Australians at War Film Archive

Yes, I was, in 1942, a little place just outside London and at the time obviously right in the middle of the Second World War, so how my father ever sort of found his way back home from wherever he was at the right time, but thank God he did.

Very little. There were a couple of impressions that I still have, and they were borne out by both my brother, who’s older than me, and my mother. One of them was what were called the Doodlebugs, the V1 flying bombs, and this would’ve been right towards the end of the war 1944-45 and whilst obviously only a matter of

two or three years old, obviously I don’t have much of a recollection, but I do remember the sound of those Doodlebugs as they came over and they used to splutter, and when they stopped you knew they were on their way down. And the recollection that comes out of that was my mother bundling me underneath the stairs in the house, which was supposedly the only safe place in the house to hide. And the only other recollection I

really do have there is not actually of the war itself, and that was one of the snowfalls towards the end of the war and I wandered down the back yard and sort of wandered straight into a snow drift, and the only reason I was found was that there was a slight depression in the snow drift. But other than that, no, I don’t, there’s nothing else of the war that I actually remember. I guess some degree of jubilation, but whether that meant

much to me at that age, who knows?

He was in Royal Artillery and was mixed up in anti-aircraft and searchlights for quite some time. And a unit he was in was stationed at a fairly famous RAF [Royal Air Force] station called Biggin Hill. And he was there for quite a while until somewhere around about 19th June of 1944, which of course was D-Day

and the invasion of Normandy; he then went into another part of the army and eventually went across, followed the invading troops and went across onto the continent. Precisely what he did, I have no idea. Unfortunately, like a lot of that generation, he was very reluctant to talk about it. I understand he got into one of the concentration camps but again he would never talk about it,

and only through some photographs I saw and a few of the memories of my mother I found out that he became involved in something to do with the control of refugees and then in Belgium at the end of the war became a, what were known as “military burgermeisters”, in other words a military mayor of a town or a city, and their responsibility was help re-establish the infrastructure after the war and the

devastation that occurred. So he stayed on the continent until towards the end of 1946, which is when he then appeared and I saw basically for the first time my father. So I was then, you know, four and a half years of age.

Yes, yes.

My father was an optician and at the end of the war, I understand he wanted to serve

on in the army, but probably like tens of thousands of other people at the end of the war, the army was probably a relatively secure place if they could get into it and stay in the army. But he was one of those that really was dissuaded from doing so, in other words there were very few spots left in a shrinking peacetime army. So he went back out into the workforce and became an optician in a large department store in London.

And I think that he was totally disillusioned with Britain immediately post-war because there was still rationing, life was not very much fun or enjoyable and as a result of that I think he, I understand, I’m not entirely certain, but I understand he wanted to migrate. And his initial choice was Canada but, for what reason I don’t know, he stayed in

London and then in about the middle of 1948 one of the two Ledger brothers, who were then the owners of Carris Brothers, in Perth offered him a job as a travelling optician, operating out of Perth, travelling down to places like Esperance, Albany, Katanning, Narrogin, etc., and doing that on a rotational basis. And I think that sort of appealed to him or probably, more than likely, anything

to get out of England appealed to him at that stage. So he accepted that and came out in late 1948 and he arrived on one of the old Blue Star cargo ships called the SS Sydney Star. And he arrived in Melbourne on Melbourne Cup Day 1948 and of course, as a Pom [English person] arriving in a place like Melbourne and absolutely nothing because it had stopped for Melbourne Cup, he found it

quite extraordinary. And anyway he got through that, hopped onto an aeroplane, flew to Perth, and had left my mother of course to pack up my brother and myself and all the goods and chattels and get herself down to Tilbury Docks, which she did, and we departed in January '49 and arrived in Fremantle on the 18th February 1949.

A little bit.

I remember an enormous gale in the Bay of Biscay and being as sick as a dog and falling down one of the gangways. I remember Port Said and watching the little Egyptian kids diving for pennies flipped over the side and they did the same at Colombo, and the only other thing I can really remember about the trip was arriving in Fremantle. And February,

Fremantle, it was stinking hot, well over a hundred degrees, and there we are, a little English boy with long socks and pants and totally unprepared.

Initially my father had a flat over the top of Carris Brothers in High Street in Fremantle. And that was only a short-term measure.

From there we moved to a house in The Avenue in Dalkeith. Dalkeith, Nedlands, whichever the suburb was. That was owned by a doctor, a Dr Strahan. And that was only a stop gap measure until we moved across to a house in Vincent Street in Mount Lloyd, directly opposite Hyde Park. And it was there that we spent most of our time in Perth

until Dad, who had been doing quite a few of these travelling optical circuits around the south-west, finally decided that he would like to stop that and get into a, obviously a more settle routine. So we went to the fellow who owned Charles M Nelsons, the optometrist in Forest Place in Perth, and offered to set up a partnership in Albany. And that was

accepted so we moved to Albany in May of 1951.

Nine.

Well, I went to the, one of the two Albany primary schools in Serpentine Road right in the middle of town. And at one stage because of an overflow

there was a requirement for, I think, two classes to go up to what’s called the old fort up on Mount Clarence, and Mount Adelaide I think is the actual title of it, but there was an old fort, fortifications up there which go right back to, certainly pre-First World War, and we were put into temporary barracks up there to actually do our primary schooling.

And those barracks are still there today and in fact have now been completely renovated and they’re now quite a substantial thing to go and have a look at.

I’m not sure. I don’t think it was to do with the Russians, because if you know anything about the Sydney fortifications and the Melbourne fortifications

they were set up in fact to repel the Russians who never emerged, of course. But I’m not, no, I’m not sure why they were established there, other than possibly it seemed like a good idea at the time to build a fort.

Not many. No, that’s not true. I

think probably from my father’s occupation and his interests I certainly enjoyed English. I enjoyed history, was not too hot at maths [mathematics]. But that was probably because my father was so good at maths and it was always an embarrassment, and that I found it very difficult, no, not an enjoyable subject

although I struggled through it. Then when I got to high school doing things like technical drawing and again, history and geography and English.

Yes, although there was an noticeable divide in the school because if you were one of the hotshot footballers or cricketers or whatever you tended to get treated fairly well.

And it was an interesting divide because I also noticed that when I got into the military the same thing occurred. If you were a golfer or a rugby player or a cricketer or a tennis player, you always seemed to sort of, almost as if you got preferential treatment. So yes, there was quite a lot of sport and I believe some of the fellow students I had there went on and did sort of reasonable things. I know about two or

three of them became fairly big Australian footballers. I don’t think there was so much in other sports, but certainly Australian Rules football seemed to be the predominant thing, which I wasn’t much good at. So I ended up playing hockey and things like hockey, badminton and in particular, cricket.

I guess by today’s standards very little. Nothing was provided, nothing was created for children. But we had no difficulty at all with bikes and imagination, I guess, and away you went. And it was also an era where there were no threats, there were no dangers to kids, so we used to just take off, and we’d go early in the morning and wouldn’t come back until night.

And who knows where we went, off around some of the south coast areas which nowadays everybody gets rather frightened about because the surf is so dangerous, but back in those days it never occurred to us. Traipsing over mountains - well, mountains, not around Albany. But traipsing over the hills, doing ourselves damage but no-one ever seemed to care. And just generally creating our own fun.

Yes.

I actually learned to swim down at Busselton. For those who are familiar with Busselton there was a very long jetty there. I was invited to try my hand at swimming by my father in rather a physical way.

Threw me over.

And it was sort of a

float and dog paddle and that was the start of swimming. But no formal lessons began. Certainly did a lot of swimming and became impervious to the cold and sort of got used to it.

Even in summer here it is still fairly cool. Well, certainly the water is.

Very few. I guess the predominant one, typical of all kids, was just washing up. And that was left to my brother and myself, which was always achieved at some degree, well, with some sort of contest always. My brother and I were always fighting as to who would wipe up, who’d wash up, throwing knives around, sticking knives into each

other. But no, in terms of us as children we had very few chores. I know a lot of the other kids I went to school with, they were from out on farms, chopping wood, digging drains and, you know, they were always into physical work.

Yeah.

There wasn’t, in Western Australia I don’t think there was the English population there is today, certainly not back in the early '50s. It was starting to build as migration, sort of got increasing numbers into Australia, but there weren’t all that many in Albany although there was a fairly large Dutch Reform group here. Whether or not they were immediately

pre-war or had come out prior to the Second World War I don’t know, but there was a fairly large Dutch community here. But not so many English so, yeah, little white-faced Pommy kid, not tan.

Well, not so much stood out because I was a little squirt in those days, I was very short. I didn’t grow until the army stretched me some years later.

I had, well, not so much what I did, what did I think I was going to do?

And the answer was quite simple, I didn’t even think about doing anything. I was so exhausted from achieving such mediocre results in my matriculation that I just lay on Middleton Beach all through that summer and tried to recuperate.

1960, there was no question in terms of what I would go and do because unemployment was not really an issue. I know my father wanted me to go to university and get qualified in optics and then eventually come back and take his practice, but I’m afraid sitting in a little dark room peering into people’s eyes didn’t quite appeal to me. So,

much to his regret, I declined that offer. I had no real sort of thoughts as to what I was actually going to do after high school. While at school I joined the Air Training Corps and in 1959, my last year at high school, along with one other boy, I’d become the cadet, one of the cadet under officers so I’d done reasonably well

in that sort of environment. And I think, like a lot of kids at the time, the air force attracted me, the idea of whizzing around in your own little plane was quite good, but I never did anything about it. I think lethargy and apathy sort of had well and truly overtaken me. And that just persisted.

The more my father pressed me to what I was going to do, the more

I thought, “Well, I don’t really know what I want to do,” even to the point that my father prevailed upon one of his friends here in Albany, who owned a dry cleaning business, to give me a job, if for no other reason than to give me some pocket money and stop being a drain on their finances. So I became the assistant van driver on a van which had “Dapper Dan the Acme Man”. I think the

purpose, from my father’s point of view, was probably to try and introduce me to something which, not being unduly unkind to the gentleman and his business, but obviously there was not a sparkling future in this, and I think he was hoping to embarrass me into finally recognising that I really should get off my backside and do something. But it didn’t. All it did was gave me a little bit more pocket money and ever more leisurely life in Albany.

And it really all came, not so much to an abrupt end, but it came to the beginning of the end when my father came home one day and he had a piece of paper and he just stuck it under my nose and he said, “Here, sign this.” And in typical youthful naivety, oh, sort of “Oh, Dad, what’s this?” he just said, “Shut up, sign it,” which I did, and then I realised, or he told me, it was an application for the Officer Cadet School at Portsea in Victoria.

And I never, didn’t really think much more about it. Off it went into the wide blue yonder and, as I say, I didn’t give it another thought until I think about a month later a letter came saying, “Report to Such-a-such a doctor in Albany for an initial medical,” which I did, and then shortly after that I got another letter saying, “Come up to Perth to go before the full-blown medical

board, psychological assessment, aptitude testing,” and then if I got through that to the selection board itself for the Officer Cadet School, which I did; and to my surprise, and I think even more to my father’s utter amazement, I got through it and I was selected.

I really can’t recall. I know it was at least

two or three days and we were living down at Karrakatta.

It is. The selection board itself is a fairly intimidating affair and certainly back in those days the medical was pretty stringent. The psychological testing was certainly something I’d never struck before, and then we got into

the aptitude testing and that was really based on what was called WOSBE - the War Office Board Selection Board techniques - and they put you into groups and put you through a whole series of tests and they have a gaggle of people standing around observing you and at the end of it they make assessments as to whether you have certain aptitudes that they’re looking for at the cadet school. My recollection

is that about twenty-three of us, I think twenty-three Australians were selected for that class and nine of us got through it.

And I was once told, I wouldn’t vouch for the veracity of the figures, but I was once told that that selection class, or the class itself there were about three and a half thousand applicants Australia-wide and I understand somewhere in the order of about eight or nine hundred of us

actually got through the medicals and the initial screening, the education screening, and then got to the selection boards and out of that twenty-three of us got into Portsea. And, as I say, nine of us actually got through.

There would’ve been, I think it was the Intermediate in those days.

And I think that was primarily to allow serving soldiers in the army to actually be able to apply and get through. There were a handful of us who were just straight civilians. The majority of them were in fact serving soldiers who were selected and, out of that twenty-three, three of us I think were civilians.

I certainly don’t know for sure, but I would suspect that they would’ve expected a higher education level from the civilians going in, so all of us were certainly Matriculation and Leaving level.

Oh, they were paper tests primarily, and then

I think we had an interview as well. I do remember in the actual selection board interview itself which was chaired by the commandant of Portsea, who was then a Colonel (UNCLEAR), who was himself a fairly intimidating, although he turned out to be quite a gentleman, but sitting on the other side of the table... So it was about the psychology.

OK. What I do remember is the selection board? The psych officer or Psychology corps officer who was a member of that board sat out to one side and he just sat there observing the whole way through. The set-up actually was quite intimidating. If anybody has seen inside Swan Barracks in Perth, in their officers’ mess area where the interviews were conducted, there’s a lot of very dark mahogany panelling and

very overbearing. And there’s, for the interview there was this big long table with, as I say, the commandant of Portsea sitting on one side and I think there were about another two or three members of the board and then off to one side was the psychology officer, and the interviewee sat in a chair like this right out in the middle, sort of totally isolated. Anyway, went through a whole series of questions and struggled through the answers

and sort of probably showed just how young and naïve I was at the time. But anyway at the end of it the Commandant then threw to the psychology officer and said, “Have you any questions?” to which he just shuffled through some papers and then looked up and he had, I can remember he was bald and he had these most piercing blue eyes, and he looked up and he looked

straight across at me and just said, “And tell me, Mr Aspinall, why did you fail second year, second term chemistry?” To which I think my response was, “Did I?” But it came right out of the blue and it was about the only thing I can remember the psychologist did. I met him years later in the army and in actual fact he was relatively normal for a psychologist.

But, as I say, got through that. And the only other recollection I had is that we had lunch, and what I didn’t realise at the time is that they were checking for your table manners, because all of those things were relatively important in those days.

No, there’s no feedback at all. The only indication that I had that obviously I’d done reasonably well in the lead-up to it was that I actually was held over to then go into the selection board. I think there were about two or three days of testing on the aptitude tests: when I say two or three days’ testing, not of me but of groups of applicants. And the fact that only a

handful of us got through and went to the interview board would’ve been a suggestion at the time that obviously I’d done reasonably well to have got that far. But no, I can’t say that I was conscious of sort of saying, “Whoopee, I’ve done well, I’ve got this far and onto the next hurdle.” In fact, I think I was just blindly following whoever told me to go where and do whatever.

You know, I don’t

know.

Well, yes, but not overly reluctantly because, as I say, having gone through the Air Training Corps and sort of, I enjoyed the glimpses of service life that you got, because we used to go to the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] base at Pearce and you’d see a little bit of service life on an air force station.

Probably false, probably misleading.

Well, I’ll go back. In 1957, which was third year at high school, the opportunity

arose – well, it wasn’t even an opportunity, there was a requirement within the school that we join either the army cadets or the air force cadets and for me the choice was fairly simple, the fellow who was in charge of the army cadets, one of the teachers, was my chemistry teacher. And as obviously I’d failed second year, second term chemistry obviously he was not one of my

most favourite teachers so I decided I wouldn’t go into the army, purely because I didn’t enjoy that teacher. Whereas the teacher who ran the Air Training Corps, first of all was a returned serviceman himself, he had been a Lancaster pilot in the Second World War, I believe he flew thirty-six missions over Germany and had been award the Distinguished Flying Cross and

by and large was a very, very nice fellow, one at least I got on reasonably well with.

Lancaster.

Flying Lancaster

bombers, yeah. And he, I guess, was my first introduction to a military officer, other than, I said my father was in the army but of course I wasn’t old enough to know what he was like. And he was a very, the teacher in charge of the Air Training Corps unit was just a very impressive man. He,

I’d hesitate to call him a mentor as such, but he was one of those teachers that impressed me significantly and in the way he conducted himself in running the Air Training Corps unit, I found to be, obviously I was ignorant of what are the requirements of being a military officer, but he struck me as being a very motivating sort of fellow. He certainly

encouraged initiative, he encouraged the cadets to really be themselves and those that had in his opinion potential he encouraged greatly. And so he was responsible for me getting through. And, as I say, I was promoted, I went and did an NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] course at Pearce and

then in 1958 I would’ve gone up and done a cadet under officer’s course, and I then became a cadet under officer.

Well, having then subsequently served in the military you sort of tend to be a little….

It tends to be Mickey Mouse [pretend, unreal] compared with, but it was certainly an influential

stepping stone and it certainly was sufficient, even though it was air force, it was sufficient to give me some insights into what it might be like within the military environment. When we used to go up to the air base at Pearce, and certainly in that last year when I was a cadet under officer, we were actually allowed into the officers’ mess and we lived in the officers’ mess. Although we

were, as I say, cadet under officers and literally pushed into the background, you still got an inkling of what might be there and there was a certain degree of glamour to it, I guess, and watching these air force officers. And in those days there would’ve been quite a lot of flying people, although Pearce at that stage wasn’t a training school as it is now with the basic flying training, and I think they’ve got

an operational conversion unit there as well. But nonetheless, as I say, it was certainly a good insight and it was sufficient not to discourage me and sort of turn me off the thought when my father did pull his trick and sort of got me wrapped up to go into the army. I might add the army is quite different to the air force, obviously, but it came as no great shock when I did go in.

Although, having said that, Portsea was an extremely tough environment to get through.

I suppose the, I’m now trying to think back what some of the subjects were. There were

things like basic military law, there was a little bit about service history, there was a little bit about the glamorous side of the air force being about aeroplanes. There were things like communication skills, operating radios, and I think probably the strongest impression I got

was actually being part of a group. And the thing that did interest me, even though I wasn’t aware of what it was at the time, and certainly something I was interested in when I’d gone into the army of course, is group dynamics, what actually happens and how groups evolve and how groups splinter and how they reform, and indeed how groups operate under various pressures. Now, as I say, I wasn’t aware

of that at the time but now, looking back, I realise that one of the things I did enjoy was actually that group environment. And then over the top of that was how people with leadership roles, how do they actually exercise leadership, what actually happens, why do groups follow various people. Now there were some inklings into that but I think there’s just generally that group environment, that was the thing that attracted me the most. I probably would’ve got it out of the army cadets

as well; it’s just I didn’t like the teacher. To this day I have no idea why I never applied for the air force because, as it turned out, when I was in the army I actually applied to become an army pilot. That’s in about 1962, I think.

Well, I was in the blue uniform, then I went into a khaki and then I wanted to get into a different uniform again and become a pilot, so....

I received a letter which I think I’ve got somewhere to this day, and it actually says, “Congratulations. You have been selected for such-and-such a course at the Officer Cadet School, Portsea.”

If I remember rightly I think there was a sentence at the end saying, “There will be following instructions.” And that came with a rail warrant so I think it was about middle of July, 1960. My parents took me up to Perth and I was to catch the Westland [Express] off to Kalgoorlie. I missed it so my father had to do a mad frantic drive up to Helensvale, I think it is, and in the meantime they’d asked

the Westland to stop so I finally got onto it and then waved goodbye to my parents. And of course I didn’t realise that that literally was an enormous separation, because from there it was across onto the Trans [Trans-Australia] train and then down to Adelaide or Port Pirie and then down to Adelaide and then on the Overland across to Melbourne, and I arrived at Spencer Street station

an absolutely lost country kid from Western Australia.

Eighteen. And I must say eighteen then was probably far more immature than an eighteen year-old today. Yeah, I was still very much a kid. And there at Spencer Street station was an army bus and there were a bunch of other people on the bus and so I think there was a

non-commissioned officer from Portsea there who probably yelled at me, threw my gear onto the bus and we got on and then drove down through Melbourne and then down around the Mornington Peninsula down through Frankston and then right down to the end, down to Portsea. And the other thing I can remember as we arrived at Portsea, the front gates of Portsea, they were these big huge iron gates, wartime gates, and as we drove through and the gates closed behind

us, there was this enormous dull clanging sound and it really was like a prison. And that was it, I’d arrived at Portsea and then found out very quickly that I was the youngest member of that class. I was eighteen, I think the next youngest was nineteen, and when I said there were twenty-three of us, there were twenty-three Australians but there were nine New Zealanders as well. But out

of those, the two oldest in that group were twenty-six years of age and one of them had actually been a serving sergeant in the New Zealand infantry and had actually been to Malaya during the Malayan, you know….

