about all that and actually we’d like to go to some of the

places you know, like Gallipoli, we haven’t been there yet but we’re going to go, and the different places where Australians lay buried, and not in Australia, on Anzac Day, that’d be good.

Not really,

just that I think the concept of this is good and it’s a pity everyone who was involved in war couldn’t be done. I mean I didn’t do a great deal of actual fighting as such in war where a lot of them did, a lot of them don’t, but a lot of people have got different

experiences, what they go through. And I don’t think it matters where you go and what war you get involved in, you see the futility of it and the people who get hurt during it, you know, and you just realise it’s not worth it anyway. And this business of going into Iraq now is just, there’s other ways of doing it without killing people.

The one I was involved in, as I said, we lost 504 blokes we should never have lost as far as I’m concerned, so they shouldn’t be forgotten.