Australians at War Film Archive

Sure. I was born in Sydney in 1944. My father was a British merchant seaman. My mother was of Italian descent and worked mainly in hotels. They didn’t have a very good life

when I was young, and my two sisters and I were quite often farmed out. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, on their farm down in Victoria, and eventually moved back to Sydney to my parents when I was about seven or eight years old. I went down there when I was about four, so I spent a lot of time with them. In Sydney,

we lived in Cronulla for a little while, then we moved to Padstow, just near Bankstown. I went to Padstow Heights Primary School, then I went to East Hills Boys’ High School and left there at the end of, what is now, grade twelve. My parents had great plans for me. I was going to be the star of the show. So they insisted that I did all these ‘you-beaut’ things

like French and Latin and so forth. Which I did, and failed miserably. So when I left school I walked into a local company and I said, “I’m looking for a job.” They said, “What can you do?” I said, “I don’t know, I just left school.” They said, “All right, we’ll put you on.” In those days it was full employment, you never had a problem getting a job. So I worked for them as a junior clerk for a couple of years, moved down to Melbourne with them

for another couple of years, came back to Sydney, got jerked around a little bit and I said, “Up the lot of you, I’m going to drive a truck.” So I started driving trucks, and around about the same time I joined the Army Reserve in Sydney. I spent a total of four years with them. Then I just sort of bummed around for a couple of years,

driving trucks, moving around, visiting different places. I joined the air force in 1968, because…Vietnam was just becoming a major issue around about then. So I joined the air force. Having been in the infantry, in the Army Reserve, I decided I would rather join the air force than the army, because in the air force you actually slept on a bed with sheets,

and that was good. So I did that, I joined up. They said to me, “What would you like to be?” I said, “Well, I would like to drive trucks.” They said, “No, we don’t want any truck drivers.” I said, “All right, I’ve been in the Army Reserve and I’m pretty good at drill instructing.” They said, “Good, we need drill instructors.” So they signed me up. So I did the, “I solemnly swear…” And just as I was walking out they said, “Oh, by the way, we don’t have drill instructors in the air force any more.

You are going to be an Airfield Defence Guard.” I said, “Oh great, what are they?” They said, “It’s sort of like the infantry.” I said, “No, I just left the army because I didn’t want to lie in the dirt any more.” They said, “Well, that’s what you get.” So that’s what I was. After I finished my training, I was posted immediately to Vietnam and spent probably

six months over there. And because of the experience I’d had in the army, they immediately made me a section commander over there, which I didn’t really want, because a lot of the guys who had already been there before me were actually senior to me, and I felt as if I was a bit of a pusher-in, if you like. But we all seemed to get along pretty well. They had a system going over there where after six months they would ask for volunteers

from the Airfield Defence Guards to go onto aircrew training as door gunners on the helicopters. So that was good. They came to me and they said, “Do you want to?” And I said, “You bet.” Because I could remember saying to a mate of mine, years before I joined the air force, when we were still in the army, and he said, “What’s your aim in life?” And I said, “Well, my aim in life is to be a door gunner on a helicopter.” So I did.

I jumped at the chance and that was good. So I did the remainder of my first tour in Vietnam as a gunner, came back to Australia, spent just over twelve months here. Then one day I was posted to Amberley…

And just sort of bummed around for a little while, doing the things that we did generally, bush work, exercises, all that sort of training. Then we were sitting around one day and I heard the phone ring in the boss’s office and he said, “Of course he’s fit. All my men are fit.” The next minute he stuck his head out the door and called out to me, and I said, “Yes sir?” He said, “Pack your gear, you’re going back again.”

I said, “All right. When?” He said, “Two days.” I said, “You can’t do that to me.” Normally you had about a month’s notice. Later on I learned I was being posted directly to 9th Squadron, which was most unusual, to replace one of the other poor buggers who didn’t make it home. So I did that, and went over and stayed there with them until the very end, and came home on the last flight

out of Vung Tau, on the 29th of February, 1972. When I came back I was, again, posted back to Amberley. I had about three months leave, which was great. And then I had been recommended for a commission while I was still over there by one of the pilots, so I put my hand up for that. And they said, “Yeah, we can do that for you.”

So things were starting to move, and then suddenly I started to get some fairly serious back pain, and they put me in Greenslopes Hospital, and they said, “Oh, you’ve got major work here, boy.” All in all, I was in Greenslopes for about six months. This was late ’62. I had two operations and all sorts of weird things on my spine. When I came back out again, they said,

“The opportunity for you to get your commission has gone, so you will just have to sit around a while and wait.” This was when Gough Whitlam and the ALP had just won Federal Government. And they made it very easy for people to get out of the armed services at the time. So I was a little bit disillusioned. To be honest, I was drugged up to the eyeballs and didn’t have a lot of self control in those days.

So I said, “Bugger this,” and I just pulled the pin and left the air force. That was in, probably March or April of 1973. I bummed around again doing…things that I shouldn’t have done, for my own health. Sometime in very early 1974,

one of the guys that I worked with….we actually shared a flat together, and we were on our way home, we were very, very late. So instead of going home to cook, we called into the Combsely Hotel for a meal, and Kathryn was serving in the snack bar. I took one look at her and I said, “You have to come out for a drink with me.” She said, “Oh, no.” I said, “Oh, okay.”

It didn’t really worry me. I’ve been knocked back by women all my life. So we sat down, we had a steak and a beer, and I said to my friend, “That girl behind the bar over there? I’m going to marry her.” So I eventually talked her into coming out with me, and then fourteen days later I proposed to her. That was in early February, ’64. We got married in December, ’64 and here we are.

After we were married, I left the company I was with and got a job through [Department of] Veterans’ Affairs with a shipping company here in Brisbane. I stayed with them for about six years. Then I was headhunted away from them by another shipping company. They went broke, or they were actually taken over, so we were all thrown out in the street. So I worked for about a year

as a courier driver, and then Kathryn noticed an advertisement in the paper one day for an assistant director for the Road Transport Association, and she nagged me until I applied for it. I applied for it and totally forgot, and about a month later they rang me and said, “Come in for an interview.” So I did and bang, there I was. I stayed with them for twelve years, until I literally couldn’t get myself up

to go to work any more. Then I applied for a pension and got it and had to retire. That was…1996–97. Since then I’ve stayed at home keeping myself busy doing things. I’m the secretary of the Airfield Defence Guards Association. And that’s my life, up until now.

Yes, three children. Two boys and a girl. The first two were twins, a boy and a girl, born in 1976, and Andrew came along four years later in 1980. But the strange thing is they are now,

after spreading themselves out all over the world, literally, they are now all living in the same house over at Bulimba. My daughter taught in England for a couple of years, and came back with a trophy, who I call ‘The Refugee.’ Hell of a nice bloke, for a Pom [English person], but the four of them are now in a house over at Bulimba and they get along remarkably well.

They share everything, and every so often when they need something they’re back here. But we told them there is no way in the world they’re moving in. We filled all the bedrooms up with junk to stop them, and changed the locks, got the dog.

We lived in Kings Cross, and it was fashionable then to call it Kings Cross. Now the place where we lived is called Elizabeth Bay, but when we lived there it was okay to call it Kings Cross. It was one of the old terrace houses that used to run all over the place, down in that area, and we lived in the top floor. My very first memory

was of actually being carried, as a baby, onto the veranda. When you think back on your childhood, you don’t remember a heck of a lot, but I can remember that. My next sort of major conscious memory was of my younger sister being born. We still lived there in Kings Cross.

My eldest sister and I went to a Catholic convent school, which is only, in those days, four or five hundred metres away, a place called St Canisius, in Elizabeth Bay itself. We sort of grew up as Catholics, then my little sister came to that school as well. I remember on her first day, she didn’t really know what to do, so she brought her rag doll with her,

and she lost it. When morning break was over and we were all going back in, one of the nuns was hurrying us out of the playground by belting everyone on the bottom with this rag doll, which she’d found, which was my sister’s. So I went and took it back off her and got into trouble. I was close to being ex-communicated then. My final straw with the Catholic school was when

we were having a lesson on something…They were very big on religious instruction in those days. I think the Catholic Church lost faith in me that day because I put my hand up when one of the nuns was talking about angels, and…she said that angels didn’t have any body, they had no body. I couldn’t quite visualise this, so I put my hand up and asked how they strapped their wings on if they didn’t have bodies…

“Get out, go away. Go to a public school.” So that was pretty much it. Around about that time, my parents started to have some major issues, so we were farmed out…My eldest sister went into an orphanage, or a ‘home’ as they called them in those days. My younger sister went off somewhere with my mother. Dad couldn’t cope so I went down to my grandparents in Melbourne,

and spent some time on their farm. My parents actually got together again after several years, three or four years, and moved to a little house at Cronulla, then I came back and joined them, I was about seven and a half. I didn’t recognise my father, because he picked me up…I actually flew back from Melbourne

on one of the old prop [propeller] aeroplanes. When I got to Sydney, this man came up and I didn’t know who he was, but he claimed he was my father. I was with him for many years after that so I guess he had to be. That was my childhood…

Oh yes, yes. Both my sisters, I didn’t have any brothers, both my sisters came back…

They were well and truly established back together again by the time I came home.

Oh, very much. I didn’t have the faintest idea. All I knew that there was a lot of shouting and yelling, and suddenly I wasn’t there any more, or they weren’t there any more, and I was on a train going down to Melbourne.

Snow.

I stayed actually with my mother’s sister and her husband first, and I honestly don’t know how long that was. It was probably six or eight months, but it seemed like fifty years. They were lovely people, and still are, absolutely beautiful people. And then they started getting worried because I wasn’t going to school. So they thought if they got me out of the city,

with my grandparents on the farm, I could go to school, I could live in the country, I could do all the wonderful things that kids do. And I did. I went to school and learned how to use a pen, with ink, and learned how to read. I’ve never stopped reading since, I’ll read any kind of books, I love them. So that was great. My grandfather was

…a very forbidding sort of a man. All that side of the family was Italian. I remember my grandfather as being a man that didn’t speak much, and when he did, he spoke very, very sternly. But I loved him, I thought he was a wonderful man. The farm was relatively small. He grew strawberries and apples and gladiola, for God’s sake.

And that was great. I just loved it. We had horses and dogs and kittens and all sorts of things, and I went to school and I had some really good friends, and it was great. It was lovely. One thing that I’ve always remembered is, I came home from school one day, and in those days…in the farmhouse,

which was a very old style country farmhouse, we used to always go in through the laundry. And on the floor in the laundry was a wooden box, and the lid was off it, and I looked at it. And for some reason all I could think of was grapes packed in sugar. I thought, ‘Great,’ so I grabbed a handful and I stuffed them in my mouth. And then realised that they were black olives, packed in salt.

So that sort of cured me from being too impetuous from then on. I always stopped and thought about things before I did them, afterwards. Yeah, beaut stuff. I loved it, and then one day just out of the blue they said to me, “Your Mum and Dad want you to come home again, back to Sydney.” I said, “All right.” So I went and packed and I was ready to go. They didn’t tell me it wasn’t for another couple of days.

As I said, my Dad picked me up at the airport and we went to this little house in Cronulla. Which wasn’t really a house, it was something that most kids would probably only dream about these days. It was actually a boat shed that had been converted into the house, and it was built out over the water of Gunnamatta Bay. And it was that sort of place where kids could be anything they wanted to be.