Whatever it was. Insurgency, that’s it. So he’d been up there fighting the communist terrorists in mid-Malaya and Lord knows what he must’ve thought of me.

I don’t think he ever spoke to me.

I can’t remember. I’m fairly certain on my father’s part total relief I was off his hands. I don’t know. Go back to that era and my parents were very reserved people.

They were not demonstrative in any way. They grew up in England through, my mother had been orphaned at a fairly early age and her father had been killed in the First World War and she, I think she was born in 1914 so she would’ve been a very young child. And they grew up in

England through the 1930s and I think they would’ve experienced the Depression so, like people of that age, their own memories wouldn’t have been sort of the best. No, I can’t remember what my mother’s reaction was. As I say, they were very undemonstrative, they hardly

ever hugged or kissed us or did any of those things.

The first thing about Portsea was first of all the total shock, because I’d never encountered, even within the Air Training Corps, and that really was quite a gentle environment

compared to Portsea.... The instructors were all ex-Second World War, ex-Korean or ex-Malayan veterans and their view was you were thrown into an adult world and, bang, it really hit you behind the ear. For I think about the first six weeks roughly I probably cried myself to sleep every night, literally cried myself to sleep, and

I was very fortunate that one of the Kiwi cadets, one of the New Zealand cadets – sorry, there were two Kiwi cadets for whatever reason decided to take me under their wing and to this day we’re still good friends although now, having retired and gone back to New Zealand and doing whatever they do, we don’t communicate anywhere near as much although occasionally by e-mail. But,

as I say, they literally grabbed me and took hold of me and got me through that initial period where you’re learning the peculiarities of the military as the environment. It’s like a new boy going to a boarding school: unless somebody actually takes you by the hand and shows you the way you literally then just stumble and flounder around. And for a civilian going into Portsea it was exactly

the same: unless one of the serving soldiers or one of the other cadets who had had experience literally took you by the hand, your chances of surviving there were fairly small. And, as I’d mentioned earlier, there were twenty-three of us selected and only nine, twenty-three Australians, and only nine of us got through so the attrition rate was fairly high.

And some of that, not all of it, but some of it was due to immaturity and inability to sort of assimilate the military environment. And then of course, a bit later on in the course, there were those who were thrown out because they couldn’t achieve their required levels from the various skills, disciplines, knowledge, all that sort of thing.

Part of it was physical, the physical requirements, the physical standards were pretty high. I, even at that age, at eighteen, I think I was only about five foot seven, five foot eight – no, sorry, I think I was five foot nine when I went into the army and I was not exactly

one of the most svelte and sleek little fellows, I had rather a portly sort of physique, so yeah, physical was probably one of the hardest things initially. Most of the subjects, things like firing weapons, weapon training, all that sort of thing I think I did reasonably well and fairly easily, but there were some of the subjects

that I found a bit difficult, things like military law and also some of the experiences. I understand the whole ethos of Portsea in those days was to take you as a cadet, literally break you, and then rebuild you in the mould that that they want. So the whole environment was geared to literally break you as an individual.

And nowadays, of course, you hear them talking about bastardisation which happens occasionally at places like Duntroon and the Defence Force Academy; that was quite rampant there. And also they used to take you through a whole series of little exercises that in fact in some ways were quite demeaning and yet also they were quite character-building as well. We used to do things

like leaps, what were called leaps. We would be called out of our class, out of our rooms at night and a senior class man would then have us and he would give us a requirement to get dressed in a whole variety, strange sort of order of dress and you’d have about a minute to do it. And he might tell you to come out, for example, with a helmet on with football socks on with

a pair of bathers on. So you’d go into your room and you’d literally tear it apart to try and find the things and get out. And then they’d tell, give you another order of dress and something totally different and you’d get another minute to go in, get dressed. And of course you’d get back into your room after that and it was an absolute disaster. Gear just thrown everywhere, yet it’d have to be in an inspection order by first thing next morning. I might add that there is a side benefit to that and that is, even

to this day, I can get dressed very quickly. We used to do things like we had to stand to attention out the front of the mess hall and we would stand there until one of the senior class would actually invite us in to have a meal and then, when we got into the dining room, we’d have to stand behind our chair at attention until one of the senior class on the table would actually notice you and

deign to let you sit down. All of those in a sense are quite humiliating, but at the same time it’s all part of that thing of trying to break you.

I think probably most of them. But we didn’t think of it in those terms in those days. There was nothing by way of

physical abuse; most of it, if not all of it, was done, I believe, in the sense of creating that sort of officer or potential officer in the mould they wanted you to be. There were the occasional cadets in the senior class who I think probably became

probably too officious, probably a little bit too vigorous in some of the things they did. But by and large no, I can’t think of anything that really was totally, or was inappropriate. There were a few things that were pretty dangerous, like sword fighting with, because we used to have swords and so that we could do sword drill, and we’d occasionally do

that.

Oh, occasionally. But not, there certainly wasn’t anything that I was aware of that was inappropriate, and certainly nothing of sort of what you might call a sexual nature or sexual harassment or anything like that. Mind you, there were no females there in those days.

They were trying to create somebody who had an ability to think on their feet, to be able to react quickly to varying situations and environments. The commonality they were trying to create between officers was such that, whilst not being mechanical in the things we did, it was a case of us

having an understanding that in such-and-such a situation our fellow officer would be doing certain things. So, in other words, there was a familiarity and you would know what your other officers, the other officers would be doing. That becomes particularly important when you got into a regimental environment where you had sort of infantry and armour and artillery working together. You have an understanding of the mental processes

your other officers are going through and likely decisions they’re going to make. So it was really that thing of being able to create a cohesiveness, particularly when you got out of Portsea and into, as I say, the regimented environment, when you were actually on operations.

A lot of it was based around

physical, practical exercises. Almost everything that you did within the classroom environment you then went out and actually practised. They were quite realistic. We used to use live ammunition a lot. And they were quite successful in being able to apply a high degree of pressure and stress to each of the exercises and activities we did.

And indeed in part of that was where some of the other cadets didn’t handle it and ultimately got dismissed off the course.

One of the most common ways, lack of sleep. You would do long exercises - and that wasn’t only at Portsea; even when we got out and went into our regimental environments there was quite a bit of training which was based

around being on your feet and awake for long periods of time - and assessments made as to how you still made decisions and the quality of the decisions you made, how you reacted to those environments.

That was on graduation from Portsea and towards the end of the course at the Officer Cadet School, we were invited to select

the corps of the army that we wanted to go into. And at that stage there were only nine of us and, as I say, at the end of the course, the Australians were asked whether or not we wanted to go to artillery, armour, infantry, whatever corps, and my selection was artillery. Not necessarily because it was my father’s corps in the Second World War but it was, again,

I was fairly impressed, I think, by one of the instructors we had at Portsea who was an artillery corps officer. And I was fortunate enough, along with two others, to actually get that corps in artillery. So in the middle of 1961 when I was actually commissioned I was posted to an artillery regiment in Queensland.

Yes. His name was Colin Cunningham. He was the,

he in fact had been a graduate of the very first class at Portsea in 1951 and he’d been to Malaya. It’s very hard to actually put a finger on precisely what it was that made him impressive, but I think it was probably his whole demeanour, how he reacted, how he interacted with cadets, the way he described events, the way he described

what was expected of officers within the regimental environment, his own demeanour - I know it sounds trite in some ways - the way he dressed, his personal characteristics, all of those things, no one thing, but put them all together and he was very impressive. I mentioned earlier about the teacher who had been the fellow who ran the

Air Training Corps and the fact that he was influential and the way he encouraged, how he gave you latitude to do things, gave you the benefit of his own experience. In many ways this artillery officer at Portsea did much the same thing.

Very mild-mannered. Very courteous.

In fact he was, probably one of the reasons he impressed was he was one of the few that didn’t shout. Very, in his own way, very intense. Certainly had a very good sense of humour and in a lot of ways now, thinking back, probably was abnormal in that environment. He was

different to the vast majority of the others.

Yeah, you’re probably right. Well, yeah, he kept a higher degree of civility and he was certainly not in any shape or form demeaning. He never put cadets down,

I never ever heard him rubbish anybody else on the staff. Yeah, I guess in many ways he was much more akin to what you would expect of a civilian. Although I should say in later life, certainly in the army serving afterwards, I found officers not to be yelling, screaming, foot-stamping ogres anyway.

A gentle little backwater, certainly in 1960, '61, when I went up there.

A very short break, although that was taken up by travel to get to Queensland. I graduated from Portsea in June of 1961 and my parents came across for the graduation parade and I think

I had a few days, three, four, five days, then I had to get into a car and drive to Queensland, which for me was quite an experience because, other than seeing around the Portsea area and the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, I hadn’t really seen much of Australia at all, so getting in a car and driving up the Hume Highway, well certainly driving through Sydney for the first time and then on up and up to Queensland....

And the regiment that I was posted to was located at Wacol, which was on the south-western side of Brisbane, on the way towards Ipswich and Amberley.

Brisbane or Wacol? Wacol was in fact an old World War II army camp and it had been used for the first lot of National Service that came in in the 1950s and it was predominantly

a Nissan hut camp so it was really quite primitive and quite barbaric. But it was sufficiently far enough out of the way to get us out of the dreadful life of Brisbane, such as it was in 1961.

The best way of describing Brisbane

then was it was just a big country town. Probably sounds a bit patronising, having come from a small country town in Albany, but it struck me it was very gentle, it was a very laid-back pace. I think there were enormous inferiority complexes in the population in terms of where it was located and situated compared with, say, Sydney, which was just down the road.

Yeah, it just really had a lot of the old country town values in a town or a city that was, even in those days, I think was about eight hundred thousand. When you think of it now, in those days Southport and the Gold Coast basically didn’t exist, they were just little villages and it was

just their back yard swimming hole. They used to go down to there and have very, very pleasant weekends, which of course you don’t do today now that it’s the place it is, the Gold Coast I’m talking about. Brisbane, had six o'clock closing of pubs,

non-existent night life. Whatever fun you had you made yourself, certainly unlike Sydney or Melbourne.

Two and a half, three years there, I think. I left in 1965 and I went down to Puckapunyal

where I joined one of the recruit training battalions to train the first two intakes of National Servicemen that came in.

Yeah, it was my teaching environment inasmuch as, having joined artillery, I didn’t know anything about artillery, what artillery was about. So going into that regiment was first

and foremost a teaching environment. And the commanding officer was an ex-World War II artilleryman and he was the first commanding officer of that regiment that had been re-formed in about 1959 or 1960, and he had a very strong belief that young officers coming out of Duntroon or Portsea were

there to learn what artillery was about, and he created the environment in which NCOs and other officers were all expected to be trainers and teachers of the new young officers that came into the regiment. And it was there that I learnt the basics of artillery - survey, ballistics, ammunition, communications,

etc, etc.

Well, the first introduction was to the, and old World War II gunners would remember it, was what was called the twenty-five-pounder gun, a field artillery piece, and we were actually required to be gun numbers, in other words private soldiers, gunners,

on that; and we were taken through and we became gun numbers, we came layers, we had to learn how to use the sighting system, how to actually deploy the gun, bring it into action and take it out of action, how to dig it in, then into the command post to learn how to plot fire, how to use the artillery board, how to use range tables, how to do the survey then also master the communication systems. And all of

that was done purely by practical experience and that was done in advance of us, then, after we’d been in the regiment for about six months, being sent to the School of Artillery which was located at North Head in Sydney. And then that was a much more formal training environment and much more classroom-oriented. So the regiment itself taught us all of the basics and it did it in a very practical, hands-on way, but in association with

gunners and ordinary soldiers, and that was our first experience of the ordinary digger.

Daunting. As a nineteen year-old second lieutenant finding myself with thirty-five, forty, forty-five year-old ex-Second World War soldiers I was amazed the way they

treated me, clicking heels and saluting, calling me “sir” and not with the slightest derision or sarcasm. They genuinely respected you although, God, I don’t think I hardly even shaved at that stage, and, surprisingly, the troop that I actually went into, the soldiers quite willingly coming and sort of saying, “I

have a problem, can you help me?” Not so much because of who I am as a person, but the fact that I wore a rank and therefore it was natural for them to go to talk to an officer or an NCO or whatever the case may be. And some of those, I might add, were way beyond my level of maturity to deal with.

I’ll decline that, other than to say that I had a soldier who

came to me with some problems with some lady friends and was expecting me to try and give him some solutions.

Yes. It was the culture, it was the environment. Their expectations were if they belonged to a unit, they belonged to a troop, or infantry platoon or whatever, the officer who

commanded that was expected to provide them with the support and the leadership and if that embraced problems and difficulties in their own life.... Remember, the environment was quite different inasmuch as single soldiers lived in barracks, it was very much a communal-type situation which no longer exists today. Most people now live out, they live off-base, they live in their own units, their own flats and things so there’s no longer

that sort of environment today. But certainly back then.

At the School of Artillery.

Well, they were formal courses, they were structured courses that took you through and started to give you the.... Go back a bit. I mentioned that the basic training that I

undertook in the regiment when I first went there was all very much practical and hands-on, it was very much about operating pieces of equipment, using the various paraphernalia within the command post that created the necessary information to give the guns their orders. What happened at the School of Artillery then was all the theoretical stuff that lay behind that. So, for example, where I did, in the regiment,

basic survey, we went out with – well, the civilian equivalent is the theodolite, we call them hanging circles or directors. We just knew how to use them. Somebody would say, “Take this bearing, do this, make this sort of a calculation.” What happened at the School of Artillery is they gave us all a theoretical underpinning of that: on what basis, what were the geometrical, you know,

solutions that you had to find to be able to create survey information. Where we talked about artillery ammunition we then were taught in the school thing like the internal ballistics of a gun, why an artillery shell actually gets propelled, how it gets propelled, what sort of force is in the breech block, what are the various types of cordite and the

other explosives that are in it to propel it, what happens when the shell actually goes out of the barrel and starts spinning and what are the influences of it in flight, what creates variation, weather, what are the meteorological conditions that affect artillery fire, how do you actually control it on a much larger scale than just a regiment, why do you use it, how is it employed, what sort of orders, all of those sorts of things then came

from those technical courses at the School of Artillery.

Yeah. And again a lot of hours, long hours. When I said it was basically theoretical, they did take it out onto the Holsworthy artillery range just outside, just south of Sydney and we did a lot of firing, but that was then really to explore and have demonstrated to us

all of these things that had happened and we’d been taught in the classroom.

No, because the, I mentioned that I graduated from Portsea in the middle, in June of 1961. All of the army courses were structured around the Duntroon classes that graduated in December and they would then go from Duntroon

onto a Christmas break and then basically onto a regiment for a few days or a week or so and then straight to the School of Artillery, and the same would happen with the December graduates from Portsea as well, the same thing, you know, bit of a Christmas break then off to the School of Artillery. But where we graduated in the middle of the year, they had six months and they had to fill it, fill that time in, so we would be in a regiment and, rather than us

being just sore thumbs with nothing to do, they took us through and gave us all of that practical training. In a sense we were better off when we got to the School of Artillery because we had already been exposed to and it seemed quite a bit of the practical side of artillery. And, I might add, the same is true in all of the other corps in the army as well, infantry people, those that went into engineers, those who went into signals, etc,

all of the mid-year graduates from Portsea had a period of about six months of practical exposure before they went to their own corps schools.

Yeah, but it was only true for that first period. When we went back to the School of Artillery for subsequent courses, of course, we were then back into the normal sort of cycle of training from January

to December. So it was really only that first initial period after Portsea that it was of benefit to us.

It was the start of the second National Service scheme, the old lottery ball, and I went down there as a platoon commander for the first two intakes, and so I was really only in

Puckapunyal I think for about nine months.

I somehow suspect it was the fickle finger of fate. I’ve no idea. It was not for us to really have any inkling as to why we got selected or why people got sent to various places. As you become more senior and you become more aware of what happens around the army and how things happens, I guess you become

much more aware of opportunities, how things are decided, but certainly at that stage I’d only been out of Portsea for a number of, two, two and a half years, so really I was still relatively a novice. So if somebody said, “Pack your bags and go to Puckapunyal,” you did, without question.

Well, I commanded a platoon,

which meant that I had a training staff which then took a group of about sixty National Servicemen, we took them through their basic training which was an introduction to the army, not at an officer level but a basic soldier level. And I think from memory the period was about three, four months, three months that we had them.

And I took through two of the platoons. And then I was posted back to an artillery regiment again.

I would have to be honest and say at the time I didn’t think too much about it, it was just a job to do. Looking back, though….

Well, you get buried in the day-to-day job that you’re doing so you don’t really spend that much time sort of philosophising and

thinking about what is the nature of the National Service scheme and what’s the implications of it, not only on the individuals who get caught up in it, but what are the implications on the military system itself. At that stage, although Vietnam was starting, we had no real inclination that it was about to become a major commitment, although with the National Servicemen it would’ve taken Blind Freddy, I guess, not to have

realised that they wouldn’t have called up National Servicemen unless there was likely to be a much more significant commitment to Vietnam. As I say, our day-to-day jobs were sufficiently sort of onerous, I guess, but you really didn’t spend that much time thinking about it. I can look back and I can reflect on the National Service scheme. There is no doubt that National Service is an enormous drain on the military.

It takes an enormous lot of resources to take them and train them and it’s one of probably the main barriers why, at various times you hear people sort of saying, “If only we had a National Service or a voluntary scheme for people - not a voluntary, but a call-up scheme for the young people - it would do them good and give them a bit of discipline,” and all that sort of good stuff.

The fact remains that, by and large, the military can’t afford to do it. It’s too resource-intensive. You only do it where you have an absolute requirement to get bodies to do something, and that’s of course what happened with Vietnam. Personally, I believe that by and large the National Service schemes were quite good. You’ll find individuals who obviously didn’t like it and resented it, but

there are also a fairly significant body of soldiers who went through the National Service scheme who said it did them good. It provided them with some quite useful skills, capacities, capabilities, that quite a few of them used in later years. People like Jeff Kennett was a National Serviceman, he claims to have become much more relaxed and

much more able to speak publicly as a result of some of his time in the army and going through Scheyville, which obviously took him to the politics.

Bearing in mind they were the first two courses, the first two intakes of National Service, and at that stage there was not the level of either community resentment nor the same

degree of individual resentment, most of them were reasonably happy to be there. If you asked them, “Did you want to be doing National Service or do you want to be back where you were?” Obviously all of them would’ve basically said, “No, I would much rather be back where I came from.” But they didn’t resent, they weren’t opposed to and they didn’t rebel against being in the National Service, most of them. There were handfuls that were obviously very

disenchanted, didn’t want to be there, actively resisted and tried their utmost to get thrown out.

Not particularly difficult. I was very fortunate that I think I only had two or three in the two intakes that were there. And by and large they were handled by the NCOs that I had working for me.

Fairly strongly.

Well, most of it was based around the fact that “Look, this is what the government of the day has decided, whether you like it or not, this is a fact of life. The reality is you are here right now. There are two ways you can approach this: the hard way or the easier way.

If you wish it to be the hard way then we’ll make it hard for you,” and I don’t mean by that there were things like beatings or constant ostracising of people, but there is no doubt that the military has its ways of making things tougher than they need to be and if you provoke them surely you find yourself on more guard duty and you will find yourself on more rosters for things like the kitchen and all that sort of stuff.

So yeah, there were ways, but there was nothing of an overt physical strong man sort of tactic.

To be honest I found it, particularly the very first course -

the second one I don’t remember too much about and it sort of was a fairly routine event by then - the very first National Service course, for whatever reason, I don’t know whether it was by design or purely by accident, but the platoon that I had, as I say, they were about sixty strong, I think from memory about thirty or thirty-five of them were university graduates, so the education

and the intellect level of that very first group I had was much, much higher than the average soldier that I’d experienced in the previous two, two and a half years in the regiment. That was quite enlightening, just to be able to talk to those and be able to sort of get the way they felt, the way they thought, their reactions too, and that was pretty instructive.

I think so, yeah. And I would have to say that I was pretty satisfied with where I was at that time. Going back to the way that I’d got into Portsea in the first place, which was a form of shanghai, I guess, on the part of my father, no, I think I’d found by then that the army was very much to my liking.

Puckapunyal? Except that it was bloody cold and windy as anybody knows who knows Puckapunyal.

