Australians at War Film Archive

Oh well I was born at Coffs Harbour, lived around the north coast most of me life, me father was on the tick staff [cattle tick control]

after the war and we moved around the far north coast and mid north coast [of New South Wales]. Went to school at four or five different places, like Taringa, Macksville, that sort of thing and then me mother died in 1959 from cancer and then I went and lived with me uncle and auntie at Taylor’s Arm, in mid north coast New South Wales and went to school there

at Medlow Public School. After leaving school I got a job in the local garage there, and we were actually on a dairy farm with me uncle, local garage, then about in 1963 I think it was I went to Sydney where me grandparents had moved to and had a couple of jobs there, with Big Sister Foods and radio and then I joined the CMF [Citizen Military Forces],

I was in that for twelve months and then I joined the regular army in 1965. From there I went to Vietnam, came back from Vietnam, done my training through Canungra and Townsville ready to go to Vietnam again, met my wife in 1968, was married in New Zealand. Came back to go to Vietnam and then they give me a transfer to another battalion, 1 Battalion [1st Battalion Royal Australian Regiment] and went to Malaysia for two years, Malaysia Singapore where me first child was born. Then we come back from there and

went to Townsville, me second child was born in Townsville and trained for Vietnam again, and then the government changed and they stopped it. From there I went to a training unit at Singleton, which turned into the Infantry Centre, from there to 3 Battalion [3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment] in Adelaide and then Sydney and then up to Orange here where I was promoted to Army

Reserve training warrant officer. After I got out of there in 1986 I got a job with Kinross-Wallaroi Private School here as just an everybody, thought I could just drop out and do that but found that I couldn’t, so I went to TAFE [Technical and Further Education college] and got a job there. I was just a storeman there and from there after five years there, I done a few courses and become Occupational Health and Safety Officer with NSW Agriculture and

went from there, and in 1996 I retired and I still live in Orange to date.

My grandfather

on my mother’s side served in the First World War, my great uncle on my father’s side served in the First World War and died in France. My father, his brother and an uncle from my mother’s side all served in the Second World War. My father and uncle and

brothers served in New Guinea and my other uncle he served in the Middle East and New Guinea. And I can remember back in the 50s where all my other uncles and that were called up as National Serviceman and used to come home of a weekend and that in their uniforms and so on. And then my brother and myself served in Vietnam and my brother also served in Malaysia and Borneo. My cousin, another cousin, served in Vietnam just

after me and now both my sons are in the army; they’ve both served in Timor, one’s had two tours. They married two girls that were in the army that have now been discharged. My younger brother done some time in the CMF but he died later on, not in service, but he died later on, about twenty-four,

twenty-five or so. And my sisters, one of them married a navy man and the other one married a soldier, another Vietnam veteran. So that’s about the history of my military.

My father never told me anything about his World War II experiences nor his

brother, never told, would never talk about New Guinea. The only one that talked a lot about the Middle East was my uncle, cause he had a lot of photos and we used to ask him. And I can always remember one photo, they were sitting over in Egypt and they all had these big overcoats on, these greatcoats on, and I said to him, I said, “But the desert, it’s hot in the desert?” and he said, “One day son you’ll be in the desert” he said, “You’ll see what it’s like”. And I was in the Simpson Desert one time and it’s freezing, it can get cold.

But my father and uncle never spoke about their service, you couldn’t talk to them that much about it until I came back from Vietnam and you could talk more openly to them, you were sort of more acceptable to talk to and that sort of stuff to talk to about military things and so on.

Oh well, “Well done son, you’re home, look after yourself” and was not a lot of what you’d done or anything like that, they were proud of ya. They used to take you round and ya used to get everybody around the place, “This is my son just back from Vietnam” and so on. But that was about all, it wasn’t a real family sort of thing, it was not like it is with me and my sons today. But still they don’t open up, I can ask them about this and that and about that and they say,

“Oh yeah, that happened, no that didn’t happen”, but it’s just like a lot of soldiers you either know or you don’t know and they just don’t elaborate on a lot of it.

I’ve got some pictures of him at Anzac [Day] marches, but I suppose he would of because he was on the tick staff and the tick staff was made up of all returned soldiers, it started from the First World War actually,

and you had to be a returned soldier to have a job on that tick staff, which is controlling the cattle tick in northern New South Wales. So I suppose he did, but I don’t remember a lot of soldiering type sort of things, reunions or anything like that, only just Anzac Days from myself from school. Every school we went, marched on Anzac Day.

Alright, well the tick staff was the Queensland cattle tick and New South Wales didn’t want it into New South Wales so they put a border and they put crossing points of tick eradication areas. And they had dips and they had DDT [dichlor-diphenyl-trichlorethane insecticide], arsenic, you name it, all those things that the cattle had to be put through. Any animal that came across the border had to be sprayed and all that sort of stuff. So me father was that and they’d go out and they’d inspect dairy farms or

cattle properties every now and then, get the whole lot in and check them for ticks and make sure there was no tick there. If they found a tick, well then that area had to be quarantined and nothing was allowed to be sold in or out and they’d trace it back to where it came from and so on. Still goes today actually. One great part of my life was when I was Occupation Health and Safety Officer for New South Wales Agriculture; I travelled all those areas and met people that knew my father from many

years ago, yeah that was excellent really.

No my uncle he went and share-farmed at Taylor’s Arm, yeah he was on a share farm at Taylor’s Arm and we had a dairy, we used to grow vegetables, peas and we had a banana plantation.

Yeh, it comes right back through, because my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather

they all started farms and were in that industry from when they first moved to the Macleay area, like Kempsey area.

Well where I lived as a child we moved a hell of a lot, because Dad was at little places like Argent’s Hill, it was a real old weatherboard home sort of thing, I can’t remember whether it had rooms or didn’t sort of thing. Then there was another

place at Bowraville and then we were at Bonalbo, Casino, places all around. It wasn’t really until we settled down, when my mother died that I went to live with me uncle that it become sort of a home of a permanent sort of thing.

Well I remember Dad left the tick staff,

he got a job with the railway we ended up at a place called Matakhana [?], out near Lake Cargelligo, western New South Wales out here, I took Dad back there a few years back actually, there’s nothing there now. And we were there, then he left that. We went to a property at Lake Cargelligo called Merri Merrigal and that’s where I started school, and Mum used to teach us because we used to get school by mail, correspondence. Mum got sick then and we went back to Macksville and I always

remember, me aunties and that always tell me too, but I can remember too. I had to go to school and Mum took me three times in the first hour, because I beat her home each time, and the last time I got up underneath the house and wouldn’t come out, me grandmother’s house, because I didn’t like going to school. But after that I seemed to get along and go to school. But me schooling only went to sixth class, I never went to high school or anything cause after

Mum died I went to me uncle’s and that was just a little school and we used to walk about five miles to school every day and walk home again. And sometimes we’d ride a bike and we had a lot of busters on those gravel roads. And, but always dread getting up of a morning, milking, going to school, walk all the way there and about half past nine me uncle would be standing at the gate talking to the school teacher and I’d have to go and help him pick

beans or go out to the bananas, something like that. So I was an extra labourer with that type of thing. And that was me schooling, where me schooling finished there then. And little story about that I always remember on the 7th of July was me birthday and I left school, it was a Friday, we walked up the hill and in the thing, Taylor’s Arm itself bottom town then top town, which is Medlow

they call it, had a garage and a shop, and a saw mill and that. And I walked up the hill there and I always remember Don Schmidt, he said to me, “Young Clegg do you want a job?” and I said, “What doing?” He says, “Serving petrol and greasing cars”. I said, “Yeh” he said, “Righto, then start tomorrow morning at eight o’clock”. And I was so excited I got home and I told me uncle and he said to me, I still remember as plain as day he said,

“Well bed early tonight, have to milk early in the morning. You don’t want to be late for your first day of work”. And I still had to walk to work after milking, so that’s where I started work and that’s it. But few things there, few historic people like Chad Morgan, the country and western singer, he had a girlfriend up there and I used to serve him petrol. And the schoolteacher used to let us out of school sometimes when he’d go past in his beautiful big Ford car, we used to all wave to him because he was a celebrity.

Taylor’s Arm, she was up Burra Pine, she was Jan Mitchell actually, she was a beautiful woman too. I can always remember she was a beautiful girl, big family of beautiful girls, she was and he was the most ugliest-looking person you’d ever seen. Have you ever seen Chad Morgan with his big buckteeth? They used to reckon he’d eat an apple through a tennis racket; that was Chad Morgan.

Medlow School, it was a good school, didn’t get on too well with the principal, I don’t know why, just didn’t get on too well with him. But we had a school reunion last year, one hundred years, and we all went back there and he thought we were the greatest blokes in the world, yeah reckons we were pretty good kids. I don’t know where he got this from but there was another family that used to live away out Kirklands and they had about seventeen kids

and they used to walk to school and then pick us up on the way and then we used to pick up the Davies and then we used to pick up Lavertys, all the way to school, walking to school and that. And he wrote a little thing up there and this last thing and said, “I’ll always remember the Cleggs and the Kirklands racing down the hill so they wouldn’t be late for school” I don’t believe that, we used to dawdle.

As a boy, oh I

think I was probably the same as everybody else, you’d get into trouble for a lot of little different things, I didn’t get into trouble that much I don’t think.

I can remember Dad one time disciplining us, chasing us, going like hell down the paddock and he’s after us with the towel, he was flicking us,

giving us a hiding, flick with the towel. Dad was a pretty fast runner but I was a pretty fast runner too. Because discipline like that was sort of funny things like Dad used to kill WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and used to sell them, he used to work at the abattoirs and he used to have us kids, we’d have to hang onto the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK while he chopped it’s head off. And we used to always think it was funny to let the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK go and it used to flap and flutter all around the place and that’s

why we used to get our hidings because that used to bruise them. We used to think that was pretty funny, WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK with no head jumping around the place. That and other things like, which you wouldn’t let your kids do today I suppose, riding a sheet of corrugated iron down the hills through the bladie grass, and ripped your trousers out and all that sort of stuff. You made your own fun, and you done things; you used to go rabbit trapping and all

that sort of stuff, yeah it was good fun.

Oh there was my uncle, Uncle Vince, which was Dad’s younger brother and his wife Auntie Betty and she was a Smith and so it was Pop Smith, I called him Pop Smith because everybody called him Pop Smith, and they share-farmed there. I had my cousin Fay, who was about six months younger than me, cousin Diane,

cousin Allen and cousin Garry. Garry, I’d left before Garry was born but there was a son Geoffrey who died just after birth; he was born when I was there. And we used to have a couple of people work there on and off. One was old Reg, I can’t think of his last name but he was American, and he lived there, they’d built like a little shack and he lived there and used to help out with everything,

but he was a lovely old person, used to always buy you something and that. And he was AWL [Absent Without Leave] from the American Army in the Second World War and wouldn’t go home. He didn’t go home right up until the 1960’s, early 1960’s he went home. But then I can remember he used to always ring up and Dorrie, me auntie’s sister that used to live across the paddock, oh probably about five or six hundred metres away sort of thing,

she had the phone on, we didn’t have the power on, we just had a kerosene fridge and that. And she used to get out and bellow out, “Reg is on the phone”, so we’d all have to head across there and Reg would talk to us for about an hour or two hours from America. And then another old bloke Peter Healey and he was a blacksmith, and they say that he was the blacksmith in the song Slim Dusty [Australian country songwriter and singer] wrote about the pub with no beer, old Peter Healey, they said

that was him. And my father and my uncle actually worked with him, he taught them blacksmithing, and I think my father was in the army with the light horse when they first joined up like the militia sort of thing, he was he’s boss in that. And he was there to, he taught me a lot, you know different things and that. It was a good life, excellent life, you had your, which actually weren’t my uncles but were my aunties’ brothers and all that sort of stuff and we had fun, used to work

for them, they used to take ya out rounding up stock, out the bush and all that, it was a good life, really good life.

No I despised it, I despised getting up at daylight and the frosts, it was so frosty, and you know you either had a pair of rubber boots or no boots. And I can always remember going over to get the cows, cause you used to have them of a nighttime, used to put them in the night

paddock and used to have to go over and round them up and get ‘em into the yard, that was part of my job was getting ‘em into the yard ready for milking. And I used to stand in their fresh manure to keep my feet warm or sit in where they’d been laying overnight where it was warm and yell and bellow and that, and had this little dog, I used to call him Sambo, he’s a little black and white fellow, me uncle used to call him Bootlace. I used to get into terrible trouble because he used to go; I used to send him out

to get the cows but he used to bring one cow back at a time, and he was around their ankles all the way, you know biting them and oh God me uncle used to go crook at me. Every time one cow out of about eighty cows each time and that would save me a lot of walking actually to get them and things like that, then you’d do that clean up after that and away you’d go to school.

Oh we’d have about seventy-five, I think it was, probably at the most, probably

about seventy-five to eighty at the most. We used to, the kids, we used to get a job of the calves, the bull calves they used to be sent to the abattoirs but they were taken off the cows and they’d go into milking and we’d have to feed the calves. So we had half a dozen calves there at most times and we’d have to feed them out of the bucket and all that sort of stuff, different jobs that you had. It was interesting but I didn’t like it then, but

today I look back and I’d love to be there, I would really love to be there in that position today.

Oh I look back and I just say to myself memories, really great memories was at that Taylor’s Arm. I had some photos of it and me neighbour was an artist Greg Turner, you probably heard of him, he used to live next door just behind us. And I give him all these photos one day and I said, “You reckon you can make a

painting up for me?”. And he sketched this thing out, he said, “We’ll have to do it this way”, sketched it all out and I wanted him to call it ‘Memories’ of the old home and the bails and all that sort of thing but he died, and it didn’t happen. And I got the sketch back but I didn’t get me photos back, his wife can’t find the photos and there probably a couple of the only photos I had of me as a young fellow, like as a sort of a teen, part teen sort of thing.

Because after, the farm, my uncle and them, well the farming industry really petered out and they bought a house in town and my uncle bought a business, a trucking business, like banana run, cream, milk run sort of thing, and their house got burnt down and that’s where we lost most of all the photos and that sort of stuff. So that part of the thing I haven’t got many at all actually.

It was excellent, we had a pub, we had a shop across the road, general store with a couple of bowsers, we had a sawmill, there was a baker, there was a butcher. We had a little RSL [Returned and Services League] hall where we used to go and play bowls, indoor bowls, carpet bowls of a nighttime, once a week that used to happen, and around the district sort of places. Because the hall was main entertainment of everywhere;

used to have dances and all that. Always remember dancing and that, you always got up in the barn dance as a little fellow and always aunties and or somebody there grab you and they just about take you off your feet, you didn’t do anything they used to wheel you around and away you’d go round the dance floors. And those halls are still there today, they’re still up there. But I remember we used to go to bowls and the butcher, I can’t remember his name, but he used to let us go over and help him make sausages,

with his sausage machine. We used to think that was great with all the kids and that. And then the baker, he was Noel Irvine and he used to let us come over and watch him make the bread and that, so that used to entertain us kids while the adults were playing bowls, indoor bowls. It was good, really interesting that sort of stuff. You go up there today and you still see those older people, the butcher he’s dead but Irvine’s up there: he’s gone into big trucking business actually, timber

and all that sort of stuff. You meet a lot of the people you knew, young kids and that you meet there and that, that are still there today.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, all I wanted to do after that when I was about seventeen, I wanted to go to Sydney because my other brothers from my family were in Sydney with my grandparents and another

auntie, they were sort of living with them, and I wanted to go down there and be there because I never used to see them. So I said to me uncle I said, “I want to go to Sydney” and he said, “Okay” and worked it all out and he put me on a train and I went to Sydney and that’s when I started work, me other auntie took me and got the job, I was only there a couple of days and I had a job working there. And then I went to Big Sister Foods, had to put me age up there because it was more money, because me younger brother was there working,

he was getting more money than me so I went and put me age up. Got a job there and then from there, while there I joined the Army Reserve, which was called the CMF then, and I was in that for about twelve months. But I enjoyed it but it was the same sort of thing, they’d say, “Right, you’ve got to work of a weekend” and I was in a unit which was a signals unit and you’d go to the range and you’d just sit on sentry duty and radio,

the security sort of thing, and it was so boring so I got out of that and it would have been about six or seven months later I joined the regular army. But my brother had joined the regular army before that, about twelve months before that, sort of coaxed me into it.

Never really, not until then; I’d seen it, it had all been around me like I said before with

1950s and that with the national service and that and me uncles and that all coming along in their uniform doing their weekends and that sort of stuff, it had just been there. I never did, it just come to me, I said, “Yeah, I’ll join it”.

My first job as I said was at the service station, at the garage and that was greasing and oil changing and serving petrol, ringbarking me knuckles.

Like a little fellow like me, I was only a little weed and I used to have to try and change these tractor wheels and all that sort of stuff, near impossible it was. And just working on the farm, that was for nothing, that was a pound a week I used to get at the garage and I used to pay ten bob a week board and then used to have to do like other jobs of help milk and in the blacksmith shop. I learnt a hell of a lot in the blacksmith shop as a little eleven, twelve year old swinging a sledgehammer for

striking and all that sort of stuff for me uncle and that. I learnt me swearing actually there, really swearing, because older people would probably know that they used to make sulky wheels, or repair sulky wheels, and to put them together it takes a hell of a lot, and it’s got to be precise and then you’ve got to curl the steel tyre down so it shrinks on and it brings all the spokes and that in together. Yeah and they used to do a bit of swearing and cursing

there. And I always remember one time, the best backhander I ever had was me uncle with the forge, you have to turn this forge all the time and keep it a constant heat for the metal to build up and that. And they had this metal in there and it was just about ready and that and my arm was just about falling off and I thought, “Oh, I’ll change hands”. And I went boom like that to change and I just blew the whole lot, and at the same sort of time I got a big backhander from me uncle,

because it just burnt the metal and that, over burnt it sort of stuff. You learnt pretty quickly that you just persevered and keep the one arm going, but they were the things. I look back on them, I probably hated them then, but I look back at them now and I use those skills today myself. I built a sulky myself, 1920 model sulky that was just a heap of junk and I built it and it’s beautiful, and that sort of thing. I do a lot of saddlery

work and that sort of thing which I learnt from those blokes in that day, took me thirty years and then I come back into it.

Oh yes, very much, me uncle used to do that, not fulltime but like all the plough shears, all that sort of stuff, all the shoeing of horses, all that. All the farm machinery sort of stuff, yeah he used to do a hell of a lot of that, a lot of horse work stuff.

It was because every place was a farm, like side by side you had a farm, dairy farm, dairy farm and they raise families of six and seven kids on them. But it started to get, they couldn’t afford to like pay wages for the kids and that sort of stuff, and then the industry changed. I think there are two dairy farms in the whole of Taylor’s Arm now and there must have been well over a hundred when I was there,

up in all those areas. And it was a mixed business, like dairy farm, vegetables, bananas and timber mainly in that area.

Put it into cans, my grandfather was a cream man, he used to separate it, his was just cream and all the other milk used to go to feed the pigs. My uncle used to sell milk and there was a truck used to come around daily. And

first of it used to be three times a week and you’d put it into, like there was ten-gallon cans, seven gallon cans and that and you’d take it up to the side of the road where you had a thing and they’d just take it from there and take it to the butter factory. Taylor’s Arm top town had a butter factory but closed down later on, then they used to take it over to Bowraville, which is a town further away.

Sort of excited,

but when I got down there it was, had to make new friends, that was the thing, like you had your family but you had nobody your age that you went to school with or that you used to go rabbitin’ with and go walk up the mountain with, chasing pigeons and turkeys, that sort of stuff. You never had that, Sydney was a different place and mainly in Sydney what I used to do there, after a while I got to meet a few people,

was go to the rugby league and we used to go to Bondi. And one of their brothers was a mad spear fisherman and we used to go out to where the mermaids were at Bondi and we used to spearfish there. And I’ve never been much of a swimmer but I could never use the snorkel and that sort of stuff and breath through me mouth, it would fill up with water and all that sort of stuff. I always remember it used to be a real

challenge; you used to go out on the water and used to come back in. And I can remember the first time I was skinned all up me chest and arms and that because the waves washed me onto the rocks and all the cockles and all that sort of on the rocks, it turned me off it a bit of spear fishing.

Well I always remember the groper, cause they used to always be out there looking, I never ever speared a fish in me life because I couldn’t get under the water to get down there and do it sort of thing because

I couldn’t hold me breath or I used to try and breathe while I was under the water and it would fill up with water and so on. But they used to go for anything that was there, but it was good, they used to always catch a couple of fish.

They had hand spears, which big long thing with all these prongs, you have a big heap of prongs on one end and you had this big rubber band and used to come across your thing and you used to pull it back, and you pull it back like this and you’d let it go, it was like a slingshot, shhh, like that.

And a couple of them had those guns, where they’d pull it back, still had the rubber band on but it was like a trigger and you’d shoot.

A couple of blokes that I worked with actually Fentons, Barry Fenton, Keith Fenton, Merv Fields that I’d met there in Sydney and their brothers, their brothers were a bit older, Frankie Fenton and couple of his mates. And they used to go out to Bondi, we used to either walk

from round Leichhardt, Rozelle area, walk out to Bondi or walk and catch a bus and all that sort of stuff, we used to walk all over the place.

Oh I don’t know, but we used to go right down, we used to go straight down from Lilyfield straight into the city, across, up, out over to Bondi, sometimes we’d get a bus into the city and then walk from there,

just different things we’d do.

It was good actually, it was always Bondi, it hasn’t changed really but it’s packed more, more people, but there used to be a fair few people still there then, it was still a popular beach. But I always remember that, the mermaids up on the rocks, if you’re standing on the road looking at the beach they were up to the left, further around on the rocks to the headland, and

we used to go up there and there wasn’t many people up there at all really, when we’d go there.

They’re big statues of mermaids, I don’t know whether it’s still there, it probably is but that used to be it, meet you at the mermaids, that was Bondi sort of thing, yeah meet you at the mermaids because there was a big statute of mermaids there.

My grandmother, my father’s mother and father, I was living with them at Leichhardt, they’d

moved there probably a couple of years before I left Taylor’s Arm, they’d moved down to Sydney from Macksville, they used to be in Macksville.

Well my grandfather was a butcher and he worked at the abattoirs all his life then he retired and I think it was mainly work and so on, because everything was starting to close down in the country and that. I don’t really know their reason for going there but I know my

other auntie and her family had moved down there and were living there first off and my other uncle he was there too. So it was just sort of, I don’t know, I don’t really know why, because really after my grandfather died, he died in Sydney, and my grandmother moved back to Macksville.

Yeah in Leichhardt it was one of those terrace,

it was not a terrace house, it wasn’t a double-storey one but it was a house that, you know they were joined together, two houses together and very long and you used to go in the gate and up some steps and into the house. There was a hallway all down one side and then the rooms were off, that sort of thing. Always remember that, I didn’t like it there because just down the road was a tripe factory and they used to cook all the tripe and

all that sort of stuff, oh my God, I cannot eat tripe now, I just despise it, my wife cooks it I just can’t stand the smell of it, it’s shocking, yeah used to smell it all the time.

Yes coming onto yes, yes there was, yes. The neighbour wasn’t but one down was, my grandfather and him were excellent friends, they were great friends.

I can still remember him because I took him in my car to me grandfather’s funeral and then brought him home again too, they were really good friends.

We used to have a few little parties, just amongst ourselves sort of thing, just go to somebody’s place and have a few parties, a few beers, yeah.

You weren’t supposed to. I can remember one time Merv Fields, he was older than us, he was probably three years older than us and we went to town and we got on the grog, I think I was only about seventeen, something, eighteen, wasn’t suppose to be drinking and that and I got home and I was crook. And to make it worse, Merv threw me over his shoulder and carried me up the steps, made me sick. Me grandfather went off the handle

and then my father heard about it and he heard about it from, he is a relation of ours, a bloke by the name of Bernie Underriner [?] and he was a detective-sergeant. And Dad come in and told us everywhere we’d been. “How did you know?” “You’re watched”. So this Bernie Underriner, this detective-sergeant must of followed us round the city, but it would probably only take us about five or six beers and we’d be drunk. But

yeah that was it, but you always sneak a beer here and a beer there, and always putting your age up, that sort of thing. Few dances, I remember going to Johnny O’Keefe one time. He used to go up to the Leichhardt Stadium, they used to call it the Leichhardt Stadium, and there used to be Johnny O’Keefe there, but he was a bit older than me sort of thing, but my brother and sister were older and they used to go there and I used to tag along sometimes. And we went ten-pin

bowling, it come in around then, in the 60s into Sydney, there was one at Leichhardt and we used to go up there and play bowls. That was about it, oh speedway, that was every Saturday night at the Sydney Showground was the Sydney speedway, yeah get the smell of all the petrol. James Stewart was a driver, there was Bob Tattersall was the American, used to always challenge one another, and these midget

racing cars, and then the motorbikes and then the stock cars, yeah that’s where we used to go to the speedway every weekend. My first date taking a girl out was to the speedway, we went to the speedway.

What did she think? Well she used to come. She used to live at Ryde actually; I used to have to walk home every night because the buses used to finish.

She used to live up at Ryde and down a bit toward Meadowbank I think it was, down near where the ferry used to be, down towards the harbour sort of thing. And I used to go all the way down there and pick her up and away we’d go to the speedway. After that we’d come back on a bus all the way up there and then by the time I got back up to the road at Ryde the buses had stopped running, so you had to walk home. Well earning a couple of pound a week you didn’t have much money anyway after you shouted [paid for]

the girl out and that. But oh we went out for a fair bit. Oh yeah another one was we used to go to the trots on a Friday night at Harold Park. So I wasn’t much of a romantic type I don’t think with the girls, the trots and the speedway, that was about it.

There were a fair few in it because at the same time there was national service, which was two years, they used to do three months fulltime then they used to do their two years after it. And the CMF was sort of like that.

I don’t remember anything much about Korea or anything like that because I learnt that later on when I was in the army, so I don’t think that had an influence on me or anything like that. I think mainly because of me uncles and that were in there and wanting something to do I suppose.

Oh we used to go one night a week and one weekend a month and then each year you had to do

a fortnight’s camp. So we done our one night a week and then we done our training, which was like your initial training and that sort of stuff, and then you done your other training and that, and weekends you’d go to the ranges and that sort of thing.

Well you’d go to range firing all the different weapons, you’d do radio training, because I was in a support company and I was in the Sig [Signals] Platoon so

I’d learn about all the different radios and that and wireless procedures and so on.

Yeah, shouldn’t tell you this probably because I got in there wrongly. Me Dad didn’t sign the papers me cousin signed the papers for me to go into the regular army.

My sister married an army person and he went to Vietnam in 1965, so I suppose that had a bit of influence. And then I was getting bored with the work I think, with the jobs I was doing, cause it was only process work and it was a bit repetitive and I just went one day, me and me mate Merv Fields, we both went down and

done the exam for the army. I passed and Merv failed and I went in from there. As soon as I went in to join it, I remember telling me boss at the place I was working, I said, “I’m going to join the army” and he said, “Don’t be mad,” he said, “It’s not all cracked up to what it’s supposed to be”. Cause he was a Second World War man. I said, “I’m giving you me notice,” I said, “I’m joining the army.” He said, “Have you been accepted yet?” I said, “No I’m going in the army”. And I give him me notice

and went down to the army thing and said, “I’m joining”. I was probably a couple of weeks and they called me up and said, “Right, in you come, be sworn in” and I went to Watson’s Bay and I was there for a week before I went to Wagga. And the funny part about it is, they tell you at Watson’s Bay where people come into the army, they get out of the army and all that sort of stuff and you meet all these different people with their different

stories and that. But at Watson’s Bay they made us all get a haircut, so we all had this short haircut. We gets to Kapooka, the second day they made us have a haircut. There was a group of us there said, “Let’s get a haircut” so they shaved it all off us, straight over the top, so we had that sort of a haircut. I didn’t find out until probably about ten years ago when I run into the platoon commander that had

at Kapooka, that we were a trial platoon, we had national servicemen and regulars mixed together, and it was a trial to see how it went, because national service were all on their own and regulars were all on their own sort of thing. And yeah it went pretty well because must of, they kept it going.

He wouldn’t sign them, said I wasn’t going into the army,

I wasn’t old enough so I got me cousin to sign them, and he filled them out, so we forged them.

I was nineteen, but I think twenty one was then, I think it was the same as drinking age, I think you had to be twenty one back in the early 60s. And yeah, and we hatched it, because I remember they lived at Guildford and we hatched it up and we filled the forms in in the back room.

Well I told him and he come and seen me at the railway station before we went to Wagga, for Kapooka. He didn’t say much really, that’s right we had a wait there and he took three or four of us down to the pub, just down from the Central Railway Station, I think it was Cricketer’s Arms or something, and

I think we all had a beer. But that was the first time he ever took me into a pub, cause he wouldn’t let me go into pubs before because you had to be twenty-one.