It was right down on the water. To get from there onto the road, you had to climb about fourteen thousand concrete steps through the bush, to get up to level ground onto the road. And it was just amazing. The trees were full of goannas and koalas and God knows what. My Dad used to actually throw a fishing line out the dining room window and catch fresh fish. And they’d come in the window, go onto the bench,

be cleaned and gutted and into the pan, and we’d have them for lunch and weekends and things like that. There was an old rock swimming pool that we used to leap into and we’d anything that you wanted to be, except drowned, which is very close to what I was one day. That was interesting. My Dad actually stood on the rock wall of this pool and watched me drowning. And in one of my

coming up for air episodes I said, “For God’s sake, help me!” Or something like that. And he said, “No, you’ve got to learn to swim sooner or later.” So I did, because I had to. And for years and years and years after that, I suffered from the most incredible migraines, and one day they just went. I’m pretty sure the stress of that triggered them. I was drowning, I knew I was drowning. He knew I wasn’t, but I knew I was.

From Cronulla, we moved to Padstow. I think I was about eleven when we moved. And I spent about the last six months of primary school at a place called Padstow Heights Primary. And then from there I went to East Hills Boys High School.

High school was great. If I could avoid being beaten up by the kids during woodwork or metal work,

while I was doing French and Latin, I enjoyed it. One of the best things that I learned in high school was that I wasn’t any worse than anybody else. I had always grown up with the idea that I was a bit of a weakling. They would take us out and do trials of running and jumping and athletics type stuff. And it was the greatest confidence booster in the world.

I didn’t want to do it because I knew that everybody else in the world was better than me. But when I got out there, and I actually did it, I found that I could do it just as well as the average guy in the class. I thought, ‘Oh, I must be ordinary.’ And to me that was pretty good, that was a big thing to be ordinary instead of slightly behind the door. So that was good. I loved high school.

Most of the guys in my classes were much brighter than me. So I had a goal, which I failed dismally to reach, and by the time I left high school I had great marks in English and Technical Drawing and French and Ancient History. My Latin teacher

and my Math teacher both said to me, “You’re never going to achieve anything in this world, boy, because you can’t count and you don’t know Latin.” I said, “Well, all right, I’ll just go and get jobs where you don’t need to count or know Latin.” Many, many years later I turned the television on and I was watching Bill Collins and I said to Kathryn, “I know that man. He was my Latin teacher at high school.”

He was a funny man. He was an interesting man in a lot of ways.

My goal was to be as good as everybody else in the class, and I managed to do it in most things. But I failed dismally in Math and Latin.

The interesting thing is I can pick up a book and start reading and see a Latin phrase and will be able to read it and understand it, in most cases. But I was hopeless. I failed every Latin exam I ever sat for. I was absolutely hopeless…

Yes. They wanted me to be the first one in the family ever to go to university.

Which I didn’t, but I was the first one in the family to own a car…

She was different. My mother was, shall we say, a very selfish lady. She died

in April of this year. She was eighty two years old. We hadn’t spoken or had anything to do with each other for about ten or twelve years. She was a very selfish person and a very domineering person. And she was also, probably, the dominant reason why they split up when we were kids. She was easily attracted to other people.

I’m leaving a lot unsaid. Dad had a lot of trouble coming to grips with that. But she was a good provider, she was an outstanding cook. She could sew and do all the things that mothers did. But at the same time, she was a fairly lazy woman. My main memory of her when I was a kid, and growing up and going to high school,

was her yelling at me, from her bed, to get up and get myself some breakfast and go to school. That sort of thing. I have no doubt that she loved us, in her own way. I had no doubt that she wanted the best for us. And that’s why she and my Dad made me do that academic course, rather than the ordinary straight forward course at high school.

I think she wanted me…they wanted me to be something better than they were. After my Dad left the merchant navy, he worked as a wharfie [waterside worker] on the wharves in Sydney for a while, then he got very sick, because he always had problems with his lungs, and had to give that away. He spent most of his life, from there on, until he retired, as a cleaner.

He just worked in buildings and offices cleaning, after everybody else had gone home. So when we were home during the day, we always walked around tippy-toe, because he was asleep. He would go to work around five or six at night, and come home around five or six o’ clock in the morning.

Oh yes, I could never deny that. No matter what else happened,

they did work very hard to give all of us a good education. My younger sister did very well in the education stakes. My eldest sister didn’t want to, so they didn’t bother with her. She just ran her own race, and that was fine, by her. She’s done well. She’s very happy. She lives out at Ipswich and we talk to each other quite a lot.

Yes.

He was in the merchant navy. He actually joined the merchant navy long before the Second World War, in Britain, then he came out to Australia and became a merchant seaman with the Mercantile Marine. He had three ships torpedoed out from under him, by the Japanese. And he was also in Darwin for the day of the very first air raid by the Japanese.

In fact, somewhere, and I don’t know where it is…He had written a report for the authorities of the day, into what actually happened. Mum still had the original report, in his beautiful copperplate handwriting. It was printed by the Courier Mail about ten years ago, when they were running a series on Australians at War, or something like that,

and they printed first hand reports from different people. Mum had put this into the Courier Mail, and they printed it, they did a wonderful job.

Very little, really. Most of the time when he was prepared to talk about them was when we were very young. And I think he did that deliberately because he knew that we wouldn’t understand a great deal of it. I know that

he…he didn’t hate the Japanese. He knew that life was difficult for him, but he didn’t dwell on it. He used to tell us funny stories about things that happened to him when he was on the ships, and the way that different people used to react to things. Most of it is very politically incorrect now, so I won’t go into it in great detail. But he told us stories of things that other people did on the ships.

And we used to laugh and think it was a lot of fun. He didn’t talk a lot about the war.

Oh yes, yes.

I thought he was a hero. I thought he was a great. “Gee, my Dad was torpedoed. All your fathers were only in the army or the air force, My Dad was on a ship and he was torpedoed. Ha Ha.” That sort of thing.

I thought that was wonderful. When I learnt many years later that that had happened to him three times, all in the Pacific and around the Solomons and New Guinea and so on, I thought, ‘Gosh, what a man.’ You got bombed once, then you go back again, then they send fifty planes to bomb you to death, and you still can get up and go back for more. That was what people did in those days. So he did it.

I guess in my early teenage years, and my younger years, war basically revolved around things that had happened in the Second World War. I didn’t have a great opinion of it either way. It didn’t worry me. It was something that had happened. I have vague recollections of the Korean War,

because I was around then, but I was only one year old when the Second World War finished, so I had no real knowledge…I know that things were tough, things were very, very hard for most people in the late ’40s. But war was just something that had happened. People had gone away to the war and some had come back, some didn’t.

That was my total thoughts about the war. I didn’t care. It was something that happened, and it was over and done with.

It didn’t change a lot in the 50s. Sydney coasted along being Sydney. Life very rarely changed. Things were very stable.

I think the hardest thing to buy in those days, in the late ’40s, and particularly in the early ’50s, was Australian cigarettes. And the only reason that I know that was because my Mum used to drag me around from shop to shop, asking, “Do you have any Australian cigarettes.” And most of them always shook their heads and said, “No.” So that was one of the reasons. The other thing I remember was red cabbage, we ate a lot of that, and smoked haddock and things like that. You know that horrible orange fish

your mother gives you when she’s not happy with you? Yeah, we ate a lot of that as well. But Sydney as a whole, I don’t recall any huge changes in the ’50s. It wasn’t until the early ’60s when television became a major force, that the whole world started to change. And I put it down to the box, quite honestly. It was in the ’50s that Sydney really started to

change a lot. We saw buildings going up and down, we saw different types of traffic arrangements. And people started being a little more assertive in what they did. Up until then, I think most Australians were fairly complacent about their lives. We were a along way from anywhere, and it took a long time for anything to hit us. And then suddenly out of the blue we got TV and all those sorts of things.

And Australia, Sydney, changed overnight. In the early ’60s, when I was still in the Army Reserves, the thought of war wasn’t an issue. We didn’t worry too much about that. We used to go along to training days, and training weekends and training camps, and so forth, and we’d put on our jungle greens and be soldiers.

Yeah, we did a good job of being soldiers, I think, for what we had to work with. In the meantime, I sort of potted along and drove a truck and worked for the company I started with as a clerk. Life was fairly stable until, I don’t know, 1964–65, then we started to see things like drugs and alcoholism and protests,

all those sorts of things that we had never experienced before. A lot of people just couldn’t cope with it.

No, I wasn’t aware of any major changes like that. Mum and Dad were both like me, like I am today, they were both heavily into technology. If something new came out, they had to have.

So we always had a fridge and a washing machine…Microwaves, of course, were way in the future. We had a gas oven and a gas stove and things like that. But we still, apart from all that, we still had a big copper out the back in the laundry, which once we got the washing machine, that copper was there for cooking the ham at Christmas time, and that was about it. It was great…

Well, okay, in those days you didn’t buy a cooked ham. You didn’t just go down to Woolies [Woolworths supermarket] and pick up a cooked ham and take it home and strip the plastic off it and eat. Hams were always sold raw. So the idea was that we’d fill the copper up with water, after cleaning it out very carefully of course, getting the ‘daddy long legs’ and other spiders and lizards out…You’d fill it up with water and you would boil the ham

in a cheesecloth or something like that. Then you would take it out, and maybe put it in the oven and bake it…I don’t know. I wasn’t near the technical side of it. All I knew was that I liked ham.

Christmas was great. There were a couple of bad ones when there was splits, as there were from time to time. But generally Christmases were great. I got into trouble because I was a thief.

I was a terrible kid. I hated surprises. So I always made sure that none of my Christmas presents were surprises by sneaking in, when nobody was home, into their bedroom and ratting the cupboards. To the point where Dad actually put one of those hasp things on the bedroom door and put the padlock on it. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew that all you had to do was undo the screws and the whole thing would come off.

So I undid the screws and got in and ratted all my presents. And I used to be beaten unmercifully for doing things like that. After a while I pretended that it was all a big surprise. And it was great, we loved Christmas. My Dad was a traditionalist, being English. Being in Sydney, which was relatively hot, he always insisted

that we had the traditional ham and pork and chicken and puddings. Mum used to hoard threepences for years and years, and every year she’d boil them up and throw them in the pudding. One year my grandparents came up to stay with us, for Christmas, and it was the worst Christmas that I’ve ever known, because my grandmother insisted on cooking the ham.

And she did it in a way where she sort of cut all the skin up and stuck cloves in it, and none of us would eat it because it was rotten. So we never had cloves in the ham any more. I don’t know why she did it. But that was the food side of it. Christmases were always good. We had growing out in the backyard behind the old dunny [toilet], which was never used, it was just a shed by those days,

we had a great big pine tree growing. And every year Dad and I would go out and we’d look, and choose our branch and we’d cut the branch off, and that would be our Christmas tree for the year. And we always had our own home grown Christmas trees, it was great. This was a huge tree. It was great because I was a boy and I was allowed to climb the tree and saw the branches down and all those sorts of things.

The girls weren’t allowed to do that because they were girls.

None, I had absolutely none. I was a kid, you didn’t think about the future, you thought about today and you thought about whether or not you were going to get into trouble for breaking that window, or not doing your homework. That’s what I thought about. I wasn’t typical, but I just floated along,

I coasted, I slipped under the radar and I stayed there. I didn’t really have any plans for the future. My plan was leave school, get a job. What kind of job? It didn’t matter, it was a job, and jobs were easy to get in those days, and that was good, because if you didn’t like a job you could move on and try something else. And I did that, after a while.

I enjoyed most of the work that I did. It was with Otis Elevator Company, and they were based in Bankstown. They had a huge factory and major office complex on Canterbury Road in Bankstown. I just loved every aspect of it,

because I was somebody apart from just another kid at school. Big people knew me and would talk to me and knew by my name, which was another big ego boost for me. The guys who I worked with were all much older than me, and they were World War II veterans. Everyone of them had been in the air force during the Second World War.

And they were just fabulous people…Sorry, I lied, there was one guy who had been in the navy, and he was, strange enough, the best of the lot. He was…I don’t know, a guide, mentor, friend, the lot. I absolutely adored the lot of them, but this one particular guy I thought the sun shone out of his backside. If he said, “Jump,” I would jump and not even bother to ask how high.