Oh well, they found the windiest, coldest, sort of wettest part, I guess, that they could. Again, I think

the benefit, and you ask about reflecting back, was again the level of experience. What happened there was yet another bucketload of experience of how to treat quite different people. The way, for example, as an officer I would’ve treated an ordinary soldier in the regiment didn’t work with that level of recruit. Even though they were National Service,

it didn’t work. By and large in the regiment if you told a soldier to do something they would do it or they wouldn’t. If they didn’t there were obviously penalties associated with that. What I found with those National Servicemen, and it was true when I went to Vietnam and mixed more with National Servicemen there and later on when I commanded my own artillery battery and I had National Servicemen, you had to more appeal to the reasons why you wanted things done,

you had to be much more explanatory, and whilst there was still that underlying military discipline which says, “Well, if you’re ordered to do something you will do it,” there was always that attachment of being much more inclusive with National Serviceman, why things needed to be done, if there were doubts about it, how things should be done. So in that sense for a, bearing in mind then

I was....

I’m being uncomplimentary to Victorians.

Well, Puckapunyal, I believe the word itself means Valley of the Wind or something similar to that. It’s not too dissimilar to here in Albany and south-west of Western Australia, it gets

very windy, but it was just a typical army camp. It was out of the way, it was up the road from Melbourne and it’s where the Armoured Corps had its main base area, so whenever you’re using tanks you need somewhere that’s out of the way, away from the civilian population. Also I think there was a case of it had available facilities

to take National Servicemen, the huts and the encampments were there, although they did build I think a new set of barracks for the National Servicemen.

They were fairly Spartan. It certainly wasn’t the lap of luxury. It was a fairly basic sort of mess we had. Certainly in

terms of the hours, they were fairly intensive. My wife at the time was living down in Melbourne, so whenever the opportunity was there, because Puckapunyal’s what, about sixty miles, say eighty, ninety kilometres, hundred kilometres north of Melbourne....

I met her initially in

early 1962. I went down from the regiment I was with in Queensland, I went down to a fellow officer’s wedding in Cessnock in New South Wales and my future wife was there as one of the friends of the bride. They were nurses together and my wife was, then, she was a theatre sister in a neurosurgical ward in Concord Hospital.

So yeah, I met her there and I ended up, I had driven down from Queensland and I was due to go to the wedding on the Saturday and then drive back that night to go and play cricket the following day in Brisbane, and I didn’t get back to Brisbane. I ended up going down to Port Nelson or Nelson’s Bay,

Port Stephens in New South Wales, with Noelene and then suddenly realised I hadn’t got any way of getting back to Queensland in time, so we did a rush trip down the old Pacific Highway to Mascot and I caught a plane back that evening with the intention of coming down in either a weekend or a couple of weekends’ time to collect my car. That never

seemed to happen. My car stayed in Sydney I think for something like four or five months, and each time I flew down to collect my car I ended up not having sufficient time to get back to Queensland. But then she obviously got sick and tired of me because she shot off to England for two years.

Oh, weekends.

But then when she came back from England, she came back in early '64, I think that she came back to see whether I was any good or to buy a Sunbeam Alpine sports car or, if neither of those worked out, she was off to Canada. So, as it turned out, we went on a trip across here to Western Australia

and then came back and we’d decided to get married.

She didn’t go to Canada. So we got married in November of '64.

No, no, no. I went to Puckapunyal in '65.

So no, I was still in the regiment in Queensland at that stage.

That’s why, as I said, when I went down to Puckapunyal she was living in Melbourne and I used to go, commute down on the weekends.

Although it’s not too hot at three thirty, four o'clock on a Monday morning in the middle of winter in Melbourne trying to drive back up to Puckapunyal.

I was posted

on promotion as a captain to the 1st Field Regiment at Holsworthy in New South Wales.

You go through promotion exams and, in addition to that, depending on the annual confidential report that is raised on you, providing it has all the ticks in the right places, you get promoted. I was promoted

fairly early because at that stage I was nearly twenty-four and I was posted as an artillery forward observer into 103 Battery, the 103rd Field Battery, in 1 Field Regiment. And I arrived January of '66 and went into see the commanding officer on my arrival and he promptly told me of his

belief that the regiment was off to Vietnam. And at that stage there had been no announcements, but he was taking the regiment through, on his own bat and his own authority, I might add, he was actually taking the regiment through a build-up period and a training period in the belief that we were going to Vietnam. And, as it transpired, Menzies came on in about the middle of February to say that there was going to be an increase. There would be the sending of a Task Force

to Vietnam and part of that Task Force was 1 Field Regiment, the battery that I was in.

A whole series of exercises out in the bush, much closer liaison with the infantry battalion that was next door to us at Holsworthy, a lot of live firing, and generally all of the sort of basic artillery skills,

bringing those back up to what you might call full operational level.

At Holsworthy it’s probably not all that instructive to say what an average day in the regiment would be like because back in base you’re just doing administrative chores and tasks. There are things like maintenance of weapons,

repair of material, general administration of soldiers, all that sort of stuff, and that essentially was an eight till four-thirty day and across the road to the married quarters, just as if you were going home in the normal sense. So in that sense that’s really not anything particularly out of the ordinary, although I might add in that period we would be doing a number of other things that we

probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. We did a lot more training with things like rifles and small arms. We started to get involved in some of the infantry tactics that were required for us to defend our own gun positions, those sorts of things, which probably was a bit out of the ordinary, we wouldn’t have done that normally. But the really intensive period was when we actually went out of the base area, the camp area, and we’d go,

for example when I arrived in early January, I think within about a week of me arriving in the regiment we actually went off down to Tianjara, which was an artillery firing range inland from Nowra, between Nowra and Canberra, another bleak, godforsaken place, and we did a lot of firing down there and that was just live artillery fire. And I might add, while I was sitting down on the

hill there, there was a message came through on the radio to tell me that I’d become a father, and I didn’t see my son then until I think about twelve days later, when I was given one day off to go down to Nowra. My wife came down. So there was that, we came back from that exercise, I think we were only back for

about a week or a week and a half and then I was off again onto another exercise with the infantry battalion, and that was for a period for about three weeks, I think.

Most of it.

Oh, the Australian, what they called the twenty-four hour ration pack. While I was with the artillery regiment most of the regiment itself got fed off

much bigger ration packs, they’re what they call the ten-man ration pack, which is ten men for one day or one man for ten days, whichever way, didn’t work out very well, one man for ten days. But it was really a bulk ration and that was augmented occasionally with fresh food. But where I was up in, as I mentioned I went into the regiment as the forward observer, well, the task of a forward observer is to work with the infantry

so while I was down on that exercise I was actually out on my own, my own little party of an assistant and a radio operator and another, what we used to call in those days, batman. So that little four-man group we’d be off out on our own, and then we’d be operating off little twenty-four hour ration packs. When I went out on that exercise for about three weeks with the infantry battalion,

again most of that was on those twenty-four hour ration packs because you had to carry it all.

Pretty heavy.

Here in Australia it wasn’t really as much of a problem and certainly where we were doing that exercise it was up around the Colo-Putty area near Singleton in New South Wales and certainly there were a lot of pretty clean fresh streams that we were able to utilise. But, even so, we were still required to carry a

number of water bottles, but nowhere near the number of bottles we used to carry in Vietnam - we’d carry five, six bottles and, as you know, water’s fairly heavy, so by and large our packs we used to carry in Vietnam were very, very heavy packs, which is, I wonder why most of us aren’t cripples today. But we had an inkling of that, we got a sort of an introduction to that in that first exercise we went off with the infantry battalion.

Then when we came back from that we went almost immediately off to Canungra, to our pre-Vietnam indoctrination training.

Yes, very much so, and that was then heightened when I went out with the infantry battalion, because that was all on foot, which we gentlemen of the artillery were not used to. We had our own Land Rovers to drive around in, so having to

go out there and walk long distances, up very steep hills and no-one to help us.... But yes, it certainly was physical fitness in terms of the level of importance of that rose enormously. Then when we got to Canungra that really was very physically intense.

I think generally elation’s the wrong word, but it was akin to looking forward to it because I know you see interviews with diggers from the First World War and the Second World War and they talk about adventure.

I’m not sure that that was true by then, in the 1960s. I think there had been sufficient international travel by a lot of people that, whereas in the First World War a lot of those that went overseas, it really was their first taste outside their own country environment as a country town, and certainly to go overseas to Egypt or France, to Gallipoli, to England,

it was a big adventure; I’m not sure that we approached it in the same view. I think by then quite a lot of us had been overseas and had seen, been exposed to other cultures and things, so in that sense it wasn’t an adventure as such. What I think there was for us as professional army officers or professional soldiers generally was a sense of relief that we would actually be going to do what

we’d been trained to do. And I think, if you put it back into, say, a medical context, it’s like going and training to be a nurse or training to be a doctor and never ever treating anybody. So I think that was more the approach that we had: “Great, we’re off to do what we’ve been trained to do.”

No, because, to be quite honest, I don’t think there was

much politically going on. There was a bit of, I understand that the opposition of the day was critical, and just bear in mind it was early 1966, we had some troops already in Vietnam so there was a level of criticism, but there was no intense hostility to the Vietnam commitment and I can’t remember any outcries when {Prime Minister Robert] Menzies sort of said, “Well, we’re

going to increase the commitment and more soldiers are going.” I think it was more a case of, “Where is Vietnam and what’s happening in Vietnam or what’s going on and why are we there?” rather than, as I say, any direct hostility to the fact that we were involved. That came later.

I was, but I’m not sure that that was a

universal thing, and in saying that I was interested I think it was more academic interest: “Oh, yes, Vietnam’s there and we’re going; I wonder what’s going on.” But the information that we got was not that comprehensive. We didn’t know then, for example, the degree of the American involvement in supporting the

Diem regime. We had no real understanding as to the political imperatives of Vietnam and why the Americans were involved. We had an exposure to the French experience in Indochina and the French being thrown out of Dien Bien Phu, more in the context of, “This is what the French experienced in fighting the Viet Minh,” which was the forerunner to the Viet Cong.

And, very generally, what some of the tactics were used by the Viet Cong. So that no, there wasn’t a great amount of knowledge. And bear in mind there weren’t all that many people who had been to Vietnam at that stage so there wasn’t much coming back, so most if was sort of book learnt and it wasn’t

really until later you got much more substantial information about what Vietnam was like, what it was all about, the extent of corruption, the political corruption, and the fact that there was an underlying sort of, “Why are we there?” It certainly wasn’t the case in '66.

There was the obvious concern, I guess, because regardless of the fact that we hadn’t heard all that much about Vietnam, we knew sufficient about it that there was shooting going on and people were getting killed. In fact, one of my artillery friends from my days at Wacol had gone there in '65, he’d been killed and he was an artillery forward observer, so that created a greater level

of anxiety in my life. So yeah, there was that immediate concern about her partner going off to Vietnam, but I don’t think there was any overwhelming sort of - what am I searching for? - calamity or, “Hey, this is disastrous and no, I don’t want you to go,” and that sort of thing. I think to a certain extent there was an acknowledgment

of what I said before about nurses and doctors. You know, you do your training; if you don’t go and practise it then there is, it’s almost as if there’s a deficiency in your professional development. So in that sense, because she had been a nurse herself, I think there was an understanding that it was fulfilment of what we had been trained to do.

A forward scout is a different

thing. A forward observer….

A forward scout is an infantry position and that’s the little man right out in front of an infantry platoon or an infantry section. Now, that is dangerous.

The answer to that is yes, it was, for the simple reason that as a forward observer my responsibility to the company commander that I was attached to, the company and the company commander, was to provide artillery

fire support, mortar fire support and call in air strikes. Now, not unnaturally, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army people didn’t particularly enjoy that, so if there was an opportunity to identify who the forward observer was and they could actually knock out the forward observer then there was an increased likelihood that they wouldn’t be subjected to the same fire coming down

on them. So in that sense, yes, and they tended, we understood they tried to target forward observers, to knock them out.

Again, I guess, the intensity of it. And also, the earlier question about the importance placed on physical fitness: that really came to the fore at Canungra and that really was all about physical fitness. And Canungra at the time of the year that we were there, which would’ve been mid- to late-April, pretty humid, wet, we used to go out

into the Macpherson Ranges and then to a place called Levis Plateau, and that was literally tropical rainforest. So that, combined with the physical exertion you went through, was pretty debilitating.

Reasonably, but Canungra took us to that much higher level. And indeed the only other time

that, and then my period in Vietnam, the only other time I was as fit again in my life was when I went back to Canungra as an instructor later on. So yeah, it’s probably the highest level of fitness that we’d achieved.

After?

Well, each morning, for example, you had physical training,

physical fitness parades and that would be, I guess, today would be somewhat primitive now that we have sports coaches and sports medicine experts, etc. But in those days it was very much about, you know, physical exercises - “physical jerks”, as they used to be called – chin-ups, push-ups, running, carrying heavy weights, carrying other people on your shoulders, doing all of that

within time constraints. Doing five, ten, twenty-five mile runs with weights and packs on and carrying weapons, those sorts of things.

Well, the heat and the humidity just raises the irritability level because you’re forever sweating.

In those days a lot of the equipment we carried, the webbing, the packs that we wore were not good-fitting. Even the clothing itself was not, nowhere near as efficient as they are today. They were much heavier cotton drill so you tended to sweat in the crutch and under the armpits and all that sort of thing.

I’m not sure I quite answered your question, but it was all, they were all things that added to the stress levels. And again, in response to an earlier question about how do you induce stress, well, a lot of it is time constraints, lack of sleep, lack of food, lack of water, piling on situations so that you’re having to make decisions constantly, how well are your decisions

made, how quickly do they degrade in their integrity, all of that sort of thing’s part and parcel of your assessment and part and parcel of the life you lead.

Not so much assessment because I think by then it’s acknowledged you’re going to Vietnam anyway. So unless you really flunked out and, well, literally were unable to cope, you knew you were going to

Vietnam.

There were quite a lot of, not so much broken limbs but certainly strained and sprained ankles and knees, initially up there a lot of chafing, a lot of heat rashes, all of that sort of stuff.

And there was a reasonable number of cases of heat stroke, because of course you were being pushed the whole time and with the heat, and you’d be expected to do things like come off fairly major runs and go straight onto a rifle range and start shooting. And just, as I say, the level of heat exhaustion that was caused by that was fairly high.

Mm, and it was well used. No, the medical facilities were, they were certainly adequate. Well, no, let me put it this way: I was not aware that they were inadequate. I never had cause to sort of question the efficiency of the medical system. So yeah, it certainly appeared to be quite adequate for there.

Back then? Again they were relatively primitive. It was a wartime camp that had been set up during the Second World War and a lot of the buildings were old Second World War buildings. When I went back there later in life as an instructor there’d been a lot of construction work done, and by then it was a very comfortable camp. But then in

'66, it was pretty basic again. But again, we didn’t spend a lot of time in the camp itself, we were out in the training areas and we’d get back in late in the afternoon so you really didn’t need much more than a fairly basic set of facilities.

Yeah. I mentioned a bit earlier there was very little information coming back from Vietnam. That’s not quite true, inasmuch as at, get my places right, at Canungra, the jungle training centre, there were quite a few

of the instructors who had been up to Vietnam, either as part of the Australian Army training team which had gone up there in '62 when it first went, and also there had been one of the infantry battalions had gone up there in 1965. So by '66, early '66, there was a trickle of people coming back from Vietnam with operational experience, and quite a lot of those early ones that came back went as instructors at Canungra,

so we had people who had just had recent experience up there. So a lot of the training was oriented around operating within a jungle environment, and Canungra has that in the local area. They’d also set up, down on the Canungra Creek, they had actually created a Vietnamese village with all of its tunnel systems and had

set up displays and examples of the rudimentary weapons and booby traps and things the Viet Cong uses and we used to go down and go through the village. And so, in that sense, yeah, there was quite a degree of realism within the confines of a training environment. There was a fair degree of realism there.

Not so much what

we were told, other than the fact they were quite effective; but it was really actually seeing them and being able to see how they work and the level of unsophistication about them and also, as I say, how surprisingly effective some of them were. You know, punji [sharpened bamboo] stakes, they had snares and things in the bushes, so

you were also taught in a way how to, I don’t say it was particularly effective because we didn’t have sufficient amount of time to do it, but you got an inkling on how you can see disturbances in the undergrowth and how traps are set. Now, that was particularly critical, your slip of the tongue earlier when you talked about a forward scout, that was particularly relevant to them.

No, I think there’s a level of, I guess, you could say youthful exuberance and that it’s not going to happen to you. So in that sense, yeah, it was interesting information; but “Is

it going to happen to me? No, it’s not.” I certainly didn’t go home and tell my wife about it because that certainly would’ve raised the level of anxiety, I’m sure. But I guess in some ways it probably heightened the anticipation of going to Vietnam. And also hearing, if you like, the stories

from these people who’d come, who’d just recently come back from Vietnam, whilst they were fairly, I now realise they were fairly realistic stories and they conveyed a pretty good sense of the insecurity of Vietnam as a place, I think they’d probably also raised our level of anticipation to go. Certainly none of it was a downer or

put us off. But then again, we didn’t know better.

I think it was a morale lifter. Not so much the notion that we’re off to Vietnam, but a lot of the exercises we went through and the training, because of the intense nature of it, not so much on an individual level but if you did it well as a group,

then the group feels better and the group morale went up and then obviously your own individual level of morale went up as well. So it was really more a sense of achievement of getting through the course, because Canungra had a very strong reputation through the Second World War and certainly through the Malayan Emergency period and then the early periods of Vietnam as being a very, very difficult place

to get through. It had a very strong reputation as a jungle training centre in the rigours of jungle warfare and I don’t think that reputation was misplaced. It was a very, it sorted out the men from the boys.

Well, when we went through we went through as a unit, so it was my artillery

battery that was there, so they were people I’d been with since the January when I joined it. What were they like? I think an easier way of describing it is to say it showed to me the physical and mental capacities of those people, in terms of those who were quite strong and those who obviously weren’t as strong. What I said about the men and the boys

wasn’t far from the truth. There were some who just couldn’t hack it, they couldn’t hack it. So yeah, it was more a revelation of what the soldiers in the battery were like and I must say as a group by and large they got through very well.

Yes. It’s like any of those things, it was a shared experience, and

bearing in mind it was very early in the Vietnam conflict we would’ve been about the second, we were basically the second major group to leave Australia. The first group had gone in '65 and we were then going to be the second group, and that’s not counting the Training Team that had been there since '62, so we were about the second major group to go through. So in a sense it’s a little pretentious to say “trailblazers” or anything like that, but nonetheless there was the satisfaction that we

were early in the piece going.

No, it was just a relief to get back to Sydney and back home. No, no. And I think primarily because when we got back to Sydney we went on pre-embarkation leave, everybody was wanting to get back, get onto seven days’ pre-embarkation leave prior to leaving for Vietnam.

So no celebrations as such. I’m sure we had the odd drink, but.

Mowing lawns, repairing fences. Doing all of those things I should’ve done over the, well, I hadn’t been around. We’d been away on all sorts of exercises and things, so there were a whole heap of things around the house that obviously needed doing.

And my mother came across from Western Australia, so she stayed

with us for a few days. And then there was a, and I don’t mean it in any dramatic sense, but there was a thought, “Oh well, we’ll go off and do things like go to Taronga Zoo, go to the art galleries and those sorts of things,” and, as I say, to say that “in case anything ever happened” is a bit too melodramatic, but still there was still that notion that.... And I think one of

the more sobering thoughts was that we had been issued with our weapons and we actually had our weapons at home with us, our own personal weapons, rifles and the machine guns, etc., and pistols, so whilst you certainly didn’t leave them lying around in the lounge, nonetheless the fact that there were weapons in our possession, in our own home,

had an impact.

Well, I had a pistol and also – God, what did I have? - an Owen machine carbine, which was an old World War II thing, which I might add we traded in on new American carbines when we got up there. But nonetheless it didn’t matter what the weapons were worth,

but the fact that we had them there at home was pretty sobering.

Not too thrilled. No, she wasn’t too impressed.

I flew there on, we left with one of those midnight skulkers, we left just after midnight on May 4th from

the RAAF base at Richmond and that was on board one of the, we had a Qantas 707 flew us up there. Flew via Townsville, landed at the Garbutt airbase at about three o'clock in the morning I think, three, three-thirty in the morning, then from there straight into Tan Son Nhut in Saigon.