Oh dear I don’t know. Because see I never lived with Dad after Mum died, but used to see him all the time but never lived together. I don’t know whether he thought he might of signed the papers

or might not have or what it was. I haven’t told him that either, yeah it’s only been me cousin sort of known that, we’ve still got a pretty good thing going.

Yeah he just signed ‘E Clegg’ yeah. We knew Dad’s sort of signature, because Dad never had much education and that and his signature was pretty straightforward, and just signed it. Put his address down and all that.

I was working at a little place called Rowell’s Radios, it was Enfield, right at the big junction of, come up from the Strathfield Railway Station to the Hume Highway, right there at that big junction, it’s still there but I don’t know whether the people are there, it was just in the back of there. Yeh Rowell’s Radio,

they used to make radios, radiograms that sort of stuff, at Enfield.

Oh just process working, you know like putting the bodies of radios into them, putting the switches on them and so on, just odd jobs and that sort of thing, just like a process, production line type thing.

No, no he never told me anything. Like I said the only person that actually

told me about stories and that sort of stuff was me uncle, me Uncle Peter Preston, which was his son that signed my documents. Yeh he probably had more influence on us, on me about joining the army than anybody else, cause he used to tell us all these wonderful stories about the military and Egypt and all that sort of stuff. And I can remember him telling us once, he said, “The

people over there are different people,” he said. “I’ve seen people over there,” he said, “They’ve tied their kids’ legs up or their arms up so that they can beg” you know so that they become deformed and so they can beg on the streets and that to be able to live. And I didn’t realise that until later on in life when you see that sort of thing and that stuff.

I had a little insight from the CMF but it was sort of completely different because it was full on, you were in there and that was it, it wasn’t just like a work tonight, go home and come back next week, it was there from day one, and training, training, training. But I was a pretty independent sort of a person and that’s really what the army’s about, getting yourself organised, being organised

and you can handle it. Like I said to me sons when they joined I said, “The hardest time you’ll ever do in your life is your first six months in the army. It’s just changing your way of life and if you’re independent, you can do your own ironing, you can get yourself organised, you’ll have no problems”.

Kapooka we lived in the old buildings, which were like the half

tank huts, the half-round sort of huts. And there was about twelve of us to a building with our sections, we were 2 Platoon A Company and the hut I was in was 3 Section. There was a couple of us from New South Wales, one from Tasmania, a Victorian and a West Australian and the rest were Queenslanders. And

we got on real well but we had another New South Welshman, Nick McGuire, who joined and he was a tattooist, he used to do all these tattoos, and comics. I don’t know whether you remember ‘Sad Sack’, Sad Sack used to be an army comic sort of thing [comic strip character of the 1960s] and he used to do all these cartoons and we had a big sign on our hut, ‘Dewdrop Inn’ [‘do drop in’] with this Sad Sack and that sort of stuff. He was the character of it, and he used to make all these cartoons up

and so on, it was Sad Sack. It’s something like what do they call them, Swamp [newspaper cartoon strip of the 2000s] in the thing now, well Sad Sack was sort of like that; he was always in trouble.

Oh he wouldn’t have them published, they were just sort of things he made a sign, I don’t know whether I’ve got a photo of it or not, he made a sign that hung on our door, ‘The Dewdrop Inn’ with Sad Sack and that sort of stuff. And

it was interesting getting to know people from different areas and you sort of relied a lot on them, because the military, a lot of people think, or they say it today they say ‘bastardisation’, well it’s not, it’s just peer group pressure. Like if you’re in a group of ten people and you go for a run and one person is just lagging behind all the time, well you turn the other nine people around and run

them back, pick him up and continually do it. So the peers put the pressure on that person later on; people call that bastardisation but it’s not really, it’s just working as a team, it’s peer group pressure, which I call it anyway.

God yeah, first off we weren’t allowed to go to the boozer or anything like that, you had to go under command, you weren’t allowed to drink and that

for the first few weeks. And if you went up there you had to go as a group, march up and get your few extras and that sort of stuff and back you’d come. Yes and you’d come back and you’d flop on your bed and it would fall to the ground because the people that had stayed behind had put little pennies underneath it so that when you sat on the bed the whole thing, boom, collapse. But there was other initiations like if somebody didn’t wash and all that sort of stuff, you know they’d boot

polish them, where the group would grab him and put boot polish all around his crotch and all that sort of stuff. There was other ones like with the broom; it was called a bass broom, which is a real heavy bristle yard broom. If somebody didn’t shower you’d get him in the shower and you’d give him a bit of a scrub up with that, just to, peer group pressure, peer group. But that’s all that I sort of come across,

but it sort of come into a little thing of you play the jokes and all that on one another and that sort of thing.

National servicemen a lot of them were educated, that was the thing. We had a university student,

we also had a regular soldier who was forty-five year old, he was a professional fireman and he come into the army as a straight enlistee but still had to do his Kapooka training. Us regulars were all ages from seventeen up to twenty-four of all different backgrounds. Most of the regular soldiers I think sort of come from a background of where they’d moved around a bit,

not all of them but like they’d been sort of bit of wanderers and that and different jobs and that sort of stuff, couldn’t settle down, whereas you got a lot of the national servicemen and that, and they were twenty year olds, and a lot of them were sort of older than us, probably a lot more mature and they were in regular jobs and so on like that, but there was no animosity amongst us that would be any different to anybody else type thing. Because I can remember we had a ball of a time,

first time I’d ever been to Canberra on our first leave. One of the instructors down there said, “Right I’ll give you a lift to Sydney” and there was four of us. And one of them was from Canberra, oh can’t think of his name, big tall bloke with glasses on and he was a uni [university] student, and he said, “Come on, we’ll go via Canberra”. And we went in via Canberra and he took us to a party

that was on the first night, wasn’t until the next morning we got out of Canberra heading to Sydney. But he took us to a party with all his uni students and all that sort of stuff; it was just a big booze up. And then we got to Sydney and went back, that was I think the first four days you get off or something, and we went back and picked him up on the way back. So he wasn’t a bad sort of a bloke really.

Well

it was mind-boggling really because the uni students, it was sort of, we’d done about six weeks of training and we were sort of moulded into being soldiers, and the uni students were pretty blasé and done things that we’d never seen, or I’d never seen that sort of stuff. I can remember we couldn’t get

back in the car because the bloke that had the keys was, I don’t know where he’d gotten to, and there was two of us sleeping outside the car on the footpath waiting to get in the car, we were ready to go, but a few of them still wanted to party on.

No because from day one I’ve always

had a short back and sides. I can remember me father and me grandfather, not me grandfather, me Pop Smith from when I was living with them, they used to do the haircuts, it was one big hand on your head and the old clippers, if it didn’t cut it, it pulled it out. And it used to, and that was your haircut. I can remember me sister one time, Dad was cutting her hair and giving her a fringe, and trimming around and he clipped the lobe of her ear with the scissors. All

the blood, yeah. It didn’t worry me until probably later on back into the early 70s when the demonstrations and that sort of started to come with the hair and that, that didn’t worry me too much. Because before I went into the army, just after I went to Sydney, there were a few blokes there we used to call ourselves rockers,

cause there used to be the rockers and the surfies. And a couple of the blokes were blonde-headed blokes and they had longer hair and other blokes had short hair, grease it back with the old axle grease and all that, that was our rockers, Spruco was the old hair-cream, used to stick it down. And some would have leather jackets; others would have denim jackets.

I remember our jeans, real skinny at the leg, you used to have to rip them about six inches up and put them on and then sew them up, that was your jeans cause they were so skin tight, peg jeans or something they used to call them. Yeah, so once you got them on, you used to stitch the bottoms of them up again, and desert boots. So long hair

didn’t really worry me much, you used to always have the little taunts, “Oh, you sissy” and all this sort of stuff, or “You girl” and all that sort of stuff, long hair, but it didn’t worry us too much; well it didn’t worry me too much really.

Oh it, you know the movie Grease the brush-back, the big curl down the front with the grease and the big ducktail at the back,

sort of squared at the back but thick. You used to mainly brush back and you used to brush it back and poof, and there used to be a big curl there, down the front a real curl. And the jacket collar and the shirt collar used to be turned up, make you cool, if you were with a few blokes, tough, I don’t know how tough really we never used to,

I can’t remember getting into any fights really, not many at all as a young fellow.

Oh yeah, yeah.

It didn’t worry too much because everybody looked the same; everybody was in the same boat. But later on you went back to it, they got a bit more lax and you had your brush backs and that sort of stuff.

But you went through your different stages, you had your crew-cut, like your flattops and that sort of stuff and your brushbacks and that, looked like you had a big mop on but just short back and sides, because it was hidden under the hat most of the time.

First got there they got us formed up and it was yellin’ and going on, march,

keep in step, all this sort of stuff. Then we got issued all our stuff, all our needles, then it was learning all the basics, all the basic drill movements, the weapon movements, the whole lot, that was Kapooka. Map reading, medical, like first aid, all that sort of stuff, it was just the whole basics of everything. Like when you go to school you learn right

you’re going to write and you go and that’s how it starts, it just goes through situations like that at Kapooka. And you march out of Kapooka there all ready and right and they can train you into being anything.

I joined on the 6th October 1965, went to Kapooka and marched out of Kapooka in January 1966

to Infantry Centre at Ingleburn in Sydney, to be infantry. There was a lot of us in Kapooka and that, you always get this thing at the end of Kapooka, depends how well you went which unit you’ll go to, which corps you’ll go to. But there was a lot of us there had a pact that, and we had our bags packed too, we were not going anywhere except infantry. We were going to infantry and if they said we were going to go to Catering Corps or Medical Corps or Transport Corps or something, we were picking up our bags

and taking off. That was our attitude because we just wanted to go to infantry. It probably comes to you through Kapooka; you have all the different instructors from the different corps. And you probably take to one or two of the instructors and he might have been an infantry bloke and you say, “That’s what I want to be” or he might have been an artillery bloke and you say, “That’s what I want to be”. It sort of moulds you in that way. But you have all lessons and people talk to you about all the different corps and that sort of stuff so you make

up your mind. But that’s the frightening part, as you’re leaving Kapooka you front these allocation boards and they’ve got their three months set out in front of them and they say, “You didn’t do too well in that” or, “You’re not tall enough” or “You’re not this” or “You’re not that”, things why they should put you into that training or this training.

Probably

me brother-in-law was in it and he was already in Vietnam and by that time you were starting to get an idea of what Vietnam was about. And the main thing, after starting your training you don’t want to be training all the time, you’d like to go and put your training into practice. I put it down to it’s like being a motor mechanic and a young bloke there he pulls the motor apart, puts it back together again, pulls it apart, puts it back together again, he’s never allowed to switch

it on to see if it goes. And that’s the way I put down all your training is you train so much and if you can’t go over and put it into real life practice, it’s nothing, you just train, train, train. And infantry was the most exciting I think because you hear the stories and they instruct you on that infantry will go overseas first because there’s more infantry and more infantry needed than there is truck drivers or cooks and so on like that.

I think that would have done it, a lot to do with it. We did have an old bloke in our unit, he actually got kicked out, he come in under his brother’s name and his brother was going to be called up, or would have been called up for national service, but he joined, his brother joined the regular army, he was in his 30s, he was a Korean man, he’d been to Korea. And he knew a fair bit about the stuff and he used to

sit there and he used to tell us, “Oh, this is me brother in Korea” and show us all these photos and that and they were dead ringers together, the photos and this bloke, and “This is me brother in Korea” and that, and “This is me brother told me this and me brother told me that”. But then when we used to get out and do our training, he was so far in advance of us. And he actually got caught because there was another bloke that was in the same unit with him in Korea had joined the army and just become a supervisor in the messes there and seen him and said, “What

are you doing here?”. And next thing we know he was called up and he come back to us and he said, “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve done the wrong thing. I come in under a false name and that and they’re discharging me” and that was it.

Because he probably wanted to go to Vietnam, there’s soldiers like that, there was soldiers that had been in the First World War, the Second World War, had been to Korea and come back in to go to Vietnam, they just…

It’s not a job, military life is not a job it’s a way of life. You can’t say this is me job, it is your job but it is a way of life, if you treat it as a job you really won’t keep going in the military, it’s a way of life, it’s twenty-four hours a day, you live it, you breathe it and that’s what the military is all about.

Probably he was worried about his age, he probably would have if he’d have been honest and that he may of got in, he may of got in, but you never know what people think about in those sort of things. But he come in under his brother’s name so he was probably trying to say, “Well I’ve seen Korea, I don’t want me brother to go to Vietnam, I’ll go and do it”.

No hadn’t been called up but would have been called up, or was due to be called up, was in that age bracket,

was within the twenty year age bracket, so he probably would have been called up but his brother joined under his name.

Yes we had one bloke, Hymie we used to call him, he was railway fanatic, he loved the railway,

if we got into Wagga he’d go to the railway station, sit on the railway station and watch the trains and that. But he was so unfit and so uncoordinated; he was called up into national service, he just couldn’t lift like a barbell up. I remember at Kapooka they made him his own barbell, which was two jam tins full of cement on each end with this thing and he used to do his training. He was like anaemic, he just

didn’t know how to throw a ball, to throw a ball he’d be like this sort of stuff, it’s sad in his life sort of thing how he ended up like that and then see him come into Kapooka and get yelled at and all that sort of thing. But he just had never been taught anything in life, life skills or anything. He hated it, there was a lot of people, we probably had about twenty of them in our group of probably about sixty I think it was in our

whole thing, they didn’t want to be there but they were there and that was it. Some of them rebelled against it always, others said, “Well I’m going to have the best time of me life, I don’t care” and away they went and done it. That’s how I found that through the army with my whole career, right up through to the 1970s when national service finished. Some blokes adored it and signed on, stayed on as regulars,

others just said, “Right we’ve got two years to do, we’ll do it and we don’t care” they just grin and bear it sort of thing. Others said, “Smile and enjoy it and hope the two years goes quickly”, there was characters like that all through.

AWL [Absent Without Leave], just take off, their dress, wouldn’t clean their boots, wouldn’t shave,

come on parade late, all this sort of stuff, just little things that they’d just get yelled at and yelled at, probably hoping that they’d get kicked out, “Right, you’re not suitable” get kicked out. But the military doesn’t look at it that way because for the first three months in the military it probably costs them about twenty thousand dollars just to start training one person, to outfit them and all that, so they’re not just going to say to them, “Right you can go, pack your gear and go.” You’ve got to be really

go through and all the counselling and everything to really say, “Right, no, you’re not suitable, we’ll discharge you”. And there probably was people like that.

Yeh because you talk, yeah you talk together and you know and you say, “Oh how long did you join up for?” you know regulars were three and six years, Nashos were, “I’m a Nasho” that was it sort

of thing, or “What did you do before you come in?”, “Oh the bastards pulled me out of uni” and some of them, you had people there that were twenty two too, that were national serviceman that were in uni and were deferred for probably those couple of years to finish off their degrees or whatever they were doing, and that sort of stuff, and then come in and done their national service later. Oh you knew because everyone talked between one another and that sort of stuff and you got to know what they’d done. Like

we had a bloke in our mob and we went, joined the army together, lived in the same hut, went to Vietnam together, went to the same unit together, served in the same unit way through, he got out, then he come back in and we met up over the years and through the time. And he was Golden Shearers Champion in New Zealand, shearing sheep, in which he started of shearing sheep here in Australia, then joined the Australian Regular Army. He was also

a junior All Black and so you had people from all different walks of life, coming and going.

Not right up until we got into the Infantry Corps and what you hear through the newspapers and so on. When we went to Infantry Centre to do our corps training

then you started to learn about Vietnam then. And after the corps training, you always go to Canungra and do three months there, that is when it starts getting a bit more intense of what the Viet Cong are, how it evolved from like the French and the communist north and so on like that. You start to get more information fed to you then and you know what

you’re going in towards. But at Kapooka and that nothing much at all really it’s just, yes you knew Vietnam was on and you knew Malaya was on and that sort of thing, but it was not until you started to get into your training of your specialised corps and especially Canungra because everybody that went to Vietnam had to go through Canungra, which is Jungle Training Centre.

I used to get a little bit from my brother-in-law who was already in Vietnam, he went over there in 1965 and he was there. I used to get little bits and pieces from him and then other parts you’d have a trickle of people coming back from Vietnam, they may have been wounded and then they were made instructors and you used to talk to them. And they used to say, “When you go to

Vietnam, this is going to happen and this” and it all sort of, Vietnam was the base and it was all sort of built on that. Probably the same as the Second World War, “Righto, this is what happened in the First World War; this is going to happen in the Second World War” type thing, through that and you got that through your instructors. You had lectures, your instructors lectured you on booby traps, mines, different ways, culture of the people there, things what not to do, like

don’t pat them on the head, you know some religions don’t like that, don’t stare at them, all this sort of stuff. You know things like that, just cultural-type things.

It was sort of told us about Vietnam. I can remember

there was one bloke as a young fellow I looked up to and that was John F Kennedy [President of the United States of America] actually, I can still say when I heard that he was shot. I walked out of 6 Cheltham Street Lilyfield actually on that morning and the next-door neighbour said, “Did you hear the news?” and Dad said, “What?” He said, “John F Kennedy has been assassinated”. That was 1963, I think, something like that, around then, and I can remember that and I look at that

and we used to be always told about the communists because we were sort of brought up on Russians are communists, “better be dead than red”. You used to hear all that all the time, “better be dead than red” and that sort of thing. And I look back at it now and I say it is better to have our service people on foreign shores than it is to have them fighting on our own shores,

because the only time Australia has actually been at war, or had anything happen to it, was Darwin. So really the people of Australia don’t know how lucky they are not to have, well a war in their own country type thing. That really sticks in me craw when people say, “We should have our troops at home to defend Australia”. Well, we don’t want

to have to defend Australia from our own shores, that’s my honest belief and I really believe in that, I’ve believed in that for years, it’s always been a…

Probably too early because, no nothing that I can remember, my mates and all that we never discussed this or discussed that, it’s just I knew it through me brother-in-law, through me sister type thing. And I learnt so much more about it joining the army. A cousin of mine

was in the army, he was wounded in Vietnam early, in the first part of Vietnam and that was it; I didn’t watch TV [television] that much or read newspapers or anything about that much, so I wasn’t really interested until I actually joined. And then it was sort of part of life; you had to learn these things and so on.

That was the School of Infantry, we used to do all infantry training which was all weapons, different weapons, patrolling, map reading, fitness very much on fitness, tactics, all the section contacts, the platoon contacts, patrolling in different stages and so on. All that, it was specialised training for infantry.

So we didn’t worry about any other parts of the army like at Wagga. At Kapooka they used to tell you oh well the Service Corps does this, the Artillery Corps does this and so on, it was just straight out and out infantry, infantry tactics, infantry was just infantry, it was glorious infantry. The only person who can walk around with his house on his back, yeah it’s like a swaggie [swagman, travelling worker] isn’t it?

That’s right.

Yes like I said when we go to Kapooka you have your allocation board, which you front up to, I think it was a colonel and a major and all that, and you knew their ranks but you hardly ever knew nothing much about them sort of thing, the highest you’d probably ever seen was a platoon commander or a sergeant or a corporal or something. And you front up there

and they say to you about your training and why do you want, because you have allocations and you fill in the forms of where you want to go. And I remember there was a group of us we just put infantry, infantry, infantry; there was no second choice or third choice. And we just went in there and we said, “We’re going to infantry”, “Why?”, “Because we want infantry”, that was sort of mainly what it was. I may have said me brother was in infantry and me brother-in-law was in infantry, I may of said that, I may have even said me father and all them were in infantry

and that sort of thing. I can’t recall that but it was just infantry, infantry.

No, no they told you as you left there, they said to you as you left, because you used to walk out and you’d go, “You beauty I got it” to the rest of the blokes waiting to go in shivering and all that sort of thing, all nervous waiting, “What am I going to get?” Cause you used to talk it over with yourselves and say, “I’m going to infantry, oh yeah we’ll all stay together” and that. Because Kapooka sort of bonds you together

and you get into groups and that and your mates and you say that’s where you’re going, we’re going to this corps, we’ll all go together, we’ll do it together.

It was a little bit better than at Kapooka. They were still huts and they were still about twelve to fourteen men per hut but your corporal had a little room on the end, he used to live there,

your section corporal, he used to live there. Not much different it was pretty well still the same, just a locker and a bed and that was it, twelve blokes living in a big hallway really, that you were responsible for. All your latrine and showers and that were outside so you had to go out in the cold weather or hot weather, whatever it was, for your showers and toilets and so on, a lot different to what it is today,

a lot different.

Very well, actually. Canungra is full on, you arrive, well we left Ingleburn, marched out of Ingleburn on the 5th May, it was a Friday, we had Saturday, Sunday off, I think it was a Monday we were on the train and went to Brisbane. We were picked up by buses and taken out to

Canungra. As we got off the bus, we had this captain and I still remember his name, Captain Krasnov, Stan Krasnov, “At the double everybody” everywhere you go was double, so you’re running and into us from that thing on, and he used to be able to run backwards at the double while we were going forwards, he was that sort of man. I later on in life had him as a CO, a commanding officer of a unit, yeah, good bloke actually,

but Crazy Horse they used to call him, Stan Crazy Horse, Captain Crazy Horse. Yeh everything was at the double. When we went through Canungra, it’s all infantry, it doesn’t matter what corps you’re with, it’s all infantry. I went through with there on a corps was all Corps 2, because there was so many of us from Ingleburn, which we went to reinforcement wing, and then went to Canungra and then we met engineers and artillery and cooks and all that,

so everybody has to do it. And it is all infantry tactics, and it’s full on from day one.

Yes fire and movement, which means there’s one leg on the ground that is firing while the other is moving forward, and you just leap-frog and go like that, there’s different ways of doing it. You might be going together, you might

be leap-frogging past one another and so on, but your covering one another for security all the way. Patrolling and patrolling tactics in the jungle, they used to call them sneaker courses where you patrol through a laneway and all of a sudden a target pops out in front of you, and your reaction is to shoot at it straightaway and get behind cover, that sort of training. Training that is called battle

inoculation, which is doing with your fire and movement but having explosives either side of ya, so it’s like a battle sort of situation, scenario, you’ve got a machine gun firing over your head and you’ve got all these TNT [Trinitrotoluene] explosives going off beside ya and you got to go over and under, through obstacles, wire and so on like that. Really fitness and the tactics and doing things instinctively, like somebody says, “Blink” you blink,

“Don’t blink” you don’t blink. It’s like crossing a road with a person, if I say, “Go” I expect you to go instantly, like that, no hesitation, no thinking about it, you go and you trust one another, you trust that order. And that’s what Canungra is really on about and really goes at twenty-four hours a day for three weeks.

Yeah all the ambushes, funny thing we train and train but there’s nothing shooting back at us. It all happens different when the live thing happens, talk about that later. But you train instinctively, you’re in a vehicle ambush, de-bus to the opposite side of what the ambush

is, fire and the other groups behind you come through, attack the ambushers. In patrolling, in the jungle, ambushing, turn right and straight into them, shooting and straight through them. That’s what you’re trained at, is that. And I’ll put it down to your trained so much that your instincts are

they say, “Go”, you go, you don’t question. But when it happens at the real thing, it’s probably ninety five percent panic and shock before all that training clicks in, for the first few seconds. And then training kicks in and you do it automatically, but first of it is sheer panic, mayhem and then bang the training clicks in and you’re gone, and you do it instantly, in the real thing.

Most of them, not all of them, but most of them had been to Vietnam, a lot of them. The instructors on my course had been to the training team, right so they were over there from 1962 training the South Vietnamese before the Australians even went there. And then the filtering came back of NCOs [Non-commissioned Officers], senior NCOs, officers that have been with the other

units and that, as they may have been wounded or something like that, but come back and do the training, so they’ve got first hand experience most of them. You had a lot of Korean and some Second World War older people that were training you and that came through from, even Kapooka there were some Second World War people, and Ingleburn there was some Second World War people and Korean people that were instructing you. So there was the experience of all of it right through.

Very good, we were told that the North Vietnamese were a very good fighter because at Canungra was where we really got indoctrinated with the Dien Bien Phu, which is when the French were there and all the old films of the North Vietnamese coming down. This one person for six months carrying one bomb from North Vietnam way down into South

Vietnam, his, what do you call it, what’s that word, his passion to help and to do that. And that’s what he’d do, he’d come all that way down, might take him six months, he’d deliver his bomb and he’d turn around and go all the way back and do the same thing again. And they showed us photos and films that the French had taken of when they were moving along of how well they were camouflaged. Like if an aeroplane would come over, they’d just bend

over and you wouldn’t see them cause they had all these branches and everything that blended in with the area they were in and you wouldn’t see them, you’d think there’s nobody there. The VC [Viet Cong] they said he was passionate, but he was a more sceptical sort of shoot and run, he was more of a information to the main North Vietnamese body.

Well

we were training and we were training because we were taking on Viet Cong, VC mainly, there was only one and two, and we were in sections of eight, nine, platoons and that. So we thought that we were pretty good and our training was good and one or two people couldn’t stop us. So that’s what it was, it was doctrine sort of, “You’re the best,

do this training and we’ve seen it first hand and you’ll win”, and that’s what it was. With the North Vietnamese, it was a different matter. Mostly with the North Vietnamese, we were told that the Americans were contacting them mostly because in our area, in the Phuoc Tuy [Province] would be just guerrilla elements of Viet Cong, VC.

Yes it wasn’t just a little situation of everybody in black pyjamas is a Viet Cong, it was be wary of everybody, children, women, the whole lot, because you did not know. And we had, what they used to say, you have to have the civilian

population on your side, so one of our things which always come through was, ‘win hearts and minds’. And so you’re not aggressive to the villagers or anything like that, you had to be probably one hundred and twenty percent vigilant of who you contacted, who you spoke to and so on like that, because you were told they were everywhere and

anybody could be an enemy.

Yes we used to do a lot of training with that but we never had the tanks or the helicopters. Our helicopter training at Ingleburn was a mock up and one of our instructors standing in the middle. We had chairs and this

is where the machine gunner sits, that’s where the scout sits and this is where so and so sits and you always approach it from this angle, and there was chairs set out like that. And an instructor with a water bottle tied on a toggle rope swinging it around so that you knew that there was a helicopter there and if you didn’t duck down you got hit in the head, or hit somewhere with this water bottle. That was our training. I never got on a helicopter until my first operation in Vietnam,

my first operation was the first time I’d ever been on a helicopter and I was sitting on the side. And I can still remember my platoon commander, grabbing hold of me like this and saying, “You’ll be right” when the helicopter banked, looking out like that, that was my first ride on a helicopter. My first ride on an aeroplane was getting on a Qantas jet to go to Vietnam; I still get a few of the blokes have a go at me about that, said

I was sitting there real stiff and they used to laugh at me, cause that was me first aeroplane ride.

Yeah that’s it, first time even in Australia that, even the training because we never had the helicopters and that to train with in that training situation, they weren’t available, they were busy somewhere else.

Yeah

I was excited about going over there; we’d see the world. There used to be a little saying about ‘visit an exotic country, see the world, kill people’, that’s what the old saying used to be, that was sort of a bit of a dry joke they used to say, ‘Join the army, visit exotic countries’ yeah. Yeah we were excited

because we’d been a group ever since we’d joined and we’d done all our training together, we knew we were ready and we knew we could make application for Australia type thing, that was it because Canungra was more of the doctrine of how they worked, their booby traps, things that we had to look for. Little words and that of Vietnamese and that, I can’t,

uc da loi, that’s Vietnamese for [an]Australian. Everybody tell you “uc da loi very good fellow”, but he might have been an enemy telling you that too in Vung Tau or something, you don’t know, and didi [didi mau: go away] and that sort of thing, “get away” and that sort of stuff where you can talk to the kids and that too.

Probably not the culture so much, there was the odd ones, which were at Canungra, were

majors and that and they were probably Intelligence Corps or something like that, but they knew and they used to have lectures of a nighttime from the French down through the culture and that, and why we had to go to Vietnam to stop the Communist aggression and that coming right down through, we didn’t want it to happen. Like the Japanese come down through to the Second World War and come to our shores, that was all our culture type sort of thing. But as I said little things like

you don’t pat kids on the head, like in Australia you pat a kid on the head, okay; you don’t do it over there because it’s not their culture. You don’t stare at people, even sometimes of taking photos of people, you shouldn’t, you should ask if you’re going to take photos. Just things like that so we would know but really we never dealt with a lot of that, the only time we’d deal with that was probably if we went

on leave, you’d be with the townspeople. Maybe you’d come into a village something like that, but it was always respect and that’s one thing that I always remember, and it still is today. I’ve noticed that from young soldiers today doing peacekeeping forces is the Australian soldier would probably be the most respected soldier in the world for that, for respecting other cultures and so on and that’s why he does so well with the

peacekeeping duties and that that they do today.