That’s the kind of guy he was. They were wonderful people. They had a totally different attitude to a lot of people these days, where they were prepared to help without being asked. And I learnt so much from them. It was a great company to work for. They were tremendous people. They had an internal plan that said if you showed some promise,

and they obviously thought that I must have, because they asked me if I would like to train as a draftsman, and I said, “Yeah, that would be good.” They had a huge drawing office, thirty, forty, fifty draftsman in there. I said, “That would be good.” They said, “Well, before you do that, we would like to rotate you around some of our state branch offices and you can learn all sorts of…how the company works,” sort of thing.

And they sent me back down to Melbourne, which I thought was great. I knew Melbourne, not all that well, but I was comfortable in Melbourne, and I lived there for a couple of years. Then I came back up to Sydney, and as I said, by the time I got back to Sydney, some of the philosophy in the company had changed, and I just didn’t feel comfortable there any more, so I said, “No, stuff this. I’m out of here.”

Yeah, when I was at high school they had a cadet unit. Most high schools in Sydney at the time had their own little army cadet unit, as a bookend part of it. You had to be fifteen, I think, to join up the cadets. I used to watch these suits come to school Tuesdays in their army uniforms. I thought, ‘That’s pretty cool. Girls would like that.’ I had no war-like tendencies, I was just a kid.

So I couldn’t wait until I was fifteen, then I put my hand up and I joined the cadets that year. And I stayed in the cadets until I left high school, and I felt comfortable doing army stuff, even though it was only cadet level. I still felt comfortable, I enjoyed it. So after I left school and I got this job with Otis, and I was mucking about there…

It was exactly one month after my seventeenth birthday. I rang the army recruiting office and I said, “Where do I go to join the CMF?” They said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “Well, infantry, whatever, it doesn’t matter.” So they sent me down to the depot at Arncliffe, in Sydney, and I trumped in there one Tuesday night, because they paraded on Tuesday nights as well, and had an interview, filled out all the paperwork…

I still remember the guy who was doing the interview, and he said to me, “So, how old are you?” I said, “I’m seventeen years old and one month exactly, to the day.” So it must have been the 19th of October. And he said, “Gee, you didn’t muck about, did you?” I said, “No, here I am.” And that was good, they signed me up. That particular night, there was a fellow in the same line with me, who was interviewed directly after me….

He had a familiar face, and I realised that he and I had gone to school together. In fact, we used to catch the same bus down to the station to catch the train to school together. We had never spoken, never ever. Anyway, I introduced myself to him and he turned out to be one of the closest, dearest friends that I ever had. We are still the closest thing to brothers that I will ever experience.

And I love him dearly, he is a wonderful man. But we went through the whole thing. We did all our training together, we got promoted together, we did different things together. He left to join the Regular Army in about 1964, I think, and he was in the first group of Australian soldiers to go to Vietnam. That was in May of 1965. So he was away for a year,

and he missed his 21st birthday. So I had two, because our birthdays are only four or five days apart. It is interesting because I have a very, very close group of friends, that you could probably count on the fingers of one hand who are special friends, and all our birthdays fall within the same ten day period. So, yeah, Trevor and I are very, very close to each other.

That was when I met him for the first time, even though I had known him for several years…known of him for several years. So yeah, that was the CMF. I stayed in the CMF for a couple of years…

I loved every aspect of it. It was when I first started to grow in ambition, because I could see what was available to me, if I was prepared to put the effort in.

Having stripes on the arm and things like that, that’s great, people will think I’m good. So I did. And I applied myself and I went through the promotion periods and so forth. Obviously I enjoyed it, or I wouldn’t have stuck with it.

I left there after about eighteen months or two years, and I think that was about the time that I was going down to Melbourne with work, so I gave it a miss. When I came back from Melbourne to Sydney again, I rejoined the same group, the same unit, and everything had changed again. It’s amazing how quickly things change…

Oh, different people, different rules. Vietnam was a goer by then, of course,

and things were a lot more serious. That was fine, because I didn’t mind the serious side of it. I’d often thought that some of the stuff we did…We did it because we could.

Okay, in the early days it was turn up every Tuesday night for a two hour training period, and you would do drill and you would classroom lessons on the aircraft and so forth.

Once every couple of months you would do a weekend away in the bush. Once a year you would go away on a two week intensive training camp. It was all right, but it was no different to the cadets. In a lot of ways, it was very, very similar to cadet training, because in those days not even the army took CMF very seriously. But the second time, when I came back from Melbourne and rejoined, things were a lot more serious.

We had better equipment, we had better weapons. We had instructors who were Vietnam veterans, who had come back, left the army and joined up with the CMF as instructors. And Trevor was one of them. These fellows had been there, they’d done it. So we started paying a lot more attention, and we started being a bit more serious about our training, and it paid off.

It was great, because I learnt a lot more in that second signing on than I did in the first one.

I was a died in the wool [emphatic] supporter of it, as did many, many people in my position in those days. Okay, if our government thinks that’s what we need to do to protect Australia,

than that is what we should be doing. That was the extent of it. I was a great supporter of it. I had no problem that Australian troops were fighting in another country. Compare it to Iraq, if you like. I have pretty much the same feelings about that…We won’t go into it.

I think I just accepted it as a given, that sooner or later, one way or another,

I would end up there. In 1965, when Trevor went away with the 1st Battalion, I didn’t really give it any conscious thought, about my own future. But I knew sooner or later, one day, that I would probably end up there. So I let it roll along. I’ve got to admit, though, that my motivation for joining the air force was

to go to Vietnam.

Yes, it was a very easy one. I was, again, I had been in the job driving trucks for a couple of years. There was nothing else they could teach me, I knew that, I’d done it. I was still in the Army Reserve, but having been in the Army Reserve for that period of time,

in the infantry, and slept on the ground and done all those sorts of things, I knew that if I was to go to Vietnam it was never going to be with the army. Or it was never going to be with the infantry, because…why should I have to sleep on the ground? That’s the kind of thing. …Once I left school and got into the world, I had a reasonably high opinion of myself. I knew that I was as good as anybody else, and to me that was a pretty high opinion.

So, there was no way in the world that I was going to sleep on the ground and wear dirty shoes and dirty clothes, if I could avoid it. So I decided I would join the air force. That was what motivated it.

I was twenty four. Yeah, October, 1968 I joined the air force.

The Australians had been involved, by then, for about three and a half years. Maybe a little bit more if you count the Training Team. I think the Americans had been there since about 1962 or ’63. But Australians didn’t go, the first real troops didn’t go, until May of ’65.

Dad was a bit concerned.

Mum just sort of accepted it. She had been in the air force during the war, in the WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force]. And she just accepted it, as she accepted most things. I wasn’t living at home by then, I had left home. I went around there and told them I was joining the air force. Dad was concerned, but Mum just said, “Okay, away you go. You’re a big boy, you know what you do.”

So I did, away I went.

Very quietly. For my Dad, it was very expressive. But for most other people it was pretty quiet sort of stuff. He said things like, “I’m not happy about this. I don’t like the idea of you putting yourself in danger. You be very careful how you go.” Things like that. For my Dad to say things like that, it was pretty important.

It must have been pretty important to him. So that was it. As I said before, he was a very introverted sort of a person. He didn’t say a lot. But when he did, you would listen.

Hell no. It was a matter of courtesy to me to go to my Mum and Dad and say, “This is what I’m going to do.”

At that stage there was nothing definite. I might have been posted anywhere, overseas or anywhere else. It was just a decision I’d made to join the air force. Maybe he knew more than I did, I don’t know. But I never looked beyond tomorrow in those days.

My sisters, we had sort of lost touch. My eldest sister left home when she was about fifteen. My youngest sister was married.

She had her own little world to live. We sort of lost touch. I’d left home, I wasn’t living at home, and all three of us were living our own lives. I guess they heard about it from my parents, because I don’t remember consciously ever telling any of them, either of them about it.

They thought it was great.

They thought it was terrific. A lot of them were in very good jobs, and weren’t in a position to just pull up stakes and go and join the army or the Air force or the navy or the police. But most of them…They were all very supportive. In fact, my commanding officer at the time literally tried to bribe me to stay on and not join the air force. I know that sounds like a contradiction,

but he said to me, “If you stay with us, I will give you an immediate commission and you can do this and that and the other.” And I said, “Very tempting, but no, I’ve made my mind up. I’m going to go.” So once he realised that I was determined to go, he was very supportive. He wrote me all sorts of recommendations and references, really, really good stuff. He was a top man.

Yes, we were probably the last person in the entire suburb of Padstow to get a television set. A) because they were very expensive, and b) because I wasn’t very good at school.

And my Mum and Dad knew what would be happening at night instead of me doing homework. So they resisted that very, very strongly. One of the habits of the time was for parents to dress up their kids in their pyjamas, slippers and dressing gowns and you would troop off down to the local television shop. It wasn’t like today, it was literally a shop with a big glass window,

and they would have all their TVs on display, all turned on, black and white. And everybody would come along and some people would bring folding chairs, and you would sit there and watch television until nine or ten o’ clock, then you would be bundled off back home…and put to bed. And again, we didn’t think there was anything unusual or strange about that. That’s what you did. I mean if they were stupid enough to leave their TVs on all night, somebody had to watch them.

So that was us. We were very late in the day getting television at home.

Mickey Mouse Club, I remember watching the Mickey Mouse Club. There were a lot of variety shows. I may be getting myself confused here, but I think people like Graham Kennedy and people like that were features of night-time television.

It was only on for limited hours in the early days, as well. By the time we got it, it stayed on from eight o’ clock in the morning until ten o’ clock at night. You only ever got a movie on Sunday nights, and that was a big thing to watch the Sunday night movie on anyone of the two channels that were available.

Generally it was variety shows. Current affairs wasn’t a big thing. You got the news, you got a lot of kids shows, you got some absolutely heart-breaking attempts at advertisements. Even as kids we used to laugh at them because they were so pathetic. We got a fair few American shows. Mr Ed, that type of thing. As time went on things got better, obviously,

and we graduated from Mr Ed to Flipper and Skippy and things like that.

I was never really exposed to drugs at all, and I still have a very definite view about drugs in any form,

but again, we won’t go into that. Sex was something other people did…And yes, sex was the occasional grope and fumble in the toilets at school. It wasn’t until…after I left school and joined the world

that I became more interested in girls. I always thought girls were soft boys, I didn’t have a great deal of time for girls, until I left school. And then the very first day on the job, one of the girls from the office came into where I was being introduced to all the other people and she said, “Hello, my name is Diane. You’re new and you’re Jim.” And I just fell in love with her, and it was the first time I had ever been in love with a girl in my life.

She avoided me like the plague after that, but again that is the story of my life. The group of kids, young people, that I knocked around with, we had a thing. Every Thursday night we would go down to the Bexley North Hotel, and we would watch the floor show and drink ourselves stupid, because you were allowed to do that in those days, and drive home, so we did. And then we’d go down Saturday afternoons

and do the same thing all over again, because we had Sundays to recover. Why we chose Thursdays I’m damned if I know, because we always had to get up and go to work on Fridays. The Bexley North sold Millers beer which was full of the most incredible diarrhoea producing stuff. So Friday morning were always interesting. Saturdays, we’d go down there just after lunch, about one o’ clock, on Saturday afternoon and we’d spend all day there.

There was always parties and things, and over a period of time you formed a group of people, and it was guys and girls and all the rest of it. There was very little pairing off, as such, but if you liked someone you told them, and if they liked you back, they told you…I was into a lot of things when I was a kid. I was into ice-skating, drinking, motor racing, all those sorts of things

that you did in those days because it was a lot of fun. Ice-skating I loved and the girls were good…

It didn’t work. It didn’t work for me. It may have worked for everybody else, but not for me. That’s not entirely true…

As we became a much more close group of people within the army unit that I was with, we would do different things together. We’d have parties and we’d have all sorts of different activities that we would do. Because we were young and relatively clean cut and we had a lot of confidence, which they teach you.