No, no. It was a Defence charter aircraft. Well,

obviously the crew, and particularly the cabin crew, I think the two pilots were ex-air force pilots so they certainly had a bit of background but no, the crew were all civilians.

Good question. Yes we were. As I say, we landed at the airbase, air force base at Townsville,

then from there straight into Tan Son Nhut, so we didn’t disembark from the aircraft at any stage. I know there were soldiers that went via Singapore and they were as civilians, but no, we went in uniform.

Chaos, actually. When we were coming in to land,

because it was in an operational area, it wasn’t the normal civilian airline type approach. We came in at a relatively high altitude and then went into a fairly steep dive to descend into the traffic pattern of Tan Son Nhut airport. Then as we came around on the finals and the flaps and the wheels were down, all of a sudden he applied full power.

We went around, he jigged off to one side of the strip, as we looked down we could actually see these US [United States] Air Force jets taxiing extremely quickly around the taxiways and then onto the runway and straight off, and they were off on a mission. And I guess that was the first inkling that we had, or the first sign, first indication that, “Hey, this is real,” just to watch those air force jets, fighters, taking off.

And then we went around, landed as we got out and it was in the monsoon season so it was hot, it was wet and, as I say, chaos. There were just aircraft moving everywhere. There was a cacophony of sound: bells, whistles, jets, piston-engine aeroplanes,

babble of….

Well, that description I gave you about how I found it when I got off the aircraft, it was interesting: the cabin crew of the Qantas crew never got out of the jet and we noticed it turn around, took off very quickly and sort of left us there.

I was describing about the sort of sound, the cacophony of sound. And also the other thing that, it was the first time that I’d actually been into South-East Asia so first thing I, the other thing I noticed was actually the smell, which I’ll think you’ll find most people who go to that part of the world, or any part of the world, they would talk about the unique smells, and that was certainly true there. The thing that really struck me, though,

was there were some US Army buses there to take us from where we disembarked from the Qantas aircraft around to another part of the airfield to where some US Air Force planes were going to fly us down to Vung Tau. But these US Army buses had wire meshing over the windows and when we enquired why because it looked rather out of place, we weren’t used to

seeing it on any of our vehicles, we were just told rather politely it was to stop the grenades being thrown through the windows, which again was another subtle little reminder that, “Hey, this place isn’t too friendly.” So anyway, the buses then took us around to the far side of the airport and we then got onto some US Air Force transport aircraft and they flew us down to Vung Tau.

And at that stage that was mid-afternoon, and there was then a monsoon downpour and, whilst we had experienced similar things up in Queensland, it was the first time I think I’d experienced what a genuine monsoon downpour was like. I’d never seen rain like it; even here in Albany it never got that heavy. So they flew us down to Vung Tau and

when we landed there we were taken to an area out near a petroleum farm which struck us as being somewhat risky, being alongside all these big petrol tanks, and sort of thinking, “Well, if the Viet Cong are as active as people say then what the hell are we doing sitting alongside these

damn great petrol tanks?” But anyway, we went out there and set up a temporary camp there, because I was part of the advance party that went in and the rest of the regiment weren’t coming up for about another ten days, twelve days.

There was the commanding officer of the regiment, the battery commander of the battery that I was

in, and then I was the only other officer, and then we had I think about five or six soldiers with us, and the commanding officer had his own group with him. And that was, the requirement on us was then to set up the area for the receipt of the whole regiment who were coming.

It was a piece of flat ground on

the north-eastern side of the Vung Tau airstrip and alongside a police training college, which was a fairly interesting experience in itself, because when we’d gone through our training at Canungra, one of the characteristics of the Viet Cong that we’d been told was that they generally dressed in sort of blue shirt, or dark blue, navy blue or black shirt and cotton trousers

and sort of what they called “Michelin thongs [sandals]”, in other words they were made out of tyres. And so that was our mental picture. And the, you know, the typical coolie hat. So that was our mental picture of the Viet Cong. And so we, the first evening that we’d arrived and we got in, set up these tents and we were next door to this police training, national police training college,

about five-thirty in the afternoon the gates opened and out came this whole bunch of Vietnamese police dressed in black with coolie hats and thongs on. And of course we hadn’t been prepared for it and so just looking at these, I’m not sure what fell the furthest, our backsides or our hearts, but it certainly gave us some excitement.

As I say, we had about ten days before the rest of the regiment came up. Some of the regiment arrived by sea, they came in on the old HMAS Sydney which people would know was called the “Vung Tau ferry” and that arrived in Vung Tau and offloaded all of our guns and quite a lot of our soldiers, that would’ve been about ten days after I arrived;

and then within the next couple of days the rest were all flown in. And then we had a period of about another two and a half to three weeks of what you might call, basically, acclimatisation.

Well, basically by just doing what you normally did within that environment and knowing that you weren’t going to get shot at and you weren’t

exposed to any particular dangers. That was the regiment as a whole; however, because I was a forward observer myself, another forward observer in the battery and the guy who was second-in-command of the battery, we were actually sent off to join 173rd Airborne Brigade, an American unit that was operating, and it was conducting what was called Operation Harleyhood and

their task was to actually clear the rubber plantation at Nui Dat in preparation for the Australian Task Force to go in. So we actually went into the Nui Dat rubber before the Australian Task Force arrived and we had a period, I think from memory about four or five days, with the American 173rd Airborne.

Well, they were on operations clearing so we actually accompanied

them, we were part of their infantry units as they went and sort of engaged in clearing out the Viet Cong. And I might add they suffered quite a few casualties in doing that.

Well, it was just essentially patrolling and sweeping through in a way that basically covered all of the ground within the Nui Dat rubber. And not so much that there was an expectation

that they, the Viet Cong, would be there in a static position, but because the Nui Dat rubber was on a communication route between the northern area of Phuoc Tuy province, down into an area on the Mekong Delta which was called the Ranh Sap which was a mangrove swamp area which the Viet Cong used as part of their logistic communication system. They used to get supplies and things up through there.

Nui Dat rubber plantation was smack bang on their communication route. So the expectation was that they would actually catch the Viet Cong moving through the rubber, and that’s indeed what happened. But the Americans lost quite a few casualties in doing that.

The toll?

No, I would have no idea.

All we heard was there had been casualties. And the other exposure to it was actually at the other end, down at Vung Tau. I mentioned that the regiment flew in and I had to go down and meet them on the airstrip of Vung Tau while I was there, where the aircraft carrying the regimental soldiers came in to park; alongside was an American air force cargo

plane. It was an old, what they used to call a Cargomaster and it was an aircraft that actually had a little lift that came down from the back of the aircraft, down and then put your stores on and got a lift up into the aircraft. But what I noticed was around the back of it, and I don’t know how many but I would’ve guessed, say, a dozen or more, say about a dozen, there were these large aluminium canisters and they were in fact

the bodies being shipped back to the States. And they were from 173rd Airborne Brigade that had been clearing Nui Dat.

How?

We were there really just as observers. We weren’t actually integrated with them and we weren’t in any shape or form part of their command structure or anything, so we actually just became supernumeraries to their organisation. We went up

there and I was out with one of their companies, for example, and that was just to see how they operated, how they used artillery, how they used air power, so it was really just an observer role and it gave us an insight, albeit with Americans and the American techniques they used, not necessarily the same as ours, but it was an insight into it. But also the other part, coming back to that question you asked about acclimatisation, it

was probably the best form of acclimatisation because we were doing what we were going to do when we actually had the Australians up there.

Well, if you’re talking about that particular experience, there is no doubt that 173rd Airborne Brigade was a very professional unit. American units

generally ran the gamut from being very, very experienced, very professional, very efficient, through to the cowboys and Indians that I know as part of the popular press. And the Americans had it. You could go into some units with the Americans and you would recognise it was ill-disciplined, because they would’ve had conscripts in those units, and their conscripts were nowhere near as

educated or, what would you call it, socially aware, socially advanced, socially communicative as our conscripts, our National Servicemen. So when you got into an American organisation that was basically a cowboy outfit, boy, they really were cowboys. Radio stood here and all the other common stories you hear. But, as I say, at the other end of the

scale, the professional, highly-trained American units were just as good as ours.

Not direct, thank God; on the periphery. We did a couple of operations where the Americans were involved, 1st Infantry Division, and some of their units were,

yeah, you didn’t feel particularly safe with them. The other area where you noticed certainly a very distinct difference in the levels of discipline was down in Vung Tau where some of the American service units, their transport units, their ordnance companies, their logistic and support administration units,

to me they had nowhere near the same level of discipline and same level of professionalism about them. But, as I say, offsetting that, at the other end of the scale, their good units were really good.

It’s a little, no, it’s a little difficult to describe because I only went into

one small part of 173rd Airborne so I didn’t see at any stage Airborne Brigade Headquarters so I got no real sense of how it was operating as a brigade. The only thing I can say about it is obviously, from the size of the unit, it would’ve been covering a very large area. It was using helicopter operations, which we had neve really seen before. So their supply system was based on helicopters flying

in. Aeromedical evacuation, casualties were taken out by helicopter. And also the other thing we had an exposure to was the amount of American air force support that was around, the number of what they call close air patrols, CAPs, just the number of fighter aircraft that were up there and loaded to the gunwales with rockets and bombs and napalm

and cannon. And that was an eye-opener because we just never saw that in Australia. And it’s all there at the end of a radio call.

It was. And of course, as we got onto operations, well, that was my role, was in fact to call in and control that sort of level of support. Yeah, it was, it was really impressive.

To be honest, we became so involved in the preparation of the regiment to move up into that Nui Dat area and take over and establish a base camp and there was a whole heap of administrative things to do to get the regiment ready to move,

not the least continuing the training, continuing the acclimatisation, that really, I guess, those just became blurs. The only thing I do remember is at some stage in that period, as a forward observer, I was being given my assignment to leave the regiment and go and join one of the infantry battalions and I

was detached from my unit and put into the New Zealand artillery battery as a forward observer, and from there I then was attached to Alpha Company of 6th Battalion; and so at that stage, at the initial stage, I actually moved into an infantry company and our actual move from Vung Tau up to Nui Dat I did with the infantry.

I would say probably about another two weeks. And there was nothing in Nui Dat, it was just a rubber plantation. So we went in there, erected our little hoochies, put up wire entanglements around the place, laid very basic communication wires around the place, dug in weapon pits, dug in the command post, it

was all done in about the first two or three days, and living in individual little hoochies in the monsoon and floating away.

Yes, although bear in mind that when you talk about an infantry battalion or an artillery regiment or an armoured squadron, they are relatively self-

contained units and therefore they have the ability to be plonked on the ground and look after themselves. So in that sense we were basically given an area of ground within the rubber plantations and said, “Go away and develop it.” And there was an overall co-ordination from the Task Force commander and his staff to make sure that there were no

weak points within the perimeter, but apart from that the battalion was told, “Go and prepare yourself. You dig yourself in and make yourself safe, safe and secure.” And the central supplies were really in things like barbed wire, star pickets, sandbagging and all that sort of stuff, but we didn’t have any substantial amount of, say, engineer support to dig pits.

I think we got a front end loader for a short period of time to help us dig out a command post for the company but, apart from that, everything else was pick and shovel.

Yes. Oh, soldiers wouldn’t dig a pit for an officer, nor were they expected to; but no, we all had to do our own.

To a level of sort of sophisticated development probably was about six months, eight months, but in terms of it being an area that had a relative level of safety about it and security, that would’ve probably been, say, a couple of weeks.

Well, from day one, the moment we got in there, the whole method of operation of the Australians was to send patrols out and patrol the whole of the area and we would have, the two infantry battalions that were located there would’ve had, I guess, at any one time probably four or five patrols out, so there was a constant circling around the Task Force perimeter

all in a co-ordinated way so you didn’t run into each other, but nonetheless there was a very comprehensive patrolling program that was established and it was something the Australians tended to do far more than the Americans. So, as a consequence, we had a comparatively good level of security - I say “comparative” because we still had the incident at Long Tan not too long later.

To a sophisticated level, but it was obviously at an operating level and I would’ve said probably within about the first two to three weeks it was a cohesive base camp area. When I say level of sophistication, things like communication trenches, communication systems themselves.

We still had radio but didn’t have any sort of wire telephone communication. Putting down roads, getting all of the weapon pits, putting sandbagging protection around things like mess, mess facilities. In those early days we all lived still on twenty-four hour ration packs, we didn’t have centralised mess facilities for food. For medical we still

had to go down to Vung Tau. So it was really very much an infantry-oriented initial base that we set up.

There was a hairy old truck ride down through Ba Ria and down the road to Vung Tau. Most of them used to travel in convoys, armoured protected convoys,

and the only other way is we had very early in the piece a helicopter pad up at Nui Dat so we, 9th Squadron of the air force were operating Iroquois and they flew into Nui Dat.

I was a forward observer so whenever a

company, or the company I was attached to was Alpha Company, whenever that company actually went out on a patrol or on an operation, I would go with it, with the company commander; and, depending on the requirements of the company commander – if, for example, a patrol went out and there was some degree of concern about the level of safety for that platoon, I would go out with the

platoon. Although it occurred a couple of times, attempts to get me to go out with a section of infantry, that was always resisted and the artillery captain was thought to be reasonably important enough not to send him out with nine soldiers and an infantry section. So we were spared that. But yeah, I would go out, and that was fairly constant.

Yes, the whole time

We spent most of our time outside the camp area.

It’s easy to say how much time I spent in camp. I spent practically all of my time out. Forward observers were in very short supply and also the patrolling regime that they’d established,

the routines and the requirements for patrolling was pretty intensive because they had no idea, the Task Force commander at the time had no idea what was the scope of the Viet Cong activity in the area. And because of the perceived vulnerability of the Task Force base, the best way of protecting it was to have patrolling constantly out, so as a forward observer I spent practically all my time out

in the weeds, bashing the bush.

We would be given, the orders would come down from the Italian commander that the company would be required to go into a particular part of what was called the tale, the tactical area of operations. And so we’d be given a fairly large slice of that piece

of ground and then we would be required to go in to sweep the whole way through that area and determine what level of Viet Cong activity had been there. If there were any of the little villages located within that area we’d have to go in and clear the villages, check them for Viet Cong activity, look to see what sort of level of activity

the Viet Cong had in terms of what I mentioned earlier, communications and bringing supplies thorough, and then just generally hoping that we would actually flush the Viet Cong out and actually get engaged with them. And that would, those patrols would normally be something like five to seven days long. And in that space of time, you would probably, on the ground, cover

fifty, sixty kilometres, I guess.

Well, a typical day, if there was such a thing, you’d go into a stand-to before dawn and the whole company, let’s take it was a company patrol that we were on, the whole company would be awake and go to stand-to before dawn,

then immediately after stand-down we would move, we would pack all of our night gear away and move. That would usually be somewhere around about five-thirty, quarter to six in the morning. We tended to move, I don’t know, two, one or two, three kilometres away from that location where we’d stayed the night then we would stop, set up a secure site with

sentries, sentry posts out, and then we would breakfast. Sounds very civilised, yeah, but in truth it was hurried scratch meals. Because you’d have a little hexamine stove that you would sort of light up and try and, being typical Australians, you had to have your brew, but it was basically a ration pack meal.

And in that you’d be expected to shave and clean yourself. That would typically be about half an hour, three quarters of an hour, and then you’d be on the move, and then you’d be patrolling and moving through that area in a prescribed pattern covering a certain amount of terrain per hour. Invariably it wasn’t too bad when we were operating in areas where there

were banana plantations and some sort of cultivation, but when you got into the jungle area with bamboo thickets and things that became quite lethal and they were very difficult to move through, so progress was pretty tortuous, very slow. Again at that early stage was the monsoon season, so humidity was very high. And

assuming you didn’t hit any Viet Cong, anything that you found by way of caches, tracks, any other signs that the Viet Cong had been there, then obviously you’d prop and then you’d send off smaller patrols out and around to them and see where they went to, whether there were any Viet Cong in the area, whether or not the Viet Cong had set up their own camps or whatever. And then, depending on the results of that, if there was nothing sort of

out of the ordinary we’d then get back together and we’d move on again and that would go on until you’d have a break for lunch. But it’d be the same routine. Only about half the company at a time would eat, then you change over and that would normally be again about three quarters of an hour to an hour. And then back again in the afternoon. And then without fail, three o'clock in the afternoon the monsoon would hit and down

would come the downpour. So you’d then be absolutely soaked to the skin until late afternoon, usually about an hour to half an hour before last light - no, it’ll be a little earlier than that, about an hour and a half before last light - we’d actually go into an area, find a clearing or create a small clearing, and then early in the piece a US Army helicopter would then come in and drop supplies

to us, water in particular because the water supplies up there were always suspect for waterborne diseases so we were not allowed to use any of the water, natural water around, so they’d ferry in on these helicopters water and re-supplies of food, ammunition, radio batteries and all of that sort of thing.

It varied between individuals, but typically we would have a pack which would contain a change of clothing, in particular changes of socks because we used to go through socks like crazy and they’d be wrapped up

in plastic bags to keep them reasonably dry. You’d have usually two to three days of ration packs, or ration food, and then somewhere in the order of about four or five or six water bottles and then, in addition to that, every man in the company or platoon was expected to carry their share of things like radio batteries, which

weighed a ton, ammunition for the machine guns, so you may well end up with sort of ammunition belts on you, and then in addition to that your own requirements. In my case, I had my own radio. Sorry, I had a signaller who carried the radio for me, but then I had to carry spare batteries for him.

And all up those packs would weigh somewhere in the order of, oh I don’t know, fifty, sixty pounds in today’s weights well over a hundred kilos.

And certainly when you get down on all fours and you’re crawling through and you’re getting tangled up in bamboo as it sort of grabs you and tears the canvas and all that sort of thing, yeah, became rather frustrating. You tended to lose quite a bit of

weight.

My signaller. Yeah.

It was still a professional officer, junior rank in that sense. But there is no doubt that you become much more informal, you become

much more aware of each other’s peculiarities and characteristics and all that sort of thing. And also their purpose was to actually support me while I did things like controlled artillery or called in air strikes and things, but outside that professional nature of the job that I was there to do we very much became a team and shared. So, for example, whereas it would’ve been

unthinkable back in Australia, if necessary I would cook up the rations for them if they were doing something that was urgent. You know, we would share things a hell of a lot more than we would’ve done, say, back in Australia. So whilst there was still always that distinction between me being a captain and him being a private soldier and the other two in the team were much the same, I had a bombardier or a corporal

who was my assistant, whilst there was still that sort of fairly significant gap in terms of our rank, it tended to be very much, what am I searching for, less important and certainly there were no tasks or responsibilities beyond my professional requirement to call in artillery fire. There was nothing else that sort of was, for an officer to do

or a private soldier to do, we just mucked in and did it all ourselves.

No. It had a handpiece and I spoke in it. That was his job, to keep the thing going.

And he would be right behind me, he would be, you know, two, three paces behind me, and at the drop of a hat I could just pick up the handpiece

and talk. Yeah, because if I’d carried it then it would’ve been a problem for me to do what I had to do, because the only interest I had in the radio was being able to communicate back to my own artillery battery or across to the air force

forward air controllers whom I would then control to bring in the air power, the aircraft. So really my only interest in that was for the actual few physical, direct physical contacts I needed back to various people. And so therefore, when I was controlling the artillery or the air, I would actually just give orders for the signaller

to actually relay them and then that allowed me to get out, be off to one side, get underneath, be able to use binoculars, you know, that sort of thing.

Yep.

No, no. Component repair, that’s all, how to do basic remedial things on the radio. But no, they certainly weren’t

technicians.

Yeah. I actually had two radios in my group so even though they were on different radio nets, this one was on what was called the regimental net and the other was on the battery net, if it ever came to the crunch and one of those radios went down, then I would immediately stay on the battery net,

being my primary means of communication. And as we had almost daily resupply by those helicopters, providing there was enough time before that helicopter came out, all I did was notify the battery one of my radios were gone and we had a pool and then a radio would be got out on that next helicopter lift.