Yes American service people are trained completely different, they’re trained as a great group, “This is a weapon”, one person will stand up in front of probably a hundred people and say, “This is a weapon, you do this with it, such and such and such and such”, they’re trained. Whereas we were trained

to perfection, we had to pass, we were tested on everything we done, even loading a magazine in a certain time and all that, we were tested. And that’s why I think the Australian soldier is so good in that, because he is tested, completely tested, tested all the time, with his skills and his skills are so high. Where the Americans didn’t and they just thought force was it, just go, force is

it.

I didn’t have much to do with the Americans, only met the odd ones, but Americans liked the Australians; we used to like the Americans because their rations were pretty good, they used to get a lot of gear that we didn’t get. Like we still had stuff from the Second World War, and they had real

new stuff and that was it, so anything you could snaffle or steal, something like that, was American or something like that, was good. So respect for them, well we didn’t want to work with them, that was my attitude and I think that was a lot of attitudes not to work with the Americans because we were with them once in Vietnam and your security is on very thin

ice with the Americans. Like where the Australians are very quiet, very systematic and so on, the Americans are not, just all that bang, crash, don’t care if we heard, well we heard, whereas the Australians would say very good. But we learnt all that at Canungra, they told us that, taught us that before we went to Vietnam.

I didn’t come across that because as I said I wasn’t involved with the Americans that much, the only time we were involved with the Americans was on an exercise once when a whole division of Americans were heading north, they’d come into Saigon and they were heading north. We had to secure the highway, part of the highway where they were, and we were there with some artillery, American artillery and that. Yes I could probably believe that, because like we are trying

to defend an area, like secure an area and that sort of stuff and in behind you, you’ve got these people banging steel doors closed, you know yelling out instead of whispering to one another and that sort of stuff. Yeah I could probably believe they could go like that. But the South Vietnamese used to go like that, they used to take their chickens and all with them, live ducks and chickens and all that with them, yeah, live food.

South Vietnamese, yeah.

Yeh as they needed, oh yeah, fresh food and that. Yeh they used to go with that, it was their culture, that was it, whereas we used to have the ration pack and we’d live on the ration pack.

Yes,

always even from the beginning, even from Kapooka and it still sticks there today, is you’re a soldier, you’re wearing a uniform, you stand out. Like today you hear about, say in Orange, if one of the soldiers here was picked up for drink and driving, it would be headline news, ‘Soldier drink driving’. But his brother that’s not in the army got picked up and that was

probably a little piece when he fronted court or something. Always been like that, it’s like the police too, same thing, policeman caught up in drug thing, scandal, or drunk and driving or so, it makes the headlines, that sort of puts us off with the media a fair bit and it always has. Throughout my whole career, “You are representing your country, you will be in uniform, once you get to your leave destination you can either wear your uniform,

or you can wear civilian clothes”. A bit like a white bloke in an Asian country, he’s pretty easily picked out sort of thing.

Oh yes, we used to have lectures, that was Canungra too, of the women, they could be

Vietnamese, they could be sympathisers, North Vietnamese and all that. You shouldn’t have sex because they might have or they’d have all these diseases. There was even times when they were saying, I don’t know whether it was to frighten us, I don’t know how they’d have done it, but they used to say, “Oh, they put razor blades in their vagina” and that “and you’ll have sex” and all this sort of stuff. That was told to us yeah, all that sort of stuff, yeah, stay away from that place.

Always cover yourself, like don’t get caught out on your own in a lot of places, if your mates, you always go on leave in two and three, look after one another, always that because you don’t know, you get on your own and you don’t know what can happen. But they were told to us, yeah.

Yes, just about to the date

actually. Yeh what you used to get, after Canungra, we come back from Canungra and we were Reinforcement Wing at Ingleburn, then you start training again, the same sort of training, you go out and it’s more or less on demonstrations. Like we used to go out to an airfield at Holsworthy, we’d go out by trucks, this was a real good

one actually. The first time we got introduced to the new GP boot, that’s general purpose boot, and they said to us, “Right we’re going out to the Holsworthy Airfield to watch this landing of helicopters and planes and that, with artillery and that”, you know, what they do in Vietnam, they’d bring them in and drop them and build a camp sort of thing, a base and that sort of stuff. So righto, we all got that morning issued with our boots,

so we put all our new boots on, they took us out on trucks and then marched us ten miles back with these new boots on, nearly crippled us, brand new boots. So there are things the army do, little sadistic things, yeah like that. Demonstrations of clearing villages, like Vietnamese camps, cordoning villages, done by troops

and we’d watch and then we’d go and we’d practice that sort of thing. We’d be involved because, you see, we were a unit which was not going as a unit, we were going as groups, individuals to all different units in Vietnam, so we had to learn all these different things because in infantry battalions a lot of their tactics are the same but not exactly the same, they’re not stereotyped. So that if one unit comes home, another unit takes over, the tactics basically are the same

but carried them out different. You know what I mean, you wouldn’t do the same, you wouldn’t drive down the road the same as I’d drive a car down the road, just got those little sequences of which you don’t do it. So we had to learn all these different things because we were going to different units, we were just learning the basics all the way through from Canungra, Ingleburn and at Reinforcement Wing before we went.

I was just a reinforcement to the Australian Reinforcement Unit, which was a reinforcement unit in Australia and Vietnam. So if people were killed or wounded, sick, came home from Vietnam, that unit in Vietnam would replace them to their unit and the unit in Australia would replace the ARU [Australian Reinforcement Unit] in Vietnam and

then from there you’d go to the battalions or to engineers or whatever your corps was that you went. So as people died, were killed, sick or injured, that were sent home, it was there just to replace, to keep the number up in those fighting units, frontline units.

Yes search and destroy, cordon and search, like you’d go into a village, you’d surround it,

go in with the interpreters and all that sort of stuff, tell the people all move out of their homes now to an area of such and such now, don’t try and run away, don’t do this because you’ll be shot and so on, because your surrounded, you can’t do anything. They were tactics used because they knew that VC and that used to come to the village, and we were told that they used to do horrendous things to women, kids or anything like that, just to make

the village give them information of Australians, Americans and New Zealanders and that that were there. So every now and then we’d do a cordon and search.

As I said you trained so much that everything is instinctive,

you never know until the time comes, that’s why you train, train, train to do it instinctively. Like if you walk around a corner and somebody steps out in front of you with a gun it’s you shoot him before he shoots you, and that’s why you train instinctively. But it doesn’t really happen like that, it’s like I said most of it’s probably ninety-five percent sheer

panic and shock before the training kicks in and that’s why you’ll find in a lot of incidents, contacts that nobody was wounded and you’ll see in a lot of books and that where you had a contact and there was no wounded, no dead no nothing, because that’s why.

It is always there, you go through your training but you go in different positions in a section in infantry, you’ll be a section commander, you’ll be a forward scout, you’ll be a rifleman, you’ll be a machine gunner, with different jobs to do. And everybody in that section has that job in your training so you have in your mind,

“If I’m the forward scout, I’ve got to protect them, it’s my job to pick up all this stuff, not walk into an ambush, not let them get hurt”. And then everyone in that section does that same sort of job, so it would go through, yes it does, it goes through, you’d say, “God I’m responsible” so much responsibility. But then again when you’re back in the section and somebody else is up the front your saying, “Gees, I hope he’s as good as me, I hope he

doesn’t miss anything” and so on and that, so there was always that there with you, yeah.

Yeh my pre-em [embarkation] leave, told we were going on pre-em leave, it was seven days and I was in Sydney so I just stayed with my grandparents and me other uncles and aunties

and that sort of stuff. And it was all excitement, “Yes I’m going, I’m trained, I’m ready, I’m finally going to do what I’ve been trained to do”. A few drinks around the place, just close family, there was never a big send off, there wasn’t a going away party or anything like that. I turned twenty

during that time actually, just before we went to Vietnam, so I turned twenty in July and I went to Vietnam in August. So, I didn’t have a twentieth birthday or anything like that, it was just a few drinks with the mates I knew that we used to go spear fishing with and that. So “I’m away I’m heading off overseas”, “Oh, right”, because most of them weren’t even interested, they were still doing their life, they weren’t interested in the army or anything like that.

It was more of a seven days was too long, you just wanted to get back to the blokes you were going with, they’d all been on leave and that too and you just wanted to get back there and have your gear all ready and ready to go.

Personal items, it was all military, there was one thing that I took that me father give me on leave, he said, “This is a St Christopher

medal,” he said, “Your mother gave it to me”. Now I’d never seen it before, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you whether that was true or whether it was what it was, but I had that St Christopher medal that I put on my dog tags and wore them all the time I was in Vietnam. And I searched high and low for that, I know I haven’t thrown it away anywhere and that, but I cannot find it, but I can see it in a couple of photos we’ve got there, that

medal yeah.

He just said, “Take care” and he said, “I’ll see you soon”, that was it. “Take care and I’ll see you soon” and with that, that was sort of it. I think my grandmother was more upset because she had had two sons went to the Second World War I suppose so she knew more about it.

Oh my grandmother she was a pretty big woman and she used to always grab you like that and just about suffocate you between her breasts and that sort of stuff. No but always, she was like a sort of a third mum after my Mum died sort of thing. In those days everybody was in the whole town, like as kids you had your families,

like today you move away for work and that, but years ago it used to be work was in the same area so that Sunday roasts were at grandma’s place or something like that, which happens. But today people are spread all over the country so you can’t have that sort of thing, yeah she was like that, very good.

Not for me, no, I didn’t think

those sort of things, like you say in hindsight yeah it’s easy to think about it and you do think about it now, of what the people and that, when you sit down and reflect. But no like I was more interested, “I’m going, I’m a soldier, I’m going to war and I’m going to do my bit for me country” and I was very proud of that, very happy with it.

Yes, we went on a civilian flight that was a Qantas and we flew to Manila. There was probably in our draft, oh there was probably about twelve or fourteen and our draft commander was Major Badcoe, Major Peter Badcoe, later VC [Victoria Cross], he won a VC,

he was killed in Vietnam and he was our boss, he was in charge of us to go to Vietnam. We got up in the morning, on a bus straight to the airport, done all our things at that airport, onto the plane. And that’s where everybody sort of ribbed me, because I was sitting on the plane and looking around and they knew I was nervous, because a few of them were a bit older than me, not all of them but a few of them. And yeah we got to Manila

that night, it was the 5th August when I went to Vietnam, when I flew out. We got to Manila; we stayed there that night on the 5th August. And Manila, it was an eye-opener, really was, they got us off the plane straight to this big hotel and they said, “Righto then, this is your room”. I remember Ivan Small, we’d done our training all through together, and we shared a room, and then a group

of us we just went and had a walk around Manila. And one thing, and we still talk about today, we went into this bar in Manila and it said, “Please hang your guns here” in this bar and they had these little pegs in the wall at reception, like a cloakroom, and we thought, cause we didn’t have our guns, they were all packed away, we thought, “Good God”. And we had a look around Manila, then we went back to the hotel and went right up

to the top floor and there were a couple of blokes up there throwing these little pennies and halfpennies, probably about ten floors down to this great group of kids that were down the bottom. And these kids were so good, the thing would hit the ground and they would fly in and pick it up with one hand and that, we thought that was excellent, yeah just throwing these little coins and that to these kids and that down there. And

then, I don’t know whether I should tell you this one, then it was…

Told that we weren’t allowed to have women and all this sort of stuff and everything, “You’re not allowed to have this because of security” and all this sort of stuff. But even the bellboys and everything like that, “You want a woman, you want a woman?” and all this sort of stuff, they’re at you all the time, “Oh yeah, yeh right yeah”.

So it was sort of a night of passion, yeah my first experience, and that’s the honest truth, yeah I lost me virginity in Manila and that was it. From there the next morning we went bang back onto the airport, Air France it was, because at the time Australia was involved in it and we were

told that Qantas weren’t allowed to fly to Saigon or something. But I think they did but they were chartered flights with some of the units they took over. And we flew to Saigon, we arrived at Saigon and the excitement of looking out the windows and that and seeing all these paddy fields, it was beautiful really, it was all water and rice growing and all these houses and that all together and these

little community huts sort of things and all that sort of stuff. It was really exciting to see this because we’d never sort of seen that, we’d sort of seen a bit of it when we went into the Philippines, into Manila, but nothing else. And yeah we got off there and we sort of knew the heat a bit because we’d been to Manila and it was sort of leaving in August from Sydney and it was nice and cool and then arriving in Manila and the heat and then in Vietnam. And being

young soldiers with our beautiful starched greens uniform and that, as soon as the sweat hit them all the starch and everything would run out. And we travelled from there by RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Caribou [short range transport aircraft], straight from the airport, we were met there at the airport and the thing that you get as soon as you get there, “Oh three hundred and sixty five days to go, three hundred and sixty four and a wakie [wake up – last day of service in Vietnam]”. That’s the whole thing, that’s how long you had to go, three hundred and sixty four and a wakie,

like three hundred and sixty four sleeps and a wake up, and then you’re going home sort of thing. You get that all the time, and we flew straight to Vung Tau. Vung Tau we met Ted Bolton, was the only bloke we actually met, we done all our training together and he went on the draft before us, he was still at Vung Tau. And we were told what we were doing; “You’re staying here for the night. If you’ve got any Australian money we’ll accept it here but you can cash it for the military

money,” that they had in Vietnam. We had a few beers there and Ted took us in to see the sights of Vung Tau.

Bloody slum actually, yeah really, and Asian sort of stuff; I’d never seen anything like that before, never seen anything like it. But when I talk about a slum, but the towns yeah sort of were

shanties, you know little shanty towns and all that sort of stuff, all clustered together. But one thing I still remember from Asia, from Vietnam and from Malaysia, is the little communes, little kampongs they used to call them, like the little village and that, people had dirt floors and dirt yards, but they were spotless. And you’d see the women out there sweeping them with a straw broom, and it was just bare earth, no dust, not this and that around, yeah that’s

very clean. But the smells and the aromas from the foods and that sort of stuff were different. Like when I first went to Sydney and you smelt the tripe factory and then you smelt the Italian foods and that sort of stuff, “I’m not eating wog [exotic] food” and all that, that sort of stuff because you just lived on beef and eggs and sausages and that sort of stuff in the country. Yeh that sort of stuff, yeah, it was like that.

A smell that you’ll never forget, it’s probably overpowering of you call it wog tucker. Like when I first went to Sydney, garlic and that, I never knew what garlic, never smelt garlic and that sort of stuff, whoo, you think, “God, I’m not eating that”, that sort of thing,

real hard actually to say what that smell was like. But yeah it was a different smell, odours, lots of different odours mixed together and then the heat of the country and that sort of stuff.

Yeah, the same thing as “Don’t trust anybody, don’t get caught in groups, like in groups of people, be very polite to the people, don’t

abuse them”, that sort of stuff. There was always curfews, certain times you had to be off the street and you couldn’t be on the street before a certain time, that was always a hassle because you were always racing and trying to get away from there. Oh on R&C [Rest in Country], your talking about R&C, like rest and convalescence they used to call it, they used to send you to Vung Tau for probably seventy two hours or a day, something like that.

Well I reckon after seventy- two hours you used to go back to Nui Dat for a rest, used to try and pack everything into that time, drinking, everything.

Get drunk out of your mind. First off when you went from Nui Dat, you used to usually go down by truck in groups, you might have two or three people from your unit

and away you’d go, and they’d drop you off at the R&C Centre, they had a centre there on the water and you used to book into there, hand your rifle in and they’d tell you all the timings and all that sort of stuff and you had your bed and that there, meals and that sort of stuff. And you’d usually have a few beers there, then you hit the town and the R&C Centre probably wouldn’t see you then until you’re ready to go home,

cause you used to always get caught out in the curfews and you used to find somebody, stay at their place, cause if you’re on the street they used to say that the Vietnamese Police, which they used to call ‘the white mice’, would shoot first and ask questions later. The Australian provosts [military police] were mongrels; they used to grab you, anything. Americans used to say, “Oh you bloody Aussies”

cause they knew what we were like. The Kiwis were pretty tough. So you had to contend with all those military police, it wasn’t just your own sort of thing. So that’s where you used to bunker down usually into a bar and go from there, probably get a woman from there, like the night, and then the next day you’d be at another bar. But first off you used to go and you used to always, well I used to anyway, only went there three times, but used to have a steam bath, haircut, massage.

That was the big thing all the time. And then you used to travel the bars, drinking, you didn’t too much eating but when you look back at it now, you used to eat little bits and pieces. Used to call them hepatitis rolls, which are like salad rolls, they used to tell you about that too, that you could get hepatitis from the foods and all this sort of stuff cause you’re not used to it. But supposed

to be a steak in every beer so used to drink plenty of beer, whiskey, cokes, mixtures, all that sort of stuff. And sometimes you used to, well you had to revive a bit so you’d go for little tours around the place and take some photos of the districts and that, down to their markets and so on, just get some memorabilia.

Well just about every

place with a bar, and you probably had within two or three of them, there’d be a steam bath and a massage upstairs, downstairs would be the bar, something like that. Really, you’d call them brothels; really that’s what they were.

Oh well I’ve got some photos there that you’ll see. Like a lot of places together,

a lot Americanised because I think a lot of the Americans used to own them, or used to support them, cause you used to be able to get American beer there and South Vietnamese beer which was ‘Ba mi ba 33’, ‘ba mi ba’. And they used to serve it, Australians like cold beer, they used to serve it to you but they never used to put it on ice, but they learnt after a while they used to have it in ice. But they’d put ice in a glass and pour the beer on the top of it,

and the ice had probably more germs and bugs than anything else in it, hair and it was shocking. But we used to get them to put it on ice and drink it from that. But used to get a lot of American beer, so you could drink American beer too, but any beer, anything that was alcoholic was acceptable, and yeah that was the drinks.

Oh yeah, yeah they were all different signs of bars,

there was My Ling Bar, the Blue Moon Bar, oh every name you could think of, Asian bars, foreign bars, that sort of stuff. There were other places, like Kentucky Bars. I remember one time we went as a twenty-four hour, forty-eight hour leave as a company went down. We flew down; we played football on

the beach, barbeque, grog and everything like that, was supposed to be just on the beach and that, but I remember our OC [Officer Commanding] saying, “If you blokes are going to go into town, make sure you get your ID [Identification] cards before you go”, cause if you’re caught without an ID card that was criminal, that was bad. So yes he was pretty well, he knew what was going to happen, everybody was going to sneak out, they still do it today don’t they? Everybody was going to sneak out, hit the town,

and we used to do that and drink yourself silly, as long as you were back there by ten o’clock before the plane went to take home or anything like that for the parades and that, everything was acceptable.

Ah curfew, there used to be curfews at five o’clock for your sleeves down and that sort of stuff, you had to cover up, you couldn’t wear shorts and short sleeves, you had to have long. Ten,

I think it was ten o’clock was the curfew probably until six o’clock in the morning or something, till daylight, something like that, and anybody on the street was supposed to be criminal, whatever, something like that, that’s what we were always told, so you had to be off the streets, you had to be indoors. And it didn’t matter too much which indoors you were in, as long as you didn’t come out on the street between those hours.

Oh yeah, the bars would probably, they’d close down too, that’s probably around about nine thirty, ten o’clock cause when the provosts coming around, cause you had drunken soldiers, probably drunk out of their brain going round the place and if they’re going to get kicked out or something, well they start getting cranky. And that’s where you used to have most of the brawls against Kiwis, Yanks anything, bar girls, anything, trying to rip you off for anything.

The provosts would come and have to sort it out and you’d have to settle down. I didn’t get into any of them, just get drunk, get a woman and go to a brothel or whatever it was, that’s where your night would be, next morning you’d get up. And sometimes we used to make pacts that we’d meet back at the R&C Centre where you’d clean up and have a meal and all that sort of stuff and plan the next day’s attack of what you were going to do.

To a bar, bar girls were the thing, very friendly women they are, like my son said when he went to Phuket [Thailand] with the army and that, he said, “Jesus, the girls are friendly over there”. Yes that was their living, they used to get paid so much for getting you to drink and buy them a drink, like they used to call it ‘Saigon tea’, which was a whiskey

and coke in a sort of symbol glass, and I think most of the time it was just coke. And if you’d buy them one, they used to sit beside you and cuddle you and go and get you a beer and all this and then you’d buy them another one and that, it’s sort of what do you call it romancing and all of that sort of stuff. Bit different to what it was in Australia, you knew that you were on a sure thing sort, as long as you had the money and you paid, as long as you paid. Yeh that’s what

it was all about.

Only so much, I think they were probably given what you call a retainer, if they got you to buy them ten drinks or something like that, they’d probably get so much there and then it was sort of you would take them. But there was always a back room or something like that where you could take off to and that sort of thing. But most of the girls had a place where they lived or something and

it was probably, I don’t know, up to them. But if they went with somebody from that bar, one told me one time she had to pay the mama san [bar supervisor, ‘madam’ (Japanese originally)], the person that owned the bar, so much of what she got that night or whatever it was.

Probably not to their homes; it would be to a room or somewhere where they lived, like a little one room flat sort of thing like that.

I remember one of them that I went to there was a very solid place actually, when I woke up in the morning she said, “Oh the cowboys were here”. The cowboys were like the hoodlums, the young hoodlums that would hang around the place and if they seen you drunk and splashing money all over the place and that sort of stuff you know, if you wandered out on your own or something, they’d knock you over the head and take your money, that sort of criminal element and that. And she said, “Oh they were banging on the door,

wanted your money” I must have been drunk and spent me money but she wouldn’t let them in or something, well I’m still around anyhow. But they were in a sort, it could have been their family, they never introduced ya. I remember one mate of mine Bobby Telford went back with a girl once and yes he did meet her parents, so he told me that, we were in Vung Tau together.

Yeah the hoodlums, yeah the local hoods around the place, motorbike riders that sort of stuff.

Oh God, maybe ten dollars, depends whether you went short times or all night.

Yeh there’s short times or all-nighters, or what you could

bargain, yeah that sort of situation. Sometimes there was houses that were set up sort of like that with a lot of little rooms and that in them and the petition would only be a little bamboo petition sort of thing and you’ve got a bed there and a curtain and there might be ten of those in a room and ten couples in there sort of thing. Yeh they were probably run by somebody I don’t know but the girls

they knew that was their area, yeah the Greenhouse was one of those.

Vung Tau, yeah, it even had a bit of barbed wire around it actually.

Oh bit of security I suppose, probably sort of give you a bit of security.

Oh yes you had your bars, you had your American black bars and you had your Kiwi bars and you

had your Aussie bars and then your American white bars, Koreans, the Koreans were in Vietnam, Korean bars and that sort of stuff. But there was always, I remember a few times, “Oh, we’ll try this bar out” and you’d walk in there and it was real dark and all these big Negroes in there and that sort of stuff, “Wrong bar” and you’d do about turn and away you’d go. Or you’d end up in a Kiwi bar or something like that and the Kiwis look at you, cause it was sort of their territory and same with the

Australians and that sort of stuff, but Australians were wanderers, tasting the Asian delights I suppose, just try everything out.

Yeah, they used to always tell you about it but I can’t remember, you had to ask for them I think, when you went on leave they were available and that sort of stuff.

But I remember later on in life back in the 80s when we went to Malaysia, where you signed that you were leaving the camp, there was boxes of them there for you to take, and I think it is today, you know the culture and that has changed a hell of a lot.

Oh gonorrhoea, syphilis, they were the ones, gonorrhoea and syphilis; if you got syphilis you were dead,

that’s it. Gonorrhoea you were deemed, you were an outcast because you had gonorrhoea or something like that, yeah that sort of thing, just a standard joke. But before we went, we were told about gonorrhoea and syphilis was the big one, syphilis in the 60s was the biggest disease you could get, it’s like AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome] is today.

So you thought if you got syphilis you were dead, you were going to die. And we used to see all these medical shows and that of people with syphilis and how they lose their skin and all that, oh God it was shocking, so you were frightened of things like that.

Oh yeah through our medical training and that, especially Canungra and Infantry Centre, before your going over there, oh yeah. And you see, “This is a person here who had syphilis, look at him”,

and he looked as though he was, what do they call them lepers, all these different rashes and this sort of stuff, you know you can lose your eyes and all this sort of stuff. Syphilis, worst cases, it was shock treatment.

Keep it

in your underpants.

If you’re going to do it, don’t do it when you’re drunk, do it before you get drunk and use a condom, do it before you get drunk, yeah you tell a soldier that.

They’d get these bloody big

penicillin needles in their backside and it would go on their medical records and everybody would know because you’d have to go on your RAP [Regimental Aid Post] parade, “When are you going on RAP parade?”, “Don’t ask”.

No, there used to be threats of all that sort of stuff, “Righto, if you’ve got this disease you’ll be

segregated from everybody else” and all this sort of stuff, and you wouldn’t go on operations and all this sort of stuff, you’d be penalised, different things and all that, but it never used to happen. It was embarrassing enough to come out on parade in the morning and then, “Righto, RAP parade” and three or four blokes would fall out and they’ve just come back from Vung Tau or some place, so you knew they hadn’t been wounded

or anything like that, you knew they were going for something. Cause that’s really the only time you’d go to the RAP, that was the main RAP parade, all the other was Company Aid Post, like all your injections and that sort of stuff was go through that.

Some of them would wear their national things, like

they were slacks and like a silky sort of stuff, slacks and coat that had like a front skirt and a back skirt and a split up the side. Others would wear a bit Americanised sort of stuff, others would just wear their normal national everyday dress, some of them would just wear their silk black trousers and a top and that sort of stuff. Not so much to the part, which more today

is like you see it at Kings Cross and that, where they’ll just wear pantihose or wear a G-string or something, no there was none of that sort of stuff. It was like it used to be in Australia years before, because that was one of our entertaining things was to go up to Kings Cross and have a look, try and look at the prostitutes. But then they used to never be on the street, they were always inside, so how the times have changed. But that’s how it was there; you never had that sort of thing of them

posing around in that sort of situation.

Oh yes, you’d probably find that the cowboys and the young men, they’d be standover types with the girls. Some of them probably would own the girls, like the pimps and that sort of stuff, that sort of situation, and be threatening the girls

to get everything they could and so on and all that. So you weren’t too sure, that’s what we were told you don’t say nothing, because they could be getting information out of you and all this sort of stuff, yeah that was how they worked. There were a few ruckuses between soldiers and the cowboys.

Oh sometimes you used to

go wandering around different areas, you’d get into an area where you shouldn’t have been, things like that. And they’d tell you, “Get out of here” sort of stuff. “You’re not telling me to do nothing,” three or four of us there probably had a few beers or something, ten foot tall and bullet-proof, you could do anything. But you soon found out because in Asian countries, even India, you start

a ruckus it brings a whole people around very quickly, and it’s very scary.

No, no I was never in that, we used to take note and used to disappear. Sometimes you’d get into an argument at a bar or something and the girls would grab hold of you, “Don’t do that, don’t do that, he’s dangerous” or something like that. So you, and your mates would be with you because you

never really got on your own unless you went with a girl somewhere or something like that. It was pretty good, that was in my time anyway, it was pretty good in that era; you look after one another.

Well you see Vung Tau was like an R&C centre, a rest and convalescent centre, it was the

base, there was a harbour there where all the shipping used to come in with all the supplies and that and it had a base but the soldiers, now those people were there, it was just like living here in Australia, like they could go into Vung Tau any time, weekends, afternoons, anything like that, they were based there. The blokes that used to get into most of the trouble were the front troops from Nui Dat. They used to go down there for seventy two hours and

just be hoodlums actually, let out on the loose and used to pack as much as they could into that time and then come back to Nui Dat for a rest. The blokes at Vung Tau sort of thing had to pick up the pieces. So that’s the way you look at it, but you never used to get there great big groups, you might

get say from a battalion of say eight hundred people, on a three day R&C trip you might get thirty people, but then there might be another thirty from the next battalion and then from around the thing. So you might have say a hundred people in that little group, or sometimes more, sometimes less. So really you didn’t hit town with say a hundred people, boom into town. And when you got there anyway you went with your own

blokes and always from the company there might be three or four blokes go on that R&C and they’d be from different platoons, so you’d just catch up on what was going on. Because in the platoon, you stayed as a platoon, but a hundred and twenty-odd people in that company you’re seeing them all the time but for that couple of days, you’re drinking and you’re talking to one another. So you just get to know and you get back to Nui Dat and they’ve gone back to their platoon and you’re with your platoon. So you didn’t hit it full on as a

bash, crash, whatever sort of thing but you used to play hard.