You learn self-confidence. So I guess women responded to that sort of thing, well, girls did. And we had great times with girls, although usually we weren’t in uniform at the time. I think in those days, and even now, anybody in the military has an aura, and you can look at somebody and say, he or she is in the military and you’re either attracted to them or not. Fortunately we seemed to attract the right kind of girls.

And I mean that genuinely. They were the right kind of girls; they were nice girls, whatever that means these days.

Only one, and it ended it total disaster. I was twenty four and I had met this girl at a party where we had gone to as part of our Army Reserve…

A lot of the guys had gone to this particular party. There was a girl there who was sort of separated from the rest of the group, and I asked a few people about her, and they said, “Yes, she doesn’t know very many people.” And I just took one look at her and again I fell instantly in love with her. So I went over and talked to her. We had a very, very close relationship,

and one night, we had been out somewhere and I drove her home, and her Dad was waiting…He wasn’t waiting, he was up when we got home. And he said, “Look, I’ve never really asked you this. How old are you?” And I said, “I’m twenty three.” He said, “That’s a bit long in the tooth.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, my daughter is only sixteen.”

And I thought, ‘Oh, dear God.’ I had no idea. It wasn’t something that you even thought about, and it just shattered me completely. And this was only weeks before I was going into the air force. I completely fell apart, because I knew that there was no way in the world that I could carry on with that relationship, with her at that age.

And it tore me to shreds, because I was very close to her. So we agreed that it probably wasn’t the best thing in the world to do, and that was it. But yeah, that was very, very close, very serious. In fact, I had asked her to marry me, and I didn’t even know how old she was.

I suppose technically, yes.

We hadn’t gone all the way, let’s put it that way. We didn’t take the final step.

Not all that much, no.

They used the term ‘Sexual Revolution.’ Yeah, okay, there was plenty of opportunity if you wanted. Nobody really thought about it. Nobody thought about sexually transmitted diseases and all those kinds of things. I know people that carried condoms in their wallets. I know girls who carried condoms in their purses, and that was probably a good thing. But you didn’t think about it.

It was one of those things that you either did or didn’t do.

Yes, yes.

When you had the limited opportunities that I did, it wasn’t a major issue.

Yeah, yes.

And even now, after nearly thirty years of being married to Kathryn, and a lot of relationships in-between, I still think of that one whenever I think about the what-ifs of life. What would have happened now? But that’s in the past, that’s all ancient history.

Sure. It was a fairly long, drawn out process because,

with all due respect, even in the late 1960s the air force was still running on 1940s and 1950s principles. So joining the air force was a very, very long drawn out process. I think it took me nearly three months. Which to me was a long time. The silly part about it now is that I have heard of young men trying to join the army today, and they’re waiting anything up to a year before they’re even told whether they’ve been accepted or not.

Anyway, three months, and one day I went down to the letterbox, and there was a letter there for me and I opened it up and I read it and it said, “You have been accepted into the Royal Australian Air force.” And I just threw it up and said, “Yes!” I didn’t go to work that day. But the next day I did, I went in and I put my notice in. They were very disappointed,

but supportive at the same time. So I went and resigned from the CMF, and again disappointment, but very supportive. Then I went and did my final interviews and took the oath, and that was where the thing happened where they said to me, “You’re not going to be a drill instructor.” Because you went into the air force as a drill instructor with the automatic rank of corporal.

And that was the rank I held in the CMF. But I had to literally start from scratch again. That was great. Even in the air force, in those days, all the recruit training was done at Edinburgh in South Australia, and you travelled by train. Sydney to Melbourne, Melbourne to Adelaide, was about a three day trip on the train.

That was great. So all my mates got me totally legless [drunk], poured me onto the train…Which was totally irresponsible because the air force had actually put me in charge of the group of recruits going down and I was the only one who couldn’t stand up. So they put me on the train, they put me to sleep….These younger guys than me,

who had never been in the service, any of them, they looked after me until we got to Adelaide, then we went out to the base. I think we had about twenty four hours just to relax and recover from the trip, and then it really started. They formed us into a group, and this young fellow came out. He wasn’t young, he was short. He was a fairly short man.

He said, “My name is Corporal Redman, I’m going to be your drill instructor.” I thought, ‘Oh. Great.’ I think they still do it these days, they select one person out of the group, usually the oldest person, and they make him the recruit in charge of that group, and it is that person’s job to make sure you’re in the right place at the right time, that your uniforms are right, and generally be the dogsbody

and cop all the kicks if anything goes wrong. So he went through this list of people and he said, “You were in the army.” I said, “I was in the CMF.” He said, “What rank were you?” I said, “Corporal.” “What corps?” “Infantry.” “Right, have you done any drill instructing?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Good, you’re in charge.” I said, “Okay, I can live with that.” And it wasn’t a problem, I was quite happy to do that. Until, about three days into the course,

when the only time we saw him was first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, when we knocked off. And he’d come up to me and said, “Here’s the training program, you know all this stuff. You teach them.” And we never saw him, until about three or four days before graduation when he turned up again and took all the credit, because we were the honour flight for the parade.

I’m not taking credit for that either, they were just a good bunch of guys. That was, in those days, we did thirteen weeks training and then you were farmed out to your various units for your further training.

It was an absolute walk. As I said, I more or less ran the show. And he was very grateful for that.

I had no problem with the training, and having done that sort of training of raw recruits and so forth, it wasn’t a problem for me. It was just a question of wearing a different coloured uniform, in all honesty. And I just walked through. At the end we won…they used to call it the ‘Honour Flight.’ So we were there and we got the trophy.

I was. By that time I was twenty four. The average age of the people in my training flight was eighteen or nineteen, around about then. We had three people who were thirty nine, which was the absolute maximum age. But they were coming into technical fields, and that wasn’t a problem. They all managed to get up and do the job, do the work.

Not on my flight, no. We had one chap who was actually from Sri Lanka, and his biggest problem was with language. But apart from that, no. Everybody just walked through it. It wasn’t tough, it wasn’t hard training at all. If it had been army recruit training, it would have been four times harder. To me, it was just a walk. And I tried to make them

pick up things as quickly as they could, so we didn’t have to keep going over and over again, and make life hard for them. Life was hard enough for them as it was. Most of them had never been in that sort of regimented lifestyle before. So my aim was to make it as easy for them as I could.

Yes, just very minor differences in drills and things like that. And of course they didn’t concentrate,

being the air force and being very much a technical service, they didn’t concentrate to the huge degree on field craft and field training that we did. Or even weapons training, although we did do some basic weapons training.

We went to Amberley. Again it was from Adelaide to Brisbane by train, although I did tell the girl

that I was going with at the time that I was flying up, because I didn’t want her to be at the station to see me off. Yeah, there was about half a dozen of us who travelled up from Adelaide. We got to Melbourne the next morning. We had the entire day to spend in Melbourne, which was fatal.

And on the way back to the railway station to catch the train from Melbourne to Sydney, we fell in with some very, very bad people who drank, and we ended up carrying on on the train. We had salami, we had cheese, we had about fourteen dozen bottles of claret and two glasses. And we had a running party on the train, all the way from Melbourne to Sydney.

We got into Sydney about eight o’ clock in the morning….Bad news. But I went around to work, where I used to work before I left to join the air force, and I had left my car with one of the other guys to keep for me until I finished my training. I went around to that place and asked him if I could get the car back that day.

That way I could drive up to Amberley, rather than catch the train up to Brisbane. He said, “Yeah, no problems.” So we got the car and I filled it up with petrol and I took and ended up in Amberley on the Sunday. It was about a week before Christmas, and the base was in Christmas shutdown period and there was literally nobody there. I pulled up at the main gate and flashed my brand new ID card

and said that I had just been posted in, and they said, “Oh God. Is the back seat of your car very comfortable?” I said, “Why? What did you have in mind?” They said, “Well, you might have to sleep in there until Monday, because we weren’t expecting anybody on the Sunday.” So they took me around and they got the duty storeman out of bed, and he found me a bed and he found me a blanket and some sheets and a pillow, and that was fine.

That was about a week before Christmas. The next training course for Airfield Defence Guards didn’t start until February. I thought, ‘Good. I can loll about and do nothing much and get paid for it until February.’ No, no, they had different ideas. They put us into what they called a ‘pool.’ Which was just a group of people who were waiting to start courses, various courses on the base.

It didn’t matter what courses. So your job was to paint grass and clean windows and take away the rocks from the edge of the runway, and so forth. And we were starting to get used to this general work. It wasn’t hard work, it was just general stuff. And one of the guys who was on pool with me was a fellow named Johns,

who had been a footballer in Sydney. I can’t remember what he was doing… he was a techo [technician], a nut and bolter of some description, and he was waiting for his course to start, but they sent us down to the runway. All along the runway they had these white washed rocks, on the side of the runway, and somebody had decided that this was a safety hazard, so all the rocks had to be moved off the runway. In those days it was about seven thousand feet long, and we thought,

‘“This is a big job. Fourteen thousand feet of white washed rocks” And we were walking back up to mess for lunch after moving rocks for most of the morning, and we walked past the officers mess on the way to the airmen’s mess

Johnsy and I were walking back to the mess for lunch, and we walked past the officers’ mess on the way, and it was really, really hot. We’re talking January at Amberley, when it gets up to forty plus. We were wearing just ordinary Air force blue overalls and neither of us had hats on, which is a total no-no. And somebody stuck his head out from one of the windows at the officers’ mess and said, “Put your bloody hats on.” I fumbled for my hat,

because I was trained to obey orders and Johnsy wasn’t, he had only just finished the recruit course as well, and he just turned around and looked straight out the officers’ mess and he lifted his head up and he went, “Get stuffed.” And we just kept on walking, and nothing was ever said. They’re the little things that you hear about. We lived in an area of Amberley at the time called Siberia,

which was way down away from everything else, in the main part of the base, and it was all World War II weatherboard huts, and it was so cold there during the winter it was incredible. We started our Airfield Defence Guard training course on the 13th of February. We were split into two groups of thirteen each, because there were twenty six men on the course. It ran for thirteen weeks

and it was course number thirteen [unlucky]! So we all knew that we were going to come to bad ends, that it was going to be a really, really bad life in the air force for all of us. So we did this training course, and unfortunately we were being trained by people who had no overseas experience, no active service experience. None of them had a clue. One of the was a ratbag, two of them I would cheerfully have shot,

and the last one was a hell of a nice bloke and a very, very good instructor. He was the only one that any of us had any time for. But with one exception, I think we made it through the thirteen week course. It was tough, it was a very difficult course, and probably more so for the other guys, none of whom had anything much to do with military in any way.

To me, again, it was just stuff that I had already done; it was just more intense….

Okay, we lived in these barrack huts that had about seven or eight beds down each side. It was a big open building and the rafters were all exposed…

The day always started with somebody falling out of bed, because during the night we would get ropes and hoist their beds up through the rafters so they were only that far from the roof. And we would wake up and yell out, “Get out of bed, it’s time to get up now.” And he would fall out of bed. It happened to everybody, including me, so you just got used to it. That was one of the things that you did.

They usually started six thirty, and it was the usual spit and polish type stuff. We would go up, we’d have breakfast in the mess, we’d come back…those of us that could be bothered, because it was a long way and you weren’t allowed to drive your cars. So those of us that could be bothered went up to breakfast and then came back and finished getting ready for the day. We never knew from one day to the next what our training program was going to be.