Well, I got up as far as saying we had

that helicopter resupply and that would’ve been about an hour and a half to an hour before last light. Once the helicopter had gone and we’d distributed rations and water and all the other things to whoever were going to have to carry it, we would then move again for about another half, three-quarters of an hour to get away from where that helicopter had landed because obviously it could be pinpointed,

where had it landed, so the Viet Cong would find out very quickly that’s where we were. So we would always move for about another half hour afterwards and that would take us to within about half an hour or so of last light, at which time we would then go into a defensive position, send out clearing patrols around our position, and they would then come back right on last light itself. And

at that stage, somewhere within that, if we were lucky, we would’ve got ourselves a sort of an evening meal, because once darkness had fallen you can’t use the hexamine stoves. So you can still eat cold food out of the packets and tins that were part of the ration pack. But from then on we went into a night routine, which was then on a roster basis.

After a while you learned to sleep anywhere.

We had little blow-up mattresses.

Reasonably.

What we found was very often the seams of them gave way. They weren’t particularly good

mattresses so you ended up sleeping on the ground anyway. But the other thing about it was in that earlier period, as I mentioned, it was in the monsoon period, so nine times out of ten you ended up sleeping wet through the night. And also you invariably got your sleep broken by enemy activity around the place because the Viet Cong tended to be very active at night, so one of the things we’d do,

the platoon or the company would actually send out an ambush patrol somewhere. If we’d found an area the Viet Cong had been active in, then an ambush would be set up on that track or in the entranceway to a village or whatever.

Oh, we came across individuals, yeah, small groups of Viet Cong.

Well, Long

Tan was mid-August and we got up into the Nui Dat area by about the end of May so we would’ve had June, July and half of August, so there would’ve been quite a lot of activity and we would’ve done a lot of patrolling and we would’ve come across quite a lot of groups of Viet Cong. Because through that period, I mentioned that the Task Force had been put down right on top of one of their main communication routes, so the Viet Cong

took a lot of….

Well, we didn’t actually move at night. As I mentioned, we’d come into what they call a harbour area at around about half an hour or so before last light and we would then go into a sort of security routine to make sure that we were safe and wouldn’t get surprised.

Then we’d go into what was called stand to: everybody is alerted, looks out, has their weapons ready, and basically they say it’s to be prepared to repel anybody if they come and attack you because theoretically first light and last light are quite vulnerable times. The truth is everybody says that so nobody ever does it. But what

that routine of going into a harbour, going into everybody alert - everybody has by then made their little hoochies, one-man hoochies to sleep in for the night, drop them to the ground, got their bedding stuff out, everything they need for the night is there but is then all levelled to the ground and, if necessary, a bit of camouflage, grass or trees or something thrown across the top - and then you

stand to and usually about a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes after last light, when it’s actually dark, everybody’s eyes are accustomed and at that stage those who are going to go onto the first shift of sentry duty, manning the radios and whatever other extraneous requirements might’ve been identified, they will then take up the first shift; now,

that will then just go on a roster basis right the way through the night, unless something happens of course, but that’ll go on right the way through the night until just before dawn and first light when everybody would be woken up again. They’ll get dressed, boots on - nine times out of ten, more often than not, you’ll sleep with your boots on and your sort of normal daytime gear anyway.

And then you’ll go through a similar routine: everybody alert, sitting around waiting for the actual light to come. Those two actions of first light and last light really, as I say, rather than being there to defend you if the enemy suddenly attack, really it’s a way of creating if you like, a break between what you’d been doing in the day to that routine at night,

so it’s a routine, an establishment period, if you like. But in addition to that, in the actual area, you may also have, if you have some activity around the place and identified it during the day, you may well say, “Well, look, we’ll put in an ambush patrol or a reconnaissance patrol and they will actually go out for the night and they’ll go to a particular location.” If it’s an ambush it’ll usually be on a track where the enemy will come through and they’re there the whole

night and they’re away from the main group. When the routine in the morning, and any patrols that you might’ve had out during the night, when they all come back together you actually then break that little area, that camp that you’ve had, the harbour, and you all move away for much the same reason you remember I mentioned the helicopter when it came down and landed: straight after that you would move away because it was clearly identified where the helicopter

came in. If you’d been in a place overnight, you’ll get away from there as quickly as you can after first light, just purely to separate yourself, give you distance, and it’s just an added safety feature.

No, you don’t actually cover up tracks but what you do is you take a lot of care that you either, you use either natural features,

so if it’s a rocky surface you’ll always tread on the rocks, or if it is jungle then you will try and pick a natural pathway so that you don’t break any of the vegetation, you don’t scuff up the vegetation and you try to avoid breaking loose sticks and, you know, shrubbery and stuff. So you take a lot of care not to leave, leave

as few signs as possible that you’d been there.

There may have been a general direction from, say, the battalion commander to the company commander, “Go out, patrol a particular area and, if you find signs of activity, establish ambush patrols and try and....”

Either you’re trying to kill the enemy or you’re trying to capture somebody from the enemy. But very often the battalion commander wouldn’t do that and it would be left up to the company commander and, depending on what has been found during the day, what signs there are of people, you know, enemy movement, enemy activity, he may well decide, “OK, yes it looks a likely prospect, we’ll put an ambush in there because we think the enemy will move through during the night,” or alternatively

“We’re not quite certain what’s going on,” so they’ll put out reconnaissance or a listening patrol and their task is not to actually shoot and kill the enemy, they actually just sit, listen and observe and gain information.

How many enemy are using a particular area, whether they’re going into a particular village, whether they are in the main

what you might call “porters”, carrying food and supplies, or whether they’re actually combat enemy. You can often determine what is the nature of the enemy, for example in Vietnam we had two: you had the local Viet Cong who were in fact local South Vietnamese-resident people who, pardon me, much the same as we’d look at our army

Reserve, if you like, in a sense, inasmuch as they’re not full-time regular professional soldiers, so they’re Viet Cong; or you may determine that they are actually North Vietnamese Army, in which case they are, you know they are professional, full-time soldiers, just the same as we are. And the difference between the two is normally, if you determine they’re North Vietnamese, you know they’ve got things like artillery and mortars, whereas if

they’re the local - and heavy machine guns, and so you get an idea of what weaponry they’ve got. If they are local Viet Cong you know they’ve got lesser capability and you can make judgements about what you do. If you found, for example, evidence of a fairly sizeable North Vietnamese Army group, a little Australian infantry company of a hundred people aren’t going to go rushing off to try and tackle them because

you don’t know where they are, what numbers they have and precisely what range of materials and weaponry they’ve got, all you know is they’ve got it; whereas you might be tempted to go and do something a little more ambitious to try and capture or kill the local Viet Cong group. So it’s really just identifying who they are and knowing what your capability is to do something about them.

In some instances, yes. Very often the.... As I say, where we were in Phuoc Tuy province, we were part on top of the supply line from the Mekong Delta up into where they had their main base camp areas, and of course they want to protect that so they used to come out and patrol. And certainly

fairly early in the piece, when we went to Nui Dat, they did a lot of patrolling to try and identify where we were, where precisely in the Nui Dat rubber we were, how many of us there were, what sort of weapons we had, what were our night-fighting capabilities, how much patrolling did we do around the area and just generally gaining as much information as they could about what we were up to, why we were there, what our intentions were, and

then with the hope that they could do something about dislodging us and getting rid of us, which of course basically is what Long Tan was really all about.

Oh, differs between various plantations, but a mature rubber plantation, you would have rows of trees that would be, I don’t know, three to four metres across and wide

between the trees. And it’s generally fairly well cleared undergrowth because the rubber tree workers go in through there and of course they’re constantly tapping the rubber trees - obviously not when we were there shooting at each other; they tended to move off. And some of the areas around, certainly around Phuoc Tuy where the rubber plantations hadn’t been tended for quite some time

because of, primarily, the Viet Cong operating in the area, then you got a quite dense undergrowth in amongst the rubber trees. And the plantations themselves could be quite extensive, you know, hundreds of metres across in various stands.

Not really, because even with the undergrowth it generally tended to be fairly light and it’s

a bit like wandering through an Australian native bush, inasmuch as it’s relatively easy to push through. It’s only when you get into various parts of, say, the alpine country in Victoria or up into the Blue Mountains or the Great Dividing Range where you really are in very thick vegetation, but certainly in most Australian bushland areas it’s relatively easy to walk through; well, so it is amongst the rubber trees.

The going up there got very difficult, where you got into the jungle area where were predominantly bamboo thickets, and of course they had great damn thorns and things in them, that really did become really a problem.

Well, certainly when you’re, as I say, bundled down under a pack weighing about a hundred-odd kilos and you’re there sort of struggling on

all fours to get in underneath and it’s all tangled up, and nine times out of ten you’re sopping wet. You’ve got a rifle or a weapon to carry or you got a radio on your back as well.

Yeah.

Oh, there were numerous occasions where you’d be lucky to travel five hundred metres in three hours.

You know, it was just that slow, and even slower at times.

And your frustration level rises, you get very irritable, everything is exaggerated, so if you’re wet and uncomfortable it’s even more so because you are literally pissed off with the world at large. And you know you’ve got to get up and do it the next day.

It’s not so much lack of morale because you can still have a high level of morale as a unit and be doing in what you’re doing. It’s really quite a localised and quite a temporary – no, I’ll re-phrase that: if you have poor morale in the unit, those sorts of things become a real problem. If your morale in the unit is good, then generally they are

transitory types of things, you know. OK, you’re irritable, you really are tired, but it passes. You get up and the next day’s another day.

Very little because everything is in whispers and there is essentially no unnecessary talking. Most of the time when you’re on patrol

all of the orders that are conveyed are all by sign language and the only voices you may hear, but you’d need to be fairly close, but the only voices you might hear would be a signaller on a radio. But the rest of the time with the rest of the group you probably wouldn’t know how many men are there, and you can’t hear them.

And it’s normally the man in front or the man behind.

That’s in very close country where you can’t see very far. And you might only be five, eight paces between men. And even then they can just vanish all of a sudden behind a bush or something or other and you’ve got no idea which way they’ve gone.

Well, normally you sort of have a fair idea of which way you’re heading, but yeah, it can be quite disconcerting when suddenly the man in front just vanishes and

he’s gone.

No.

Well, there are drills that are established and that’s part of all of that work-up period where we’re doing all the training back in Australia and did some of the initial training in Vietnam: if you’re in open country then you adopt usually a particular sort of formation. If you’re going to very thick

country, you automatically move, close up, get much closer to each other and you change your formation. And that’s all done essentially automatically by the platoon commander and the section commanders. So it’s not really a case of we’re changing the nature of the vegetation and the terrain; we will change formations, it all just sort of happens, and that’s as a result of the training that’s been done.

Mm. Now it’s a different matter if you have contact with the enemy and you need to change your formation. Usually whoever’s in charge of the group, be it the company commander or the platoon commander, they will actually give the directions and the orders, who goes where to do what. So that sort of change of formation is very much structured and ordered by whoever’s running that, what they call the contact with the enemy.

Well, the key people within the group all work on bearing and distance and compasses - and that was back then; nowadays they use global positioning systems, so it’s all a matter of push a button and look at a little screen and you know where you are. But back then, no, it was all done by compass and pacing. So somebody had to keep a judgement of how far you’ve actually

moved. So if you’re moving through country which is particularly thick, a lot of bush and you have to make variations, somebody has got to make an estimate of how far you would move laterally off your track, back on again, how much space, how much distance have you actually covered in that traverse around something, because it all affects the total distance we’ve actually moved. And where that became critical for people like me is, very often, if

we had a contact and I had to bring down artillery fire then where we actually were on the ground became a real problem, and if you weren’t relatively good at measuring and judging those distances and what bearing you’d been on, it’s quite possible you could be kilometres away from wherever you really were supposed to be, or more than likely over a short distance, say in a matter of

metres, and the thing is when you’re bringing down artillery fire, being out by a few hundred metres can be rather unfortunate.

If you’re underneath when the artillery comes down.

Yes, you map-read as you go.

We had what were called pictographs and they were a semi-photographic representation of, aerial photograph of, where we were actually moving around, and overlaid on that were all the symbols you normally see on a map. So that, depending on how up to date that was, that could be a better sort of guide for us than the normal army map

that you see. The problem was in that part of the world the French had not done a lot of surveys since the '40s and '50s so quite a bit of the, certainly when you’re talking about vegetation like open grassland areas or there was a rubber plantation, the picto might show what it was like ten, fifteen years ago. Of course vegetation changes, so providing there

were some quite distinct outlines and shapes of rubber plantations or a particular open grass area or something like that, you could often pick up the shape of it and sort of say, “Yes, that’s where we are right now.” There were some other techniques we had. For example, if we weren’t too uncertain about where we were and were prepared to

take a risk, but it wasn’t much of a risk, I could always call an artillery smoke round and it would land and then it would burst into smoke and the smoke would rise and you have a reasonable idea of where the round actually lands. There are some variations in the trajectory of the shells which could throw it out a bit, but you generally know where that shell has come down, and if you see the smoke coming, you take a bearing distance to the smoke and then you

work out where you are. The other alternative is the other way round. At that time we had a lot of both army and air force aircraft flying around, and if you really did get lost and you were uncertain, totally lost as to where you were, then one of the things you could do if you knew an aircraft was up there and you’d got their radio frequencies or you knew which frequencies they were operating on, you could actually call them up and you’d say, “Help, we’re lost.

Can you see my smoke?” And you’d throw a smoke canister and whether it’s yellow, purple, orange, whatever the colour might be, if the aircraft sees it, it would actually see it and sort of say, “Yep, got your smoke, this is where you are.” So there were methods of sort of determining where we are. But essentially most of our navigation was just simple bearing and distances on the compass and pacing.

Pretty effective. You get fairly

experienced at it. And you, some people more than others, but you get a feel for the shape of the ground and you can read a map and the contour lines and you can see where the ridges, where the gullies are, where the creeks are, and by looking at those contours you can determine the shape of high ground and hills and what they look like - as I say, some people are better at that than others - and from that you can navigate quite easily off a map.

Well, they are – well, they were then, but it still had enough valid information on it to still make them worthwhile. And it really only became a bit of an issue if you were in areas where there were rubber plantations or banana plantations or other cultivation going on. Rice paddies in particular used to chop and change as the seasons

went. But even so you would get an idea of where, for example, a set of rice paddies was actually located. Even though the shape may have changed, the shape of the ground, the contours of the ground, if it sits in a little valley or in a little depression or something, you’d still pick that up and you’d be able to identify it, even though it may have changed since the days of when the photograph or the map was made.

No, it depended on what we were trying to do. If you had, for example, an SAS [Special Air Service] patrol out, then yes, they would avoid everybody at all costs. If we went out and we came across villagers, it would depend on where we were, there were some areas where villagers were allowed in and they were allowed to tend to their

herds and their crops and things. And they were, during daylight hours, open zones, free zones and the Vietnamese could come and go at their own will, in which case it still may be that we would’ve gone up and asked them questions. Now you’re not always certain what their sympathies were, so you never really had a real idea as to whether you were being told the truth, but it was still useful to hear them, what

they said. And there were quite a lot of people around, Vietnamese, around the Phuoc Tuy province who were pro-South Vietnam. Not that you ever knew who they were, but there was always information that became available and you took it because there is always the possibility it may corroborate something else that has been found out by someone else somewhere in some other area. So you still kept up with the villagers, you met

them. Other times you may well, if you were going out to set up an ambush somewhere, then you may well avoid them so they wouldn’t even know that you were in the area.

Oh, it’s usually things, you know, the most obvious things about the Viet Cong. “Have you seen them? Are they in the area?” Bear in mind a lot of these villagers used to suffer quite badly at the hands

of the Viet Cong. They were very heavily taxed, if not in money, then in food. In many instances quite a few of those villagers were killed by the Viet Cong. At times they had to harbour the Viet Cong whether they liked it or not, so of course they put themselves at risk. So you’d just generally ask them questions about the activities of the Viet Cong.

Some of the better officers that had been doing that a while and had a flair for it would get a sense of whether they were being told the truth or not or whether it’s questionable - you’d never know whether you were being told the truth, but whether or not this information is worth taking back and passing on.

At times we did. At times we had

South Vietnamese army interpreters with us, but not all that often. We generally tended to operate on our own and, as an Australian force in Phuoc Tuy, that was our area, we did our tasks and our responsibilities there and it was only if we did what were called cordon and search operations - which is where you would go in, you would find a village that for whatever reason may be of interest to you, you

would surround that village, cordon it and then you’d put a force through to clear it out and then find out what’s there - those kinds of operations quite often we took a Vietnamese interpreter with us.

Not necessarily clear them out of the village, but you’d get them in, assemble them, you’d go through all of the houses and the huts in the area. Again you would do that because you had some sort of evidence that the Viet Cong were in the area and the hope is, of course, that you would find Viet Cong

or, as happened on a number of occasions, you’d find things like weapon caches or food caches, in which case we’d destroy them.

That’s one way of doing it, yeah. Otherwise you may leave them in the huts and just confine them to their own huts and then just move through. Some were hostile, some weren’t.

In terms of the threat to us, the Australians? Only inasmuch as we came across more of the Viet Cong than we did the North Vietnamese. But in terms of their professional capabilities, the North Vietnamese Army was a professional army, so in that

sense their training, their standards, their discipline was as good as ours. So no; as I say, on one hand you had numbers, Viet Cong, and on the other hand you had professionalism, so I wouldn’t have really differentiated between the two.

I think the easiest way, better way to describe them would be they were always wary of us. There were some villagers that we knew were very distinctly pro-South Vietnam and therefore friendly towards the Americans, the Australians, the Koreans, etc. For example, if you went into a village and there was a Roman Catholic church there,

the chances were that the majority of a village was a Catholic village, in which case their allegiances would tend to be towards the South, not towards the North Vietnamese. Being a communist state there was no sort of allegiance there. But you could never take that for granted that that was the case.

No, we didn’t, no.

We were always re-supplied out of our own logistics system, for a number of reasons, much the same as the supply of natural water. We would never use that – “never” is a bit too strong; we rarely used it. It was only in a real dire emergency when you used the local natural water because of waterborne diseases. If we had to then we did

have chlorination tablets, but to keep up a supply of chlorination would’ve been an additional burden on our supply system and even then you’re still not certain you’re going to kill all the bugs in the water. So it was better to do it from the resupply, from the helicopter system bringing water in which we knew had been treated properly back in a base camp area.

But no - well, sorry; the other reason was really the one about the hearts and minds. Don’t go in and just take food off the locals. If you’re in a particularly heavy war zone, very often they don’t have much food themselves and so if you’re trying to maintain and foster their friendship, their co-operation, you don’t sort of lob in and just take all the food off them.

It would come through the infantry units, but there were also specialist intelligence groups further up there, and that’s really about all I can tell you because I was never part of it so that’s way outside my experience. But we did have specialist intelligence groups. And the other thing I mentioned earlier about the Special Air Service,

much the same as you read in this day and age about them in Iraq or in Afghanistan, they were going out on long range patrols and they were there to gather information.

They operated quite a bit further out from where we were. You might come across a patrol if it was coming back in on foot, but more often than not the SAS would come back out by helicopter.

No, they kept very much to themselves.

We generally tended to keep in our own groups, mainly because if you got away for a little bit of leave somewhere it was usually your group that got the leave, so you’d stay together as a group. And it was pretty rare to

sort of know somebody in another infantry battalion, across the other side of the Task Force, and even get communication with them and say, “What are you doing, are you going to Vung Tau or something?” Not that I knew much about it, because I had hardly any leave.

It was actually a French resort village and had some tremendous old French colonial architecture

and some fairly good restaurants. Loved the French bakeries. But with the Americans and the Australians, and particularly when they put in, the Americans put in the air base - or an airfield rather than an air base, put in an airfield there - yes, Vung Tau expanded. And then, because of its location down at the mouth of the, near the mouth of the Mekong,

a lot of ships would come in to unload and resupply. So it developed quite enormously. I don’t know what the population was, but it would’ve been significantly expanded with both American and Australian logistics groups there.

I think I probably got about one or two days. Pardon me.

I got two days up in Saigon and that was it, in the whole time I was there.

You might recall earlier I said I was a forward observer and we were in short supply and that’s exactly what happened. We would finish with.... For example, the moment I finished with 6th Battalion, it was at the end of the operation that involved Long Tan, soon as that

operation was over I was then moved from 6th Battalion across to 5th Battalion. And so packed up our goods and bags when we got back in, because we’d been out on an operation, came back into the base camp area of Alpha Company, packed up our stuff, a Land Rover took us over to 5th Battalion, we were shown where our tents were - this is my whole group, the four of us - threw down our gear, I had

a message saying that there was an orders group, which meant the company commander was going to give his orders, and so I went up there, was introduced around all the platoon commanders and then we were out the next day off on another operation with 5th Battalion.