Very much black and white, black and white straight, very much. Still is, later on in the 80s I was an umpire on a

Kangaroo exercise [name of major Australian Defence Force exercise series] up in Rockhampton and we had Americans with us, we had white Americans and black Americans with us together and there was only about ten of us, and the segregation was still there. Like it’s different, like one of my best mates is a black fellow, we still get on together, I call in and see him all the time, oh he’s a Thursday Islander, and we joined the army together, we went to Vietnam together, came home together, served together for another

few years and that, and still go and see one another now and we walk into a pub and a bar and all that. And I can remember in Vietnam, we were in Vietnam when the aborigines had the right to vote, there was a referendum and out of the company, there was a few of us, but I remember walking over with him and saying, “I’m going to vote that you have a say because you’re here, you’re doing your duty for your country, why can’t you have the same rights” and we went over and voted together. But the Americans, we went into Rockhampton and I was in charge

of this group, I had Kiwis, Australians and Americans and that was the same, we had two Negroes with us and the Negroes were radio carriers for white officers, used to carry their radio, sleep with them in the same tent out in the bush, but as soon as we went in there, wouldn’t drink together. Come into a hotel and the Negro would buy a beer and go down to the park and drink it, yeah,

so like wouldn’t stay in the hotel part of it because there was probably white people in there, but they used to go down to the park and drink. So it was sort of social life, the culture and that it was just that sort of thing.

Not with the Australians, the Australians doesn’t matter who he is if he wants to have a beer with you or he’s got a smoke you can bludge off him, doesn’t matter who he is. Australian soldier, they’re

all the same, doesn’t matter, look in Vietnam we had Chinese, we had bloody Italians, we had Greeks, we had black fellows, we had the whole lot, we’re soldiers, we’re Australian soldiers. But Americans were more segregated to that, they may have units of just all Negroes and that sort of thing. But in the bars and that, and that’s the only time that I really was with them, you know everybody’s out

on the grog and that and you walk into a bar, “Oh, wrong place, get out”. But they accepted the Australian soldier, I think they must have been taught about the Australian soldier too because even the provosts, because if the provosts came to a ruckus or something, you were happy if the American provosts come there because you used to be able to talk them around. They’d say, “Oh, you bloody Aussies, piss off, get out of here will ya or we’ll lock you up”. But if the Australian blokes come in, they come in there ham-fisted and lock you up and the key was to get in there to clobber you, sort of thing.

But yeah that was the situation with them. And there was only one really operation we were with the Americans like I said on guarding the highway and we had a few there and it was exactly the same there, where you’d get a beer sort of thing and you’d go with them and any Negroes there wouldn’t sort of stay in the group if you were having a drink, they’d sort of go to their part,

and the whites would sort of stay in their part.

Not so much in our time because the only Kiwis we had were artillery Kiwis. Later on they had infantry units there and they were combined with the Kiwis. But the Australians and the Kiwis always got on well together

but they used to have to always have these - it’s like the football, “We’re better than you - used to have these bloody, well you still had it with us blokes there too, you used to have like these cartoons would come out with the kangaroo raping the kiwi or the kiwi raping the kangaroo and all this sort of stuff, all the humour and that sort of stuff. You know where if you done that sort of with Americans, they might get a bit upset,

but with Kiwis, they sort of took it, yeah righto, saying they’d come back at ya. No not really, in my time there our brawls were sometimes probably a 6 Battalion bloke and a 5 Battalion bloke have run into one another and said, “We’re better than you” or something, “No, you’re not”, and they just get into a brawl and then they’d be broken up and then they’d just get out and get on the grog again, that sort of competition between units

type stuff. Or you’d go down there and you’d run into a ‘pogo’ [base/logistics soldier, in the rear], we called them pogos, like the cooks or somebody that was at Vung Tau and hadn’t been up to the top and they’d give you a bit of cheek or something because we’d come down there and go wild for a day or so and used to get into arguments in that sort of situation. We’d call them pogos and they’d call us, “Yeah you ‘grunts’ [infantrymen],

you think you’re bloody heroes” and all this sort of stuff. ‘Oh, you bastards get up and do a bit”, that sort of thing, but without them you wouldn’t be able to support ya, yeah those sort of brawls. But there was a few brawls with the cowboys sometimes but they were cut up pretty quick because the cowboys used to come off second-best because the bar girls and the bar owners and that, see

the Australians and Kiwis, they were their money earners, the cowboys didn’t spend the money. Like if they were to buy there, they’d pay fifty cents for a drink where we’d probably pay two dollars for that drink, so the bar owners and the mama sans and the bar girls and that would be on our side against them in the brawl and the fight would break up pretty quick. And they’d get kicked out and we wouldn’t get kicked out, we’d be brought back in there and say, “Oh you’ll

be right, we’ll look after ya”, that sort of stuff, because they knew we’d spend the money, fair enough.

Pogos, pogos, base wallahs [men]; there’s always this thing in the infantry right, the infantry are the grunts, they’re up the front line and they’re the ones that do all the fighting and that to protect the ones down the back. But there’s always a saying in the army,

it takes five people to keep one infantryman in the field, so everybody behind an infantryman is a pogo even though he feeds him, gives him medical, gives him all his ammunition, gives him everything, keeps him in the field, he’s still a pogo because he never gets out there. And you get it, there was a song that came out, American song, he was a Staff Sergeant Barry Sattler a ‘garra-trooper’ [garrison trooper, a play on the word paratrooper], right,

pogos are posers type thing, and this song goes, “A garra-trooper, he’s got an itty-bitty knife, a little bit bigger knife and a tiny-winy knife and a pearl-handled whatsie, he’s a trooper, he’s a garra-trooper”, because he’s a garrison bloke, see he’s not in the fighting but he’s a poser. And it sort of comes back through those sorts of things. And you find that the infantry blokes don’t talk much about

their stuff, but a pogo he hears about it second-hand and he probably know more about it than the infantry bloke. And the saying goes, “God, I wonder what war that bloke was in, that was different to the war I was in”; he sort of inflates it a bit. Not all of them but there is the odd one, throughout life.

Yeah poser, he was a poser, he was a camp

wallah. I suppose there were different names through the different wars and that, but I just said he was a poser, yeah he hadn’t done any bloody hard work, yeah some of the big soldier, get in the limelight and all that sort of stuff, whereas the infantry bloke he was like the pig doing the work.

No went by vehicle, went by road.

Hectic, very hectic. We drove in, we drove all the way up from Vung Tau, that was when we first sort of knew we were in a war, we were on the back of a truck and you loaded your weapon and away you went, and it was a convoy of probably ten, fifteen, twenty trucks with MPs [Military Police]

and vehicles like guarding you. Away we went to Nui Dat, you seen the destructions there, the bridges that were blown up and all that sort of stuff, culverts that were blown out, you know on the roads where you had to go round and all that, and the new construction; the people waving to ya, yellin’ to ya and all that sort of stuff. You get to Nui Dat and it’s a different atmosphere, it’s the jungle and the part of it

that’s been made roads out of, tents up here and there, and you get off the truck, “Righto, you blokes up here”, and it’s full-on from there. “Over here, righto, hand all your paperwork and that in, right, that’s where you’re living. Get your gear down there, back here” and like that, it was go, go, go. You seen units coming and going because Nui Dat

ARU, the Australian Reinforcement Unit, was in the middle of Nui Dat and the infantry battalions, two battalions were around it and then you had engineers and artillery and all that around, you sat in the middle. So there was really no danger because you had everybody around you. But it was thought that there was danger so you still had to do the picquets, you had to man the machine gun, watch out for this happening and all

this sort of stuff. That was sort of instilled into you, so you were on edge as it was from there. And it was sort of a place where you met up with blokes that had gone before ya and then blokes that had come after ya, before you went to the units. So it was like a pecking order, “Right oh yes, you’ve been there for ten days so you’re going out first, you’ve been there for nine days you’re next to go, eight days”, like that, and you’d be the ones to go out to the unit. And you’d be wondering, “Which unit will I go to,

wonder where I’ll go to, which unit, will it be 6 Battalion, will it be 5 Battalion, will it be down to the task force [Task Force headquarters, brigade equivalent] and look after the big nobs at task force”, sort of thing. But everybody wanted to go to a battalion, all infantry blokes, battalion that was it. Yeh it was sort of a twilight zone, “Oh God, this is war” and all the things happening around you. But it was never, it was not chaos but it was never set out

to what you’d learnt in your training. Like in your training, you set out your pits here and there and so on, and your company’s here, it was sort of on a hill, that was the Australian Reinforcement Unit. I seen Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam there actually, I was on a gun picquet and they were over there visiting and they went past on an APC [Armoured Personnel Carrier].

Malcolm Fraser, oh yeah I recognised him because we’d know him, he was the Minister for Defence I think then, I think he was something like that, something to do with that anyway.

Not to us in that bit, they went past, we waved, they waved back, they’re under escort and they’re going to the headquarters part of it. They may of went down to the battalions, I don’t know, but I wasn’t in the battalion, I was in the ARU part of it, just there then ready waiting to go.

Not particularly no, because 5 and 6 Battalion were there when I was there and they were only new battalions too, they were only formed in, 5 Battalion was formed in about 1965 I think, 6 Battalion was formed in 1965, so they were only new battalions. See when

we first started, there was only 1, 2 and 3 Battalions and 4 Battalion was in Malaya. 1 Battalion split and made 5 Battalion and 2 Battalion split and made 6 Battalion. So yeah they were new battalions too, so the reputation, no it didn’t matter who you went to, it was you were going to go to a battalion that was it, that’s all you wanted to do, go to a battalion, go to your unit.

In ARU when we first got there, they were old sixteen by sixteen Second World War tents that were falling apart. We had our field gear which was our blow-up mattresses and our little sleeping bag which was made up of a horse blanket and a silk sort of thing, used to put together and used to get in between it,

that was it, on the ground. And just outside those little tents you had a pit, which was your pit; if something happened you had to get into. That was it there, but when we got to the battalion it was completely different. First off, just as we were getting there, they were starting to get the eleven by eleven tents, but it was individual hoochies [improvised field shelter], right when was your two man hoochie. And then we got into the tents,

we got the sixteen by sixteen tents and they just had a dirt floor and they were up and if you were lucky you had a stretcher. And when you got a bit luckier, you got an American stretcher which was up off the ground where the Australian ones were right on the ground and if you sit on them your knees are under your chin, where the American stretchers you’re like sitting in a chair and you could sit there and read or have a feed or something like that, but they come

spasmodically throughout the thing. Then we would get floorboards, the old tongue and groove pine floorboards and each platoon would get allocated and it was allocated as who was next in line, if you’d been there the longest, well your tent would get some floorboards, but you had to do them yourself, you had to build them yourself. So you got sandbags as pylons put a few beams across, got the tongue and groove, put them together, cause there was a few blokes, there was some

national serviceman were carpenters and plumbers and mechanics, everything and you always got somebody to give you an idea of how to do it and that was your job. So you were waiting in anticipation for your turn to come to get floorboards so you wouldn’t be on the ground, and it was red mud, that was it, everything was red mud. And you went like that and at the same time you were building, you were building sandbag walls around your tent for your protection and it was just ongoing

building the camp. We actually built Nui Dat, the battalion areas, we dug defensive pits, we put up wire after wire after wire in our areas and dug big holes for the CPs [Command Posts] so they were secure, they could control the war from underground sort of thing. We dug a great big trench, we used to call it the booby trap trench, it was supposed to be the mortar trench, but if you got caught away, either near the kitchen

or at the boozer, that trench you could get in there and you were sort of safe and then you could get out to get to your own fighting trenches on the frontline sort of stuff. But it used to capture more blokes coming home drunk and they’d fall down, miss the pathway and fall down it and knock themselves out, sprain their arm or do something, pretty good booby trap.

I can’t help laughing; you make me.

Well all we knew was when we got there was it was just like VC and it was our job, like the task force job there to control that area, clear it out and that was it. We didn’t know much about big forces or anything like that.

Not until, well on the 16th August there was a big mortar attack, artillery attack on the base itself, Nui Dat. I remember that because I was on duty, radio picquet that night, heard these boom, boom, didn’t take any notice, still kept writing a letter. And the sergeant was on there he said, “Get out, we’re being attacked” and it just sounded like, because every day the artillery went off and all that, the guns

and that sort of stuff. So I dived down onto the ground under the table, oh no first off I had to ring the task force and tell them and they told me to get off the air, there was an attack going on. And a few rounds landed in our area, the mate I told you about that I stayed in Manila with, Ivan Small, he was wounded, he was on duty in a bunker. And the post office next door they took a direct hit and there was a couple of blokes there pretty badly hurt. And the bloody sergeant

says, “Get out and get them blokes and tell them to stand to”. So I had to get out from under me table where I thought I was safe and go about fifty metres down the paddock to wake all the other blokes up. But they were all awake and tell them to get into their pits, then had to go back up the hill again. And then it ceased after a while, I don’t know how long it was, it was just a blur sort of thing, and that’s when we found the blokes in the post office had been pretty badly injured. And Ivan Small

they took a direct hit onto the whatsie, but he was lucky he only copped it in one shoulder. And I talked to him later on and he said, “Oh” he said, “I thought it was good” he said, “Seeing all these things blowing up around us and all that and we’re looking out and saying ‘Oh look at that one’” and then the next thing one hit them. Yeah that’s part of it there and from then on, or the next day, we had to do a clearing patrol which was, there was a couple of sergeants

and corporals there and they got a group of us together and we had to go out all within that area and find out where the rounds had landed and that. We were still pretty safe because we still had the battalions and that around us sort of thing. And we had to go out and do that, and yeah we were safe but it was hairy, you weren’t sure of what was going on. Yeah and we come back from that and we found out actually that day,

and they told us it had been mortar fire and recoilless rockets from the enemy that had hit the task force and that. And then the next day, the day after, we were at what was his name, Col Joy’s [Australian singer] concert and all hell broke loose, this artillery, just

a roar, you know just like a freight train coming through your lounge room, just artillery going and going, and everybody was scattering, like going back, moving away from the Col Joy thing, you couldn’t hear him. And everybody was called back to their units and we all went back to our units and that’s when we found that D Company 6 RAR had hit the big Vietnamese force at Nui Dat, about a thousand metres away, and there was a big battle going on,

and that’s with the artillery and everything. So everybody was just on nerve’s edge and hanging around all the radios and everything to try and find out what was going on. But it was all just, “There’s a big battle, there’s a big battle”, just going on like that, and then the artillery just continuously going and going and going and then the helicopters and that coming into the task force and the action of APCs racing

over here, racing there and that, the whole task force was stood to because we didn’t really know what was going on at that time, just that they knew this company had hit a large force and were in a big fire fight. And into that night we heard a bit more and over the next couple of days we found out exactly what it was, that D Company had run into, what did they call them the D445 Battalion and North Vietnamese and that, and there was a hell of a fight

just went for about six hours or something into the night, and so many people were killed, and there were a few people that we knew that had only went to the battalion a couple of days before, and they just joined the battalion and went out and were killed. We heard that, sort of makes you feel for it sort of thing. That then got the roll on, “Right, now we’ve got to go”, “Where are we going?” And that was on the 18th, a few days after that we heard all about it

sort of thing and then about the 29th August they told us we were going to 6 Battalion. There was about eight of us actually, there was Ronny Yaho, myself, Ivan Small, I think Bobby Telford, four of us that had been through training together and a couple of other blokes that had been through with us too, but we’d been there since the beginning, since Kapooka. So we packed up all our gear onto the truck and

went to 6 Battalion. 6 Battalion, we knew all about 6 Battalion, and we got there and the RSM [Regimental Sergeant-Major] come out, always remember him, big bloke, big George Chinn, RSM Chinn, he was a lovely person, later on you got to know him. And he come out and he said, “Right” he said, “Who’s been together, or who wants to stay together?” and the four of us said, “Oh we all joined the army together” he said, “Right, D Company”, and that’s where I felt it,

it was just like a cold shiver went through me as if me heart fell out me backside really, cause it was sort of, “Why do we have to go to them, because they’re heroes, they’ve just had this massive great victory” type thing. Frightened of what was going to happen, whether they were going to accept us or reject us, or what was going to happen. And that was that and he threw us on a couple of Land Rovers , a couple of the other blokes went to the other companies

and that and we went down to D Company, and we got there and it was good really. Jack Kirby [Warrant Officer Second Class J. W. Kirby, DCM, Company Sergeant-Major (CSM) of D Company 6 RAR], old Jack Kirby he was a big man, big fellow, we used to call him Dad, he was like a father. If we got into trouble and he had us doing work party or something, we used to have to dig these big pits for the command post and that, and he used to walk past and if we were stopped having a smoke he says, “Get to work, you criminals”, joke along like this. But he was always there and

looking after you and that sort of stuff. And he said to us, he said, “Right”, there was me and Ivan, he said, “11 Platoon, Telford, 10 Platoon”, no Ronny Yaho sorry went to 11 Platoon too, three of us, he was the dark fellow, yeah three of us went to 11 Platoon, one went to 10 Platoon. And we goes down there and meets the platoon commander and he

called out to some blokes, some section commanders they were and, “Righto, you’re there, you’re there, you’re there”. And I got put into 4 Section and I hadn’t known at the time but they were the lead section that hit the force at Long Tan, there was only about four of them from that section that survived, the rest of them were killed, and

I went in there and found out a few days later as we talked and that sort of stuff, but we weren’t rejected we were sort of welcomed, you know, “Come on in”. The first night we got there, we were on this belief that a couple of beers a day if you got them, cause that’s what we had when we were at Nui Dat, you were only allowed two beers per day and that was in the afternoon, it was sort of rationed out to ya. But that night there

was, went over to the boozer, yeah they had a couple of beers and then that closed, dark come, closed. Went back to the lines and in one of their tents there they’ve got their own little supply. Yeah and, “Oh this is alright”. And that was then and it was probably four days, five days later, 5th October, 5th September it was, we went on our first

operation and that was me first ride in a helicopter. We got picked up and were going to do, they used to call it ‘Warburton Mountain’, you know the old song, Don’t go to Warburton Mountain, “They say don’t go to Warburton Mountain because…”so and so lives there and he’s got a beautiful daughter and all this. Well these were the mountains, the Nui Dinh Hills or something in Vietnam, and they said, “Don’t go there, it’s dangerous”. And that’s where we done our first operation

and that was, because in the helicopters they’ve only got narrow seats, sometimes they were up, sometimes they weren’t. The Americans were good because they had all their seats up and you sit on the floor and we used to jump on with our packs on our back and just sit down. But this one must have been an Australian one or something and it had the seat down and I ended up next to me platoon commander, Paul O’Sullivan [Brigadier (Retd) P. S. O’Sullivan], he was a reinforcement too actually because he was in battalion headquarters

because the platoon commander of 11 Platoon was killed and he took over that platoon. And he’s sitting there and I’m sitting right on the edge and this helicopter comes around, and you’re sitting just your cheeks of your bum cause your pack’s pushing you forward, and this helicopter comes in and banks around like that and he put his arm around and said, “Don’t worry you won’t go out”. I always remember that, I thought I was going to fall out of the bloody thing. We got out there and we started patrolling, I was a rifleman, just

a rifleman in the section and we started patrolling up to the mountains. We walked, oh God they dropped us off in some flat paddy field somewhere, it was so far from these hills we just walked and walked right up into the afternoon and got there late afternoon, halfway up the mountain sort of thing. Yeah and that was the first day of the exercise and it was funny really, things happened like

we stopped just at the bottom of the mountain and then these shots rang out and you do it in training, they fire shots over your head so you can hear this ‘crack, crack, thump’ they call it. So like the crack is when the bullet’s going over your head and the thump is where it’s being fired from and you try and recognise where it is. But one of the companies in front of us had had this contact and these bullets started whistling over our head, probably nowhere near us. But I’ll tell you what, I couldn’t

have a smoke, I was not game to have a cigarette because I was so nervous and shaking so much I didn’t want to show these blokes that I was so frightened and nervous, and then we went on and that night we hoochied up [harboured in a night position] and got our picquet. The next day from there we went on a half-platoon patrol from the company area, just say two sections and the platoon headquarters sort of thing, go out on a patrol,

more of a fighting patrol sort of thing, you’re going out looking for a fight sort of thing. And we went out and we had a contact, we weren’t the lead section but there was a section in front and this shot rang out and a few shots went back, contact and hit the ground. And then we had to sweep through our section and like the section on the ground is supposed to cover you with fire support to where the enemy was so they can’t fire at

you while you’re sweeping through. They talk about all the training and that but when those shots ring out, everything just goes poof, and then all of a sudden bang the training comes up in your head and you’re away, “Where’s the next order” and waiting to go, “What have I got to do, come on tell me”, waiting for somebody to tell ya. And it was, “Righto, 4 Section sweep around to the right and sweep through there”. One enemy was up there near a cave entrance, fired from there. So we sweeps around

gets around, gets in line and the section commander he says, “Advance” and we start advancing and I had this bloody grapple hook, it’s a grapple hook made up of six-inch nails and had oh must have been twenty metres of cord on it so if you found a booby trap or something you had to lift up you’d hook that onto it and go back and hide somewhere and pull it up so you wouldn’t get blown up. I think it’s funny now but a couple of blokes didn’t think it was so funny at the time.

It come off and I’m dragging half the jungle behind, like a bloody elephant coming through this jungle and you’re supposed to be trying to get through. I remember Johnny Bear saying, “Cleggie you bastard, get up here, forget about that” I’m trying to grab this rope, “Forget about that and get up here”, oh Christ. And we gets back into line there and bang and then the section commander, he was right next to me actually, this bloke jumped up from behind a little bush and he shot him. And

that was shake, shake and you go through that and you reorg [reorganise] out so you’ve got a defensive perimeter and the enemy is back there and then you say right you’re on the ground, the rest of them will come through and pick up the enemy and that sort of stuff. And he said to me, “What did you reckon of that?” and I was quivering, I was frightened, he said, “Oh you’d have done the same thing”

he said, “You wouldn’t have froze or anything like that”. I said, “Barry, I hope not, I hope I wouldn’t have” sort of thing, I didn’t know what I’d do sort of thing, he said, “No you’d have been right” cause he’d been through Long Tan, he’d been wounded at Long Tan too, he was a national serviceman, one of these national servicemen that later on in life got me into so much trouble. Oh always into trouble because he was there for two years and he didn’t care and I used to follow along with him

and I used to wear all the trouble all the time. But yeah and that was my first contact, you say it’s funny, it’s so funny that it’s frightening, it’s frightening, it’s so funny sort of thing, as you go through it. And then from there we buried the person and moved down further and run into a camp and they’d all disappeared because of the fighting and that, that we done probably about three hundred metres up the road from them. This bloke was sort of an early warning, and all their meals and that were still hot

and that sort of stuff, and they’d taken off. So we mapped it all out and went through the place and then the next day called the company up and we destroyed the camp, burnt the camp and all that sort of stuff. And you always think, “Do these blokes trust me or what?” but two days after that I was asked did I want to be forward scout of that section, and that section still had

the forward scout and the second scout, the section 2IC [Second-in-command] and the machine gunner that were in the battle of Long Tan, that were in the whole front of it. And I was dumbfounded really, it was either with fright, shock or pride to say that, “God, these blokes have asked me to lead them, to be their ears and eyes”. It’s either that or, “He’s so dumb getting caught up

with all this stuff, put him up the front and we’ll sit at the back”. “You make too much noise and endanger us.” I don’t know whether they either trusted me or thought that of me after a week sort of thing or that anyway, “Let him cop it first”. But I was so proud of it actually, to do that and that was the first time that I was forward scout of

the section, the company and it was a job that was, great job, because you knew what was going on, you were at the front, you didn’t have to wait for something to go bang or anything like that and wonder what it was, you were there. And to know that all those people behind you relied on you and trusted you, and they were so

quiet behind you, cause we never used to walk on roads and tracks and that a lot, you used to have to make your way through the jungle, and getting through the jungle and then people with packs on their back and that following ya, not making that noise, because you were the ears and eyes. It was so invigorating, so proud to do it, it was a great adrenalin rush in a way that those blokes thought that of you and you thought,

“Well God, I’ve been accepted in this unit”. And that’s what it still is today actually, those blokes will say ‘G’day’ to you and ‘remember this, remember that when you done that, you mongrel and done this’, something like that, all the funny things and that sort of stuff, yeah. You were sort of the leader of that section.

Probably did, it showed that they were willing to look after me and they weren’t worried that I was shaking and nervous and that sort of stuff. They probably thought, they must have seen something there to say, “Right if he’s that worried back here, what’s he going to be like up there?” Well they must of thought it was going to be okay, so I don’t know, it made me so proud to be that because, and another good thing

about it too, you got rid of your big heavy rifle and you got this little plastic rifle, lot more ammunition [M16 5.56mm calibre rifle]. And it was an automatic rifle too, the one in front and it was sort of your decision, you were making the decision. You really had to worry about what was in front of ya and the main thing was to make sure they were following ya, you weren’t out there on ya own, so you had to look back every now and then, make sure your section commander is there telling you to go this way or that on your [compass] bearing, and stopping

here and all that sort of stuff. And you got sort of, as you went through, it just sort of got into you that you built your confidence, you felt confidence in the people behind ya; if you were left out there, you knew they’d get to you and bring you back or anything like that, it was a two way thing that really bonded you together, it was really that

like your security blanket, it was a really bonding-type thing and you knew those blokes were there and you didn’t mind, because in my day you didn’t mind walking up to a bloke and throwing your arm around and hugging him and saying, “Good on ya, mate” and that sort of stuff. Whereas once before you’d never do that, that wasn’t manly sort of thing.

I’ve never told anybody I was that frightened before, because you try and put on a brave front, oh no I done this or I should of done that. No not that much, you know yourself you’re trying to put on a brave face but you’re talking to the same

people that are there at the same time and you know they’re scared as well as you’re scared, you are scared, I don’t care what anybody says, anybody that says that they’re not scared have never been there. Like an old bloke said to me once, he said, “If you’ve never done it, you never know what it’s like” he said, “It’s like having a glass of milk, it might be flavoured milk” he said, “You can have it” he said, “And if that person, other people have never

drank from that cup, they don’t know the taste”, it’s sort of like look at it that way. And that’s sort of a bond with military people and you don’t, infantry blokes well I never come across, there is odd ones that can tell you that many stories and that sort of stuff, like you say, “God, well where was the war when you were there, because it wasn’t like that when I was there, it never was when I was there”. But they can exaggerate and get a good story and that. But infantry blokes and even today

with our company blokes and that we don’t talk about it, we talk about the stupid things we done and the things that should of got us in jail or whatever sort of things like that, and that’s how it sort of goes on. Yeah but that was my first operation and my first thing of being into the company. First off, I thought, “Good God, you’re going to these heroes and what are your expectations, what are their expectations”, but it wasn’t, it was, “Come on,

you’re a soldier too, let’s go”, national service and regular soldiers and all.

Probably made my senses so

keyed up, even today my senses aware of everything that is around you, twenty-four hours a day. You are so aware, you’re sort of, like I said before, if you’re crossing a road you do your left and right look and that and “Lets go” or say “Go” and you never hesitate, you go. But somebody beside you might hesitate, might think about, “Why have I got to go now,

why can’t I wait for a couple of seconds”, or you might be trying to beat a car across that’s getting closer or something. It’s just put me onto that and sometimes I think it’s made me very hard with me kids, I know that. I know with me eldest boy I was very strict, youngest one I let him go a little bit easier. But very strict on those things of not to make mistakes, try not to make mistakes just don’t,

you’re relied on, other people are relied on, so it’s instamatic, that’s the way you go. I still do it today but I’m getting a lot slower, yeah well, I’ve got help now and stuff and that yeah. And probably, but for, what do you call it, for adventure and all that sort of stuff,

it probably made me worse, we’d drink anything that had a bit of alcohol in it, do things that you shouldn’t do, just being, have to have that adrenalin all the time, you’ve got to be on edge. Like if you drive a car, if you get out on a big highway somewhere and you know there’s nobody around and that you’d say, “Oh I wonder what’s it like to go a bit faster and that” and this sort of thing, just take things to the edge.

When you do your work after getting out of the army, mowing grass or sitting in a storeroom handing out tools and that was the biggest boring thing you ever come across, because everything you trained for was to come to a final resolution. It’s like with me with Vietnam and it was a prove a thing against you type, where you were, “Did I win or did I fail,

or succeed and fail.