And I think that was purposely designed to keep us on our toes. We would do drill in the mornings, then probably some PT [Physical Training] type stuff. And then there would be classroom lectures. …on the confidence course or out on the rifle range, something like that. And that was a fairly normal day. Couple of days a week you would be out in the bush doing field craft, and field training and all those sorts of things.

Weapons training was very big. Because of our particular situation, Airfield Defence Guards was run very much along the lines of army infantry, but it was a step above. So over the years we got the opportunity to do parachute courses, we learnt demolition, counter intelligence, counter insurgency operations.

All those sorts of things that in those days the army didn’t bother with. That was our training program…

Airfield Defence Guards were pretty much the air force’s private army. It originated in 1945, in the air force, when they needed

a specialised troop of people to protect the airfields, particularly up through the Solomons and New Guinea. So they developed this training program, using mostly army instructors, and it was set up along the lines of an Infantry company or platoon with, as I said, the little extras of training thrown in. So, we knew what our job was going to be.

Our job was to defend airfields to stop bad people coming in. In fact, we used to joke about it in those days. There were a lot of protest groups hanging about who weren’t happy about the Vietnam War. That was their life, that was what they did, okay, but our joke was that that was what we were there to stop the protestors coming in.

And it wasn’t as silly as it sounded after a while. But we had no illusions about what our job was going to be. We did radio procedure and all the sorts of things that the infantry did, like ambush drills and all those sorts of things. We always thought we were a step above the infantry. The air force didn’t think so. The general attitude of air force towards ADGs was

that we were only doing that because we weren’t able to do anything else. Most of us were stupid, and the ones who weren’t stupid were crazy, and somewhere in the middle were the people who were both. I don’t know which one I was in, but we all managed. And gee, some of the people who I trained with and who I served with in the air force have moved onto incredibly important positions in the industry.

These days, Airfield Defence Guards are the elite of the air force. They’re treated like it and they know it. They’re great guys. They’re very, very highly trained and probably about that far below SAS [Special Air Service], in a lot of ways. Very, very highly trained young men. Good stuff.

I don’t want to dwell too much on that side of it…

I think the majority of them were only made instructors, to us, because of the time that they had been in the air force. The majority of them had, in fact, been drill instructors of some description, and because they knew how to march and they had some knowledge of weapons training,

and some knowledge of field craft and so forth, from being drill instructors, that they were considered to be the most logical people to be the instructors for ADGs. In taking the whole thing, they did a good job, they got us through okay. And most of us, when we left, we knew more than when we came in. And I suppose that is the whole aim of the thing.

When I was doing my basic ADG training, I was a little bit disappointed in some of them, because they seemed to think that their ranks entitled them to be foolproof, even when they weren’t. You weren’t allowed to question them because of their rank, and they were fairly ordinary…let’s put it that way. They probably wouldn’t have lived that long

in an active service situation if they had employed the same attitudes as they did during the training. But I guess you get that. I’ve probably had recruits think that about me. But that’s life…

I liked the fact that I could do it all. I liked the fact that I finished the course…

I liked the fact that in a lot of the things that were part of the course, either a) I was already familiar with them, or b) I was learning new stuff. And the thing that I really, really liked was that we were all incredibly fit. We were very, very healthy and very, very fit, because from our training area at Amberley it was only a couple of hundred metres

down to the mess, and we could go down there for lunch. So we didn’t miss lunch as we missed breakfast, or dinner. But we ate well, we were pretty well trained, all things being considered and we were very fit. I think they’re the things that I remember about that basic training…

Ahh, walking on the gravel on my knuckles. That was one of the things that our PTIs [Physical Training Instructors], used to put us through. They would say, “You’ve got to learn to withstand a little bit of pain, guys. So down on your knuckles and walk around on the asphalt or gravel.” And we’d do that. Apart from that, there was no major problems. I didn’t have any problems….

Actually I did, now I come to think of it. I had a major problem with my right shoulder at the time. And at one stage, I was being threatened to be ticked off the course because they didn’t think I was going to be physically fit to finish. And I said, “No, no, if it’s a problem, then it doesn’t exist. I’ll just keep going.” And I used to get back into the barracks after training, in the gym, or out in the bush for a couple of days,

and I would be literally crying with the pain of it. After they threatened to kick me off the course, I thought,”You can’t do that to me. I know more than any of you.” That’s how arrogant I was in those days. But I just flatly refused to give them their excuse to kick me off the course. So I just wore it. It went away after a while. I had to have some major

cortisone injection treatment, straight into the shoulder…I still think about those days…The needle was about that long, and they used to just spray something on the shoulder first, and they’d ram this needle in. And I’d kept looking at this shoulder to see whether it had come out this side. That’s how big the needle was. But it never did, so they knew what they were doing. Eventually it just went away.

In retrospect it wasn’t a major problem. On the basic training it wasn’t…The only people who really disciplined us were the instructors who were very insecure, or the PTIs who did it because that is the kind of people that they are.

Apart from that I don’t think we gave them any reason, any of us, any of the twenty six, gave them any reason to really come down hard on us. We got the usual, you know, “Your boots are dirty.” Or, “Your belt is not polished properly. Give me ten push-ups,” or twenty or thirty or whatever. But apart from that, we had no real major disciplinary problems. Except for the one guy who didn’t finish the course.

And he was taken away by the police. We never found out why, and they wouldn’t tell us why. After a couple of days he wasn’t there any more, so that was just one more bed that we could throw junk on.

I can’t remember the exact rumour mongering that was going on, but I think it was something to do with little girls.

But we never really did find out why.

No, very few. I fell off a cliff once. And that’s how I developed this shoulder problem, which I didn’t tell anybody about when I joined the air force, but they can’t do anything about it now, so…

Yeah, I fell off this cliff and landed on my shoulder. And the medic who was with us, this was on a two week training exercise, he took my shirt off to have a look, and he said, “Can you flex your arm?” And I flexed my arm and he said, “Oh, dear God.” He was standing behind me at the time, and I thought, ‘What?’ I’ve said that and I know why I say it.

“What?” He said, “You’ve got this huge great depression right in the middle of your shoulder blade?” I said, “Oh, what do I do now? Can I get a new one?” He said, “No, but hang on a sec.” And he got on the radio and got onto the main base hospital, and he said, “I’ve got this guy here, and he’s fallen off a cliff and he’s hurt his shoulder, and he’s got this big depression thing in the middle of his shoulder blades.” And the doctor said, “Is that when he lifts his arms up above his head?” And the guy said, “Yes.”

“And does it hurt him to do that?” I said, “No.” He said, “I hate to have to tell you this, but everybody gets that depression in the middle of their shoulder blade when they lift their arms up.” So yeah, that was fun, that was a lot of fun.

Oh, from around about the ceiling height. Two and a half metres.

Yeah, for going off the base, yes. But our normal daywear, workwear, was exactly the same as the army. We wore green floppy hats and jungle green uniforms and black GP boots, and webbing. So if we were in the bush, you couldn’t tell us. We were no different from the army.

But off base, we wore the same uniforms. You weren’t allowed to wear greens off the base.

Oh, okay. The last week or so of the thirteen week course was taken up by things like inoculations and medical exams and dental exams and psychiatric exams and so forth. And about three days before the course actually finished,

if teeth were okay and you were mentally blank, but generally healthy, you were posted out to a real operational unit. So some of us, for our own reasons wanted to be posted closer to a base, near where their homes were. I could never figure that way. Why would join the air force to see the world,

then want nothing more than to go home. Home was where you went on leave if you had nothing else to do. That was some guys. Other guys were quite happy to go anywhere in Australia. And the other group said, “I really, really hope that I get posted to Vietnam.” I was in that one. I wanted to go. Some of it was selfish, because it was the only way I knew I could get a War Service loan if I ever got married.

Then I could get a War Service loan and build a house. It was selfish. And the other thing was I’d done all this training. ‘I’m not going to mope around somewhere in this country and do nothing else except for more training during the rest of my life. I want to go overseas.’ So I was in the…”Gee, I hope I go to Vietnam group.”

Oh yeah, the chap I spoke about before,

my very, very closest friend, he was in the 1st Battalion, the first army troop that actually went over there, he spent twelve months over there. That was when I was still in the CMF.

I just accepted it. I thought, ‘The guy’s in the army, and he put his hand up and he’s going to Vietnam.’

That’s where they send you, and that’s where he went. Kids these days are…taught to question and ask questions and express opinions and so forth. We weren’t. We were encouraged to keep our mouth shut and do what we were told. And that’s what we did. There was nothing unusual to me that Trevor being sent overseas. There was nothing unusual in me being sent overseas. That’s what you did.

Heck yes. Yeah. I just wasn’t prepared, in those days, to take that final step and join the Regular Army. Even though I’d made some enquiries, early in the piece, about the Australian Army Training Team [AATTV – Australian Army Training Team Vietnam], and going on what we used to call full-time duty, where you could transfer from the CMF to the Regular Army for a finite period of time.

So I had made those sorts of enquiries. But I was happy in my job, I had a good job, and this CMF side of it, to me, was an add-on to me in those days, until I stopped being happy in my job.

You’re talking about the mental and the pysch testing…

Well, the physical tests were simply just that. Go into the gym and you would do a set, a process of physical jerks and so forth, and by then we were all very good at walking on our knuckles, so we all passed that one. The psych tests were probably no different

to anyone applying for any job anywhere. I think they wanted to know, did we like boys, and how did we feel about living in close proximity to other people…This is after we’ve already been in the air force for probably eight months or more, and now they’re asking…Just general stuff. I went through, literally, the same psychology tests when I joined as an instructor for the air force cadets.

I went through almost identical psych tests before I had some operations on my back at Greenslopes, when it was a Veterans Affairs hospital. It was just a series of fairly random questions, but from that they can work out whether you’re a nut case, or whether you like little boys or whatever.

I know which one I wasn’t. So the medical tests were simply that. It was just a basic physical examination as you would get from any GP [General Practitioner]. Although I did object to having to bend over and spread the cheeks of my backside to see whether I had any piles or anything. And the dental checks were just that again. I remember I had to have about eight fillings

in my teeth before I could be declared ‘dentally fit.’ And the only time they could fit me in was on a Saturday morning. This was all done on the base, at the dental section on the base. So I trotted down to the dental section at eight o’ clock on a Saturday morning, went in, and the guy…had a look at the chart, and he said, “Yeah, we’ve got about eight fillings to do here.” He said, “Sit down there.”

They had the best of everything, obviously, being the air force. So I sat down in this chair and I had headphones on and I was listening to music and I suddenly realised that this fellow was talking to me. So I lifted the…and I said, “What?” And he said, “That’s it. You’re done.” And in that time, I had just gone into a trance, and he had done all the fillings. And he was quite insulted when I said I was surprised at how quick and how painless it was.

I just drifted off completely, and he thought that was pretty insulting to him. He didn’t like that at all. But he was a heck of a nice guy and he knew exactly what it was about, and he did it, he did the job, there was no mucking about and after that I was dentally fit. I remember they put a notice on the board up in the training lecture area, and it said,

‘“The following personnel are dentally fit for overseas service.” Mine was there, and someone had crossed out dentally and wrote in ‘mentally’ and put an ‘un’ in front of the fit. So we were all unmentally fit to go. It was all that sort of testing and so forth. During the course or at the end of the course,

there was no actual sitting down and doing exams to see whether you had passed or not. The instructors said whether you had passed or failed. And if you failed, we don’t know what happened because nobody failed. Everybody on my course got through with the exception of that one guy. A couple scraped in, but everybody got it.

Yeah, yeah, a couple of the younger fellows, I must admit, I thought would have problems, but they all got through. A couple of them became very introverted and didn’t want to talk to anybody and became very withdrawn. But it is amazing how quickly they perked up afterwards, at the end of the course, when they found out that they had passed and when they found out that they had been posted

to a base near where they lived. That was fine, they were all good guys. Like any group of twenty five or twenty six people, you get twenty five or twenty six different personalities, and I was one of them, and there were twenty five others.