Well, I’m not sure I know how really to answer that. What I can say is that towards the end of my time in Vietnam I was absolutely buggered. I’d well and truly had it.

There was no trade union to say, or

no occupational health and safety officers to say what we could and couldn’t do. Yeah, if there was a requirement you just went and did it. And that particular incident I just mentioned, where I’d been out with 6th Battalion and then changed across to 5th Battalion, in total I was out for nearly a month on end.

And at the end of it you sort of look at your feet and wonder how the hell you stood up to it. You got the odd day here and there where you could - well, you had to because you had to wash all your gear and sort of repair them, or your uniforms or your kit. You had to maintain the radio sets and all those sorts of things, so there were periods where you actually stopped and

you rested, but you were still back in the base camp area, certainly not resting as you might if you went down to Vung Tau, went up to Saigon or, as they introduced the R & R [Rest and Recreation], where you went off and had a week in somewhere like Taipei or Bangkok or Singapore or somewhere.

Didn’t see much of it. Got up there on a

one-day, one-night. I think we went to a restaurant and came back the next day, that was it.

No, no.

Oh it was just, they were the weapons we were issued with in Australia, but when we got there, first of all the OMC was an outdated weapon and it wasn’t particularly

effective, and by then the Americans had, you’ve probably heard of the M-16, the forerunner to that was a thing called the AR-15 and when we were there the Americans had those and we looked at them and sort of said, “Hey, they’re far better than what we’ve got.” So I think we’d only been there, I don’t know, but it was after Long Tan so we would’ve been there about three or four months,

and then we got the American AR-15s.

Well, through their supply system.

They had lots of goodies.

Oh, they had things like night scopes where you could actually look at night out through these little telescopes and light intensifiers.

Well, they had a lot of equipment we did not have in the Australian Army and it was there and we realised just how effective they were and what benefits they could be. Also they had a fairly generous system in terms of their rationing system, their boots were generally much better-suited to that

part of the world than ours. They had a canvas-sided boot which was a much better boot because, even though your feet got wetter quicker, they also got drier quicker and there was a lot more air circulating around your feet. You tended to get less tinea and skin peeling off your feet with their boots than we did with ours. I suppose it’s really more just a sort of a general expression, their

“goodies”, but yeah, they had a lot more kit and equipment than we did.

Oh we begged, borrowed and stole.

Not very much, actually. But it got to a stage where we actually plugged into the American supply system and, as time went by, I mentioned those light intensifiers from looking

out at night. The general we had up there at the time, General McKay, he actually badgered the Australians in Canberra to the point they actually allowed him to buy, or he acquired them through the American system for us, and of course Canberra then had to pay for them. But those sorts of things slowly became available to us. The other thing was that

we also had use of a lot of American firepower. We had an American battery, we had an American heavy artillery unit, we had access to a lot of various support.

It was added to our Task Force structure to provide heavy artillery. We were using 105mm Howitzers. In fact, when we first got to Vietnam, we were using L-5 Italian pack Howitzer which was a bit like

a Meccano set, you could pull it apart and break it down into bits and pieces and carry it around. Unfortunately most of the time we were firing at fairly long ranges, we would be firing at nine, ten thousand metres. Well, we weren’t firing at that range, because we couldn’t get them out of these little Italian pack howitzers; we would only be getting seven, seven and a half, eight thousand metres out of them, and for them to do

that they had they had to fire with the highest incremental charge of propellant behind the shell and unfortunately the Italian gun was just not designed to do that on a prolonged basis, so they started breaking down and we had a lot of troubles with them. Whether it was as a result of that I don’t know, but I know that not too long after we got there an American self-propelled 155mm battery came

and I suspect, as I say, I don’t know, I suspect it was there to give us the additional support, and also obviously had much longer range on the guns than we did with the little Italian pack howitzers. But it wasn’t all that much time after Long Tan that we actually gave them in and we got what was called the M202, which was an old American-cum-Canadian howitzer, it

was a Second World War vintage but still a very, very serviceable gun, and that was then giving us about, you know, nine, ten thousand metre range consistently and not breaking the equipment.

It was attached to and took part of the perimeter of the Task Force base.

Well, it was undesirable, but two of the gun batteries actually were located on the boundary, on the perimeter of the Task Force, which is not a good place for artillery to be or the artillery guns to be because, when they’re actually firing, there’s no-one to defend them because all of the crews are obviously servicing the guns. And so whenever the Task Force, the

guns in the Task Force base actually started firing, there was always the problem of defending that part of the perimeter of the Task Force base. And the Americans were slotted in in much the same way. They were a little bit better off, inasmuch that, being self-propelled, guns they were in a sense a bit like a tank and they had a lot of armour around them, so they could sustain sort of light arms fire being directed into their

position and they would sort of be reasonably protected. But we weren’t, or our guns weren’t. So if anybody started taking pot shots from outside, because the gunners were actually servicing the guns while we were firing, there was always the chance you could get injured or wounded.

Initially I think it certainly had its problems. Where I was

located, because remember I went out to an infantry company or an infantry battalion, by its very nature that’s quite a secure unit, it looks after itself very well, but I would’ve thought that back then in '66 when we first went there they would’ve been relatively insecure except, as I mentioned, there was all this patrolling going on, so there was not so much the risk that there would be a large enemy force; but there was always the risk

of lone individuals getting in and getting close to the base and, you know, taking pot shots.

Well, as Long Tan proved, it was a distinct possibility.

I don’t know what happened at the Task Force level

because obviously I wasn’t involved at that level, but there was a certain amount of information, I understand, flowing in that there was quite a significant amount of enemy activity around the Task Force base. And also immediately prior to Long Tan itself occurring, we started on the patrols that we took out from the Task Force base, we started striking more and more of the enemy,

not in any great numbers, but the frequency of those contacts started to rise. And, whilst I don’t think we necessarily made any connection with that and the possibility of a major full sale assault on the Task Force base, there was no doubt there was a heightened, an increased amount of enemy activity around the Task Force. But, as I say, I think there was still the

reliance on the amount of patrolling we were doing around the Task Force that we would actually strike any sort of main force or large group that was intent on assaulting the Task Force base.

Well,

the enemy actually moved into a rubber plantation to the east of ND [Nui Dat] and it was at a sufficient distance out from the Task Force base to not have a high probability that it was going to get run into by the patrols – although, having said that, the company that I was with, Alpha

Company, was actually sent out on a patrol the day after the Task Force got mortared. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the sequence of events at Long Tan or what led up to it, but the Australian Task Force base itself got mortared the night before.

It was, yeah. That hadn’t happened up till then so yeah, that was quite unusual. And

as a result of that, the company that I was with, we were already out on one of those patrols, and then, as a result of that mortaring, the next morning we were ordered to go further east from Nui Dat. And at the same time, a couple of other companies from 6th Battalion were sent out in the general area of where the mortars had been firing from the night before. One of those companies was

D Company, and the company I was with was then sent around what was called the second Nui Dat, out to the east of Task Force base, and it was our intention to then travel south and come in through the Long Tan rubber and had we done that we would’ve walked straight into the side of the assaulting force, the group that actually got D Company. But what actually happened is that

we actually struck one of the mortar crews, we caught one of the mortar crews that had been mortaring the Task Force base.

Oh, it was just a brief encounter and I think there were two of the crew were killed and I think we got the mortar piece itself and that’s, and having recognised that, of course, radioing that information back into the Task Force or into our battalion. They ordered us to

retrace our steps back the way we came so we fortunately missed the side of the Vietnamese force and we came back into the Task Force area, which was a bit surreal, actually, because the – oh, from a distance, I don’t know, five thousand metres or so out from the Task Force as we were coming back in, there was a good old Col Joye rock'n'roll concert going on and Little Patti and a few

of those were there, and so there was this sound booming out from the Task Force base as we came back in.

Oh, it was a relatively direct one and we were moving fairly quickly. Although we took the sort of the normal amount of security measures in moving, there was no doubt we were moving fairly quickly to get back in. And when we did get

back in, we arrived around about lunchtime, we’d been out I think for about three or four days at that stage so we were still pretty dirty, bit scruffy, and the intention was that we’d get out of our gear and they’d laid on a bit of a bit of barbecue type of lunch for us. Well, we dropped all of our equipment and as we did that and were about to get ready to go off and have this barbecue lunch,

the orders came down for us to stand by and then a troop of armoured personnel carriers came into our location and we were told, “Be prepared to mount onto the APCs,” which we did, I think from memory somewhere about three-thirty in the afternoon, mid-afternoon-ish. And then from there we then started to move and we

drove out through the Task Force base down south and then swung east again across the Suoi Da Bang River, and at that stage we knew that D Company was in contact with Viet Cong and, as it turned out, main force troops, North Vietnamese troops. We were held up because the commanding officer of the battalion wanted to come with us

so we had to wait for a period of time while an APC with him in it came and joined up with us. And then, having swum the APCs across the river, we re-formed on the other side and then we started move into the rubber, the Long Tan rubber. And at that stage it was starting to get fairly desperate for D Company and I could hear

through my radio network all of the artillery that was being called in to completely ring D Company with artillery fire. And that created a problem for us in the APCs because, to get in to them, we had to somehow create a corridor through the artillery which in fact we were unable to do. We couldn’t contact, for whatever reason we couldn’t get radio contact and we couldn’t create this corridor. So the

company commander that I was with just ordered the APCs to drive on, so we drove through our own artillery and, at that stage, late in the afternoon by then, it was not too far away from last light, D Company was completely ringed by the enemy and to get to them we physically drove over the top of the enemy and engaged them and then fought our way out of

there into where D Company was.

Absolute chaos. It was done from the APCs, although at one point we actually stopped and one of the infantry platoons actually dismounted from their APCs and engaged the enemy directly outside the APCs. And when it was realised that we hadn’t reached D Company’s position,

the platoon commander was ordered to get his platoon back onto the APCs, which fortunately he did without losing anybody. But then we had another, it turned out to be fairly critical, one of the APC commanders, an Armoured Corps corporal was actually shot through the chest and the APC troop commander ordered that APC

to actually turn around and drive back out again and go back to Nui Dat; and in doing so he took one of the platoon commanders and the platoon radio with him, which left part of a platoon, the majority of the platoon, without radio and communication. So that created a few headaches and a few problems. But by then, as I say, the other platoon had got back onto the APCs and

when we drove on then we physically drove across the top of the Vietnamese. And at that stage they were actually on their feet and advancing on D Company and I guess, a supposition but it’s a fair bet, that at that stage D Company were almost out of ammunition. They’d already been once resupplied by helicopters and that was quite remarkable because it

was done in an absolute blinding rain and failing light: these helicopters, two RAAF helicopters, flew in at tree-top level with their navigation lights on so they were a sitting target, flew in, hovered over the top of D Company and tossed the ammunition out and then got back out. So they had a resupply of ammunition but they’d then gone through that as well. By then, we understand the eighteen that were killed there had already been

knocked over. And, as I say, by that stage when we got there, just on last light which would’ve been somewhere around about six o'clock at night, they were virtually out of ammunition again. The implication of that was that group that we’d driven over in the APCs probably would’ve rolled right across the top of D Company if we hadn’t arrived right there, right at that time.

They were on their feet and walking. They were moving. And of course the rain, the noise of the monsoon was just so loud they didn’t even hear us coming up behind them in the APCs until we were right on top of them. And we, as gory as it is, we literally, we really did drive right across the top of them.

Well, that wasn’t particularly difficult because we were in the Long Tan rubber, so even though there was undergrowth there it was easy moving. They were on their feet with their backs to us and, as I say, right until the very last minute when they realised an APC was behind, they had no idea we were there, so we just caught them totally unprepared. So, in that sense, driving over them, no, there were no real difficulties.

And then we only drove a short distance beyond that and there was D Company on the ground, literally on their last legs, so when the APCs stopped, we got out, Alpha Company got out of the APCs and we took up a defensive perimeter around D Company and then they tended to their wounded people, put them onto the APCs and then D Company itself got into the APCs, which then turned around and drove back out again and left us

on the ground there. And the irony of it was there were fewer of us in Alpha Company than there were in D Company. But really by then the actual shooting side of Long Tan was then over, because when the APCs arrived with D Company, essentially the Vietnamese then said, “That’s it, stop.” They didn’t have the wherewithal to take on the APCs as well. So the actual

serious, intense shooting side of it literally finished when we got onto the position with D Company.

It’s very hard because it was right at last light. They were in a very concentrated area, there were two platoons in the company headquarters, the other platoon was the one that was cut off and had lost

most of its men. It’s not doing them a disservice to say they were obviously in a very agitated state.

Well, I guess easily distracted. Something would happen and you could see their attention would immediately fly to something

that was happening on the periphery.

It’s a way of putting it. They’d obviously come through one hell of an ordeal and there was, I guess, a sense of relief that it was over; but at the same time there was a very high level of concern about (a) their own safety and (b) the fact they

knew they’d lost a substantial part of their group had been killed. And so yeah, easily distracted, highly agitated, very voluble, chattering away, but I can’t really say much more than that because we then had our own job to do, so we actually moved out beyond

D Company and left them to sort of re-group themselves, as I say, get their injured onto the APCs. Then they themselves got onto the APCs and then they turned around and drove out.

Well, actually, there was total confusion. When we took over the

perimeter, the first thing I tried to do was to find my counterpart who was in that other company, in D Company - and he was a New Zealander, Captain Morrie Stanley - because he’d obviously directed all of the artillery fire that had come down around them and so therefore he knew where all the targets were and what the artillery was actually supposed to be doing. But I couldn’t find him anywhere.

And because my company commander was going off to set himself up and take over, of course I had to go with him, so really in terms of knowing what was actually happening in the area I had no real idea at all. So it was a case then of, through radio communications which had been re-established, I then found out basically where the various artillery

targets were, although it was not really that critical by that stage because, as I say, the actual shooting side of Long Tan had basically come to an end. But what happened after that is, when the APCs had driven back out with D Company, we still heard a lot of noise of both the Viet Cong and also some of our own soldiers who were outside, they were moving around,

and at one stage one of our own, the company sergeant major actually crawled out to try and find one of our own soldiers who, you know, we could hear the voice out in the dark, and so he tied a sort of a rope around either his leg or his waist or something and actually crawled out trying to find him. But he got discouraged from that when he heard a lot of movement around him and

assumed quite rightly it was Viet Cong that were moving, so he then came back in. As far as I was concerned, the next element in that was we had US Air Force Phantoms who were coming in and they were dropping bombs on our immediate vicinity, which then became rather disconcerting because they were dropping the bombs from back behind us and they were coming in over the top of us, so it’s rather a disconcerting

noise and sort of sensation when you know that there are big bombs being dropped way back beyond you and sort of coming in over the top of you.

Oh about five hundred metres, we hoped.

Well, it was really just a ring perimeter, it was just literally a ring of soldiers, taking up fire

positions from the best cover they could find. By then, as I say, it was no longer as critical as it had been earlier and certainly not as critical as when D Company was there. And also by then darkness had fallen so it would not have been possible for the Viet Cong to have got a real good idea where we were on the ground. I’m not sure that that actually featured in anybody’s

considerations, but certainly we were no more, we were certainly not at the same level of risk as D Company had been. And that’s the way it remained through until about one o'clock in the morning, and then we eventually got up and formed a daisy chain and held onto the webbing of the man in front of us and then we weaved our way back out from Long Tan down into the

edge of the Suoi Da Bang River, which is where D Company had gone back to and the APCs had gone back to, and when the APCs got there they actually ringed an area and switched on their headlights which is where the helicopters came in to get the wounded from D Company. And that’s where we stayed fro the rest of the night. And then right at first light the next morning we went back into the actual Long Tan location.

And that’s, when we moved in, the first thing we noticed was the amount of enormous destruction that had been done amongst the rubber trees, primarily by the artillery fire, and that had accounted for a lot of the Viet Cong that were killed because I think the final toll of bodies found was about two hundred and fifty and the majority of those were killed by artillery fire. So they were scattered around as we went back in. Then when we got

into the actual D Company position, we pushed on a little further and that’s where we came across the eighteen that had been killed.

Well, there was no enemy around by then. They’d used the rest of the night to recover and move out and get away from that location, because they knew, quite rightly, that there would be a very significant ally, American,

an Australian force would go in, so they were in retreat, had moved out. So in that sense there was no immediate threat in the actual conflict area. But when we got back in there, a couple of things: one of the eerie things was from a distance, first thing that was noticeable, no sound at all, no birds, I don’t think there was even a wind to rustle the trees or

anything so it was dead silent; and then, as we got close to the platoon that had been cut off and where the casualties were, we could hear this hissing sound and when we got closer it was actually the radio set on the back of the dead signaller and we could hear it from quite a long way away. Of itself it doesn’t sound much but it was quite an eerie sound.

And the squelch control on the radio had been knocked so the actual squelch sound was coming through, and that broadcast required some distance, we could hear it from quite some distance away. And then we got up into the air and of course we saw the eighteen soldiers who’d been killed.

It was. What was noticeable was

all of the dead Viet Cong that were around. As I say, we eventually found about two hundred and fifty of them. Some of them were, they’d been totally dismembered by the artillery rounds going off in the trees above and I don’t think there was any sort of real reaction to that, but when we got up into that area where those Australians were, it was quite significant the number of people who actually vomited or were gagging and found it very hard to handle.

Again, as I say, no reaction to the dead Vietnamese.

Well, the first thing we did was then secure that area. We set up a defensive perimeter around it: notwithstanding the fact the enemy had actually gone, you still do that as a matter of principle. And at that stage then the APCs came back in and

at that stage they then started recovering the dead Australians. I’m not quite certain of the sequence, I think the APCs then turned around and drove back out, drove back to the Task Force with the dead Australians. We stayed there and then the Australians and some American forces set up a, it’s wrong to call it a pursuit,

but we took off after the tracks because the Viet Cong when they actually departed the Long Tan area left in great haste and they left a lot of signs as to where they’d gone, so we actually followed them up. We attempted to pursue them. We found a number of dead bodies along the way, they were obviously people they’d recovered and they’d either died or they’d recovered the bodies and were dragging them away. We found an area that had been set up as a

temporary hospital facility. But we never actually caught up with the Vietnamese again, they’d really well and truly bolted and got out. But that chase of them went on for about another week and then we finally called it quits and went back into the Task Force base.

The Australian platoon? They were predominantly head and shoulder wounds because they were down lying down and taking protection between, in between there usually were little mounds, I would imagine to help channelling of water during the monsoon season,

so they had taken sort of protection behind those. But still the ones that were killed had all been shot in either the upper body or the head.

No, no. As it turned out one of the soldiers in D Company who was wounded, quite badly wounded, actually lives here in this town and I’d been at school with

his sister. He was about a year or two years behind me at school. But no, that’s about the closest I can say that I have any direct relationship to anybody in D Company. I knew the company commander, Major Harry Smith. I certainly knew the artillery forward observer, the Kiwi that they had with them, Morrie Stanley, and I knew a couple of the platoon commanders. But that was only by general association, not because I knew them as individuals.

Don’t forget I was an artillery person attached to the infantry company. There were, there certainly were soldiers in Alpha Company, which was the one I was attached to, there certainly were soldiers that knew people in D Company and certainly knew some of those that had been killed.

It was just that I wasn’t an infantry person so in that sense I didn’t have that connection. But yes, there were certainly were people in the company I was with that knew very well quite a few of those people killed and obviously were quite distressed and distraught with it.

To be truthful I’m not really certain because, I think I mentioned earlier, the moment I got back from that I then was sent from 6th Battalion across to 5th Battalion, so I actually got back on that afternoon, packed my bags and we went across to another company in another battalion. The only thing I did do was I was required to write

part of a report on certain aspects on the use of artillery at Long Tan and the company commander that I was with also had to write his after-action report as well. And it’s my recollection that there, the company commander I was with, his report either was not accepted or

it got re-written quite a few times. I’ll read no more into it than that, but there was a lot of disagreement as to what actually happened at Long Tan. And certainly from my perspective, sitting in the back of the armoured personnel carrier that took us into Long Tan, there is a discrepancy between how, a discrepancy between the APC

troop commander and the company commander I was with as to just how they did get into the area where D Company was and, if you like, if there is such a thing, who takes the credit for that. Unfortunately, only one of those two gentlemen has been particularly public in saying what actually happened. My recollection is a slight variance to the more public version.

And I’ll leave it at that.