I had a lot of doubts in a lot of things after coming home from Vietnam and staying in the army I was going to be nothing, I just wanted to be a private soldier because I didn’t want to have any responsibility and all that sort of stuff, I didn’t want to tell people what to do and that, I’d just go and do what everybody told me to do. After a while you say, “God

I can do better than that bloke” so you start thinking about, Right yeah, I want to command” and that’s probably the best job of your life. Especially in my job as a section commander, you only get one chance in life to be in command and that’s as a section commander, looking after ten people, you’re responsible for them. And then the rest of the time after that, all your promotions after that, you’re administration and discipline and that type stuff. Whereas, yes and then I realised, “I think

that I can do better than this, I don’t want to see all these billy goats, young fellows, passing me and be the old soldier sort of thing” and that sort of thing. So I think pride comes into it after a while and you go from that way. It, well yeah it changes your whole outlook, like that first operation sort of thing was, then operations after that were really nothing, used to get bored being

in camp because all you’d do in camp was fill sandbags, do night picquets, make wire entanglement for your defences, dig pits and all that sort of stuff. And out on operation you sort of said, “Right, you’re on operation and you knew from daylight to dark you were working, nighttime come you knew you were going to harbour up [form a night position] or you were going to do an ambush, you sort of knew what was going on all the time. And it was yeah, it was the adrenalin I suppose, it was there all the time and you were waiting

for that thing to happen and prove yourself again I suppose. Just keep proving over and over again because really I hadn’t proved me self, I was so scared I didn’t know where I was, yeah that’s the thing. It wasn’t until later on in other operations and that where worst things happened to you, cripes. We had an operation, Operation Ingham,

it was a big battalion operation and we went out to this area, we flew in by helicopter and were patrolling and the three platoons split up and went in three different directions and we ended up with company headquarters in this old enemy camp. And 12 Platoon had a contact down the ridge from it and they had wounded, yeah two wounded there were. And our section, I had to lead

to go down and get them and bring them back to us. And that there, the things and mistakes that happened, as we moved out of our cordon, this bloody Australian helicopter gunship started shooting us, come straight down the ridgeline and ‘brrrr brrrr’ straight through our camp. We didn’t get any injuries or anything like that, but we had to go down, pick up 12 Platoon and bring them back to the company position. But at the same time, you’re hearing these bugles and that and then reports are saying, “There’s enemy

coming across the river, get a move on, get back here to the defensive position” and so on, they’re frightening things. But it’s your job and you just do it because you trust all the people around you, you trust the people to say, “Go and do this”, you go and do it, you just don’t question it. If you question it, you either going to cost yourself injury or life or other people’s life and that’s just the way you were trained, so you were trained to that highly-trained

thing. And from there we get back and we were a bit lazy actually because we used the pits of the enemy, we didn’t want to dig it ourselves, we were going to defend this old enemy camp and hear these people are coming and all that. Got too dark and nothing there, and then we moved out, we moved that night. I always remember this one because our platoon commander and a small group went and they

had to find an area because we had to, there was something about we had to marry up with the APCs, the Armoured Personnel Carriers, right. And so away they went, oh must have been a couple of hours later the rest of the company went and were going bashing through the bloody scrub at night and that, oh God it’s ridiculous, and then all of a sudden you heard this ‘bang, bang’, and then ‘bang’ right on top of us, ‘bang, bang’. It was our OC on the radio with our platoon commander

saying, “Well, fire a couple of shots so we know where you are” sort of thing. But they’d taken the lead out of them and it just like a blank sort of thing so it makes a different sound and that. We married up with them and then we found into the APCs and went into our defensive positions and we all had to dig shell-scrapes [shallow trench] because of the imminent sort of thing. And so we dig these shell- scrapes, which are about eighteen inches deep, if you can squash yourself down a little bit you only have to dig twelve inches, you

get lazy, you do. And I remember I heard it on the radio, and we all heard it, was the OC was talking about artillery support, because everywhere we went you used to always have artillery could reach you and back you up and that sort of stuff. And something come through and said, “No, they can’t support you, you’re out of range”, that was our artillery and that. And then it come through something about the ships could support and

I remember the OC saying something about, “No, no, no you wouldn’t be able to support us if you’re that far out” and that sort of stuff. And the next thing we heard this bloody great ‘zrooom’, like that, and as this big zrooom was coming, all you heard was this clang, bash, crash, all these APCs closing their hoods down and their doors. And this was a bloody big ship out in the ocean said they could support us, they could, yeah they reached us alright

but frightened the living hell out of us, that made us get in our little pits, but yeah that was them supporting us. So after that we kept patrolling and then there was, on that same operation actually that was the worst part, one of the worst things I think happened in Vietnam that I experienced was we come through, had another contact and we had

one VC killed, we moved out the next morning. Our OC was brilliant, Major Harry Smith; if it started to rain in the afternoon around about three or four o’clock, you always knew that you were going to hoochie up after it did rain, so you hoochied up when you were wet and you ate in the wet, never missed, just brilliant it was. And we moved out the next day and we moved and we moved

along this, out of the jungle, I can see it vividly, we moved out of the jungle, my section wasn’t leading, I was the third section. We moved out of the jungle and there was this big road, and we moved onto that and as we moved onto it we had 5 and 6 Section, one on either side and platoon headquarters on the road and I was following platoon headquarters, he was our medic [medical orderly] Maxie Cameron. Nobody would let him near them cause he’d done

two days first aid course, he was our medic, but he was just about ready to go home because he’d been there, he was an old soldier, he’d been there with 1 Battalion before, he was just about ready to go home. We started moving down this road and these people, Vietnamese come down the road carrying their things over their shoulder and that, and they were yelled at and yelled at to stop, but they kept coming. And they converged into this little bridge, culvert

sort of thing and at the same time, I don’t know why, I was a private soldier, they’d say, “Go that way” and I’d go that way, I didn’t know nothing about, I knew how to read a map but I wasn’t interested in that, they said, “We go on an operation for five days, we’re going to ambush, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that”, “Oh, righto then”, make sure you’re ready to go and away you go, that was it. So, but I can see it as plain as day, and there was a group did stop and stayed

back up the hill, Vietnamese of villages and that sort of thing, and these come down, we had a Vietnamese interpreter with us, he was the first time he’d been with us actually he was a, they called them ‘Chieu Hois’ [Chieu Hoi amnesty program], they were North Vietnamese or VC that had come over to our side and they interpreted for us and that sort of stuff. And they moved in, the headquarters moved in to these people and it was either an old man or an old woman

and a couple of kids, and they walked up to them, and at the same time our two lead sections crossed the road, just at the culvert, you know just changed sides, sort of thing like that. And there was this hell of an almighty blast, boom, right in front of us, about thirty metres away sort of thing, that was the platoon headquarters and half the sections and that. We lost one bloke

Corporal Col Lithgow, he just got blown to pieces it was…you know they talk about blood and guts and all that sort of stuff but with an explosion there’s no blood, he was just burnt. And I raced forward, but that’s just instinct I think, just to help because there was blokes everywhere, yelling and going on. And the platoon sergeant

he grabbed, I had an M79 [grenade launcher], which is a forty-four millimetre like shotgun thing, throws little bombs, he grabbed that off me and started blasting into the scrub across from the road, from this whatsie, just pumping it in there, because he must of thought there was enemy or something in there, had to be to detonate this mine, or there was a bomb in the villagers’ bags or something, I don’t think they even know till today, they keep saying it was a

claymore mine or something. But Col Lithgow, the night before we’d ambushed and he still had our Australian claymore on his pack and they reckon a lot of the damage, see we had about, oh God in our platoon there must have been about ten or so wounded, one was killed, probably more than ten wounded, one killed and we only had twenty-odd people in our platoon and that was

the whole lot. And they found out a few, that it was Australian shrapnel that was in some of the wounded, so that ignition must have set his claymore off and that’s why he was just blown to pieces. So we just had to pick up…oh picked his leg up and all it was was his boot, it was just cut off

at the top of his boot, just no blood no nothing, just that and his boot was there and his leg and foot in it. Then you pick up bits and pieces, and by that time then the company’s all out there, like the CSM [Company Sergeant-Major] and he’s starting to organise and get people out of the place and the medics they’re there, each company has a fully qualified medic and that. And I,

you might not think it’s funny I don’t know, but Peter Emsley was our radio operator in the platoon headquarters and I goes up to Peter, I said, “Peter how are ya?” and he’s whinging and whingeing and going, “Oh me leg, me leg”. And Doc Dobson, our medic comes up to him and he looks and Peter says, “Me foot Doc, me foot Doc, is it there, is it there?” He said, “Of course it’s bloody there but you’re going to lose it”. And all his foot was

just hanging on by just this, everything else was sort of blown out of it. But then Peter says, “Oh thanks Doc” but he was petrified and panicking about where was his foot, he thought it was gone, he lost it, he lost it in the end, he’s got a false foot now, but what a character he is now, he still does runs and God knows what. But remember, and the first time I’d ever seen it actually, I thought, “God how are we going to fix this” and Doc pulls out this blow up

splint, we slipped it straight up his leg like that and I had to blow the air into it. There he was, a splint, we didn’t have to touch nothing, got him onto a chopper and away he went. And then the other blokes, you hear and see other blokes and run to them and the CSM just, oh I don’t know why, he just grabbed me and he said, “You, you” that was Johnny Heslewood actually, me and Johnny Heslewood and he was

forward scout of one of the other sections, he was, he didn’t get wounded. And he says today he said, “That teached that Quincy bastard” he says, “All those times he carried that machine gun and he used to up me all the time saying ‘Oh you scout, you’re a mongrel’ he said, ‘You’ve only got the light rifle and I’m lugging this machine gun away all the time’”. Hesso was telling us the same thing here twelve months ago, he says, “Yeah when I was carrying the machine gun” he said, “We swapped over, I was carrying the machine gun and Quincy

was scouting and he got wounded, he got blown up”. Quincy always lets him know, Heslewood lets him know too. Quincy always tells the story about too, he says, “And Cameron come running up to me and saying, ‘What’s wrong with you Quincy, Quincy what’s wrong with you?’ and Quincy said, ‘Piss off, Cameron’ he said, ‘I’m in enough trouble without having you here’”, had his knee blown out.

Then Terry Comedan, he got hit pretty bad, he got hit in the head actually pretty bad, but he’s still alive, he still shaves and little bits of metal come out of him, he’ll be shaving away and clunk. Or he could be sitting down and all of a sudden his ear will start bleeding, there’s little bits of metal coming out of him, it happens, it just goes through your body, comes out of him, and scratch his arm, and oh there’s a little bit of metal there, comes out. But he said, “I didn’t

know where I was” he said, “All I got was this bloody…

Yeah and that’s when the CSM grabbed me and Heslewood and said, “Get all that gear those blokes” cause we’d evacuate them by helicopter and all that sort of stuff, “Get all their gear and get back to camp”. So we took

all the gear and that back to camp. And that afternoon there was dribs and drabs of our platoon coming in from there with just bits and pieces and that. I suppose because the exercise, or the operation only lasted a few extra days from that, sort of thing. And yeah they come back into camp and that, back then to camp life. But that there was sort of, the CSM he’s like an old father figure he was, he’d been to Malaya and that and

he could see if there was something wrong with ya and he’d put his arm around ya and say, “Come on, get over here and tell me what’s wrong”, he was good, really top bloke. And then we went back to camp and it just went on from exercise and exercise, oh I call them exercises, operations, operations after that, you do your normal one day patrol, three-days patrol and that sort of stuff in the province and that sort of thing.

Nothing much really happened in those times, you know, just had the odd contact. You have a contact sometimes you do get an enemy killed, sometimes you get nothing, lot of hell and fire and God knows what and mayhem and stuff and end up with nothing, that’s just the way war is. But one of the other big operations that

was really a disaster for us, probably kicked the guts out of our whole company, our OC and all. Just after Christmas, wasn’t long after that other operation, that was Ingham, this was one called Tamborine, Operation Tamborine, was just after Christmas, January or February something like that.

And the whole battalion went out and we’d moved into different areas and the platoons then go and do different areas and meet back to a secure base type thing. And we were in this place sitting down having lunch, I don’t know how it happens but this VC walks into PHQ, Platoon Headquarters, straight in.

I remember Bob Buick jumping up starting shooting and yelling, “VC, VC” and this VC racing and Bob Buick chasing him. And then all hell broke loose because woke everybody up I think, they shot this VC and we had one bloke wounded. I don’t know whether he got wounded, I don’t think he got wounded by the VC probably got shot by all the mayhem that was going on.

We evacuated him, buried the VC, evacuated him by helicopter, and as we were evacuating we had other contacts from around the helicopters with VC all coming into that area. It sort of made us think it must have been a meeting place or something, because they were coming in there. And we pulled out, or company called us out and we moved along, oh must have been a thousand metres or so

and we caught up with company and just tacked onto the back of them we did, just tacked onto the back of them. And somebody said, “There’s enemy behind us” and we heard this shot, just off in the distance and then one of the sections swept through and come back, didn’t see anything and then we heard a couple more shots. And then they called in artillery and the artillery ‘brrrr’ over the top and

into the scrub sort of thing. And the next bloody thing we copped it, the artillery on top of us and I can still hear Paul O’Sullivan, you don’t mind if I swear, I won’t swear, I just hear him yelling, “Stop that f…artillery, stop that f…artillery”. I don’t know who was going to hear him because this artillery was coming straight in on top of us, and just blew the living hell out of our whole company. And we had something like about thirteen,

fourteen-odd blokes wounded, three or four killed, and that was when our CSM Jack Kirby was killed, he was killed then, that kicked the company in the guts, tore the guts out of the company. And we got our blokes evacuated and I can remember as we were evacuating because Harry Smith our OC,

he must have been in hospital, he must have been crook or something because he wasn’t on the operation with us, we had our Company 2IC was with us, he had the command. And I can remember Harry coming in on a helicopter to evacuate and he had his pyjamas on and his robe, he must have been in hospital or something, but word had got around that fast that his CSM was killed and he was out there for his

boys sort of thing. And that there sort of sticks in me mind that today, but to have that, they talk about, I’m not a very good Catholic, I was brought up a Catholic, but not a very good religious person and that sort of stuff. But that day when that artillery come in, I don’t know what it was going to do, I hit the deck and put me hands over me head and prayed to me mother,

I said, “Mum, help us, help us”, I don’t know what me hands were going to do, that’s not going to do nothing, but I’m still here today so I suppose I should change me tune a bit, do something. But that there, the company from then on, because first off in it’s tour it had lost nearly a platoon of their people, then again mid-tour,

they’d lost nearly another platoon of their people, so the company was, you didn’t know people, there was new people coming and going, there was people coming in, three days later they were dead or they were wounded, you didn’t know some of them. And that’s sort of how it got on and I think the company morale, the real morale was down. But Harry Smith being the good OC,

he was still good because there was no way in the world we, if we went out on a night ambush or anything like that, he used to check the platoons and all that and make sure they had their sleeves down and had camouflage on, and our dog tags [identification discs worn around the neck] in those days were stainless steel, we had to have black tape over them all the time. All that sort of stuff, so it sort of kept our morale up, but there was still a lot of edginess to what it used to be before. Like once before, if you’d have an argument somebody

would come and say, “Righto, you blokes, wake up, get away” and now it sort of start to getting on there was a few punch-ups and that sort of stuff, edginess between the troops and that sort of stuff. But yeah, that hurt the company very bad, very bad but it stayed together, it’s good and our company today is still, our company association and even though I wasn’t at Long Tan, but it is

D Company Long Tan Veterans’ Association, D Company 6RAR 1966-67. So even those people that come over there say three months before we come home and stayed on with other battalions and that are still welcome in our company organisation. And today we have our reunions and that and we’ve got our kids coming along with us, our families.

I’m surprised to hear around the place that so many Vietnam veterans’ marriages break up and all this sort of stuff. You’d be surprised at the amount of people that were married before they went to Vietnam, engaged or had girlfriends and that and are still married today in D Company. There is the odd one or two that are divorced, yeah, but the rest of them they’re still married. And first few years of reunions, it used to be just a back to big grog up and that sort of stuff

and I know Bev said, “I’m never coming again” and a lot of the wives said they’re never coming again. But it’s come down now it’s a family reunion and we have a big family reunion and our kids are coming along now. And you’d be surprised of how many kids of the Delta Company blokes are serving members of the forces today; there are heaps of them, just in that company. It’s probably all over but yeah. But yeah, but getting back to Vietnam,

it just went on and on, operation after operation.

Big man, big man, married never had any children, so we were his kids and that’s the way he used to treat us, we were his kids. If there was a bit of an altercation or something in our platoon, next thing you know Jack would be down there, get us all together and say, “Come on fellows, tell us all about it,

what’s wrong, get it off your chest”. And he was approachable, very approachable, I don’t think, oh there might have been a couple which had to, in our company that I can remember anybody that got charged, they never went past the OC, he give them the option of my punishment or go to the CO [Commanding Officer]. Because if you went to the CO, he’d put you on field punishment, put you in jail or fine you,

if it was bad enough. But Major Smith, old Harry, they used to call him Harry the Rat Catcher, he got this rat catcher name from being in Borneo, he had a pistol and he used to shoot rats or something, so they reckon, Harry the Rat Catcher they used to call him. And he’d say, “Righto then, what do you want, my punishment or the CO?” “I’ll take yours, Sir”, “Righto, seven days field punishment” they used to call it, it never used to go on our record but it

used to be bloody raking up rubber nuts, rubber trees have these nuts that drop off and as you walk on them they’re like walking on peanuts, that sort of thing. So you used to have to rake them all up so you didn’t have the noise in our area, if people walking around and that stuff, and that was your job. But you used to always make it and after dark when the boozer was open or something, you’d sneak over into the dark and blokes would always bring you a beer over and all that sort of stuff. The CSM knew that was going on, as long as you didn’t

get absolutely caught out like that, well then you were pretty right. That was it yeah, the company, and we had one of the best company setups going actually, because like I said at Nui Dat, at ARU they were sort of all over the place, well we had our lines all in line, there was 10 Platoon, 11 Platoon, 12 Platoon, straight down, just facing one another like that. Further forward were our FDLs [Forward Defensive Line], our front defensive line where

we done the picquet and that and that’s where we’d fight from, but the rest of it was where we lived. But the other companies and that used to say, “Right, there’s a platoon there” and they were just in a gaggle there and a gaggle there sort of thing. And some of the times like you used to, if a company was out on patrol, you’d have to go over and defend their area, so a platoon would go over. And oh there was so many blokes used to fall down pits and that in the dark because it wasn’t sort of set out the same as ours was. And it was really

a top setup.

A hell of a lot but can get on one another’s nerves, but you didn’t that much because you had your little area which was your area, you had to look after, and you had to look after, and everybody had the wire. So we sort of worked together, and like we used to have

at Christmas time skits there. I remember one skit we done at Christmas time there, we had the two ugliest blokes in the company, Blue McGrath was Prince Charming, I’ve got a photo in there actually, and Peter Detman was Cinderella and he was about six foot six or so, he was Cinderella, then we had the ugly sisters and they done these skits, but the language was completely different, but you used to do things like that.

There was a time there that we kidnapped Lucky Starr [Australian singer] and his show touring group, they were over there doing a concert and that and all of a sudden Lucky Starr and his concert group ended up at our boozer, until they come and got him and took him back.

Well there was…national service was a funny thing, it could of come from Gordon Sharp [Second Lieutenant G. C. Sharp; he was a TV cameraman before call-up] actually; Gordon

Sharp was a national service platoon commander of 11 Platoon; he was killed at Long Tan. But he was on The Mavis Brampton Show [TV comedy circa 1960s] and he was in television and there were a few other blokes and all these little things, he knew everybody, knew everybody around the place. And he was a character too, he was just there to do his two years and he couldn’t give two hoots, but that was it. And yeah things like that. There were other things. We done

a night ambush out through the task force and we had Bob Buick, he was the commander, yeah Bob Buick was the commander and SAS [Special Air Service] they were always, SAS were crash hot, but they weren’t on the perimeter either, they were right in the middle of Nui Dat until after a year and then they went up onto SAS Hill they called it, but that used to be 5 Battalion used to be up there. And we come back from this ambush at

dawn and we stopped to have a smoke right at the SAS gate, we flogged [borrowed] their sign, their big SAS sign which they were so proud of, every unit is so proud of their sign, we pinched it because Major Harry Smith was an SAS bloke beforehand. We pinched it and up and away we went and went back to camp and give it to the OC, but he might have had something in it like that, for Buick and them to say like, “We’re going to

take this” because you don’t usually go out on patrol with a few spanners and that to undo these signs. And they hung it up in their officers/sergeants mess, which the company had an officers/sergeants mess type thing. And the OC Harry Smith invited the CO of the SAS over for a drink and he walks in and here’s his sign, he didn’t even know it was missing, that’s one we’ve got against SAS, didn’t even know it was missing

and here it is sitting in the boozer, yeah I thought that was pretty good.

Oh that’s what it is, that’s exactly what it is, humour, things like that. If you haven’t got it well you might as well not be here, you’d be a zombie. Because your turn, it’s just a

military tradition, even soldiers today that haven’t been overseas or anything like that have still got that dry sense of humour. Like my young son, my two sons are completely two different, my eldest son is a thinker like his mother, they’ll think about something before they do it. My youngest son is like me, reads between the lines in advance sort of thing. And I remember here one day

Bev was telling us something and Jason was sitting there and I was sitting over here and he’d look at me, I’d look at him, he said, “Come on, Mum, get to the punch line will ya”. Because Bev and Steven they’ll tell ya from the beginning to the end, where me and Jason will tell ya something the start, you read the middle and that’s the end. So different people like that and military is just like that, it is just like that, and you’ve got your people like that and

if you haven’t got it, it will be a sick and sorry place, even a sick and sorry country really, it’s more of an Australian attitude. A mate of mine told me two years ago, Sting Hornet, he was at Long Tan and he was up in the Pilbara and every Long Tan Day they’d have a big do and that, and they had this American, he was an American Commander off one of the ships or something come up there, as their guest one day. And he must of read a bit about it and that sort of stuff and

he said, “God” he said, “I don’t know you Aussies” he said, “How did you do that at Long Tan?” he said, “How come you killed all those people and you never got all those casualties and that?”. And Sting he’s a character he said, “Oh its latex, they used rubber bullets” and he said, “What do you mean rubber bullets?” he said, “Well they bounce off ya” and he said, “How do they do that?” he said, “It was a rubber plantation,” he said, “And as they went through the rubber trees they got latex on them and they bounced off us”. And this bloke he said, Sting says, “And he

thought for a minute”, “Oh, you’re bloody having a go at me” sort of thing. So that sort of humour and that and it still goes on today, yeah still sort of stuff. You can have anybody on, doesn’t matter who they are, you can have them on and that’s what soldiers will do.

I thought they, well like I said, I went there and I felt it was going to be intimidation or something, these heroes and that sort of stuff, but it wasn’t like that, they never, “Oh, we Long Tan veterans, we this, we that”. It was never that, it was, “Come on, we’re still soldiers, we’ve got a job to do”. There was, yes there was a bit, because what had happened was like 11 Platoon had nearly got wiped out, they only had

about five or six people left and so the whole company then was split, people from 12 Platoon, 10 Platoon had made 11 Platoon, and they’d mixed up so they got a mix of them and then us reinforcements coming in had a mixture of just not a complete new platoon and then an old platoon, it was a mixture of all of them. And I don’t think they, they probably did have a psychological thing

but it was never shown because it was straightaway, “Come on, let’s get into it, we’ve got this job to do, you’re one of us let’s go, let’s get on with the job”. In the camp it may have been a bit more lax, bit more blasé type thing. Like Allen May, the bloke I took over from scout, was the lead scout that hit the Vietnamese in Long Tan. He used to have a little thing with Bob Buick, him and Bob Buick hated

one another. Bob Buick used to come down the lines just on daylight, but Allen May used to get up before that and roll his mosquito net. Because Bob Buick used to come down and burst into the tent and say, “Got you this time, May”, but May would be up and had his thing, cause see it was against the law, you had to have your mosquito net down and all this sort of stuff or you’d be charged. And so he was trying to get him but Allen May used to play this little game with him and beat him to it all the time. And same with this, Barry Magnusson was the same sort of thing,

they sort of, well even today they say they hate one another but they put up with one another. Bob Buick doesn’t come to the reunions anymore, I haven’t seen him there for twenty years, but all the other blokes come.

He was platoon sergeant. It goes back to when the first

intake of national servicemen went to Kapooka, Bob Buick was there too, he had been in the air force and got out and re-joined the army. And he was down at Kapooka with them and done a bit of initial training and they said, “Right, you’re upgraded” and away they sent him to Ingleburn. And then from Ingleburn, he done training there and was up-squadded [advanced more quickly than usual], and when these blokes all got to the battalion, here’s Bob Buick up there as a platoon sergeant. So it was that sort of bit of animosity there. And Bob was just,

he just had no man management, it was just forceful all the time, “Do it or else”, I used to say he was just an arrogant South African and let it go at that. But yeah, but he was probably a good soldier, he never done anything wrong to me or anything like that but he was just arrogant like that. He was even arrogant like that in the 1970s when I was at Infantry Centre, I was an instructor at the School of Infantry and he come through there on a course to do his RSM

Course and his first thing to me was, “Clegg, what are you doing here?” as if I had no right to be there. “Well I’m an instructor here, I’m staff here Bob, you’re only a student so shut up”, I should of said that but I didn’t, sort of thing like that, that was just his gruffness and arrogance. But the blokes themselves yeah they were a bit more lackadaisical and that sort of stuff in the camp, where you’d think it would carry on, but when the job was there to be done

it was a hundred percent.

Not that much, you used to ask. One story I got from one bloke about my section commander Barry Magnusson, he was wounded at Long Tan, only I’m not too sure where he got wounded but he got wounded at Long Tan. But how he made targets for his machine gunner Darby Munroe

to snipers in the trees, because that’s where a lot of the Vietnamese were, up in trees and sniping, you know shoot down at the soldiers. And he used to make himself a target for this bloke to shoot at him and Darby with the machine gun would shoot the bloke. Now I heard that not from Barry, not from Darby, but from another bloke that was there and seen it. And the only story I heard was confirmed was by Darby,

he said, “Yeah that’s right” because Darby stayed in the army, he went back to Vietnam the second time and lost both his legs in a mine accident. And he said, “Yeah” he said, “He did that” and that was the closeness of those blokes, you couldn’t do wrong, it didn’t matter if you did do wrong, if you murdered somebody sort of thing, you know the bond was still there, he was still there, he was that. And Barry told me, because when I took over as scout Barry then was the section commander,

and he told me how he had two bullets in his pocket, that he was out of ammunition and wouldn’t use them, they were for him because he thought they were going to get overrun. And how his weapon, when they did get ammunition it wouldn’t work because of the mud, and he says he doesn’t think he shot anybody he said, “Because the barrel was bent”. He said to make the working parts go forward with the mud and that, he was putting one round in and bashing it against the tree and he said, “The barrel had a big

bend in it” so he said, “I couldn’t have been shooting anybody” he said, “But I was firing off a round at a time like that”. But those were the things, they didn’t tell you about the gore and that because they were probably in a bit of shock too. Some of them will tell you about how it was, not from 11 Platoon blokes but mainly from 12 Platoon and 10 Platoon, which come in on the side to extract 11 Platoon out

of the fight itself, because they were overrun. And how the Vietnamese used to stand up and start walking forward and this artillery used to come in and just blow them to hell and then the next lot would do the same thing, just step over the top of them, move up, go down behind the bodies that were dead and then up when a bugle or a whistle went, and then this artillery would come in and just blow them to pieces. They said that’s how the thing was, and that’s what a lot

of the blokes will only talk about today, of the destruction of what the artillery done to the enemy. And I think it was a few of our blokes were wounded with our own artillery too because they had to put it in on top of themselves just about to survive. But that’s really all they will talk about, they won’t talk about heroics, they’ll talk about certain ones done this and certain ones done that sort of thing but they don’t talk

about heroics like that.

Shock, hate, hate, how could it happen, who stuffed up,

it shouldn’t happen, so much destruction, so many lives and that. It’s probably more shock than anything else, hate yeah, there is hate there, but you can understand a mistake, but a mistake like that so far from behind the front line, battle line sort of thing

was a terrible mistake. But that bloke could have been on duty for so long and he was tired or whatever he was, it all came back, stories, I don’t know what the thing is at the moment, but they said it was the plotter. See he plots and he says, “Righto then.” You’re supposed to be about five hundred metres away from artillery to land on you, it’s last resort to come in any closer sort of thing. And it went over the top of us

and I know they’d drop and they were suppose to go right because there was report from where we’d left there was enemy moving into that area. And after the initial lot went over us, from the people following us and then I heard later, I didn’t hear it over the radio, I heard it later from different people saying, “Well the order was drop five hundred, go left a thousand”.

Right and all they did was drop five hundred and that was on top of us, because where we were was right around like a paddy field, all paddy field and all the jungle and we were in the edge of the jungle, on the edge of the paddy field. And you could look back from where we were in the company to where we were that morning and had the contact and you could see Vietnamese coming into that area, and that’s where the artillery was supposed to go.

Thank Christ that’s over. We didn’t go straight back to camp, we ambushed that night and then went back to camp and then it’s usually let your hair down, a few extra drinks, bit of extra tucker and then back on

with the job as normal. Debriefs at section and platoon levels, just your platoon commander, or the section commander would debrief the section and say, “Righto, did you feel there was anything we could of done better or shouldn’t have done” something like that. Then he’d take that to the platoon commander and then that would go to the company commander like that. But not as a whole group, just blokes together and what happened, and then you get like the little rumours and that that float around, this happened and that happened

and all that. But you just don’t know, it’s, “Forget about that and let’s get on with the thing”.