Yeah, I’m going to qualify that, though.

Everybody in the air force is a volunteer. There was no National Service or no conscription for the air force. The same with the CMF. It was purely a volunteer service. When they introduced National Service, there was a condition there that said if you could avoid the two years National Service if you joined the CMF for five years,

or something like that. So we did get a few people in who were less than desirable, if you want to use that term. But in the air force, yeah…The attitude was different, principally because it was permanent, rather than something you only came to on a Tuesday night or the odd weekend. Apart from that…We still partied hard and worked hard and played hard.

Weekends were great. Some of the guys were locals and…it was always open house, for any of us on the course, on the weekends, if you wanted a home cooked meal or a different bed to sleep in. You could just rock up any time you liked to some of these people, and they were lovely, they were wonderful people. Unfortunately the two that stick in my mind most have both passed on in the last five years or so.

They were such wonderful people to us, and it was a really heavy blow when they both died.

Okay, there was no application as such for overseas Service. Somewhere during that particular course we were given a bit of paper that said, ‘Write your name, or get someone else to write it for you, and then tick the box your order of preference for postings.’

You had a whole heap of different postings that you could apply for, and you put your first one at the top, then the second choice and so forth…Most people got their first choice. Everyone who put in Vietnam got Vietnam, because they had to have them, they needed the guys over there. So that was easy enough. If you put in, say,

Williamtown, which was another operational base, and they didn’t need any more aggies there, you got your second choice, and so forth, and some people put Vietnam as their third choice. That is where it became interesting because once you had been accepted for overseas service in Vietnam; you then had no choice as to where you were sent. You would be sent to Vietnam, no problem, but there were two operational bases in Vietnam. One was at Vung Tau

and the other was at Phan Rang, which was up in the north of Vietnam. And that was a lot hairier, a lot more closer to the action than Vung Tau, which was only very close to Saigon. It was thirty odd kilometres away from Saigon, and it was an established town, but Phan Rang was put down there as a major United States Air force base. Vung Tau was the United States Army Air Corps base.

So different places, different attitudes and so forth. The guys in Phan Rang got a lot more bush time than we did at Vung Tau.

Okay, there was never any argument…If I put Vietnam at the top, that’s where I was sent. The only qualification was where in Vietnam.

I still think I was relatively lucky to be sent to Vung Tau, rather than Phan Rang, mainly because I still enjoyed my comfort, and the less people who were shooting at me the better. So I was quite happy to go to Vung Tau. I must admit, I was absolutely convinced that I was going to go to Phan Rang, because the night before the course finished, there was this major thunderstorm out at Amberley,

and I didn’t quite wake up, but I could hear this thunder, boom, boom, boom, and I thought, ‘That is bloody artillery. They’re going to kill me, so I must be going to Phan Rang.’ And I went back to sleep again. But I went to Vung Tau. I got ten days pre-embarkation leave. That was fine, I jumped in a car and I drove down to Sydney. I spent some time with my parents; I spent some time with my friend Trevor

and just generally mucked up. At the appointed day, at the appointed hour, I went out to Mascot and I got on a plane and away I went.

Oh, Mum was pretty quiet, she didn’t say very much at all. Dad, again, was disturbed about it. He didn’t say anything to any great extent. I could tell that he was disturbed, but he didn’t say anything,

one way or the other. When I banged on the door at seven o’ clock in the morning, after driving all night to get down to Sydney, and he opened the door and he said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m on pre-embarkation leave, I’m going to Vietnam.” And he went and sat down for a little while by himself, and that was it. He didn’t say anything one way or the other. Mum, from memory, didn’t say anything. Again, I think my sisters learned about it from them,

because I didn’t particularly make a point of telling either of them.

Oh, if they were they didn’t say so. They didn’t…put it in so many words. I never got any feelings one way or the other, in all honesty, from either of them, about,

‘“What a great thing that you’ve done” or, “Aren’t you proud of yourself for doing this?” I never got any of those vibes from them in any way. It was just…Mum, I think, identified more with it, because she had been in the air force during the war, so she knew some of the ins and outs. Even so, the only time she showed any real interest was when I got promoted. And she learned about that after the event anyway, so what the heck…

Yeah, Trevor was good. He taught me some words in Vietnamese that I’m not going to discuss with you. There was nothing strange about it. He threw in a whole heap of things that you never would have learned from books. For instance, when you do that, you are calling somebody to you, not waving them away.

And never touch children on the top of the head, and some of the words for “Go away,” and, “Come here,” and, “Lie down,” and things like that.

I don’t know, it’s a religious thing, I think, or it used to be, but they were very, very anti being touched on the top of the head.

No, Trevor never changes.

He was totally positive about the whole thing. There were two things Trevor regretted about going to Vietnam. One was an exercise that they did, or an operation that they did, outside of Bien Hoa air force base, in an area that they used to call ‘The Iron Triangle.’ And their orders were to get in there because it was a suspected stronghold of the Vietcong.

And they had to kill and destroy everything. And that came down to livestock, cats, houses, or huts, those bamboo huts type of thing. They had to destroy or kill everything, and he said that was the only time that it really upset him, apart from seeing his first dead bodies,

which was another experience. The only thing, apart from that, that he was really negative about was the fact that he spent his twenty first birthday over there. Okay, we all do that, one way or another, you miss out on something. But we sent him a tape of his twenty first birthday that we had for him back in Sydney, and he enjoyed it.

That’s what we did.

It was fairly generalised. In fact it was, more or less, half a dozen pages of photocopied typewriting on what to expect, and some ways to treat the people over there. It was always along the lines of,

“You’re an Australian, you’re a serviceman, you’re an ambassador for Australia. You’re expected to behave the right way all the time. You shouldn’t say this; you shouldn’t treat people in any way except with respect.” Yeah, we read it, and ignored it.

That’s a very difficult question, we didn’t know who we were fighting.

Everybody’s idea of the VC was that they wore conical straw hats and black pyjamas, but so did ninety nine percent of the population. We were told that they would serve you a hamburger in town one day and that night they would come and try and kill you, or throw a grenade in the toilet while you were in there, or something like that. We had some incidents like that, but nothing of any great major problem.

It was very difficult for them to get down to specifics, because nobody really knew the specifics. We would get daily briefings on what the army was doing and what the enemy was supposedly doing, and so forth, and we just lived our lives.

The car that I had at the time was a 1965 Ford Falcon two door hard top. It was my absolute pride and joy, I loved that car. It was snowy white, really, really shiny white, and it had a black vinyl hardtop roof on it, and all the upholstery

and everything in it was bright red, including the steering wheel. And I had driven past the yard, at the time I had an old Holden panel van, with kangaroo dents in the side of it. And I drove past the card yard one morning and I saw this thing in there, and I said, “I’ve got to have that car.” I drove into the car yard, with old Holden panel van, and I said to one of the salesmen, “I want that car.”

He said, “Okay, would you like to have a drive in it?” I said, “No, I don’t need that. I just want that car.” He said, “Oh, do you have a trade-in?” I said, “Yes, that one over there.” So he did a deal for me. It wasn’t until I actually signed the higher purchase papers that I knew how much that Falcon cost, but I didn’t care.

I had to have it, it was one of those things. And it was just my sheer pride and joy. I loved that car. And everybody loved the car. It only had two doors, but they were half as big again, long, as the standard sedan Falcon door. All the guys loved it. We were going through a stage there where everybody in the group had white cars.

So this one fitted in very nicely. But I used to wash it and polish it and I loved it, and the girls loved it. It was loved by man and woman alike, good stuff.

We did all sorts of things in those days, what we called fun. We’d just go to the beach. When I was at Amberley, the thing to do was to go down the coast for the weekend, or up to Noosa for the weekened. In fact, the first couple of days after I got back from pre-embarkation leave…

Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. That was on my second trip.

The north coast was very, very ordinary. It was nothing like it is now. Hastings Street in Noosa you could fire a gun down…We used to camp in what is now that big botanical gardens type thing, right at the very end of Hastings Street, that was public camping area. And we’d just get a tent fly out of the store,

and take it up there and throw it over a tree branch and stay there for about three or four days. That was very good. Getting back to the car, there was one time I remember when Trevor and I and about five other guys had gone out down in Sydney. I think we had gone to Wollongong or something for the day, and it was a Sunday, and we were coming back and the traffic was incredible.

We were just coming through Liverpool, and the traffic was nose to tail, and only about half a dozen cars at a time were getting through the traffic lights. We were travelling in a convoy, if you like, of three cars and Trevor was driving one and I had my Falcon and somebody else had another car, and we each had a passenger. And because the traffic was travelling so slowly, every time it came to a halt all the guys would jump out

and we’d talk to each other, and…the guy in the front car would come back and sit with me until the lights changed, and then we’d move on a bit further and he’d get out and go to the middle car. And we were sitting there and the three of us were one behind the other at the traffic lights, so it was our turn to go the next time. But the guy in the front car with Trevor got out and he came all the way back and got into my car, and he was sitting there,

and we were just chatting away, and the guy in the middle of the three cars, he got out and came back, and as he did so the lights changed to green and the traffic started moving. So he got to my car, reefed open the passenger door, pulled this other guy out, dropped him on the road, jumped in, slammed the door shut, pushed the button down and we took off. And left him just standing in the middle of the highway in Liverpool. Fortunately we pulled up on the other side of the traffic lights

and let him get back in again. But that’s the sort of things that you remember we used to do for fun. We used to go parties and drink and go to parties and drink and go to the beach…all those sorts of things.

I never was a great surfer. No, no, I didn’t…I loved the surfing music, but I never actually got onto the board.

I used to go to the beach a lot, but I never quite made it onto the board. Again it was that self-confidence thing. I didn’t want everybody to laugh at me when I fell off, so I took the easy route and didn’t fall off.

I’ve always loved every kind of music that you can think of, but I really struck a chord, no pun intended, with the surfing music.

I loved that surfie type, Beach Boys and Jan and Dean type of things. I just loved that sort of stuff. It was great for the time, because it was always summer, in those days. In your memory, it’s always summer. And the bubble gum music, God…Some of that, you’d have to look that up, but there was some funny music around in the ’60s…

Yeah, saw the Beatles.

I saw a lot of American groups or performers when they came out. They were either at Festival Hall, here in Brisbane, or at a place called White City down in Sydney. And we used to quite often go out there and see Josie and The Pussycats or the Beatles or any one of the thousands of different groups that came out.

They were good. We had a different mind set in those days. I mean, their hair was really, really long. So most of us, the guys who were military minded, had a bit of a problem with them. But we were there for the music, and they were great, they were tremendous performers.

No, the guys in the military tended to avoid them by choice, because people who were with the hippie groups avoided us, by sheer luck. We liked to think that most of their time was spent in a fog anyway, and they didn’t really know where they were going, and it was only bad luck if they bumped into a normal person.

There wasn’t all that many of them, until the very late ’60s or the early ’60s when things started to get a bit psychedelic and over the top.

It was fairly strong. But strangely enough, with one exception, I don’t think I ever came across an actual street march or a street protest.

I only ever saw one, from my own personal viewpoint. But they were in the papers every day, and I know the army really copped it when they came back and they did their return home marches through Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide. They really copped it. But the air force, we didn’t go over as a unit, we went over in bits and pieces and dribs and drabs, and we came back the same way.

So we didn’t have any of that sort of stuff to worry about.

Oh, I suppose contempt is probably a very harsh word. It wasn’t really contempt. It was just a shaking of the head and saying. “What the hell is wrong with these people? Don’t they know what we were trying to do?” That was my attitude. I didn’t hate them; I didn’t have any major negative feelings,

and I didn’t have any contempt for them. I just had…”You poor buggers. You really don’t know what it’s all about.” That was my whole attitude towards them.