Oh, both the officers are still alive and they’re still, you know, and one of them has chosen to not say a thing about what happened on that journey into where D Company was.

Oh, there was, I don’t think there was any doubt there, the intention was to try and dislodge us from Nui Dat and there was quite an amount riding on it. Had they been successful, that would’ve been a very serious blow to particularly the Americans

and obviously would’ve been a tremendous morale booster for the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. The intelligence was that it was a genuine concerted effort to try and knock us off Nui Dat, so they actually put a lot of resources and a lot of time and effort and planning into that particular action. And I don’t think

it was, I don’t think they were prepared for sort of the intensity of what happened afterwards and the swiftness of the reaction after they’d actually literally ambushed D Company. And in particular I don’t think they anticipated the firepower effect of the artillery, which was in fact lethal and

very destructive.

The Viet Cong?

Oh, because if they, it wouldn’t have taken all that much to have knocked the Task Force base out. And if they’d done

that, even though they would not have reclaimed the land - because land is not, occupation of land was not a real particular, of value to the Viet Cong - but just the ability to inflict that level of damage, if you like, onto the Australian forces would’ve been a tremendous psychological coup for them and indeed would’ve created an enormous problem in,

I would think, in Australia. Even the loss of those eighteen soldiers created a real furore back here in Australia. Whilst in comparison to the Americans and the numbers they lost eighteen is relatively insignificant, for Australians that was a fairly sizeable loss and the public relations and the public reactions probably would’ve been

fairly significant and probably could’ve been quite decisive on the government of the day. And so, a bit like as it is today, the Americans were relying on people to support them and be there with them as an alliance and Australia was one of their main ones.

Well, the mortar attack on the Task Force base itself was primarily designed to get one of the infantry companies out and searching in the area where the mortars had been, which is where the enemy had their main force. So there was no doubt the use of the mortars

was very much a ruse to get a company or more out of the Task Force area into their particular location. Now that, you got to say they were successful, they did. They drew D Company. There was a bit of difficulty in D Company itself, inasmuch that one of the platoons, the platoon that was eventually cut off, continued to advance

in the face of fire beyond the point of its being prudent to do so, and by then they had got too far away and were then literally cut off from the rest of the company. And the attempts of one of the other platoons to try and rescue them failed and there reached a point, obviously, when they’d lost their platoon commander very early in the skirmish and then, by the time

they started losing those soldiers - and eighteen out of a platoon of probably not more than about thirty-five, thirty-six soldiers there were too many - so the remnants of that platoon then did a bolt and they actually ran through enemy fire to get back to the other platoon which couldn’t quite reach them, and from there they then got back to the company location, and that’s where they drew that tight little

group where they defended themselves until we arrived.

That’s Alpha Company I was with. Yes, our luck was in fact finding one of the mortar crews and striking it and, as a result of that, being called back on the, out back through the same route that we’d gone in. If we hadn’t hit that mortar crew,

we would’ve continued on our planned track which would’ve taken us down through the northern boundary of the Long Tan rubber and we would’ve come in towards the rear of the enemy formation, and at that range we were almost out of artillery range, we would’ve been that much further out so therefore would’ve taken that much more time for some sort of relief and rescue operation to come and get us.

So it really was luck that we struck that mortar crew and came back out, otherwise I’m not sure that Alpha Company probably would’ve survived.

Oh, that was purely luck. We knew roughly the location where they’d been but we didn’t really expect to come across them. We thought that the mortars, once they’d fired the night before, they would’ve packed up their

equipment and they would’ve gone. And it just so happened that one of the mortar crews travelled north and ran straight into our company, so you’d have to say that’s pure luck.

Well, it was a very small group, there was only about two or three of them and I think from memory we killed two of them, I’m not sure what happened to the third. But the

main significance of it was we identified the mortar and the significance of that was such that, as I say, the battalion commander then called us on the radio to then come back into the Task Force base, the purpose of which I don’t know, so I’m merely speculating that he wanted as much of his battalion back into the same area. And because he had then moved two of his companies out to start searching

for where the mortars had been and to see what was there, so he wanted the rest of his battalion back with him, so that’s why I suspect we were recalled. And as it turned out during that afternoon, of course, D Company then ran into the opposition (UNCLEAR - they did?).

We had a reasonably clear idea because the company commander was listening in to his own battalion

command radio net. I was listening to my own battery’s radio net and also my own regiment’s net so we could hear all of the radio transmissions that were going on between the company commander and the battalion commander, my counterpart in D Company, the artillery forward observer there and the battery and the regiment, so we had a fair idea of what was happening. What you didn’t really get was, I guess, the

near-calamity it became. We could hear Morrie, I could hear Morrie Stanley, the Kiwi FO, and he was getting a little shrill at times. And fortunately the battery commander of the, the New Zealand battery commander was an ex-Korean War fellow so he had seen action himself before and was a pretty good

steadying influence over the radio, and he did a lot of the interpretation of what was being asked for. The forward observer would be asking for artillery to do things and the battery commander was able to interpret what he was saying and asking, “Is this what you want? Do you want fire over here? Do you want, how many rounds of gunfire do you want over here? Do you want

defensive fire targets in depth?” and some of this technical artillery stuff. So he was there as a moderating influence and there was no doubt they were getting pretty agitated up in D Company.

No. Once we got into the APCs and started moving, you’re not really in a position to do that. What I did try to do

at some stage - and I mentioned earlier we had artillery that was ringing the whole of D Company so the fire coming down on the ground - and to get into D Company we had to try and create a pathway, get artillery to stop, give us a bit of a laneway so we could drive through. For whatever reason, I don’t know to this day whether or not my radio was jammed or whether we were in some particularly dead spot for communications, but I just could not

communicate, and in the time frame that we had I was not able to stop the artillery and give us a laneway in, so the company commander and the APC commander just said, “Fine, we’ll drive in,” which we did. So we drove in through our own artillery.

No. If we’d had a significant hit of artillery in a tree above us, for example, we would’ve wiped out the APCs. And

of course if you got a direct hit on an APC it can’t stand artillery. As it was, a few of the radio aerials were shot off, a lot of the APCs were sprayed with shrapnel from the artillery shells going off. Fortunately nothing landed close enough, hit the trees above us or directly hit any of the APCs, but that again was pure luck.

Possibly, I didn’t think of it that way.

Well, it was the frustration because I wasn’t able to do something we really wanted to happen. With hindsight it didn’t really matter because we got through there basically unscathed, but we weren’t to know that at the time.

And of course there was a decision for the company commander to make. Did he wait for artillery to stop, or did he order us to go on and carry on and go in? As it turned out he ordered the APC commander to keep on driving and go in. And, as I say, we arrived in the nick of time. So had there been any further delays, who knows whether D Company would’ve been overrun?

But then that’s warfare. Very rarely do things go as planned.

Some of it does, yeah. Some of it almost seems a bit surreal as well. Yeah, I think

that illusion of things moving in slow motion I think becomes more apparent when you’re in immediate peril and immediate danger, and I don’t know whether the expression “your life flashes before your eyes” is apt or not but yeah, there is a tendency to sort of feel that time just drags out and just goes that much slower.

Went back in.

I think so. When we got back into the area where D Company had been and then we moved on a little bit further to the platoon that had been cut off and the losses had occurred, yeah, I think so.

And also I think we got a sense of just how significant it had been by the scale the artillery had created around D Company’s location with all of the shells bursting in the trees and sort of splintering all the rubber trees; and, as I say, a lot of the dead bodies that we found were scattered all over the place. I think it was then that we realised the scale

of that action, and particularly the luck of D Company to have lasted as long as they did.

Well, there was other troops came out from the Task Force area and there was a clean-up done and

those Viet Cong that were found were buried. The unfortunate thing was, though, there were a lot of wild animals in that part of the world, and in particular wild pigs, so quite a lot of the bodies didn’t stay buried for very long. By the time we got out of the Long Tan rubber, it was pretty high [stank]. So it wasn’t a very pleasant place to be.

Well, they were taken back in the APCs to the Task Force base and then from there I presume they would’ve been flown down to Vung Tau because there was a morgue attached to the field hospital down there and then it would’ve gone into the military system for repatriation of those bodies back to Australia. But they were fairly quickly removed from the battlefield area.

Quite a lot of snakes, pigs, monkeys; not that I personally saw it, but one of the soldiers in, one of the infantry soldiers came face to face with a tiger, which got a bit of squeak out of him.

And the bird life up there was quite prolific as well, quite a lot of parrots and things. Other than that I can’t.... There was a deer, that’s right, there was a particular deer that exists in that part of Vietnam as well. So they were the main things.

I don’t know there are many tigers there now, though.

The world.

No, monkeys.

Oh, mosquitoes were rife. I don’t remember flies – yeah, they must’ve been there, but I certainly don’t remember them as being sticky flies

like we have here in Australia with the bush flies. And certainly during the monsoon season you tended not to get very much by way of insects other than mosquitos, which would come, and of course malaria was always a high risk.

Not many, but there were some. And I think certainly in my time there, there were a couple of cases of encephalitis, I think.

The first place would’ve been down to an Australian field hospital in Vung Tau. Then, depending on the severity of it, some may go to a very large general hospital the Americans had in Saigon; or, depending on the ability and the capability of people travelling, they may well have gone straight from Vung Tau to, the army had a base at

Singapore, or even to the air force, Royal Australian Air Force base at Butterworth. There I presume they would be stabilised and then sent back on to Australia.

Yeah. No, the medical system was particularly good. It was pretty rare for a soldier, if he was wounded in daytime,

to be anything more than about twenty, twenty-five minutes away from a hospital. Night-time was a bit more difficult because you had to try and arrange for a night flight of helicopters and that tended to be fairly hairy, certainly if you didn’t have anywhere for it to land.

Yes.

Well, when a soldier is

wounded or injured, there is a medic within the infantry company, not a doctor but just a basic medic, and they do a quick assessment and if it’s serious enough to warrant an evacuation then that immediately went back to the battalion headquarters and there, sitting on a

helicopter pad at Nui Dat, was what they called the “dust-off”, which was the aeromedical evacuation helicopters, and they would literally fly anywhere, any weather, any time and even at night - if they had nowhere to land they’d still come, they’d hover over the top of you and their penetration gear would get a litter down onto the ground - and take the soldier out.

They were exceptional

pilots and a lot of the risks they took, not only the Australian air force but the US Army pilots who flew the dust-off as well, the Americans’ dust-offs; as I say, they certainly risked their own life and limb far more than we did, actually, and did a tremendous job.

They had arms with them but they weren’t armed helicopters as

such, they didn’t.... I think they had machine guns with them but that’s about all, primarily because they were more worried about, you know, medical gear on board and the weight of that as opposed to the weight of ammunition. So they tended to be escorted if they came into an area where there was a lot of enemy activity, they would tend to be escorted by another armed helicopter or what were called “light fire”

teams which would usually be two armed helicopters. So they themselves were relatively unarmed.

Oh, soldiers being shot and wounded in contacts. We had some down on Long Son Island in the Mekong Delta. We did an operation there, soldiers were wounded so we had to get them out.

That was an operation to clear the island of suspected Viet Cong. Long Son island was - I mentioned before about this communication route down through Phuoc Tuy province into the Mekong Delta - Long Son island in the Mekong Delta was almost the end point of that particular route and the Viet Cong were known to use it quite frequently and at times have

quite a lot of people there, and so we put an operation to clear it, and in the process, we ran across quite a few Viet Cong on Long Son Island and in the process some of our soldiers were wounded.

No, they were out in the area. In fact a couple of the heaviest contacts we had were on the edge of paddy fields, rice paddy. So

they used, we were out in the rice paddies and crossing over them and they were out in the tree line and so we sort of had to try and flush them out.

Oh you are, but you’re spread out.

Well, no. And the other thing is we had a lot of air power flying around and if we ever

got shot at from one of the tree lines we’d either immediately bring in artillery to fire into that area or else an air strike onto it. So we had a reasonable amount of protection.

Well, the air power is there, it’s up in the air, it’s flying around, but yeah, it’s mine and the company commander’s decision to use those aircraft and bring them in

and actually use, say, rockets or bombs or napalm or cannon. And that’ll depend on what the situation was if it warrants using that, or whether we use our own artillery fire or mortars or whatever.

How many of the enemy are there, whether they’re dug in, are they in a cave system, what sort of weapons do they have, do they have any

mortars themselves, do they have any escape routes that we can see? And depending on that, we would then chose what sort of weapons we would use against them. In some cases, as I say, we’d be using air power; in other cases, we’d use our own artillery.

Very rarely, actually.

Napalm wasn’t used all that often. We used it more often to try and clear vegetation away and occasionally it was used where we knew that there were Viet Cong in, say, a tunnel system somewhere, but even that’s not really that effective to do

that. Because napalm of course just spreads across the surface and just burns, and its main effect is to burn up the oxygen. Most people, a lot of people die of asphyxiation rather than burn when they get hit by napalm, so the number of times we used napalm.... And often it can be a double-edged sword because you go into an area where

the napalm has just been dropped, and the actual napalm, the petroleum jelly, is still hanging in the trees and of course it’s very corrosive.

Yeah. So if you got it on you, it’d burn. So if we had to move into an area that had been napalmed it was not with sort of any relish that we would do so.

Well, you can’t, you don’t have anything with you so you only did that as a sort of last resort if you

had to go into that area.

No.

Yeah, it is. It’s there, there’s no point in sort of denying it and denying its use. But I must say that I found the times where I thought it would be an effective weapon were very, very rare.

And that wasn’t really through any philosophical objection to napalm, it’s just that the nature of napalm is so general, it just spreads out over a large area and can be equally damaging to yourself as it can be to the enemy.

Well, the napalm, there are a lot of things that govern it: the nature of the vegetation, the slope of the land, whether it’s wet or dry, whatever. But as a sort of generalisation,

if a napalm bomb was dropped, it could be anything up to a hundred metres long by twenty, twenty-five metres wide, it would be this sort of the elliptical area that napalm would affect. And one of the things you do notice, if you’re sufficiently close, is when it actually goes, the suck of oxygen out of the air, and you can actually feel it in your chest as it gets drawn out.

It’s a big whoomph.

Hot, and as I say, its burning of oxygen and the air creates a vacuum and you get this air sucked out, so yeah, it’s not a very pleasant weapon.

Oh, I got doused in it.

Agent Orange, I think about six times.

The physical impact of it is it leaves you with a very oily, sticky smear over you. If we were back in the base camp area and I, it didn’t happen to me but, because back in the base camp area you could always go and have a shower and sort of get out from under it fairly quickly. We went into areas

where it had been sprayed and of course we were out, so if we couldn’t get a shower And the thing that was quite noticeable is, if it got onto your shirt, the sweat where you sweated tended to get a very strong burning or tingling sensation and ultimately the risk was always there that you could become

affected by it.

Not at that stage, no, because it was so brand new. It didn’t come in until fairly late in my time in Vietnam and certainly not in the quantities that they dropped it later.

Well, I say about six times and, yeah,

whether it had an impact on me, I don’t know. Certainly all through my life since then I’ve had rashes all over my body. But it’s had no other effect that I’m aware of.

And cancers that have been developed, and

whether or not it’s directly related to Agent Orange, there have been Royal Commissions and all sorts of things, so....

No, it comes as a spray. They actually have boom equipment on the aircraft and they fly over and it just comes out in very fine droplet form. It’s really a defoliant and the aim of it was to clear the vegetation and it did it very successfully, cleared great swathes of land,

unfortunately for the wildlife. But it was never deliberately used, that I’m aware of, it was never deliberately used around American or Australian forces. I suspect the times that it occurred we really got caught in downwind drifting of the spray.

Not all that much after that first time when I said with Operation Harleyhood and the Airborne Brigade. After that, not all that much. The American artillery battery that was attached to us was probably the unit we had the most contact with. We in fact had an Australian officer who was attached to them as a liaison officer and we got to know them reasonably well through

fairly frequent contact, and they were in the same location. But apart from them, we tended not to fraternise much with the Americans, even those of us who were lucky enough to go down to Vung Tau tended not to fraternise with the Americans. Kept very much to ourselves. Now, I say that without any knowledge of my own because I hardly got there. But my understanding was no, there wasn’t

a significant amount of fraternisation.

Yes, but they tend to have a different system, and the technical control of artillery in the American forces is a bit different to ours. As a forward observer in our system,

we actually give the orders and controlled the fire of the guns, and as a forward observer our normal rank was captain. In the American system they had junior lieutenants or even warrant officers as their forward observers, and their system required them to actually ask for artillery fire, and what fire they got, the type of ammunition that was used was always determined from the gun position

where the senior officer was. So their system was a reverse of ours. We had our more senior officers in the battery out front, directing and controlling, theirs were very much the junior people were out front, asking and requesting.

No. It caused some confusion initially with the American artillery battery, though. Because it was attached

to our Task Force it meant that we had the authority to call for fire from the American battery and of course we called up for fire under our system and that caused a bit of friction at the beginning because it took the Americans to realise that when we called for fire, there was no question, we weren’t asking for it, we were telling them what to do, whereas they treated it as a normal request for fire under their system.

And quite often, in the initial stages of that, they would quite often give us something we didn’t ask for or they would do something that we hadn’t wanted, and of course they then ran into the problem of us going quite off our heads and sort of saying, “Hey, this is not negotiable, I’m telling you what to do.” And it took a while and after a while they did, they became very used to our system, and

my understanding was towards the end they even preferred our system because they recognised the person who was out front and was actually calling and directing the fire had a far better idea of what was required than somebody two, three kilometres back.

No, no, that’s a pretty well-entrenched American system.

Well, yeah. Of course

their whole system is just so much bigger and so much more complex than ours, but it’s a system that appeared to have served them.

Well, the main thing you do first up is basically do all the repair and

maintenance on your equipment and you then have sort of debriefing sessions with the company commander and the battalion and the intelligence officer. And in my case, being an artillery, if I had the opportunity I’d go back down to my own unit which would be in another part of the Task Force and go back and see the officers from the battery or from the regiment. And if there was sufficient time before getting sent out on

another operation, you literally had about two or three days of relatively relaxing time. But it was still within the Task Force environment and still at the Task Force base.

In the main, I guess, you just get with the rest of the gang and sort of have quite

a few beers. There really was no other way to do it, there was, not too long after we got up to Nui Dat they started getting things like films were coming through, movies were coming, but other than that we certainly didn’t have any telephone communications. Of course there were no computers in those days and no emails, we had no communication back to Australia,

so it was all just purely by letter. And other than that used to turn on impromptu sport events, play volleyball, cricket, football, whatever it might be, generally just to keep people occupied.

Not so much for the infantry companies because they’d be fairly constantly going

out on patrols and going out on operations; but there were other segments, other sections of the Task Force and certainly down in the logistics area at Vung Tau, amongst transport, medical, signals, surveyors, engineers, all of those, I would assume that morale and keeping up interest would’ve been quite a problem. They would’ve tended to have a fair amount of time on their hands.

Well, the company had its own little tent set up as a bar, and that was mixed, all ranks together in the company would go into that. Then the infantry battalion would’ve had its own officers’ mess, sergeants’ mess and other ranks' mess. Initially in those days in Nui Dat they were all in tents, but they eventually became steel

huts. And the same would’ve been, the same was the case in the regiment, whenever I went back over to the regiment. We’d usually go up to the officers’ mess and so they’d have a few drinks there amongst the rest of the officers.

It’s not my recollection that it was rationed.

But no, I don’t think there was much going overboard. It was too much of a trial if you had a hangover the next day, too many things that you were doing. There were certainly some functions they might turn on, if you knew that there was a particular break between some operations, they may well turn on a BBQ or something or other and the tendency was to have too much.

No, no.

Certainly not up in Nui Dat. There were women down in Vung Tau, there were nurses at the field hospital and you came across nurses from some of the American, women from some of the American units. Again, I can only say that by second-hand because I never had the opportunity. The only women you ever saw up at Nui Dat were those that came up, usually

they would fly up in a helicopter, be there for whatever reason and then fly out again before nightfall. Now I don’t know what happened later in the time in Vietnam, whether that changed, but certainly in '66, '67, no, there wasn’t very much - certainly amongst the troops, combat troops up in Nui Dat, no.

That was actually the first concert they had. I think 5th Battalion had had concerts at Bien Hoa Airbase, but I think they were probably American USO [United Service Organisation] concerts. I think the one we had, that one with Col Joye and Little Pattie and whoever else, I think

that was the first Australian concert to go on.