No not as much, the only artillery that is with us, each company, is usually an officer, a corporal and a

private, and that’s their FO Party [Forward Observer team]. In the first half of the tour to Vietnam, we had the New Zealand blokes with Long Tan and that right up till near Christmas time and then the Australian blokes took over. So really those Australian blokes they call the artillery in, but they send grids [map/positional references] and that back to the gun position and the guns know how far they’ve got to shoot it and where they’ve got to aim and

elevations and all that to get it there. So, but they live in the lines with us, those three people, they still come to our reunions from New Zealand every now and then. One who was Corporal Willy Walker, oh God he used to get us into trouble too, he used to always take us down to the Kiwis to the artillery, get on the grog and then come back home, back to our battalion. He made the highest position in the New Zealand Army as

RSM of the New Zealand Army, Willy, but you wouldn’t have thought so when he was a lance corporal, 1966, he was terrible. But he still lives over in New Zealand he only just retired from the army. And Stanley the officer he comes over, he done a career in the army. But the other bloke Bloomfield, he lives in Brisbane and he comes to our reunions and that yeah. So we’ve still got contact with those blokes. The only contact that I have had with the Australian

FO Party, it was actually by accident here at Legacy one year, they used to bring up an air force bloke or an army bloke as a guest for Legacy for a week, and he used to come up and talk to the older soldiers and that sort of thing. And I was in Legacy down there and this bloke said, “Oh you might know this fellow, Major-General somebody” and I thought, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have known any major-generals”.

And we just got started talking and that sort of stuff and I said, “Oh, when were you in Vietnam?” and he said, “When were you in Vietnam?” and I said, “Oh, I was there 66-67” he said, “Oh the same time as me” I said, “Oh I was with D Company” he said, “I was your FO”. And I thought, and we just had a little talk about oh yeah remember that time, that accident, and haven’t seen so and so since and that sort of thing,

it was just sort of like that. There’s no malice against one another, some people hold a grudge and I don’t know how they hold a grudge, like I said I was a private soldier, there’s a lot above me to worry about, I just had to worry, make sure there was no enemy in front of me and somebody was following me, so that was about the responsibility I had in that way.

We were told it all the time, never bunch-up, never go like that, but we did it. The platoon headquarters went in like that, except Bob Buick and Max Cameron, they were all wounded, our sections crossed like that.

It’s things you train not to do, it doesn’t happen, not to happen and it happened, it just.

All civilians yeah, always, not to get too close to them because they can put a knife in ya, anything like that, all that sort of stuff, that terrorist type stuff which is still going on today.

They talk about don’t get them around you; don’t let them have your weapon and that. But we did it, the kids and all that sort of stuff, we played with the kids and all that, it’s just the Australian way sort of thing. You can sort of trust, you know it in your own heart and mind that they’re not a threat to you,

but that time there was. But we should have known, we were on operation, it was in a war zone and we should not have done that and that’s what happened.

There was a lot of times that could have been worse actually because we used to do, they used to call it TAOR patrols, Tactical Area of Responsibility, around the task force and so far out,

and there was days of restrictions where civilians couldn’t go in those areas because of patrols being there. But those civilians that had been relocated from that area to another area still had their banana plantations or something in that area and one or two days of the week they were allowed to go in that area. And there were times, there were contacts because you were patrolling and there was supposed to be nobody there and you run into civilians, yeah.

You could tell, it only happened to me once and I didn’t fire at them because I knew they weren’t enemy, because as I come into range I heard this yabbering, talking and that, and as I turned a corner there was a couple of bullock drays and there were people putting bananas on. I could of easily just opened up firing like that,

but I knew, it’s a sense that get into ya, that’s part of your training that you know that. If they were enemy, they probably wouldn’t have been making that much noise, yabbering and going on like that, and you’d probably see straightaway they had weapons or something, their reaction would have been different, whereas the civilians’ reaction is stand startled like that, whereas an enemy reaction is startled, boom and run, get

go sort of thing. That’s the only one thing that happened to me and I never done it, I can’t say it didn’t happen to other people. It would probably depend on how much edge you were on, say if you’d just had a battle and you were moving on, it could be a completely different thing, and it could have been. But that was just a day patrol we were on and we just come from camp that morning

and doing that area and coming back to camp. But it took us a lot longer to come back to camp because we had to bring all those people back and then we had to separate the poor buggers from their bullocks and their drays because they couldn’t get across the river where we wanted to come across, we weren’t going two or three thousand metres the other way to get them across and bring them back around, because we were out of our area. So they had to leave all their belongings and everything like that and we had to bring them all the way back to the task force, blindfold them all before we brought them into camp and that and hand them over to the task force.

I don’t know what happened to their stuff, they’d probably been released and go back and pick it up, I don’t know. But yeah those things, I heard of things happening where civilians were injured.

Well like you were told that all Vietnamese could be enemy and you didn’t want them knowing because with the wire that’s around your perimeter,

there was high wire, there was low wire and it’s got tracks, zigzag in and out and around and back on top of one another, and if they start to know them, they’re not booby trapped, they haven’t got mines or anything, it’s for us to go in and out of them and we cover them with fire all the time, and the rest of the place is there, it’s near impossible for them to get through the wire. So we don’t want them to be able to tell anybody that is how you can get in because a person can crawl up through those sort of things there and you

probably wouldn’t know until they were right on top of you.

Well Hoa Long was right on the task force border, right on the border, it was a sort of a relocated village because it was in an area that they relocated. There were a couple of other villages that were relocated out of certain areas into different areas, which was wrong. It’s just like saying,

“Righto, Orange is going to pack up, we’re going to put you in another place” and they burnt this whole place, “Take what belongings you’ve got” and that sort of stuff and wreck it, and we’ll build you another place in a different area, it was wrong. But you can’t have that sort of situation in there if you’re trying to protect an area.

Yeah, you would be given an area, probably the day before you’d be given an O [Orders] Group, which is an orders group of saying, “Right, you’re going out on a fighting patrol”, so it might be three quarters of a platoon and you’re heavily armed and that,

you’re expecting to run into enemy. Or it maybe just a recon [reconnaissance] patrol, which may be just a section goes out; and then the other patrol is just a platoon normal patrol. But with the jungle in your training you have all different formations, you have like the single file, one following the other, you had arrowhead, you can have open file, which is say if you’re walking up the road you’re walking parallel with one another, like that.

So it adapts continuously to the area you are in, if you are going across a paddy field you’d be out in arrowhead, which is like a big arrow spread hundreds of metres apart. In the jungle you’d be in single file, probably five metres apart if that, depends on the jungle. And it just goes on like that, you have your section set out so that you know where they are. And it’s always the same of like

the scouts go to ground, observe, section commander gets forward, the gun always goes to the right or the high ground and the riflemen go to the opposite of the gun. So that’s just your basic formation. And then your section commander can yell at you from there to go and get around here, go that way or this, and he knows exactly where they are sort of thing, so he doesn’t have to be asking where are they and all that, it’s just automatic.

Well a patrol is a patrol really and you just adapt the patrol to whatever you went through, because most of the Vietnam that I come across you were either paddy fields combined with jungles and it was like the map of Australia, as it goes around with all its dips you had the paddy fields, then you had the jungle, then you had the mountains, which were the jungle. And then you got

out further onto the plains, the grass plains type stuff, and we were even down on the beach at one part, through the swamps, like the mangroves and that sort of stuff. So the patrols were there all the same reason to clear the area of enemy and you adapt your formations and that to the lay of the land. And it all comes down from the intelligence from the different people

and all that through the headquarters down to you, to the soldier and he has to go out and make sure there’s nobody there, or if there is, find them.

Hand signals, we had to use hand signals, if you’re close enough you whisper. You learn hand signals from day one when you’re in the army, you’re not allowed to talk. Like you’ve got all these hand signals, do you want me to demonstrate some?

Right oh then, well a finger or a couple of fingers onto your shoulder like that is you’re asking for the platoon commander. On the arm, you’re asking for the section commander. And it depends, righto I’m a scout and I come across something up the front of me I want the section commander to have a look at it, so I go like this,

like that, so tapping on the head is come to me and looking through an eye glass is I want you to have a look, okay. And you’ve got other things, just like that is a hoochie, there’s an enemy building, there’s an obstacle in front of ya, which might be a creek or might be a big heap of blown up areas where the bombers have been or something, like a big monstrous crater and that full of rubble. And you get to it and you say,

“Well do you want me to go through there or do you want me to go two hundred metres that way to get around it?” and all this sort of stuff, so you want them to have a look and make that decision. But it was just all basic things, like going like this is hurry up, get a move on, stop is just a normal stop sign. Move on. Most of our signals in the Australian Army are below head and shoulder sort of thing, they’re not way up in the air or anything like that. Paces, you just

lift your foot and you tap your foot because people had to pace to know how far you’d gone and they’d tell you, three hundred or four hundred, whatever it was paces. Just like the Indians with all their signals, way back from time began.

As a forward scout you are the ears and eyes

of the section and you might be in front of a section, you might have a platoon behind ya, you might have a company behind ya and you may have a battalion behind ya. So you are the forward ears and eyes of that section and you are to look out for everything as an early warning. You have to pick up before the enemy, sight the enemy and

kill him before he can kill you, or put the rest of your people behind ya in danger. That’s really basically all it is, you’re the ears and the eyes forward of the section to secure them.

Yeah you’d be looking for trip wires, which we were trained so often through Canungra and all that sort of thing about trip wires,

which is a little wire across a track. Holes in the ground, they used to call them panji [sharpened bamboo stake] pits, they used to have all these big stakes and that and just over them with a light layer of leaf or something like that and you could walk and straight down and you’re pierced like a stuffed pig with all these spikes and that sort of stuff. Those sorts of booby traps. Movement of people in that area; now the Australian soldier in Vietnam doesn’t usually follow tracks,

he may have a track but he may be ten, fifteen metres off that track just going along with that track. Because tracks are where you do get booby-trapped a lot, the enemy tracks use them and everybody uses them sort of thing, so we never used to use a lot of them. Sometimes you did, sometimes you didn’t but that’s what you were looking for. Any signs of the enemy, mines, like undisclosed, mucked-up earth and that sort of stuff, because

you were the one that was either you were going to step on it and kill yourself or you were going to miss it and the people behind you were going to be killed. So you had that on your mind, do you want to miss something and let somebody behind you get killed and you’re still alive, so that played on your mind a bit. It was a very nerve-racking job and I know myself if we were in an area and

we did have to follow a track I used to say to my section commander, I used to say, “Please pass it back to the boss to make sure everybody is perfectly silent”, because I was the one that was going to wear something. Like you might be going down a track and you’ve got all the signs of an enemy camp or something, you don’t want to go sneaking down a track and somebody behind ya

bash into something, or something like that and give yourself away and that. That’s the sort of thing and people respect that and soldiers respect you for it because you’re their ears and eyes. You either respect it or they say, “That silly bugger out there, let him do it, it’s better him than me”, so they either trust you or they’ve got that attitude, I’m not too sure.

You can be very quiet, you can’t move real fast but just the way you walk. Like when you walk you put your foot down on the side and roll onto the sole of your foot, you don’t just put your foot down like that you just tread on a stick and it goes crack. If you go down on the side and come over it like that well you don’t get that crack. Things like that, you learn

those type of things. Probably I learnt a bit of that because as a kid when we used to go like rabbit trappin’, turkey shootin’ up the bush and all that sort of stuff, you had to be quiet and sneak up and all that sort of stuff, so you learnt that sort of stuff. But yeah you get used to it, walking through the jungle’s pretty good, it’s only you making a track, but it might be a four lane highway by the time the company gets through, because you are making just your

own little track and getting through and the bloke behind ya can see as where you going so he just does the same thing. But by the time it gets back to the company and they’ve had a couple of hundred people come through, it might be a four lane bloody highway, bashed and crashed and smashed down. But when you’re up the front you’re that far out in front sort of thing, the front platoon is very very quiet and they know what’s going on.

Enemy camp would be, that’s enemy is your thumb down, camp is the hoochies right and on the ground, go to ground, and everybody do that. And then you’d go through your things of section commander come to me, have a look. And he’d have a look and he’d probably send the signal back for the platoon commander to come forward, have a look. And if it was big, anything like that they make the decision of how we’re going to

attack it or what’s there, what’s not there, they may have to send back to company and let company make that decision. But it’s just the signals, straight to ground, all quiet, if there’s enemy there right then you’ve sprung them first, it’s not just straightaway start shooting em because there might have been thousands of them there hiding somewhere that you didn’t see and you only seen these two people. So you’ve seen them and they haven’t seen you, it’s all quietness; it’s not just straight into,

bash into them, it’s to find out exactly what’s there before you put yourself at risk. But if you bumble straight into it well then it’s go for it, either run back the other way, hit the ground or do what you can, whatever, it’s just go into your normal contact drills and it’s bellowing, yelling and screaming and going on. And the section commander yelling at the scout, “What’s going on?” and the scout’s got

his head in the ground cause there’s bullets coming at him and then the platoon commander’s saying, “What the bloody hell’s going on up there?” and the section commander’s saying, “I don’t know, the scout won’t tell me”, “Go up and find out”. That’s it really, it’s just mayhem really, just mayhem for the first initial thing. And then it seems, it’s funny you know a contact has its stages, first off it goes pooof, it’s full on

and all of a sudden phoop it will stop. And all of a sudden, “Right we’ll flick around to this side here and we’ll attack through there”, then she’s on again. Even with the enemy and that, you don’t just stand there and fire, fire, fire because you haven’t got that much ammunition anyway. Yeah so it’s not like the movies where the guns don’t run out of bullets, you have to keep putting them on and you only carry so many of them. But as a scout I was lucky because having a plastic gun

and I used to have fifteen full magazines, so that’s twenty-round magazines, so that’s three hundred odd rounds I carried on me with a couple of grenades. And that was good, but as a rifleman I’d have three grenades and about sixty rounds on me, with just the other rifle. But then you’ve got spares and that you carry with the gun and all that sort of stuff. So it’s not an all-out battle of

straight into it, you have your lows and then your high parts and your lows and high parts and that, so it’s not intense straightaway all the time. It might just be a contact bang, straightaway like that and you as a scout of one and just yourself, you’ve just run into one person, it’s all over and then the others will just sweep through and there’s nothing there, and they’ll say, “Oh beauty, we didn’t have to worry about that, it was there. So we’ll keep him up there and hope he saves us again”, something like that.

Or “He survived this time, see if he can survive the next time”, yeah just a sort of a thing.

First off yeah it was an honour and all that sort of stuff. After a while, after a few contacts if you’re not the lead section you really don’t know what’s going on, you just hear all hell break loose and everybody scatters

and then people start yelling and going on. If you’re not up the front you don’t know what’s going on, everybody’s yelling, “What’s going on, what’s happening?” and all this sort of stuff. I felt when I was leading I was in control, I was controlling the whole situation, I could control the speed, the whole lot, I was in control, that’s how I felt as a forward scout, that I was in control. But when you’re back in the section or back

in the platoon or something and a contact happens up front, well you just go into your normal reaction and what the hell’s going on. You might sit around for ten, fifteen minutes and don’t know what’s going on, till they make a decision of what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do this, it might be half an hour, might be more. So up the front you know what’s going on, and being an inquisitive person I always like to know what’s going on, and that’s the way I felt

it was.

Well you don’t know what’s going on, you know if it goes on for a fair bit you know there’s something big there and you know that you’re going to get grabbed then and you’re going to be heading around to assault a position or something right. But if you’re the lead section, you know that you’re not going to be pulled back and have to go and attack from somewhere else.

You’re already on the ground and got a good little safe spot, you hope, little hole in the ground or dint in the ground sort of thing and you are bringing fire to bear on that, so you are going to be the fire support. So you’re not going to have to get up and maybe expose yourself by going around anywhere and attacking through. That’s the way, I don’t know whether I looked at it that way too much, but that’s a way of looking at it. So if you

know what’s going on you can control it, if you don’t know what’s going on, well you’ve got no control over it and you say, “Where we going, what’s happening?” and all that sort of stuff.

VC with their ambushing and that, not so much in my time was an ambush-type situation. Their ambushes were more or less in the situation

of setting up booby traps in an area or something. Like we had a big rice cache that a company found, was Charlie Company found it, they were there that day, they all went in it and got all their photos taken, “Oh look at all this” and everything like that. Left it and went back and reported it and the next day come in there and it was booby trapped, they got three or four wounded. So that to me, well they were ambushed really but there was no Vietnamese there, they’d made booby traps and that and they just walked in there and bang, there was blokes

wounded. Most with the VC was only two and three men groups, four men groups or something like that and probably what they were doing was going out and gathering information and passing it back through to the North Vietnamese, to the regular soldiers. And most of them were like run into one another, just an accidental blunder, run into one another like that and it was just a straight-out who was the quickest. And most f the time they

would run because they didn’t have a force to stay and fight, not like if they were a bigger unit they fought and that’s when you got the big regular units like at Long Tan and that, they were there and they were going to beat ya and that was it.

I couldn’t say they were North Vietnamese troops but we did have some times we picked up contacts with some that were in uniform,

like with the pith hat and that on, the uniform, so they would probably be North Vietnamese but be advisers and taking back the information to the North Vietnamese I’d say. And usually the Viet Cong used to have rubber sandals on, usually a belt with a pouch and an old rifle.

And some of the rifles were that old that it wasn’t funny, they were really old, obsolete, made you wonder how they’d fire really at times.

Well I believe the North Vietnamese were a very good soldier, just hearing all the reports that you used to get; like when we’d have O Groups and that, we’d get reports through from the other units and what happened to the Americans or something like that. And I suppose if you were fighting for your own country yes, of course you would be committed. Whereas we were committed, Australian soldiers were committed, but I don’t think the Americans were

committed as much as we were, because they were there just fighting a war. It’s the same as here in Australia, why fight it in Australia when you can fight it somewhere else, you know why put all our civilians and all our people at risk? That’s the way I look at it, so yeah they were very dedicated because they were fighting for their country. And you got to look at all the Vietnamese,

like even the people, the racketeers and that, that used to make money out of the Australians and the Kiwis and all that with their bars and all this sort of stuff and selling you everything, they might have been sympathisers for the North Vietnamese but they were still making a quid [pound, dollar] off the Australians and that sort of stuff. So yeah you’ve got to admire them, admire the soldiers and the VC too, the Viet Cong local force blokes and that too, you’ve got to admire them, I do anyway.

I probably didn’t think of it so much in that detail when I was a younger soldier but later on you look back and you do, you think good on them.

Well as a private soldier I didn’t know, I was just worried about what next operation

we’re going on, how many days I had to go home, when we’re going back to camp, where you’re getting your next beer from, whatever, sort of thing, that was up to the big nobs. We used to do our patrols, that’s what patrolling is all about, we used to patrol, all the information that came back from patrol, we patrol this whole area we have seen nothing. Now a patrol from another company might go out in that same area two days later and still nothing. So it means that all that information goes back to the boffins

and they work it all out and say, “Well, there’s nobody working in that area”. But then with the Vietnamese and the VC, which was so good, we could go to an area like that, search the whole area and find nothing and then go out there three days later and walk into an attack. Because that’s what happened with Long Tan, they’d been patrolling all those areas and that before and they bombed the task force and then they go out there and find a complete

regiment of them. So that was the frustration probably to us as soldiers, probably a bigger frustration to the politicians and that, of us going out patrolling the areas, having contacts, kicking them all out of this area and patrolling it for say another month and nothing there and then the next month we go out there and bang they’re all back there again. So in Vietnam we never gained ground, like we had our area which was stable,

we patrolled out from it, we secured that area. And our job was to secure the whole province so that the Americans could move through going north and all that sort stuff. Not like the First and Second World War where there’s a front line here and there’s a front line there, we had our front line but where we lived was our front line too, and then we patrolled out from that all the time and we’d say, “Yeah, that’s clear”. The next day you go out there and you have contacts. So that’s the difference of the war

sort of thing, so you never knew everything was going to be easy, you went out on patrol it was a breeze, next patrol you had contacts, two days later, when the day before it was clear as a bell. That was what the Vietnam War was, you didn’t know who you were fighting and there was no lines, no forward lines or back lines or anything like that, it was just all open slather. Just like

no mans land. Righto today we’re patrolling really strong in it so the Vietnamese move out, then we pull out and the Vietnamese move back in, then we go and patrol and they move out and we move back in and that’s really what it was all the time.

Well it was very early in the war, like they’d only been there a couple of months, in the task force there,

because the Australians were at Bien Hoa Air Base with the Americans, which is another province right near Saigon sort of thing, and they were working that area, but up in the Phuoc Tuy province that was just a new area. And it’s surprising how they got there, how did they get there, their supposed to have all this intelligence and all this information and people keep talking about it today and say, “Oh but this information was available here and that information was available there” and all that. Well,

was it, or wasn’t it, or somebody didn’t use it or what, like easy in hindsight. My opinion of it today is the North Vietnamese made the classic mistake when they bombed the Australian Task Force. They could have come way in a lot further, a lot closer, even surrounded the task force, attacked the task force because the

task force was only in it’s infant stages of being built, and they could of attacked it. Why in the hell two days beforehand did they bomb the task force and wait? They either bombed the task force and waited and they thought they were going to get the whole task force with the two battalions to go out there and they were going to ambush them, and that happened to be Long Tan. And they were in range of the Australian artillery,

when you look at tactics now, if they didn’t bomb the place they could of stayed out there and moved in and how’s the artillery going to fire on them, they’re right on top of the task force so they’d have been firing on top of themselves and all. Tactics and that, it just seems to me to be a funny sort of a blunder in a way, because knowing the Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese and knowing the tactics of a lot of different armies, some of the things you don’t do.

So they were supposed to be an ambush for the whole task force to go out and find out who these people were that were bombing them. But they only sent a section out first from B Company and picked up a few places of where the artillery had fired from and then they sent D Company out to follow up and have a look and D Company run into them. So they were either preparing themselves to make a big trap, ambush or something like that for the rest of the task force to come out and that’s it.

But the stories go today, come through and say, “We thought we had the whole task force there,” like the Vietnamese say, “We thought we had the whole task force there because of the ferocity that they fought with”. But the artillery, there was three and a half thousand rounds in six hours were blown into that area, that is a hell of a lot of artillery.

I don’t know, I honestly do not know,

you know they might of thought they were a bit out of range, you can knock an artillery round over a thousand metres, they were only a thousand metres away from the task force. And Long Tan was an old village that was relocated too, we’d moved out of. Yeah I don’t know, like I said in those days, I’m talking of today with the experience, twenty years experience behind me, but in those days it didn’t even register to me why they’d do that and why they wouldn’t do that.

Like I said, I was only a private soldier and I wasn’t really interested in tactics and that, that was for the officers and all that to do. So looking at it today after being an instructor in infantry for twenty years, you say it was a blunder really to do something like that. They were either waiting for more to come down and they thought, “Oh yeah, we’ll just give them a bit of a hurry up”, or they didn’t like Col Joy’s music or something, I don’t know. That could have been it because the

D Company blokes were going out to the scrub and all they could hear was Col Joy’s music, so that might have been it.

It could of, yes, but then when it comes back to it, most of their rounds that they fired into the task force landed in no man’s land sort of thing, it didn’t hit the battalions. See the two battalions that were down at thing

didn’t get the artillery, it landed in sort of the middle area of like us blokes, ARU, which had the post office and the reinforcements, a few engineer little bits and pieces, and it sort of concentrated into there, where the rest of it was around it. So that might have been a mistake with them, from that situation.

Col Joy was there, Little Patty was there, they were the singers, Col Joy and his band, Little Patty. I couldn’t say who was on stage; they were mostly on stage all together, because they only had a little tent behind sort of thing to change in, it was pretty makeshift sort of stuff. I’ve got some good photos of it, but I was a fair

way back. You have the whole task force, or most of the task force except skeleton crews like manning the perimeter and that and people not on patrols and that, there. But they’re all there with all their gear and their radios and they all have to stay in one group and if they get called well they’ve got to go. And what was happening was the band was playing away and everybody was happy and all of a sudden this artillery started firing ‘boom, boom, boom’. And it just got going longer

and longer and longer, and you seen these groups leaving, the people leaving, which were the battalion blokes getting called back to go back to the battalion. And they were told that there was a big contact, and that’s all we sort of heard was there was a big contact was going on and the artillery was just continuously going and going and going. And then like the activity around the task force itself was going on, like the vehicles started moving everybody, then Col Joy

and them, you couldn’t hear them because of the artillery, and they just closed up shop there and then. I don’t know how Col Joy and them got back to Vung Tau actually because the choppers [helicopters] that dropped the ammunition into Long Tan were the ones that brought them there I think, were the Australian ones that brought them there. So they must of went somehow, I don’t know. But there was a thing too; Col Joy and his Joy Boys were in Townsville in 1968 when

the battalion and D Company were presented with the unit citation and we had a big parade and they brought all the Long Tan blokes back that had got out of the army, they flew them all back to Townsville. I remember that vividly, oh I remember that very well, because it cost me ten dollars and seven days CB [Confined to Barracks], Barry Magnusson again, yeah, “Let’s go over to the sergeants mess, there’s no more grog here”, oh yeah, I was still a serving member and everybody knew me. And Col Joy and them

there had done a little bit of a skit at their motel for a few of the blokes, on that weekend that they were up there. So I don’t know how they got back from there or anything like that, but it’s not a vivid sort of thing, because it wasn’t long after they started, that the artillery started going. It was after lunch that the concert started, it was around about three o’clock or so I think it was when the artillery and the battle sort of

started and it was just, “Get back to your units”, and everybody just sort of filtered away.

Barry was my section commander, he was a national serviceman, he was a lance corporal, he was the section 2IC at Long Tan, he got wounded,

and he took over the section because his section commander was killed. Anywhere you could find a beer, Barry knew where it was. Barry was the organiser of a lot of things. I think he was a Queensland State javelin thrower as a young fellow. I think he still holds the record at Kapooka for their sports days at throwing this javelin. And if there was something

that wasn’t legal, Barry knew about it and he’d say, “Lets go and do this, we get this or we do that” and being a young bloke used to follow along, and I used to follow because I trusted Barry. I slept in the same tent as Barry, we were in the bush we slept in the same hoochie together as Barry. He used to tell me where to go because I was the scout and he was the section commander, so you trusted him like that. The one in Townsville was when the citation was, I had a

1965 Falcon Ute [utility truck], as soon as we got there, they got there and I come into camp, “Let’s go to town”, in to town we goes, on the grog, late back that afternoon, supposed to be back for curfew, late back into trouble, didn’t cop anything for that. As soon as that was all over, “Let’s go to town”, into town and then the ute wouldn’t start when we were going to leave town. So he’s as drunk as a monkey, I was worse,

so we pushed this ute down the hill and got it started and come back to camp. Come back to camp, he didn’t get caught because he was a civilian, he was living in the camp but he was a civilian, I was the army person, I got caught out after curfew and probably about eleven o’clock that night, because the next day was the big parade and you were on parade for about two hours, and if you’ve been on the grog sort of thing you might fall over on the parade.