Yes. The flight for Saigon was always a Qantas charter, for us anyway.

The army went across on the ship, on the Sydney, on the aircraft carrier. But we always went on the charter flights. I can’t remember what day they left; I think it was a Wednesday night or something like that. For most of us it was our first experience of super-duper bureaucracy, and customs and all the rest of it, and we had to go through the customs

and get on the Boeing 707. By the time it actually got off the ground, it was nothing but a huge relief to get away from all the tears and crying and misery and so forth. So away we went. Apart from that, the worst part was all the waiting. You sit around the airport and you wait and you wait and you wait until finally somebody says, “Get on the plane,” so you get on the plane. And they didn’t have air bridges in those days, so you had to walk across the tarmac and up the steps and into the plane itself.

There was no reserve seats, you just found a seat and sat in it. That was what we did. And when it was full, it left.

No, no. The girl that I was going with, we agreed that it wasn’t going to be a good thing, so we hadn’t seen each other for a while.

From memory, I think I said goodbye to my parents at home, and again, from memory, I think Trevor drove me out to the airport in his little white Morris 1100. Yeah, he stayed with me for a little while, then I told him to go. There was no point him hanging around. So he went, and there I was and eventually they called the flight, and I got on it, and away I went.

It wasn’t happy, it was obviously a very unhappy time for a lot of the people who had families that they were very close to, particularly young guys. The over-riding feeling there was that if you were on that plane going to Vietnam, you were going to replace someone who had been badly hurt, or killed. So you had that to contend with before you even got to think about anything else.

It wasn’t so bad for us in the air force, because we were going to replace people who had already completed their twelve months and were coming home, in the majority of cases. So that wasn’t a problem for us. But anybody in the army uniform, you know that they were going there because they were replacements, and that was a worry. It is probably something that dwelled in the minds of the families, and let’s face it, most of these guys were only 19 or 20,

or in their early 20s. Yeah, they had a bad time of it. That’s why I said it was a relief to actually get in, start up and get going. Probably for all of us, it was a great relief.

About fourteen hours altogether. Because we flew to Darwin, refuelled in Darwin,

that was just a very brief refuel stop. Then from Darwin to Singapore, and then we left Singapore in the morning, and we flew directly from there to Saigon. That was the shortest part of the trip, only two or three hours. We weren’t allowed to wear military uniforms on the flight, because we were getting off to spend some time in Singapore, at the airport there.

So we all wore our shoes and socks and trousers, but we had to wear civilian t-shirts and things like that. There was just time to get off the plane, go and wander around the transit lounge for a little while, buy a postcard, then get back on again. We left there seven thirty a.m. local time, and

we got into Saigon, probably about eleven thirty, in the morning.

Dear God, it’s hot. Yeah, it was hot. Again, there were no air bridges in those days, so you came down the steps off the plane, across the tarmac. They’d stand you up, tick your names off to make sure you hadn’t jumped off somewhere on the way.

Then the next thing they did was to change your money. You had to hand over all your Australian money and be given what they called MPC [Military Payment Certificates], which had an equivalent to dollars. And I remember getting into an argument with the young army guy behind the teller’s window, for want of a better word, because he wouldn’t change the coins, he would only change the notes.

So I got up him about that because I had a pocket full of coins. And he kept calling me, “Sir,” which was most unusual, because I wasn’t a sir, I was just a bargearse, the same as anybody else. But they couldn’t quite come to terms with the fact that we wore peaked caps in the air force, and they always associated peaked caps with officers. We learned to get used to that. Besides, we never wore them for another twelve months anyway, so it didn’t matter.

After we’d done that, they sort of mustered us about and they put us onto trucks and drove us to one of the messes to get something to eat, for lunch. And I remember thinking as we sat in these trucks, there was no protection and we didn’t have any weapons and there were these thousands and thousands of Vietnamese all around the place, looking at us, and figuring out the best way to kill us and eat us.

It turned out that we hadn’t even left the airbase, but I didn’t know that at the time. I thought that we had been let loose in the wilds of Saigon. But we were still on the airbase itself. So they fed us, then they put us onto a Hercules and flew us to Vung Tau, and we got there about two o’clock in the afternoon, totally shell-shocked, completely jet-lagged. They met us in at the air field in a bus,

and drove us to the Australian air force compound. They said, “You in that room, second bed on the left. You in that building, forth bed on the right,” that sort of thing, and away we went, and they just left us alone for the rest of that day and that night. And there was…there may have been thirty or forty of us. There were pilots and crewmen and techos and armourers

and clerks and engine fitters…There was a whole mish-mash. So they left us completely alone and the next couple of days after that was orientation and working our way out and getting kitted out in the tropical wear, and all that sort of stuff. They figured it was easier for them to fly aeroplane loads of uniforms over, than to give us huge amounts of clothing to take with us. That was a sensible move.

Oh, just boots and socks and shorts and greens and a weapon, those sorts of things. That was fairly simple. I was quite surprised to find local Vietnamese women on the base, and their job was to clean and make the beds and do the ironing and the washing. And this was something totally new because we didn’t even have to pay them. You’d wake up in the morning and they’d shake, shake, “Get out of bed.”

“What for?” “I want to wash your sheets. And give us your underpants and socks while you’re there.” That sort of stuff. So you got used to that very, very quickly. The other good thing about the building that I was in was directly across the road from the mess hall. So it was just backwards and forwards any time, and I loved my food. And we did eat well in the air force. We ate very, very well compared to the army.

The food was always first class.

You name it. Breakfast was whatever you wanted, bacon, eggs, sausages, cereal, fruit, juice…What you would have anywhere for breakfast. The only thing that ever really got me was the bread. The bread was American, and it was like cake, it was so sweet. And we had these milk dispensers, like an old milkshake machine.

And it was really, really thick, almost like a thick shake, and that came from Hawaii and it was American. And the eggs were left over from World War I, and they had been preserved with iodine. And so nobody ever really ate eggs. But every now and then they would get a consignment from Australia of fresh eggs, and fresh milk. The Hercs [Hercules] used to come in once a week and they would bring fresh supplies and fresh food and so forth.

And every so often they would bring a couple of fresh cans of milk from Darwin, and they would put one in the sergeants mess and one in the airmen’s mess and one in the officers mess, and it lasted about five minutes. You would just go and dip and drink until you couldn’t hold any more. It was wonderful. Occasionally they would bring in fresh milk. And in my section, there was always a tradition that if you went back to Australia for R & R,

[Rest and Recreation] which most of us didn’t do, but if you did, you had to bring back a dozen bottles of beer, and two dozen pies, because they were things you never saw. We got canned beer, there was every kind of beer imaginable from Australia, and possibly American ones, but you never got bottled beer. So you always had to bring some back with you if you went to Australia on R & R.

It was a tremendous memory jolt yesterday, because I heard it again, but they had a loud speaker system through the compound, and the thing was tuned to a radio and they played music over the loudspeakers most of the time. And I don’t know whether you have ever heard this song, ‘Good Morning Starshine,’ from…I think it was Jesus Christ Superstar, or one of those.

And as they drove us into this compound, that particular song was singing, and it’s always been there. Yesterday I was driving up the road and it came on the radio and I just had to stop and listen to it, I couldn’t keep driving. It was just amazing.

Oh, nothing bad. All I saw was the main sort of drag of the compound, with all the buildings on that side and the mess and so forth on the other,

and some sandbags and some barbed wire. But it wasn’t bad. It was a good memory. It wasn’t something that made me have flash backs. But that song has always stayed with me, from that very moment I got off the bus, and that was wonderful. Anyway, they sorted us all out and we all went off to our various jobs. There we were.

Okay, it was a huge place. It was a single runway and the majority of aircraft on it were United States Army. Things like observation planes and things like that. The runway was just huge, and it literally covered the entire point of land. I can’t tell you right now just what it was in square kilometres,

but it was lots. It had two rows of barbed fencing, concrete posts with about four or five strands of barbed wire, and two or three metres behind that was the same thing again, and two or three metres behind that were watch towers that were manned twenty four hours a day. Behind that were most of the buildings. Now the majority of buildings there were either

living accommodation, there was an incredible number of Americans there, and probably two or three hundred Australians. Our compound was actually right on the perimeter fencing, closest to the city of Vung Tau, at the main gate to the base. So we could look straight out through the windows of our accommodation blocks, through the barbed wire and see the life as it was going past.

And that was pretty good, because I think if we had been further into the base itself; it would have been a lot different. There was all bitumen roads and a lot of technical workshops and accommodation areas. There were hangars for all the type of aircraft. There was one street that had a PX [Post Exchange – American canteen unit] in it, which was like an

American supermarket for the military. And you could buy anything in there. When we first arrived, we were given a ration card, and that entitled us to buy X number bottles of booze, or X number of cartons of cigarettes, whatever was on that particular day…And when you bought something it got clipped by the people in the store. So you couldn’t go back and double up. The next month you would get another ration card and so forth.

There were even things like fresh bakeries, where you could walk in and buy cakes and things, and this was all run by the American military. I never could quite come to grips with somebody being in the American army as a pastry cook, and being posted to Vietnam to operate a cake shop. But you could go in there for breakfast, into one of the little shoppy café type of things,

and order eggs and bacon, any kind of cooked eggs, anything you liked. And the prices were dirt cheap, if you wanted to pay for your food rather than get it from the mess. None of us could ever see the point because bacon and eggs is bacon and eggs no matter where you go, and if you can get it free there, why go down the road and pay for it? So it was a very, very big base.

The 9 Squadron hangars were probably two thirds of the way down the runway, and the 35 Squadron hangars were right at the far end of the runway, the opposite end, and they were the ones who operated the Caribous and the little twin engine transport planes. Our main living area was very close to the main entrance to the base.

Oh, just people going around doing what they normally did.

It was still by our standards very primitive in those days, and I’ve got photographs somewhere of carts and things like this…

It was mostly brown, there was a lot of mud actually, which wasn’t very pleasant. But where it was vegetation it was really lush,

super-tropical vegetation. The houses were all fairly low set places, very close to the footpaths. That surprised me because I expected thatched roofs and bamboo and so forth. But the majority of them had been there since the French occupation days, so they were fairly substantial houses. The base itself was about four kilometres from the centre of the town,

and it was just a dead straight road into town, and there were houses on both sides. It was just like any suburb, but hotter, and a different smell. A lot of people, the majority of the people, wore the white or black pyjamas and the conical straw hats. They just went about and did whatever their jobs were and lived life. It was noisy. I can remember

part of our job was to man the guard house on a twenty four hour thing, and the worst one the two to six shift, in the morning. But these people started getting out of bed and becoming active anywhere from four thirty in the morning onwards. You would see them come out and drop their black pyjamas and relieve themselves in their front yards

and go back inside and cook breakfast and off they would go. They were very simple people, very ordinary people in their own way. They just loved their lives.

Yes, yeah, there was three or four of us, actually, from the same course. But one of the things that was done very early in the piece

was to split us up. We had three groups, three sections, so it was done on a twenty four hour basis. One group would be doing something, another group would be doing training, the first group would be perhaps building sandbag bunkers or watchtowers, and the third group would be sleeping, because they would be on the midnight shift…Our job was mostly security

and maintenance of defence facilities, like bunkers and towers.

I was a bit disappointed. I thought they were going to say, “Here’s your rifle. Go that way and shoot people.” But I didn’t. I had to build bunkers and fill sandbags. That was pretty much it.

Once a week we would go to the range and do weapons firing and so forth. If we weren’t doing that, we were manning the watchtowers and guardtowers, and if we weren’t doing that we were sleeping, and if we weren’t doing that we were filling sandbags or repairing, or building new ones. So that was pretty much it. We didn’t get to do any real war-like stuff for probably three or four months.