Oh yeah, yeah. In fact if you see, there was an SBS program on the Battle of Long Tan and Little Patti actually describes, talks about, all the artillery fire going off and the fact that in the afternoon, when they were doing the afternoon concert, the number of people that were vanishing

as obviously Long Tan became more and more intensive and more and more people were called away.

In Long Tan? Well, basically the whole of 6th Battalion so there would’ve been about six, seven hundred men from there. No, that’s probably being unfair. In a way the whole of the Task Force became involved,

medical people, transport people, because there was a lot of ammunition being trucked around to the artillery bases, so there was that. As I say, medics, Signal Corps, probably the overwhelming majority of the people in the Task Force base at Nui Dat would’ve been in some way involved in that action. And of course they were there when the mortars came in the night before, so what were there in the Task Force? Probably

two, two and a half thousand people, I think. I’m not sure what the exact number was.

Yeah, they picked the wrong time to be there. But then again, if you think of it in terms of history, we probably were there at the right time.

Critical. And yet, early in that

time, it was a chaotic system. It used to go to Hawaii and then, come from Australia to Hawaii and then back into the American system to get into Vietnam, then cut out of the American system back into the Australian system in Vung Tau. And yeah, so mail was pretty chaotic.

If it reached us. Oh, I can

remember mail being two and three weeks. And there was a lot of mail that just vanished so there were quite a lot of, a number, I can’t say quite a lot, but there were a number of letters that my wife would query whether I’d written and I’d say yes, but they never turned up, and vice versa.

Well, for those of us who were constantly out on operations, it was almost impossible because if somebody had written, or if a number of people had written, what you normally got was a whole bunch of mail so unless you dated them you had no idea of the sequence of them. And the same sending back. I think the smarter ones eventually numbered them or something, but

yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It was the only way of knowing what was happening back in Australia. We got very little by way of newspapers. Of course there was no, I think some of the people that had short-wave radio picked up Radio Australia, but other than that there was nothing coming from Australia

as to what was happening, so yeah, very much isolated and cut off.

I’m trying to think of the sequence. By then yes, I’d become estranged from my family so my wife was the only one I was writing to.

No.

I don’t think my wife was that way inclined, actually, so no, I didn’t get any of those.

Not so much Red Cross, but there were comfort rations or whatever they called them that came through the American system, but really they were sort of additional rations over the ones

we normally got and they were nothing to write….

I left in February of

'67. The remaining time in Vietnam was just really a procession of operations, contacts, calling in artillery, doing the same things almost over and over again. So really, in terms of the story, there’s not that much more to tell because it’s just really more of the same - obviously not to the level of intensity of Long Tan, but nonetheless there’s a

degree of repetition about what happened from then on. So eventually in February of '67 I came back to Australia and I came back early, and I suspect, I don’t know for certain, but I suspect it was because, I think it was on-camera much earlier: I mentioned about, in response to a question of

the stress levels, I said at the end of it “we were buggered”. That’s literally how I was by that time in January, to the point that I actually went to the second-in-command of the regiment and I actually said, “I think that I’m reaching a stage of exhaustion to the point where my decision-making processes are starting, in my opinion, to become suspect.”

And I thought, “If you’re going to be out there throwing artillery and bombs and things around the countryside, the last thing you want to be is totally exhausted and in a position where you can easily make wrong decisions.” So, as I say, I asked to be relieved as a forward observer and come back into the gun position and have another role.

Not that I was aware of.

But it had happened. Not by me, but the company that I was with had received a shell from the New Zealand artillery battery, it landed right in the middle of our company area; and just before I did leave Vietnam, in late January, early February I think it was, another shell was fired on a wrong

bearing, on a wrong elevation, and it landed in D Company 6th Battalion and actually killed the company (UNCLEAR - ?) major who had actually been one of the sort of more heroic characters in Long Tan, so he was killed by artillery, a round being placed in the wrong, thrown in the wrong direction; so that those things were happening. And I just felt I was reaching a stage of exhaustion that

the possibility that I could do the same - obviously not deliberately but through an error of judgement - was starting to become too great, so I asked to come back out from the forward observer role and go back into the artillery regiment in some capacity. And I can remember the second-in-command of the regiment sort of saying, basically saying to me, “You can’t hack it.” So

the next thing I knew was that there was a posting order for me to come back to Australia, which I must admit disappointed me - not disappointed me in coming back to Australia, but the fact that I didn’t serve out my full time there, and also in my judgement I was being unfairly assessed as not being able or capable of keeping up the job.

Shock, I think. From a man who had spent practically of his time in Vietnam sitting in a little tent back in the Task Force base and I’d spent all of my time tramping in the bush with the infantry companies and going through all of the actions, including a lot of live firing and contacts with the enemy, to then be told by - I think there was an expression used very early in the piece in reference to other stories about “pogos” - to me he would’ve been the typical

pogo, and then for him to tell me that I couldn’t hack it, I thought was a bit rough.

I think I was too surprised, I was too shocked. And anyway he pretty summarily dismissed me anyway. I was a captain, he was a very senior major and he was acting commanding officer of the regiment at that stage, so yeah, I just think I went out in total surprise

and went back out. And I must admit, when I told some of the other officers down in the battery that I belonged to, they were quite surprised as well. So the upshot of that was, anyway, I got a posting back to Australia and I came back to Sydney in February of '67 and became the second-in-command of the battery that I was a member of in Vietnam, when it came back to Australia.

I came back to Australia on a normal commercial flight. I flew out of Tan Son Nhut on a Pan Am flight which was predominantly a US Forces aircraft they had a lot of American servicemen on. That took me to Manila and I stayed a period of time in

Manila, a number of hours or overnight - I can’t remember, I don’t think it was overnight, I think it was a number of hours - and then caught the normal Qantas London-Manila-Brisbane-Sydney flight. So I came back in on a commercial flight and I arrived in Sydney just after dawn on a Sunday, I think it was. And I must say that created, for me, quite a

strange situation because, if I remember rightly, I had been out on an operation in the week prior, come back out to the Task Force base, packed up my gear, went to Saigon, and I think it was about a Thursday I came back out of the field when I was on an operation and there I was on a Sunday afternoon sitting in my lounge room in Sydney and being told very politely

basically to mow the lawn. There was no recovery period, there was nothing. You just flew back to Australia and back into the so-called “real” world.

It was just all so surreal. It was just all so strange,

as I say, that on the Thursday you could be there with artillery fire and air strikes and rifles going off and people shooting and there on Sunday there I am mowing the lawn in a suburban backyard in Sydney. I just found it very hard.

Well, it almost seemed like a dream.

And I kept expecting to wake up at some stage and still be back in Vietnam, but it didn’t happen. And the saving grace, I think, to all of that was I very quickly went back into an artillery regiment at Holsworthy and, if you like, the army life then surrounded me again and, unlike a lot of National Servicemen who came back from Vietnam and went straight

back out into their civilian occupations, at least I went back to within the inside of a military organisation. And I think out of that there was a lot of moral and psychological support, even though there was no formal counselling or any of those things, but I think it was just being back with a whole bunch of army people again sort of gave me the support that was necessary.

Yeah, that was strange. Because I’d been away for the, although it wasn’t the full year I’d been away for quite a period of time, and there was also the build-up period to Vietnam as well, so I’d literally been away from the January of the year before. By then my son was what,

about fourteen, fifteen months old: yeah, it was just a situation of arriving back and moving into a household with somebody who had a daily routine, was used to the life that was going on around her in good old suburban Sydney, and to a very large extent I felt like

an intruder. And also unfortunately my wife found it very hard to talk about Vietnam, she didn’t want to. And when I came back from Vietnam I think she very much had an attitude of, “Well, it’s over for you, forget it.” And basically we never, ever talked about it.

No. Certainly not any of my non-

military friends. The only area in which it was discussed was amongst some of the other artillery officers out in the regiment that I went back to, but because most of them had not been to Vietnam - in fact, I don’t think any of them had been to Vietnam, they were due to go within the next few months - in a sense they wanted to bleed me of whatever information I could give them. But at the same time I couldn’t really gain any

sort of, I was going to say “sympathy”, it’s the wrong word.

Understanding, because they didn’t have it, they hadn’t been there although, as I say, they were still very supportive and in that sense I don’t think it traumatised coming back as much as it might’ve done. But still there was that lack of understanding of what Vietnam had been like.

I’m not sure that’s for me to actually say. I didn’t feel it and, for all those years after in the army, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me and I’m not sure whether there was or not. It was only, it’s only been in very later in life, in the last two, three years that certain things have occurred, in

terms of flashbacks, dreams and that sort of thing, have occurred about Vietnam. So whether or not I was traumatised, I don’t think so. Whether it has affected me in terms of things like my temperament, my personality, I’m not sure. I don’t think it could’ve been, that could’ve been affected to any great extent because I’m not aware and I can’t recall my wife ever sort of

complaining or indicating that there had been a change in me in that sense. There were a few, for a period of time after I got back there were a few things that were strange and I’m sure quite a few people who’ve been in combat would relate to, for example startled reactions to backfiring of cars, or what was one of the popular television series? Good Old Battle Cry used to be on

TV and if I was asleep in a chair or dozing in a chair or half-asleep or my mind was elsewhere and you heard a machine gun fire, you’d roll out of the chair onto the floor until you realised what a goose you look. Those sorts of things. And, I must say, to this day I get quite a sensation whenever I hear a helicopter which I think you’ll find a lot of Vietnam veterans will say; it’s a sound that’s inescapable

with Vietnam. So those sorts of things. But in terms of traumatised, no, I don’t think so.

Yes, to the point we eventually never wore uniform out in public. There was a time that I went into Liverpool in Sydney, I can’t remember the circumstance, there was a

civilian function in the council chambers or RSL [Returned and Services League] or somewhere and I think I was there representing the brigade commander or I was in there in a sort of an official capacity so I was in uniform, and there was another couple of officers with me, I think this particular incident there was a councillor from the Liverpool Council, and yeah, at one stage, this young woman came up

and we thought she was going to talk to us and then right at the last minute from behind her back she produced one of those little yellow beach buckets and it was full of very stale urine and that was hurled over us. On another occasion, again in Liverpool, a young man spat straight in my face. And I can remember at one of the parties I went to,

with some civilian people there - and again that was fairly early when I’d got back from Vietnam so a full understanding of the negative perception and the negative reactions, I don’t think I really had an understanding of that at that stage - but I can remember when I was asked what I did and I said I was in the army and the reaction to that was, “Have you been to Vietnam?” and when I said, “Yes,” I then got accused of being a

baby murderer and a killer. So those sorts of things. And that in 1967 was, I think, a start in the fairly noticeable shift in public reaction to Vietnam and when a lot of people started taking actions against the troops themselves,

which is really unfortunate because they were only doing their job.

Walk away from it. It was really a case of sort of acknowledging, “Well, OK, they’ve got their private opinions but really they don’t understand what it’s about, what it was like.” And I don’t think I.... A couple of my own

civilian friends, who were anti-Vietnam but I felt had a capacity to sit down and reason, I tried to sit down and rationalise with them about Vietnam. I’m not sure that they ever changed their persuasions. But other than that, no, tended, as I say, to sort of stick within our own community and eventually wouldn’t wear your uniform out in public or even

attend official functions where civilians were at.

There certainly was a sense of relief that it was all over. I’m not sure at that stage that I really sat down and started to think about the futility, if you like, of Vietnam.

I will say to this day that I still believe Vietnam was an appropriate conflict. I just don’t think the Americans and the Australians were resolved enough to win it. And ultimately the Americans in particular, through the strategies they had or, one might argue, the lack of

strategy they had in Vietnam, allowed themselves to be, the public opinion in the States to be changed, and ultimately of course it all fizzled out the way it did. I think there was still some purpose to Vietnam; there is in my mind no doubt that the actions in Vietnam and the involvement of both the Chinese and the Russians had an impact

in terms of the Cold War that was going on in Europe to the point that the Americans, the Russians in particular were quite significantly distracted and who knows to what extent that may have had a positive effect and ultimately a leading to what eventually happened in the late '80s with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the....? I’m not directly pinning it back onto the Vietnam War, but who knows

what impact the Vietnam war did have on both China and Russia? So I don’t think it was, from my perspective I don’t think it was a totally wasted episode. I think what happened at the end when it all fizzled out really then became, yeah, it was unfortunate and

by then, yes, it had become a spent argument and a lot of the logic and the validity had gone.

I stayed on till 1988, mainly because the army kept sending me to, you know, reasonable jobs around the place, and at that stage we still moved around various parts of Australia and

the life was still reasonably good. But eventually, by late 1987, I think my wife had had it and by then she’d become a matron of a hospital in Sydney so she basically gave me an ultimatum, “If you move, I don’t,” so at that stage I decided to resign my commission. And as it also turned out, an old army friend of mine who had left the army had joined the AMP Society in

Sydney, so he invited me to join AMP [Australian Mutual Provident Society], which I did and stayed with them for about nine years, during which time I got some post-grad [post-graduate] qualifications in Strategic Marketing, so that then resulted in me being invited to act as the assistant to the Professor of Strategic Marketing at Charles Sturt University for a period of about two years.

And then eventually took, for another two years, a job with (UNCLEAR - Tower Light?) Australia which was another financial services organisation and that took me up to, ooh, October 2000. And during that year, 2000, May of 2000, my father died; the following month, about four weeks later, my mother-in-law died; then later on in the year my mother

had not a severe, but a sufficiently serious enough, stroke that I realised that living in the corporate world, as I was at that stage, I was probably a walking heart attack myself. So with my mother suffering the stroke I eventually decided that that was it and so I resigned and retired from the workforce in October 2000. And

by then my daughter had been married and she was living up in the Blue Mountains so we decided to sell up from where we were living up on the northern beaches of Sydney and move up to the Blue Mountains, which we did in December of 2000. We bought a house fairly quickly and got all of our affairs settled, and then in June of 2001 my wife told me she had terminal cancer and she died in the following

October, October 2001. And so that really brings it to an end. The final stage of that is the last thing I did over in the eastern states before I sold my house was to go out and get my pilot’s license and then finally decide to move back to my old home town of Albany where I had left in 1960. So basically a full circle.

Fascinating. What I found was that, as a generalisation, the military life had given me a capacity to make decisions, which I found in the corporate world tend to be very much group decisions

and corporate decisions and, if you like, collegiate-type decision-making processes. In the army you’re expected as an individual to make decisions, so I found that became a bit of a conflict in civilian life. The hardest thing I found was the fact that within the military, being an officer, I was used to being saluted and called “sir” by those junior to me; when I arrived

in AMP I was in my late forties and being called by my Christian name by seventeen and eighteen year-olds was a bit strange at first. But after you get over those, corporate life was also quite rewarding and what I found even better in the corporate world was, notwithstanding what I said about corporate decision-making and

collegiate processes, you’re also held very much accountable for the decisions that were made. And one of the first things I did was get engaged in a fairly large project which ended up in some computer systems which was worth in total something about eight hundred, nine hundred-odd thousand dollars. Well, in the army, that was almost unheard-of, to spend that sort of money in one

decision. You know normally to get to that sort of decision involving that sort of money, about a million dollars or more, you went through enormously complex processes in the public service, in the military environment. Within the corporate world, when I sent the paper I sent up to the Chief General Manager to be approved - and, as I say, it was about eight hundred, nine hundred odd thousand - all I did was put it on one piece

of paper, it went up to him and then scribbled on the side of the paper was “approved”. And when I went up to query him, because I didn’t realise the process was so quick in the corporate world - I was expecting six months, eight months before I got a response - he just merely looked at me and said, “What’s your problem?” I said, “Well, here it is, all this money.” And he said, “Oh well, it’s simple. If it doesn’t work, I’ll fire you!” So the impermanence of the corporate

world certainly became also very clear to me. But by and large, no, I enjoyed it. But probably the most intellectually challenging time, and in that sense the most enjoyable time, was when I worked for the Professor of Strategic Marketing and more so, not so much in the academic side, but more in his private managing and marketing consultancy business that he ran in Sydney.

Well, I was one of his consultants.

Used to go out to senior management of major organisations like Telstra and News Ltd and the Quality Assurance Service, even back into old AMP itself, and being, as he was, as I say, a professor and an active professor at that, just his intellectual agility and his ability to look at things

was just fascinating and, as I say, it was probably the most enjoyable, intellectually enjoyable period of my life. And the only reason that I eventually left and went back to the corporate world again was in many ways he was very difficult to work for. He was a perfectionist through and through and also he never knew when to stop.

And in the commercial world, as I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate, there’s a point beyond which there is no further gain to be had from your endeavours. What do they call it, the eighty-twenty principle? Yeah, that’s the main one, I guess. So you put, you know, the most productive effort comes out of basically eighty per cent of your labours, and that

final twenty per cent, you’re not going to gain anything more out of it so why expend that energy for no gain? But that wasn’t him. He pushed everything to the last, last absolute drop of blood from the stone. And that became fairly hard to take after a while.

’88, [Australian Federation] Bicentenary year.

At first nothing because I didn’t intend marching. But it was actually on the day of the march my wife actually said, “Why don’t you?” and I didn’t really have a good enough reason. And because I’d never participated in any of the Anzac Day marches I didn’t really give any thought to going into the Vietnam “Welcome Home” march.

But, as I say, she insisted and I did. And I must say now, to this day I am grateful I did. I met up with a whole lot of the gunners that I’d been in Vietnam with and I hadn’t seen them since basically the 1960s. And also to see the effect of that march

through Sydney on a lot of those Vietnam vets, almost to the point you could see a sense of relief in them and a sense of, I guess, pride that notwithstanding the end of the Vietnam War and the way it ended and the controversy about whether it was worthwhile or not, the mere fact they’d taken part in it and come back and were being

recognised, you know, just to see the enormous relief and, as I say, the sense of pride in all those diggers, yeah, it was pretty moving.

For me, two: one was that I didn’t see Anzac Day as a day of

any particular celebration, and in fact most of the exposure I’d had on Anzac Days was to, if you like, the post-march boozing and sort of writing themselves off and I can see no point in that at all; and the second, I don’t know whether you’re aware of the antipathy of the RSL towards Vietnam vets to the point

that there was eventually the creation of a Vietnam Veterans’ Association? That would not have occurred if the RSL had been far more supportive and understanding of the Vietnam conflict, which they weren’t. So basically for those reasons I just saw no purpose in marching. I saw no reason to glorify any of that.

No, no.

I did for a very brief period at Pittwater in Sydney become a member of the RSL, having said what I just did about it. But by then it was a totally different era and I’ll probably do the same here now that I’ve moved back to Albany. No, I didn’t join the Vietnam Vets’ Association, primarily because I was still a serving army officer and I guess there was no personal

need for the sorts of – well, I perceived there was no personal need for the sorts of things the Vietnam Vets’ Association were doing for its members. Now I guess that’s a fairly selfish view in one sense, but had I been traumatised, had I been in psychological problems and difficulties, maybe I would’ve done, but I didn’t see the need to so I never did.

Yes, I did,

mainly because I think the whole societal attitude to Anzac Day has changed over the last decade, decade and a half, and it’s now recognised I think by the majority of the population for what it is, and that is not a celebration of war, but a celebration of the lives of those who’ve now gone and also

the deeds of those people who, however unwillingly they talk about it, in war did so much. And I think that applies in no small measure to a lot of people who went to Vietnam: they went because it was the requirement of the government of the day, and they went there probably against their own personal views, and they served as they saw fit

and served, if not willingly, but they did at least serve their country at that time. And I think that’s now some of the things that Anzac Day is starting to reflect.

Well, there are two elements to it. One is I went to the dawn service here in Albany which was quite a moving ceremony, although what made it more moving for me was up there

overlooking the King George Sound, which was where the Gallipoli ships sailed from, I thought back to quite a lot of my friends that lost their lives in Vietnam and then reflected on the fact that I survived, and in some of the things that I did in Vietnam that was purely luck that I did survive. Then, later in the day with the Anzac parade, I actually took part with an old friend of mine,

and the main reason for doing that was, going right back to the days when I was in the Air Training here as a schoolboy, I mentioned the school teacher who was a bomber pilot over Germany. He’s now about eighty-seven-odd years of age and he still wants to march. And this other friend and I, who were both cadet under officers with the ATC actually, we were more than proud to march with him.

And that was the principal reason I did.

I think so, I think it was.

It’s my pleasure.

Thank you very much.