That didn’t cost me anything either, just a reprimand, but the night after the parade we had a big do, it was a do for the soldiers and that at the canteen and that sort of stuff, and all these civvies or ex soldiers were invited and so all the grog and anything. And ten o’clock come, closed because that was the curfew for the boozer, for the soldiers. And having not seen these blokes for, oh ’68, would have been about twelve months

I suppose, it was a big reunion, more grog, more grog, “Oh, the sergeants mess is still going”. So there was Barry Magnusson, I was the only serving soldier, John Quincy, Heslewood, I think Allen May, who else, probably Johnny Bear, oh about a dozen of us or so, “We’ll go to the sergeants mess”. “Where is it?” “I’ll show you.” I knew where the sergeants mess was. And we go over

and bowls in as proud as brass and they were all over there in their uniforms, like their white little coats and their red cummerbunds and all this, they had a formal sort of thing. And I always remember this bloke, I never used to get on with him, Bomber Harris they used to call him, he was a CQ [CQMS, Company Quartermaster Sergeant] and he got the name Bomber Harris because he was a bomber, a tail bomber in the dam busters in the Second World War. He’d been to Korea and Malaysia and then

was come in again and was going to go to Vietnam, and he knew me, “Get out, get out”, he come running down the big mess hall, “Get out, get out”. So we all turned around and went outside and old Bill McLaughlin, he was another staff sergeant he was a good bloke, he was B Company CQ and he said, “Come on fellows, get out of here before you start something”. So we all comes out and then he goes in and he brings us out a few jugs each and so we sit out the back. But the next day, they’re all going home

out to the air base, I ask me OC if I can go out there and say goodbye to me mates, “Yeah you can go out there with them and that”. Goes out there and what should Barry Magnusson have, the signing in register, the visitors’ register of the sergeants mess, which is a very precious book, like generals that visit there sign and all this sort of thing. Barry Magnusson had flogged it, I said, “You’re

mad, you’re mad, give it to me and I’ll take it back”. “No, no, this is my souvenir”. And they hold up the whole place, it was the air force actually, the RAAF, they held up the whole plane, searched everywhere, “Wouldn’t know”, No nobody come up with it”, “No, nobody’s got it”. They got to Brisbane and they wouldn’t let them off the plane until it came up, so he handed it over. Yeah but for my stage there of going into the sergeant’s mess was ten dollars fine and seven days CB and I’d

known Bev then not so long and she wondered where in the hell I’d got to because I disappeared for a week, I couldn’t get out of camp. And that’s the last with Barry, but Barry is still the same, he actually lives in Port Augusta now, I’m going to go over and see him but I’m tossing up all the time. The other time was Barry says to me he says, oh yeah Barry got into so much trouble then they took him out of our platoon and put him in 10 Platoon and then they took him out of 10 Platoon and sent him to B Company

and then he got wounded again in another big battle that B Company had at Bribie, and then they sent him home. When we came home on the [HMAS] Sydney, we come home on the Sydney, eleven days on the cruise and we got into Brisbane and who should be at the bloody wharf, Barry Magnusson and another bloke by the name of Peter Bevan, he was the one that got wounded this morning before we got the artillery dropped on us, that I said

I wasn’t too sure if he got shot by his own section commander or what he got shot, but he got shot in the shoulder anyway. And he was there, so it was Noel Clegg with his rifle in the back of this vehicle and probably about eight o’clock in the morning and they had all these pubs lined up and we toured all these pubs because we didn’t have to be back to the Domain until eleven o’clock, ten thirty it was, ten thirty to march through Brisbane. And these blokes were part of our unit and they were supposed

to, they were still in the army but waiting to get out, but they were supposed to be in uniform and march with us, but they were in civvies, no way in the world they were going to do it. So yeah, Noel Clegg was late getting back, unsecured of a firearm because it was in the back of…yes, but we went on leave, I still got on leave. Didn’t see Barry again until 1968

when we got into trouble then in Townsville, again, until probably about ten, twelve years ago, yeah would have been about twelve or so years ago, got a phone call one night and me daughter-in-law, or future daughter-in-law answered it and I come home and [she] said, “Oh, a bloke rang you up and oh he seemed terrible he was”. I said, “Where from?” she said, “Oh he left this number”. And I rang this number and it was a hotel in Port Augusta

in Adelaide and I said, “I got a phone call from somebody there, do you know anybody that was trying to ring anybody”. And this bloke yelled out something and then this bloke got on the phone, “Oh it’s Barry, Barry Magnusson”, “God, bloody hell, what do you want Barry, what’s wrong?” “Oh look mate, I’m down on me luck, me mother and that they’re pretty crook and they’re up in Brisbane and I’ve got to go up and see them and I’ll be coming through your place. I’m going to get the Indian Pacific”. He done

his homework because the Indian Pacific stops here in Orange, he said, “I’m going to get the Indian Pacific, I’ll be there on Tuesday and meet ya, only be stopping for a few minutes and then I’ll be on the way” he said, “But at the moment” he said, “I’ve got no money” he said, “Do you reckon you can lend me some?” And I’d lent Barry a hundred dollars to go on a second R&R [Rest & Recreation] when he went in Vietnam and never seen the hundred dollars, still haven’t seen the hundred dollars, and I said, “How much do you want, Barry?” He said, “One hundred dollars” and I said, “I’ll see what I can do” he said, “Here’s

me account number” and he give me his account number.

The morale was pretty fair but tension, there was a lot of tension, a lot of newer people coming in and I think

in that there could have been a bit of resentment, I don’t know. But there was tension and you could see it, a lot of it was sort of controlled but there was more open slather on the grog. Like our canteen used to stay open then and the two cans a day you used to get was a bit more and so on like that. I know a lot of us used to go in

groups to different companies for grog and that sort of thing. But there were a few more fisticuffs. The new blokes coming in probably felt the same as I did when I first come there, because a lot of the blokes were staying, they weren’t coming home with us. So how friendly are you going to get, and that’s one of the big things with the army,

you think you’re very good friends and that but you don’t try and be too close, especially when you’re over there because the next day you might not be there and he might not be there, or he’s gone and you’re still there or something like that. So you’re not real, your mates, your really good mates, not friendly, don’t get too attached, that you accept what’s going to happen. Little odds and ends and I think mostly what it was because it was more beer

and there was a bit more squabbling and so on. Because what we used to do, you used to only work one night out of three, on the front line because three sections and you used to have to only fill in one section area, so each platoon done that, so there was more time to get into trouble. And our camp was coming together very well then, it was just about finished so it was just sort of a little ongoing maintenance type of work.

Yes I went on rest and recreation, R&R; I went to Singapore. I wanted to go to Singapore because my brother was in Malaya at the time and we’d been in contact by writing and I told him that if I got down to Singapore could he get down to see me and he said he could. So we made it there and we met in Singapore, went there for seven days.

Oh drank and drank and drank, it was. I went there, there was one bloke from our company, Steve Williams, he was in the Q [Quartermaster] store, he was a national serviceman. And there were two other blokes, artillery blokes, one was an older fellow Frank Rowen, he was an artillery bloke and he was a character, he’d been around a bit too. And we just sort of hit it off and everywhere we went.

And what we done, we got a taxi driver and said, “How much are you going to charge us for the seven days?” and he was there at our beck and call, if we walked into a bar and stayed there for five hours he’d wait out the front, if we were there for half an hour he’d still be out the front, and he’d drive us here and drive us there. One funny part of it was there was a massive downpour in Singapore and it got flooded and he said, “We’ve got to get out and push, got to get out and push”. And Steve was the only bloke that was going to get out and he did get out and he took his trousers off, here’s Steve in Singapore trying to push

the taxi in his underpants and the coppers are going crook, Singapore coppers. So we got him back in the taxi and that and we waited and it went pretty quick, because all the drains and that fill up and it floods and then it just goes. And then we went back to where we were staying a hotel and more grog and so on, so that’s what it was, it was just a big binge.

Oh yes I’ve got a few photos of Singapore, probably half a dozen photos of

Singapore, of a couple of big buildings and parks, I don’t really know what they were but I took photos of them as I was going past in the taxi, sort of thing. We were more interested in women, oh I did get a suit made, tailor-made suit in three days in Singapore, so I had to go back and get that, had one fitting, one measure up then a fitting and then pick it up, the

third time; it wasn’t a bad suit either. Yeah that was about our sightseeing but most of it was nightclubs, chasing girls, grog, we didn’t see that much at all really.

Yeah, when we got to Singapore and that we had a couple of private talks ourselves

and that, cause he’d been to Borneo and that was terrorists in Borneo sort of thing, and we just sort of compared things like that. He thought I was a bit hyperactive, a bit overboard and I said this and that, and he said, “Well I’m going home shortly and we’ll be going to Vietnam”. And he did go home and as I was preparing to get onto the chopper to fly out to the Sydney to come home, he arrived into Vietnam with 2 Battalion and I said to the CQ, old Ron Gillies,

I said, “That’s me brother there, can I stay and talk to him?” So he took me off that flight and left me for a few and we had a bit of talk and that, and I got a couple of dollars Australian that he had on him and I give him all me Vietnam money and that was about it, I don’t know who won with the changeover. And that was good, yeah we just had a bit of a quiet talk about what things were like and what he should expect, but he thought I was a bit hyperactive, bit overboard. So he was an

older soldier, been in twelve months longer than me.

Probably not to say advice, it’s probably just to say, “Oh we’ve been doing this, we’ve been doing that, this happened and that happened” and so on. It was all six months that I’d been in Vietnam of telling him in a couple of days type thing. Yeah and he was a bit more settled than I was

and he thought I was a bit of a ratbag racing from here to there and chasing women and grog and all that sort of stuff, and that’s all we were doing. And he’d been in Malaya for about twelve months before that, sort of thing.

Hell of a lot. You could always find grog because people from home used to send you

packages. I remember my auntie sent me a fruit cake and it was all sewed up in calico and in a tin and when I opened up, it nearly made me pass out, she’d poured a bottle of whiskey all over it. And then you’d get parcels with cans of beer, a six-pack and all this sort of stuff, so you always had it there and that was your little private supply. And after you’d been to the boozer and got as many into ya as you could in the two hours

it was opened then you could go back and have a warm one, sort of thing. But it was a bit lax on certain occasions, I remember we were on operation; there was an operation Duc 1 and Duc 2, that was the one where we secured the road. And we come back on New Year, and the CQ was pretty good there then, he said, “Right ya’s are only allowed a couple of cans of beer” he said, “But Corporal Moore,

keep an eye on them, I’ll trust you” and let us take a couple of cartons into the tents, which you were supposed to have in the tents. So we had a pretty full-on thing there and the next day we head back out again, that was sort of our rest. So they sort of wavered it a bit and sort of things like that.

Well that’s what it was, you used to be out in the bush, the odd time they’d come out and resupply ya they’d give you a can, you had a choice two cans of beer or two soft drinks. Now most of the time you wouldn’t have beer because it would be warm and you didn’t really want to drink warm beer, so you’d take the soft drinks and the lollies and that sort of stuff. But you couldn’t sort of save it up till you got back to camp. But there were a lot of people

in camp, soldiers that didn’t drink at all, and “Oh righto, matey, I’ll have yours and you can have my soft drinks” and you used to get a supply. And coming back from operation well then everything used to go because it was into the grog, back to work again, it was just sort of a release that way. And grog did play a fair bit and you could find grog

anywhere, and you’d go to a lot of different means and that to get it around the place.

Oh devious means. I was the forward scout, we had this bloke called Peter Detman, oh he’s a massive man, and he was a machine gunner and his number two was Shortie Brown. Now Shortie was about four foot nothing, real little short bloke he was, and Detman, oh he was

six foot odd, big fists and that on him. And every time we’d go to the movies or anything like that, we used to have to come back and the Admin [Administration] Company Q store was there, was a big tent and it had barbed wire and that all around it. But they used to have rations and all that in there and they used to stand guard while I used to skinny under the tent and all that. And odd times you’d find a carton of beer and a carton of rations and away you’d

go and back to camp that night, that would probably be eight, nine o’clock at night. And you’d get back there and you’d cook up the rations that you just salvaged and drink the beer, on your merry way. Other ones were do little patrols to other companies and if you got caught by the senior NCOs you’d get kicked out, because they knew who was in their company, but you had mates in there that would get you a few beers and that, you

could sort of hide in the shadows and get your grog and that sort of stuff, yeah. A lot of that happened when Barry left D Company and went to B Company, because he was my contact over there then and I could always visit him.

Christmas time, I just showed you a photo there of me having a brew, sitting in the bush. Christmas Day I was on patrol but it always happened, if you were on patrol or anything like that the cooks

used to always make up a fantastic meal and that and set it all out so it was like a Christmas dinner, and you used to get a couple of beers. Like of a daytime, you weren’t allowed to have grog, it was only when you knocked off that night, that afternoon. But set it out and the senior NCOs, which is a tradition in the military, senior NCOs and officers used to feed ya. So you didn’t sort of miss out on a Christmas thing like that. But then there was other times when you’d have, there’d be a company barbeque, so the company

would sort of knock off, the ones that weren’t working, say at two o’clock and we’d have a barbeque and a big sing-song and a grog-up and all that sort of stuff, where the whole company would be together sort of thing. And then you’d finish that probably about eight o’clock that night and everybody would be back into their own little stashes and so on like that. So you were trusted in a way but you could always get it, as long as you didn’t break their trust and go silly on it.

Getting a fair bit, because the thing that I found was mail is the greatest morale thing going, it doesn’t matter if it’s a two line letter or something, you get a letter and you can read it twenty times, over and over again. Getting a letter was phenomenal, I used to write to me sisters and I used to write to me Dad and me uncles and aunties, me brother and that. And I had a couple of blokes that had sisters that

wanted to write to a soldier and that sort of stuff, so you wrote to three or four girls back home here, just for the mail to keep flowing. And then some of them, me uncles and aunties, they’d always send you a package and there’d always be a couple of cans of beer or something in it, and that sort of thing, or a cake. We used to have, after a while we got that many cakes in our platoon that we used to have, “Righto morning tea tomorrow will be at your tent and we’ll eat your cakes”. Next day it’s at his tent and we’ll eat his cakes, because you used to get so many cakes and that,

used to get around the platoon like that.

In the packages probably, just mainly the letters. A big thing that we did miss was like the Women’s Weekly and that sort of stuff, the Women’s Day, the Women’s Weekly [magazines]. The girlie magazines, they were a dime a dozen, you could get them everywhere.

The prize possession though of anybody was a book, like a novel, something like that, because it would start off in a platoon and the first bloke would start reading it, when he’d finished the first couple of paragraphs he’d rip them off and they’d go to the next bloke, and go down like that. And if you’re at the end of the line and somebody lost the last bloody paragraph you were very cranky, because your story…and that’s how it used to go, the book used to go down and you could be two operations

before you finished that book, because that was a very prized possession if you had a book. I remember reading things like, I think it was The Carpetbaggers, Harold Robbins was a very good one, they were big books and that and you’d take so much off and it would go round the platoon sort of thing, yeah like that, especially the section and that. A few of the other books were those little cowboy ones, those Zane Greys [author of Westerns], the cowboys and Indians ones. But a book was a real prize possession; you had first

choice if it was yours and you read the first couple of paragraphs and then you give it to the next bloke, and then you kept reading, so you had the book right through, the other bloke had to wait probably two days because you didn’t read that part so he didn’t get it until you got it, “Come on, hurry up, get on with that book, read it”, that was one of the big things. I never was a bookworm but over there you were because that filled in time.

Well we done a hell of a lot, as I said we built our area because it was just a rubber plantation when we got there, so we had to build the whole lot. So in between operations, it was just like work parties on and on and on. We had our volleyball teams, we used to play volleyball, we used to play touch football. There was, oh this happened everywhere, the scorpion and the frog fights and all that sort

of stuff and you used to get the big spiders and that and used to throw them in a tin and stir them up to fight one another and that sort of stuff. Other things was, I know John Quincy and John Heslewood they had this record and it had Melbourne Cups in it, and this was our gambling record, and they were gamblers, they were the bookies. And it had these different tracks you used to get into it and it would start off, “and they’re racing in the such and such Melbourne Cup and Night March has taken off from so and so and Phar Lap and so and so” and

then as it went, it could change a track so you wouldn’t know which one was going to win. And it would go through like that and then, “They’re in the straight and such and such and so and so”; they’re all the same horses but the track would change in the middle and you’d have your bet before the things started. You had five or six horses there and you’d have your bet on it, you know with the odds and that, that was gambling, that was a prize possession that was, what Quincy and them had. But no to get the bet on and all that sort of stuff, I never gambled much but

yeah because it was only a couple of dollars or something like that, where you used to go pay-day to pay-day and you’d get ten dollars and you could live comfortably and have a good gut full of grog and smokes, you were pretty right because there was, get ten dollars, and ten cents for a drink and ten cents for a packet of smokes. They used to issue your smokes in your rations, so really it was pretty good living. But we only used to get, I don’t know probably by the end of it got about twenty-seven

dollars or something it was a week, it wasn’t much I can’t remember too much, there in me pay books I’ve got them there. But yeah everything was cheap, very cheap and I think that’s one of the things where you could drink a hell of a lot.

Yes I remember them really well; it was after the big

contacts and that our company was sort of mixed and I begged the platoon commander to go in to be his batman [officer’s assistant], because his batman was wounded and went home, and he said, “No, you stay where you are”. I didn’t want to be scouting anymore. I suppose I was getting on tenterhooks because our whole section was sort of changing over and there was still only from the original, when I went there, there was Allen May, but he was sort of wounded again

and he was then put in charge of the canteen type thing, and Dougie Fabian was the only one, Dougie and Darby Munroe were the only ones that were sort of there that went there when I went there. Because Barry had gone, been wounded again and went home, Johnny Bear had gone, he went to Admin Company because he was a fitter and that and then he become, he went right up to be a major or something in the army as an armourer with weapons and all that sort of stuff. And it was all new people coming in and I think

then it was the sort of trust was starting to waiver a bit and I got into platoon headquarters. And the rest of the sections, there was only the one or two blokes that were left in them because the rest of them were changing all the time, that’s how I finished me time off as the platoon commander’s batman.

Oh I just had to go with platoon headquarters, I used

to have to man the radio with them, if he was away on a reconnaissance or orders or something like that, I used to have to make sure I had a brew made up for him, you know so that when he come back he wouldn’t have to make a brew up and that sort of stuff. My other job was platoon laundry man, because all our clothes used to be washed by the South Vietnamese, the Hoa Long, and I used to have to control that. They used to have to give them to me and I had a big book,

that was the batman’s job, of all the numbers, everybody had a number on their clothes. And that went away and when it come back, I had to sort it into their things, “Right, come and get it”, and make sure they got their things and make sure that the wash-house didn’t keep any stuff that they could give to the North Vietnamese or anything like that, report things like that, that sort of thing. But it wasn’t right at the front again, it was sort of a bit safer position with the platoon commander and the platoon sergeant and the sig [signaller] and the medic, five

man group.

Oh the last couple of months, would have been probably around April, May, yeah because we came home oh beginning of June, just for that time.

Mainly because of the changing section behind ya, the changing people. When I first went there the blokes that were there, I fitted in with them and then the odd other few that come just after me fitted in and we knew how one another thought, worked and everything together and it just sort of went on. But then when those people started to leave, like me section commander, then you get another section commander

and he was a completely different person, he wouldn’t let you make any decisions yourself sort of thing, he was a sort of a demanding type, he did all the things, “You do as I say, you don’t do this and you don’t go there”, and that sort of stuff. And the soldiers and that behind you too, they were as good as ya but they were sort of like you when you first were sort of learning and coming through. But you just sort of

were a bit wary of if something was to happen, you’re probably frightened I’d say, yeah a bit frightened of saying, “Well we’re getting close to going home and we don’t want anything to happen now, and we’ll go home”. But one time we went out on a patrol and the platoon commander made me go back to the section. I went back to the section, yeah we hadn’t had a contact for about six weeks, bang the first contact in that section, but that was alright. That was one of those ones I

told you before where you run into them, it was silly. We were coming back from patrol and we got a report that there was four VC seen moving towards Hoa Long in a certain patch of area, this pilot had seen them so we were redirected to go there. We goes and we coming along this road in a banana plantation and as we come along the road, these four blokes were sitting down in this banana plantation, just sitting there like that, there they are.

The machine gunner, get the machine gunner up here, and he got on the ground and the other blokes sort of filtered out ready like this and then come up and then they looked up and seen us at the same time and then the machine gunner started firing, everybody started firing and they started running and going everywhere, we got two packs and a rifle, no bodies. So that’s one of those sorts of thing, yeah that sort of thing, and that was it. And then we come back from there

and I was back in the platoon headquarters again and it was just about time for home. Except in May, probably a couple of weeks before we come home, we used to always have a section on the helipad [helicopter landing point], we used to call it Eagle Farm, because there was a helicopter always there, it was a reaction section. And there was a platoon was the reaction platoon but they just do their normal day stuff, but the section had to stay there at the helicopter all the time. And we got this report,

must have been about four o’clock in the afternoon, five o’clock in the afternoon. Sergeant Buick came racing over to the boozer, “Get out of here, you blokes”, see we were allowed to do that sort of stuff, “Call out”. The section that was on the helipad had already gone in the first helicopter and then we got in the next helicopter, we went that fast, I don’t know what we were going to do when we got there, we had our ammunition, just our basic weapon, we didn’t have our packs or nothing, so we didn’t have any tucker, just had our water and that sort of stuff. And this helicopter

was doing a hundred and ten knots, flat strap [maximum speed], and it was just shuddering like this, “Where are we going, where are we going?”, “There’s a chopper been shot down, going to pick him up”. And he’s flat strap and that was terrifying, because we were going home shortly and we were sort of on our own. But there was a section in front of us and then there were other helicopters to pick up that, but it was sort of one section had already gone and then we’d jumped on and it was just our platoon headquarters part, and we’re going and this helicopter’s going like

this. And then all of a sudden it was vroom, turn around and come home; he’d been picked up. So that was terrifying, really terrifying, “I’m going home and you’ve got me out doing this”. Bob Buick even talks about it because he wrote a letter into our newspaper and said, “All them bloody officer bastards, they were all having their going-home party and we had to go out there a couple of days before we were going home”.

But other people see it in different ways, some people say that didn’t happen, but I know it happened because I was on the helipad and that, yeah, helicopter and that. So things like that happen, bang at that time.

Yes and probably drank more grog, few more arguments broke out. I only had one fight in Vietnam and I’d

come back up from 12 Platoon, drunk, back to me tent and the blokes that I lived with were in there, they were having a card game. And I don’t know whether I wanted to go to bed or what, or just stirring or what, but I said to one of the blokes I said, “Come on have a go at him, you’ve got a good hand there, bet him up” and all this sort of stuff, “Shut up, get out, get away”. And I always believed

until 1986 it was that it was a person that I had this little bit of a wrestle with, he jumped at me and we wrestled out the tent and then it was over sort of thing like that, just a card game. And I thought it was this Dusty Miller, but when I went back to the first reunion in 1986 and Allen May, which we lived together for nearly twelve months side by side, he said, “Cleggie,

this is the only bastard I had a fight with in Vietnam or me whole time in the army”. So it was Allen May and I didn’t realise, I thought it was this other person. So the tensions were getting there.

Yes we come home in the Sydney, on the big boat, the big aircraft carrier, we got choppered out from Nui Dat from our helipad straight out to the boat

and we had it all, they were loading, like there was landing barges coming out and all that, and we just all got put on there and then we come home. Eleven days it was, we were to arrive in Brisbane on the Monday, I think it was the 10th June, oh I’d have to check on this, but the Monday was a public holiday and it come around and it said, “We won’t be arriving until the Tuesday”, so we had another day on this terrible boat. And I used to get so seasick I couldn’t

live inside, I used to sleep out on the deck and that sort of stuff because every time I went inside I was crook, get crook. But one thing I did do though, on the boat you used to get these big twenty-six ounce cans of beer, big can they were, and if you give the platoon sergeant a hand to get them, and that was to go down into the bottom of the boat and drag them up, you used to get an extra one. But they used to open it and by the time you’d finished the first one the other one was hot, but you used to keep drinking it, still getting the grog. And we stopped

right up the top of Australia there somewhere and we had to stay there for nearly a day, and all the navy blokes went over the side and painted the side, and some of the blokes jumped in, went out on their boards and ropes and that and had a bit of swim and that sort of stuff. The reason was because we couldn’t go to Brisbane because the Monday was a public holiday and the march through Brisbane was for the Tuesday sort of thing. And we had to reverse

all the way up the Brisbane River so they painted one side of the boat, to the side.

To come home?

It was excellent, we didn’t know what to expect really on the boat but it was, there was no real discipline, it was just like our normal parades. On the boat

they used to have these sporting quizzes and that at a certain time of day and we used to go into all teams and we used to listen there for the questions and answer and send them down for the winners and that sort of stuff. We used to do some shooting off the back of the boat, play a bit of volleyball, bits of things and that sort of stuff, but it was more just relax, there’s no more war, you’re going home. But talking to me brother and cousin and that

sort of thing, get on a plane in Vietnam and the next day they’re in Australia, so that was the change, bang straight like that. But I didn’t have that, we got on our boat and come home, leisurely eleven days, had a beautiful suntan, all that sort of stuff.

It probably did, I think it did but I was still pretty wild when I got home, I still couldn’t get enough grog.

I wanted to get here and get there because there was nobody really from the Sydney part that I’d joined the army with. And then me mates that I’d come back to, they’d gone their own way, or left where they were living and that sort of stuff and different things, so you never knew them. And the only people that I had to go and see was a couple of blokes that I used to write to, that I worked with when I first went to Sydney, I used to write to them all the time, went and seen them. A couple of me cousins

that used to live out somewhere else and just get on the grog of a weekend. Most of me time was me uncle had a delivery truck and I used to get up of a morning and go with him, deliver different things. He used to go to a factory or something and pick up some stuff and then deliver it over to Manly or somewhere, and here, there and that sort of thing. And then Friday nights and Saturdays, I used to head out to me cousins’ place out there, they were a bit older than me and we used to get on the grog and that was it. But when we did come to Sydney,

there was three of us, we made a date that at a certain date we’d meet at the Tattersall’s Club in the city and have a night out, and that was Jimmy Bourke, he was a nasho, and J. J. O’Ryan, he was a nasho too. And we met in there with our suits and all that sort of thing for a big night out and we were into the Tattersall’s Club for the Tattersall Bar, that was big stuff in the city. Went in there and then we ended up out at

Coogee, the Coogee Bay Hotel, and they got onto a couple of girls and I didn’t, but I got home the next day so I must of tied up with somebody along the lines somewhere, had a bed somewhere anyhow. Got home the next day and me uncle said to me, he said, “Oh you must have had a good night”, yeah.

Fantastic, we’d seen Australia

all the way down the coast, we come in through the reef, we’d come all the way down through the reef and coming into Brisbane, see we’d all been checked by Customs in the ocean, they’d checked all our lockers, all our stuff that we had to make sure we didn’t have dirt and that in our boots and this sort of stuff, and we were all ready to march. So we were all dolled up and we had our little ribbons on and we had to line the decks, like they still do today, they line the decks, and standing up there and all

the people down there, well I didn’t have anybody met me except Barry and that sort of thing. But the people yelling out and waving and, “Oh there he is” and waving and the blokes, you weren’t supposed to, but they’d wave back and all that. So the discipline was still there but we were allowed to do the waves and all that sort of stuff. And then like I said, it was sort of down the gangplank and these blokes grabbed me and on the grog again and march through Brisbane, on the grog.

Caught a plane to Sydney that night, that’s when me sister, me father and me brother met me, me younger brother, and they took me straight to the pub at Rozelle where me grandfather was and I was the big hero, still in me uniform and they’re introducing me and everybody’s giving me beers and congratulating me and all this. And that was pretty good until a couple of days later I went out with Dad and Elsie, Elsie very good friend, Dad and Elsie

were together, she was a Second World War, she was one, went to Japan and had the Korea part of it, she was a nurse, she was an excellent women. And they took me to the Drummoyne RSL [Returned and Services League club], I remember this because there was a massive dust storm that night over Sydney. Went in the Drummoyne RSL and I was having a good time there and Dad and Elsie were dancing and that and I was drinking me beer and I was in me uniform, me polyesters and that sort of stuff. And

I don’t know what it was, but Dad had said to the MC [Master of Ceremonies] band bloke, he said, “Oh me son’s back from Vietnam” and the bloke announced over the thing, “Oh, we’ve got a soldier just back from Vietnam, Noel Clegg, everybody cheer him, stand up Noel”. I was so embarrassed I left; I said to Dad, “What did you do that for?” I didn’t want to be a hero or anything, I don’t know

what it was. And I walked outside and this bloody great dust storm was going, so I sulked for a few minutes and then went back inside. I remember that because of that big dust storm, but I remember that and this bloke gets up on the thing, “Oh, we’ve got a soldier back from Vietnam”, I said “Gees, I don’t want to be standing out in a crowd”. I don’t know what it was, I still don’t know to this day actually what it was, but I just didn’t want glory or anything like that, I was just being a soldier, that was it.

It was pretty good here in Australia when we come home, Brisbane was excellent, our march through Brisbane was fantastic. It’s like when they had the Welcome Home parade in Sydney, a lot of the blokes were ringing one another and that sort of stuff about carrying bloke’s flags that had died and that sort of stuff, and getting that all organised and where we were going to stay in Sydney and organising hotels and where we’d meet and all that sort of stuff.

And there was a few of the blokes said, “No I’m not going because I had my welcome home in Brisbane, I was very happy with that”. And I said, “Yeah well, we did have a great welcome home” but I went and then a few of them went too and I’m really happy that I did go, because it was a welcome home. And then I went to the Canberra one and that was a reunion, so the two different parts of it, the welcome home, yes march through Sydney and everybody cheer ya,

clap ya and all that sort of stuff and then go and have a few beers and then we all dispersed sort of thing, that was it, went our own ways again. And then the Canberra one was more of a, “Oh, Sydney was great but this is beaut too, lets have a big party”, and that’s sort of what it was, a big sort of reunion in Canberra. But the welcome home we got in Brisbane was phenomenal, it was phenomenal, it was completely different to a lot I seen later on of

the things. Even 1 Battalion when they come back from Vietnam, the first tour, a woman raced out and threw red paint over the CO, I don’t know whether this should be on tape, but a bloke told me, I said, “I didn’t know who it was” and a bloke told me he said, “Oh yes I know who it was”. Do you want to know? They said it was that Ros Kelly the parliamentarian, but she was a parliamentarian later on, but I don’t know whether that was it or not. But talking to me

brother-in-law and a few of the other blokes later on, because in 1969 I went to 1 Battalion, and a few of them were the older fellows that had been in the first tour and second tour and they said, “Yes she got a few bruises on the way down through the ranks” you know, bash, elbows and that sort of stuff. But a bloke told me that only here a few years back, he said, “Oh that women was Ros Kelly the politician”.

I didn’t know, but I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but he just said straight out, he said, “Oh that was…she was a uni student or something then.

Yes we were aware while we were in Vietnam because the Jeparit, which was a merchant navy ship, supply ship used to bring all our supplies, they went on strike, we got all that, we got nothing. Like at Christmas time 1966 there was no grog from Australia and one of the people in the company done some wonderful magician job

that an American truckload of grog turned up, American beer. But they were on strike; they would not give us stuff. We had to at times when the Jeparit arrived at Vung Tau go down and unload it, we had to send work parties down, I never got one of those, but a couple of me mates did, they reckon it was pretty great because you used to get all the fresh milk and this sort of stuff. And go down and help unload it and they used to get all the stories there. But the wharfies here in Australia wouldn’t load it to send it over to

them. We used to hear that and we used to think it was pretty bloody rotten that they couldn’t support us. But they still do it today, they’ve threatened to do it today so, but that’s what they call a democracy.

When I come home, it still wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t until later on

that you got the gibes and you didn’t want to go out in uniform. Once wearing a uniform was excellent, because you were a soldier and that was it and you were proud of it. But then the uniform was off and you didn’t want to be a soldier. And I know myself a lot [wanted] to know “What do you do? “I’m a public servant” and that was it and forget the conversation, go on to something else, put it aside and never say you were a soldier.

Because people might not of, but people could of, but family never done anything like that, that I can remember, there may have been somewhere along the line but my family never done anything like that; they were proud of me and they reckon it was great and all this sort of stuff.

Not when I come back from Vietnam but later on through me military career up

into the 70s, yes it did happen. There’s still a thing goes in Townsville at the moment and Singleton and that, “Oh, there’s all the AJs, the army jerks”, that’s just a normal thing from the civilians. When we come back from Malaya in 1971, the cyclone hit Townsville, we had no power, we had nothing, we all had to go back to work and leave our wives and kids and my

baby was…

Yeah, like we were the ones, the whole army got called back on Christmas Day, we had to go and clean up the whole of Townsville, and these people standing in hotels and that calling us jerks, taking our job, yeah makes you feel really wanted. And Townsville today is still a town,

they keep saying it’s a garrison city and all this sort of stuff, but you’ve still got that attitude same as Singleton. If you took the army out of Townsville and Singleton they’d die, really. But it’s just the attitude, not all the people, but there’s a lot of attitude like that. But I didn’t get anything too much about Vietnam, any slander or anything like that, because my role was come back from there, training

to go back again, go to Singapore-Malaysia, which was two years and then come back from there and went to an instructor at Singleton. So really there wasn’t that much of mixing with the public, you never mix with the public too much. Singleton I did in a way, I met some really good friends and I’ve still got some good friends there because of the kids going through their soccer and all that sort of stuff, and we’ve still got good friends and that up there, and we still contact

with. But no I didn’t get much. The thing that gives me the willies mostly is people, “Oh, you’re a soldier, go to Vietnam did ya?” “Yeah.” “Oh did ya kill anybody?” They ask you stupid questions like that. And then the other people are saying, “Oh, you Vietnam blokes, you poor buggers, Jesus I was lucky, I got called up but I didn’t pass the medical, but I wanted to go” and all this and

that sort of stuff, and you think, “Well, you could always volunteer”. Or “I didn’t get the ballot” and that, “Well you can always volunteer if you want to”. A lot of people seem to, and I feel as if they feel that they’re guilty sort of thing, and I said, “Oh well don’t worry about it, good on ya, look at us poor buggers now, look at the situation we’re in, so you’re lucky”.

I’ve had a lot of problems but I’m dealing with them.

I don’t mind telling you I go and see a psychiatrist. I wouldn’t for years because a psychiatrist to me was if you went to a psychiatrist, they were going to lock you up somewhere like Callen Park, the looney bin, which used to be our sort of thing. But today seeing a psychiatrist, you talk to a kid today and it’s just like going to the dentist or something, psychiatrist is just another helper. I see a psychiatrist in Sydney, I’ve been seeing him since, oh about 1994, ’93 or something and we have a fantastic time and he has helped me

great. I go and see him again in about three weeks time and I’m going to tell him all about this and he’s going to be wrapt, he is because that’s what he wants me to talk about, get rid of that and enjoy life. Because when we get down there and talk about it we talk about, he’s an overseas person, and we talk about his country and this and that and I know there’s over two thousand varieties of avocados in India, grown in India, his golf wasn’t so good last

week, things like this. And I said to him, “Don’t you want to hear anything else?” He said, “You’re going well” because he wants me to talk about other things and get like me war experiences off me mind. And it’s excellent, I enjoy it, I enjoy going down to see him.

To tell you the truth I don’t know, I honestly do not know. All my life right up until the 90s, I thought I was a normal person until one day I just seemed to be doing everything and getting nowhere. And I just sort of hit the wall as they call it, as if I’d walked into a brick wall and couldn’t go any further. And I needed somebody to help me

and that was it, Bev said, “You’re so close to a nervous breakdown it wasn’t funny” sort of thing. And that was it and I went and spent three weeks in a clinic there and from there is where, over that time it’s given me a bit more insight into me whole thing and let me look back a bit more. But before there was nothing wrong with me, everybody else was a problem, because I was a hundred miles an hour and that’s where I’m going

and don’t get in me way. And that’s exactly what life was, hundred miles an hour.

Oh simple things of I would plan me day, nothing could change that day, don’t you dare, it doesn’t matter, don’t you dare change my plans that I’ve got mapped out for that day.

And I used to have a diary, I’m five minutes early, if you’re five minutes late I’ve gone, always even, not so much today but that was my life. I think I didn’t understand it while I was still in the army because it was all so full on of adrenalin and everybody was in the same way and if you got into trouble it was sort of worked out in-house type stuff. You used to get your reprimands

and all that sort of stuff but it was in-house sort of stuff and nobody else knew. But anybody outside the army that had made an appointment with me for say two o’clock, I was there at five to two, if they weren’t there at five past two I left and I’d abuse them for not turning up. It didn’t matter, they had no excuse, it didn’t matter if they’d broken their leg and couldn’t get there or something like that, they had no excuse, they couldn’t be relied on. And that’s how

my whole life was evolving, going that way, it was so timetabled and so set out, nothing could get in the way, nothing, not even me family could get in the way, it was me, I was going to do that. And even today there’s no problems to me, because if there’s a problem I make it work, I don’t let it fail, I won’t let it fail to the best I can do. But lately I just sort of say, “Oh well that’s not

a real problem”, but before it used to be nothing, no problem to somebody, but it was a huge problem to me or thing to me. I think that probably has, I don’t remember doing that as a young fellow, I can remember before me auntie died that I grew up with and I asked her about a lot of different things, did I have these problems or anything like that and she said, “You always were a pretty wild sort of a kid running here, running there, active sort of thing, but

never anything like that sort of thing”. So yeah I don’t know, I just cannot explain it. There’s only one person explained it to me and that was a doctor, he’s out at Wellington actually, I went and done a course in 1995 or something that these Vietnam counselling people do for this post-traumatic stress thing. And he actually was a national serviceman but he was doing his doctor’s thing and he never went to Vietnam but he went to the hospital in Sydney where all the wounded

and that come back to. And he was, he said, “The problem is with you blokes” he said, “You’ve never been taken down off that height, so your adrenalin’s up there and it’s stayed there” he said, “And you look back and you see most of ya, a lot of ya stayed in the army, a hell of a lot of ya went to the police force, the fire brigade, the ambulance service and all this” because they had to have that big adrenalin stuff. So I suppose it’s something that the army does to you, in that way, I can’t explain it, I don’t

know. And he said, “Somebody’s got to let you down” and we expect everybody to be the same, we think we’re normal but we’re not. But all Vietnam veterans can get together and have a bloody good time, and it doesn’t matter if they are a little bit late or anything like that, they are forgiven. But if you’re not a Vietnam veteran or something like that, well you’re sort of not forgiven.

The Vietnam Veterans Association, I’m not a member of it at the moment, I used to be. I think they have made the RSL sit up, because the RSL was a situation, “Oh, the First World War blokes have had their time, we’ll have our time, then you blokes can have your time, you can fight for your benefits” and all this sort of stuff. Where the Vietnam Veterans got off their butt

and said, “We’re going to get what we deserve, we’re going to be looked after, we’ve got too many problems” and that was the situation yeah. They’re a great mob, some radical, some very radical, which I don’t agree with, but others have just put it down and went and helped, and they have helped, even here I’ve looked after Second World War blokes and put them through with Veterans Affairs to get their medical

and their health and that fixed up, because the RSL couldn’t do it, or didn’t want to do it or something like that. But they’ve pushed and pushed, where I think the RSL would ask and they’d say no, so they’d leave it, whereas our blokes didn’t because we had some very educated people. It’s probably the biggest mistake the government said, “We will select national service”, they didn’t say, “Everybody will be a national serviceman”; they selected the cream of the Australian youth.

And you look at them today and they’re doctors, they’re professors, there’s solicitors, there’s everything, and they all come back to help their own, and that’s one of the big things of Vietnam veterans. Anywhere in Australia and always, you can go anywhere and get that help from them.

It’s probably, I said it the other day, I

seen a mate of mine down here, he’s fifty-odd years old and he’s got this bloody pony-tail and this bloody earring in his ear and I said, “I’m going to get the bloody scissors and cut that thing off ya”. I don’t know, it must have been a lost part of our life or something; I didn’t go through it. A lot of blokes say it was two years out of me life, when we come home our parents wanted to have our twenty-first birthday,

like our big twenty-first birthday and that and the blokes said, “No I don’t want it, I’m twenty-two year old now. I don’t want to have a twenty-first birthday”. So they probably lost that sort of thing of life because that was the thing wasn’t it, an eighteenth birthday, a twenty-first birthday, big thing and a lot of blokes lost that. But with the long hair and all that sort of stuff, that was the sort of changing of the ‘60s and people were doing things they wanted to and these blokes weren’t allowed to, they had to have their hair cut short and do as they were told and when they got out, it come

to them a few years later. But yeah that’s it, I’ve never done it, it’s never worried me because I stayed in the army and I just grew that way. Yeah I could never, my hair is what it is today as what’s it’s always been sort of thing, from even a kid, sometimes a little bit longer but not that much. I don’t know what the radical part of it is, rebellious part, because we didn’t have our rebellious part. Where you’d been to Vietnam and you come home, you got out, everybody was

demonstrating, you couldn’t go and demonstrate because you were a Vietnam, you were one of these, what they used to say, you were one of these child killers and all this sort of stuff. Probably the media’s got a lot to bloody answer for, which they still have in Australia anyway, they’ve got too much say. Yeah can’t say why.

Yeah, that’s probably hit it with a nutshell, yeah, I went over to do something, I volunteered went over there to do it, whether it was right or wrong, I served me government, I was there to serve me government’s wishes and that was it. So why should I protest now, it would probably make me a hypocrite. But I do know one thing that happened today, you’ll find just about every Vietnam veteran, maybe some of them have a motorbike, but all others

will have a ute, it’s probably the culture of the ‘60s or something, a ute. Yeah you have a look around today everybody, just about everybody I know, has got a ute, so it’s probably something they thought they’d missed out on and they want to have it now, go through it now.

I think the national service, that’s where the government made the big,

the wrong decision of having selective national service, because before it used to be national service three months fulltime training and then two years part-time training, everybody done it. This time your names went into a hat on a date, just a date of a birthday, “You will go, you won’t, you will go, you won’t”. So it sort of, I believe it split that generation of people and still does today

when you talk to people that are your age that never went to Vietnam and like I said before have got that sort of guilt complex, whereby, “Oh I didn’t get called up but I would of if I’d have got called, if me number would have come out”. So it sort of, got a, probably that in a way if you know what I mean, bit of a complex in that sort of thing. So you’ve got one generation but it’s split in half, put it that way.

I used to say, this is a fair while back too, when it first come out that these people were having problems and that and I used to say, “Oh the bludging bastards, that’s bullshit” because I was a regular soldier and I was still tied up in it, in that sort of situation, my adrenalin, the rush everything.

These blokes had left, they had spent two years of life together and then left, in which you have today, you go back to these counselling services and you get twenty blokes together for a week and they have a ball. Their big problem is when they leave there, they’re on their own. So really they’re getting them back together and they’re thinking back thirty-odd years ago and then they’re saying, “Well, see ya later, if anything’s wrong with ya, ring us,

we’ll talk to ya”. So it probably works reverse I reckon, because I know when I went back to a couple of them, they always invite you back to have a talk to the next group that’s coming through and that’s what I say to everyone, “How’s your week been?” “Oh fantastic” when you talk to them at lunch and all that, “Great, remember this, we got together and done this and we went down the pub and all had a few beers and we done this and done that”, “Oh how do you feel?” “Oh great”. I said, “Well tomorrow

ya’s are going home” I said, “You’re going to be on ya own”. And that’s what it is, the army has moulded them together as a group and then I stayed in, a lot of regulars stayed in but then they just said, “See ya”, didn’t even say thanks to them really, paid them off and said, “You’re out” that was it. So that’s probably what a big thing happened to them, because I found that once I got out of the army, that hurt me, the camaraderie that was in the army, the familiness

that was there. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t talk to other people and that, I’d go to the pub, people would say, “Let’s go to the pub and have a few beers” and that sort of stuff. Well my excuse was I drink pretty fast and I wouldn’t get into a shout with them and if they started talking about something I didn’t want to talk about, well I’d go to the toilet, that was my excuse to get away from that conversation. I noticed that once I got out of the army, but when I was in the army

it was just grog and talk about anything, just fun times like we’ve been talking today. But it was civilians, I still call them civilians, people that haven’t been in the army, it’s the same thing if you haven’t done it, you’ll never know what’s it’s like. So the attitude, and I’m an arrogant person in that way, people start commenting Australian troops in Timor shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t be in Iraq,

shouldn’t have went to Afghanistan and all that sort of stuff, I cannot talk to those people because they just give me the willies. I think, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, I know what it’s like and I know that those soldiers, they’ve trained”. My son when he was going to Timor he used to ring me up and I’d say, “When are you going?” he said, “Dad” he said, “I’m not suppose to tell ya but we’re just on the verge of going” he said, “All the Ghurkhas [Nepalese troops] have arrived in Australia and other troops have arrived here and everything’s assembling at Townsville,”

he said, “And there’s all briefings going on” and I said, “What do you think about going?” he said, “Dad, I’ve trained twelve years for this, I’m not letting it slip through me fingers”. It’s just like being a motor mechanic, pull the car apart, put it back together, pull it apart but never allowed to turn the key to see if it works, and that was his attitude, and that was my youngest son when I spoke to him, before he went to, “I’ve trained for it, this is what I’m doing, I can’t train all me life and not see a final result”.

That is the attitude of military people.

Yeah that question, yeah I thought about that myself, I thought, “Now, me Dad never waved goodbye to me at the airport to go to Vietnam, he seen me go to Kapooka. I couldn’t wave goodbye to me sons to go to Timor” and it makes you think now “What was he feeling like,

how was he feeling when I was over there”. Now a sort of situation when you sit back and think about the wives and the mothers and that of their sons going off to war, yes. But I knew from my own background in the army that they’d been trained right and I personally knew General Cosgrove who was their commander because we served together and played rugby together, great mates, and I knew that he looks after his soldiers, he really looks after, his

men come first, there’s no glory for him, it’s his soldiers. And I knew that they’d be safe, you know if the worst thing happened well the worst thing happened, I’d accepted that and that was it, you accept that, but I knew that they’d be safe and yeah they’d trained for it and that was it. And even when they were in Timor, me young bloke went up and said, “Oh sir, me Dad said to say G’day” he said, “Oh, Sergeant Clegg” he said, “Wouldn’t be Noel Clegg, would it?” But that’s the type of person

he is, and I felt safe because he was a good commander and my boys were under him and it was an honour really to have them under him and I knew they’d be safe.

Not very well actually, we had a seminar, it was a week in Sydney about twelve months before I got out and we went to

this big hotel and we got all these people up and all these financial investors and all these people of public servants and all that sort of stuff of saying what was available to you because of your qualifications, we want you, the people want you out in the business world because you’re reliable and all this sort of stuff. And when I got out of the army, it was actually a, oh what do you call it, a shock, a culture shock.

It was sort of, “How in the bloody hell does this world work, because the army works”. And like I said before make it work, something’s there, you make it work. But this mob, “Oh well, I can’t get in today. Oh well, that can wait till tomorrow”. With the army it doesn’t wait until tomorrow, your job’s there, that job there is finished when you’re finished, it’s not knock off at four o’clock and go home and come back tomorrow, “We’ve got to finish it before we go”. And that was the culture shock sort of thing of that and I used to be

trying to do these things and people were saying, “What’s wrong with ya, it can wait”. But I always remember a bloke by the name of Steve Black, he was the secretary of a union and he addressed it at that same conference and we asked a lot of questions about, “Do we have to join the unions?” and all this sort of stuff. And as he was leaving he said, “Well fellows, long live the revolution” he said, “Because that’s what the bloody thing’s going to be like when you blokes get into the work force”, because of our questions and that

we’d asked him, he reckons there was going to be a revolution. Cause we’d all been twenty-year people and that sort of thing in the forces in one job and bang and you finish and all that sort of stuff. And that’s how we took it, I always remember that bloke and he wasn’t an old bloke either, “Long live the revolution”. So people see military people different, I found by going in, “Oh military yes, we love ya, great, you’re mighty” and all this sort of stuff. Want all your

knowledge and everything, but don’t try and exert it on us, “I’m the boss, I’ll take everything on board that you tell me but don’t you try and make a decision, I’m the boss, I make the decisions” that sort of thing, and that’s where I got into a lot of trouble actually and that’s where in the end was very frustrating. It was okay I suppose in the store because I had no responsibilities or nothing, I just had to give the kids their tools and all that

and learn what I could learn, and I learnt heaps. But then when I went as an Occupational Health and Safety Officer, safety was my main aim and it was just a blasé way, like the work covers and all that say, “Yes, you go to this course”, well in the army you advance on your record of how you do, like people will over-jump you if you’re not performing your performances and that. And it still makes me sick today to see,

and go to these courses and you get a certificate saying you attended. You can sit in the back and sleep the whole day or the whole week, and you still get a certificate to say you attended and that says you’re qualified to do this sort of thing and that. You attended but you’re not competent and that’s what I found and that’s what really frustrated me when I had the position of I had a boss above me, but I had the position there to teach people the safety, which was never there. And the way that the big businesses

and the people that do a lot of training today, training is so simple. I used to get asked by foremen that had been in a job for so long and supervisors, and I’d say, “Well, can’t you teach the bloke how to use a chainsaw?” “Oh no, I don’t know.” I said, “Well look at it this way, you’re the supervisor, you’re qualified using a chainsaw, aren’t ya?” “Yeah.” “Righto, well I supervised my son, he wanted to earn some pocket money, I got him out on the front lawn showed him how to put fuel in the

mower, showed him how to raise it, not to put his hands or anything underneath, start the mower for him, do a couple of laps like that and then watch him,” I said, “That’s supervised” I said, “So I can’t really be held, if he slips and his foot goes under the thing, I’d be sorry yeah but nobody can sue me over it” I said, “That’s supervising so you’ve trained that person”, “Oh no, no, we can’t give him a certificate”. That really craps me off today, that’s just a cop out of the people that are supposed to be up there training people

not wanting to take the responsibility, there’s my bitch.

Completely different now; all their qualifications are combined civilian, like my sons now they do a course, it is equivalent to the civilian course and they get a certificate, which is a civilian course. Ours never was, we just done a course,

we were qualified, you qualified and so on like that, and you were a jack of all trades really, had everything but never had a trade sort of thing. But the sons and that now they’ve got all these certificates of all these courses they’ve done, they are qualified, like as a platoon sergeant, my son is, there he’s a manager of thirty four people, right, now that’s a big job outside, that’s a manager, that’s probably not a section, that’s probably a division manager or something like that in civilian life, which he could do. But he might find it a bit hard because the

Commonwealth or the military is so rigid, that’s why the German Army got down because they keep so many records and that sort of stuff, that sort of thing. But he’s got certificates for all that, like me as a warrant officer, I was in charge of a hundred and twenty people, to feed them, to train them, to make their safety, to look after them, everything, make sure they were paid, their health and everything like that. So who’s got that responsibility in a civilian job, you know, you’ve got to be a general manager, something like that, but we never had the certificates for that, today they are on line

with all civilian courses and so on, which is excellent for them.

I thought it was a thing, and I still think it is today, that never finished, it was a letdown for the people that went there. We went there, done the thing that our country wanted us to do and then they all pulled out,

so you never achieved anything really. Because when we went there, we were supposed to stop all this communist aggression taking over South East Asia; well they went there for what ten years and they were pulled out and the communists took over. It was not like the Second World War where they beat the Germans and the Japanese and made them pay for their situation and the country was changed. And I still think that there was a cop-out by our governments

to the soldiers that went there to do it, because they thought, “Yes, we are working for our government and we are going to do the right thing for our government” and then they take you all out and it was a no-win situation. But you didn’t know that at the time, but that’s how I feel now and that’s how I’ve felt probably the last twenty years about that; it was never, you could never win it.

In which way

do you mean?

Bev reckons I play football in bed of a night, fighter and go on. I do, I’ll probably have after this, tonight and tomorrow night, last night wasn’t too good, tonight and tomorrow night I’ll probably have the worst sleeps I’ve ever had, probably won’t sleep because I’ll be thinking about everything I’ve spoken to you about, thinking about things that I should have told you but I couldn’t tell you, something like

that type of thing. Yes it is shock, memory coming back to ya that ya don’t want to have, that’s why you don’t talk about those things, I think that’s why soldiers together don’t talk about the bad things, they talk about the good things. You’ll always have soldiers when they get together they’ll laugh and cheer and go on and remember when you done that or done this, or so done that, or something like that; nothing about

nearly getting yourself killed or nearly killing someone else or something like that, that doesn’t come into it. And after this, it’s good for you I suppose to talk about it, get it off your chest but it’s still there and I know that after a few days I’ll feel like that, but I’ll get over it, I’m going pretty well. But like you say flashbacks, you can be

in a situation where it’s not working for ya, right, so ya get angry about it and ya going to make it work and you get so angry that you think, “Calm down, calm down” sort of thing. But you have these flashbacks of just memories, they just come, you can be laying in bed of a night and thinking about something great sort of thing and then all of a sudden,

“Why in the hell did I think about that?” Something might come back from twenty years ago; it’s like that. It’s things you can’t explain, like you can be driving along the road and you’re driving along and all of a sudden you start thinking about Vietnam, or start thinking about something you done in the army, twenty or thirty years ago. Just sort of comes back in your brain and you’ve had no

trigger reaction to it or anything. Except there’s a few things like loud noises, sometimes shock noises, like you might be standing somewhere and all of a sudden a door slams behind ya or something like that, you get a shock and you get into a bit of a cold sweat or something. But yeah it’s something that I really can’t explain. When you’re with the blokes you are with and a few beers and that you don’t think of them sort of things,

but later on you do.

Probably some of the worst things that you’ve experienced, but then there’s some other things that are, that nothing happened but you’re going along and you’re exactly in that timeframe and you say, “Why did we do that?” In your

mind, it comes out, “What was that all about, what brought that on?” You don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just never have been able to and nobody can really explain it to me, sorry I just can’t do it.

Can’t do it, but I can dream about things of a night, wake up in a cold sweat, dreaming about Vietnam, dreaming about different things, situations I got into and that sort of stuff. Yeah it’s

just subconscious.

I’ve always thought that and I look back and I talk to a couple of blokes on Anzac Day and we say, and he’s got the same thing he says,

“You’re a baby boomer, you’ve got to put up with that”. And we’re all baby boomers, all the Vietnam blokes, you look at it, and we’re all sons, or not all of them, but a lot of them of Second World War blokes and then probably a lot of their fathers were First World War blokes. Yes I’ve always thought about that, we’ve talked about that and say, “Is it something that’s in us?” But then again my young brother, yeah fair enough he’s a bloody

little drunk, that’s all he does is drink, drink, drink, works and drinks, but he never went to Vietnam and he feels, with me and me elder brother, he feels that he’s missed out, he does. And he said he got called up and Dad stopped it or something, or he had two sons in Vietnam or something and he hates Dad for that and he’ll tell ya straight, he hates Dad for that. But yeah, he seems to think he’s

missed out on something. But I don’t know, I cannot say, I’ve always thought of that one there of baby boomers, being a whole military sort of thing come through ya, but yeah we talk about it, Peter talks about it. Even on last Anzac Day, he said to me when we were talking about it, he said, “How’s your father going?” cause he knows I’ve had problems with him, his dementia and that sort of thing, and he said, “Oh well yes, I’ve been through that with Mum, that’s a problem with the baby boomers”. So

it could be, but nobody’s proved anything through that.

Not much at first, I was on the parade where they were told and got their medals and all that sort of stuff. There’s still a big stink about it and blokes got dolls given to them from the South Vietnamese President Thieu, presented them with

Vietnamese dolls, cigar cases and this sort of stuff. A few other blokes got medals in the company for bravery. When you look back at it, that was one of the major battles of Vietnam War, most people got killed, wounded and so on and the amount of bravery medals that went out, like you had three platoon commanders, one got killed, two fought a six-hour battle and got a MID, which is a Mention

in Dispatches, mentioned in the orders after the battle, where other people later on went to Vietnam and just about every platoon commander got a Military Cross, which our company commander which fought that big battle got a Military Cross. So there’s a discrepancy in the situation there a lot. The citation to them there today means a hell of a lot but there’s a hell of a lot of people abuse that citation and we’ve got a great thing going at the moment,

if anybody that we see that wears that citation gets jumped on from a very high place. Because that’s why our company sends out every year an update of our addresses, our names, who died, who didn’t, we get a newsletter every month of who died and who didn’t and all that sort of stuff, and we’re always coming across people that are walking around, “Oh I was in Long Tan”, “No you weren’t mate, you’re a bloody liar, you’re an impostor” and there’s a lot of them still in Australia

today. It means a hell of a lot to those blokes that they were given that because the whole lot of them were appreciated for it, not three or four that got bravery medals and that, the citation meant the whole company got it, we were honoured.

Well the Australian Government still goes under the English system where

you don’t get nothing much; lately there’s a lot of stuff flying around, still getting medals today that you never thought. The Australian Government because it’s just pressure groups today, national service, the three months blokes and the two years and that, got a medal struck for them because they pressured the government, “Why shouldn’t we get something cause we done something for the country”. And there are a lot of national servicemen that went to Vietnam

won’t wear the national service medal, they said, “Well you blokes were regs [regulars], you haven’t got a medal for going there, so why should we get an extra one for being a national serviceman?” And now there’s talk that the government’s going to strike one for regular soldiers, so it’s going to cost us more bloody money to do our medals up if they give us one, but if the government gives ya one, you take it, take whatever the government gives.

That Australia has never fought a war on its own soil and I believe it is better to do it on somebody else’s soil, it’s not right,

but on somebody else’s soil than your own soil. The countries overseas that have had wars fought on them, they are very proud, very proud countries but they are still suffering from it, cause their whole community, their whole country, whole population suffered. The First and Second World War people probably suffered more because the wives had to go and work, work in the factories,

the fields, the farms and all that, know a lot more about it, Vietnam did not, it was just everyday life. And you hear so many stories of blokes coming home and people saying, “Where the hell have you been for the last twelve months?” “Oh, been to Vietnam”, didn’t even know they were gone. So it never ever affected Australia unless it was the people that were closely associated, like the families and close friends and that of the people that were in Vietnam. That’s the thing, I’d like

democracy, democracy’s a great thing, yeah it’s a great thing but it’s abused a lot. My son said to me when he first went to Malaysia, he was seventeen years old and he come home and he went out here and he come home early and I said, “What’s wrong?” he said, “Dad” he said, “The Australian Government should give all these kids when they leave school a return ticket overseas to see how the poor bastards

over there live and they might come back here and be better for their country”. That was his attitude as a seventeen year old, going to Malaysia and seeing how the people lived over there and how they make do with it. They’ve got nothing and they don’t get anything given to them, that’s the situation all over the world. So I suppose you’ve got to go through a war, but as you get older you change your attitudes a bit and you mellow but you’ve still got the same principles.