Then they decided they would get us to go up to Nui Dat, which was the main army base, and we would do some night ambushes and patrols out of Nui Dat. That was good. That was when we started to feel like we were actually doing something worthwhile.

Oh yeah, yeah. There were bars. Strangely enough, they were very, very heavily regulated by the Americans as to where they could have their bars and their brothels and so forth. Just outside of the main gate there was this huge square, if you want to call it that. It was just basically gravel and ashphalt, but that was where all the taxis and…we called them ‘Lambros,’ they were little three wheel Lambrettas, and you could fit probably four people in the back,

two on each side. And the little Vietnamese guys would drive down the road, just like that advertisement you see with Pierce Brosnan. Normally, every night, if you had leave there was a truck that would take us into town to avoid the local traffic. There was a place right in the centre of the town

called ‘The Flags,’ and there was huge billboards type of things, and the flags of all the countries participating in the Vietnam War were painted on this thing. That was the central point where everybody went to either be picked up or dropped off. From there, you just fanned out. It was like any Asian city, little streets go everywhere. There was a place called ‘The Street Of Bars.’ It was literally wall to wall, shoulder to shoulder bars on both sides of the roads.

And you could iron yourself out very, very quickly, just by having half a drink in each one. There was so many of them. And there was lots of girls and they had a job to do and they tried to do it. Most of the Australians that I knew steered clear of them, because it was so commercial there was no fun in it. They would come and sit with you and have a lot of fun if you were in a group of guys having a drink.

But they very rarely stayed very long once they knew that you were Australians, because Australians just wouldn’t spend the money that the Yanks did. There were bars all over the place.

Yes, it was well covered, let’s put it that way. It didn’t stop most people. At the guardhouse of our compound, where you went out of our compound, before you actually got

to the main gate of the base itself, we always had a cardboard box of condoms on the shelf. I can’t remember ever having to refill it, but they were always there if you wanted them. Nobody really thought about it all that…They didn’t care. Either that or they went into town with a pocketful anyway and never used them. I don’t know. That was for them to worry about.

Oh, pretty well. We had no problems. The Americans actually looked up to us, in a lot of ways. Because I think, firstly, most of the Australians were easy going, but we also had a lot of self confidence and confidence in our own abilities. We knew that we had been pretty well trained, by general standards.

We knew that if a situation arose we could handle it. The majority of the Americans we met at Vung Tau, on the base, were technical people, and we very rarely saw the you-beaut American fighting soldier as such. Most of these guys were mechanics or drivers or clerical staff or military police or whatever. They were all fairly technical. But we got the impression that they quite admired us,

because we didn’t muck about. We got in and got something done. I remember a huge argument I had with a big American truck driver one day. They had these wonderful trucks and I just had to have one. I was sent down to the airfield one day because we had to pick up some stuff, and I can’t remember what it was. All I know is it weighed about three or four tons.

And they sent an American around in one of their big…two and a half ton, huge things, and he wouldn’t put it on the truck. I said, “Why not?” He said, “Because this truck is rated at two and a half tons and that weighs four tons.” I said, “Mate, the damn thing will carry fifty tons.” “Nuh, ain’t going.”

I said, “It’s time for you to go and have a break.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I don’t want you here in five minutes.” So he got the message and he took off and we loaded the stuff onto the truck, and there was no problem. It would have carried twenty tons. Their two and a half ton rating is over any terrain, anywhere. Underwater, up mountains, down mountains, it will carry two and a half tons. But if you put it on the flat, on a bitumen road, it will carry fifteen, no problems. So we loaded this stuff on, drove the truck up to the hangar,

unloaded it, took the truck back, and when he came back the job was done. That was it. And they sort of admired that because they didn’t really have the initiative of their own to do that. Well, that was my impression anyway, I could be totally wrong. They knew that we were better trained, and we knew that they in general were poorly trained, from a military point of view. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for them to come to us

and ask us to show them how to clean their weapons, because they might have done two periods during their basic training on how to strip and clean their particular weapons.

We had it drilled into us until we could do it blindfolded, in the dark, upside down….That was what we did, it was our profession, so we did it.

A lot of these guys were conscripts, were draftees, they didn’t want to be there. They did the absolute minimum that they could to avoid being killed, and to spend their time there without any hassles before they went home again. The things that really stick in my mind is how quickly they became involved with the local women, and how many of them

actually had pets. They had dogs and cats and birds and God knows what else. It was just so quickly that they became involved. To the point where they would set up house with girls, and talk about “My girlfriend,” or, “My wife,” or whatever. And then, “I’ve been here for three hundred and sixty four days, out goes the dog, off goes the woman. I’m home, see yah!” I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t work that one out at all.

But that was them. They lived well.

No, not really. And I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense. There were a couple of times when things became necessary, if you know what I mean, but…

That’s right. But in general terms, I wasn’t physically attracted.

A couple of times I found the girls, particularly the women who did the cleaning and so forth, I found them physically attractive until I started to talk to them, and then I was still in that mindset where if a girl looks slightly western, you would expect her to be able to speak English, and they never did, and I lost interest.

It was either that, or getting involved with the bar girls who spoke American English, after a fashion, but only because it was worth money to them.

It was very little dollars. You could probably pick up a girl for a short time for a hundred piastas, which was,

in Australian dollars at the time, probably twenty or thirty cents. It wasn’t a lot of money. They would have had to have worked pretty hard to have made a living. But then, the cost of living wasn’t all that high.

Not permanent relationships, no, or not even long term or deep relationships. As far as they were concerned, they probably had the same attitude as me.

I don’t get phone calls. The attitude was that the women were there for a purpose, and you didn’t stop a young girl on the street, or a housewife doing her shopping. If you were that way inclined, you went to a bar. You didn’t touch the girls on the base, for any one of a hundred reasons. If you needed a woman, you went into town.

If there were they were unwritten rules. I don’t remember ever seeing anything in writing that said, “You will not do this…” I know there were incidents from time to time that involved some of the guys and some of the women. But it was all…gosh, I was going to say light-hearted, but it was

relatively innocent stuff. There was never anything super-duper bad about it. In fact, I’ve got photographs there of our girl lying on top of me in the bed, with a sledge hammer in her hand. But that was a staged photograph, designed specifically to send home to my family. That was life; that was what you did.

Staying awake was one. It was very intense….because of the heat, and the fact that they insisted on serving us three full sized, man sized meals every day.

We actually all put on weight, and because we worked on a twenty four hour rotational thing, you never really knew what time it was. You would wake up in the twilight and you would look at your watch and think, ‘Oh, it’s four o’ clock…Is it four o’ clock in the morning or four o’ clock in the afternoon?’ And you would have to ask somebody what part of the day you were in. That was the hardest part. I think I mentioned to you that because of my earlier experience that they made me a section leader

basically as soon as I got there. And that was hard. That was very hard for me, because for all intensive purposes I had just finished basic training, and I was put in charge of ten men who had either been in country for anything up to ten or eleven months. Or who had been trained a good year or so before me. So I had to sort of worry about the impression I was making on them,

and make sure that they did the job, and at the same time, I was the same rank as them. And it was quite difficult for the first month or two, but then after that, we just slipped into a pattern and it was great. But the hardest part was staying awake, because it was very stressful and the heat didn’t help. When you’re by yourself, you can manage, but when you’ve got ten other people and you’re responsible for them, then it’s another issue altogether

because you’re living ten lives. And that does suck it out of you. It is a big thing. That is one of the things that I found most difficult. Being away from home wasn’t a problem. It didn’t concern me in the slightest. I wasn’t happy to be away, but I was quite comfortable to be home. Counting the days off on the calendar that we all got,

yeah, that was a plus. But not in the early days because there was a lot of blank spaces on that calendar. So all in all it was just get up in the morning, or get up at night, do your job and then when you’re finished go back to bed again.

I think my biggest problem from a stress point of view

was making sure I did the right thing by the other guys, and didn’t get them or me into trouble. Particularly me, I was most important. It was very important to me not to get myself into trouble, so to do that I had to make sure that the other guys did the right thing, and again, it’s a hard thing to do when you’re relatively the new guy on the block and they’re the same rank as you are. And in some cases,

you’re junior rank. But that is one of the things about the military, I guess, they give you a job and they expect you to do it, and they don’t give you a job unless they think you can do it, so I did it, one way or another…

Once I realised that it wasn’t a problem to them, I managed. Nobody every came up to me and said,

“Who the hell do you think you are? You’ve only been here five minutes and now you’re telling us what to do.” Nobody ever did that to me. People came up to me and they said, “That was very good what you did before.” Or, “That was pretty poor what you did to Joe Bloggs.” And I had that happen to me a couple of times. And I would say, “It was either him or me, and I’m the man in charge, so if you don’t like it go and tell somebody who cares.” And that sort of generally ended the conversation.

I did things the way I was trained to do.

No, I am really a very easy going sort of a guy, once I realise that the situation is hopeless,

I just travel with it. And once I realised that I wasn’t going to be going out winning medals and saving lives and being the hero, I said, “Well, what else can I do?” And the answer was, “Build bunkers and sit in the watchtower.” So I did. And that didn’t worry me at all, I was quite happy to do that.

Very little, very little. We did get our daily briefings and we were told, “Last night this happened…” “Our guys are going to be doing this today. The bad guys will be doing this today, and this is what is going to happen.” Or, “This is what we hope will happen”.

That was our contact with combat for a couple of months. I never really had any major war-like experiences in those first few months, apart from doing those night ambush patrols…

Sure. They were fun, they were good. What we would do was we would fly up to Nui Dat by chopper,

in the afternoon, then the army commander for the area that we were going to be working in, would brief us on what our job for that night would be. We would get maps and radio codes and all the other bits and pieces. And then they would take us out,

usually by truck, to a drop off point and then we would go to where we were told to go and set up a night ambush position, go to sleep. Then in the morning we’d go back, do a fairly lengthy foot patrol, then come back to a pick up point, they would pick us up by truck, take us back into Nui Dat. We would have something to eat, get on a chopper, come back to Vung Tau and go back to sleep again.

They were what they called perimeter patrols, and the idea was to make sure that there was no infiltration by the enemy into the base area itself. We used to go out probably five or ten kilometres, I suppose… We would patrol the area to make sure that it was clear,

during the daytime, and then just after dark we would find a place, usually a pre-arranged spot, and we’d hole up there for the night, usually in ambush position, just in case somebody tried to sneak through during the night. My experience was that nobody ever did, in any of the patrols that I was on. I do remember that we took one of our ground defence officers out with us on one of the patrols once, and

he was quite determined he was going to call in an artillery strike onto an area that I thought was pretty close to where we were. And when I asked him why, he said because he heard a dog bark. And yeah, I’d heard the dog bark, too, but it had never occurred to me that it wasn’t anything but a dog in a village somewhere. But he had it firmly in his head that it was a hidden VC outpost and this was their guard dog and it had barked, so he was going to obliterate the whole area.

But we talked him out of that, we managed not to go ahead with that one. This is the same guy who…on the morning after one of our ambush patrols, when we were walking back and we actually walked through one of the villages, and we had to go across a bridge and then through some paddy fields to get back to our pick-up area. We walked through the village, no problems. We walked across the bridge

and we were halfway across and there was one shot from the village area behind us. Just one single gun shot. Of course, we all hit the deck, through self preservation, and we’re looking around and we looked up and there he was standing up in the middle of the bridge, “Where do you reckon that shot came from?” I said, “Well, I don’t know, but I bet I know where the next one is going.”

He suddenly realised what the situation was and he joined us on the deck of the bridge. We stayed there a couple of minutes, then we got up and wandered back across the paddy fields.

He was what they called a ground defence officer.

Yeah, it was….it was just strange.

But we made allowances for officers…

That was the only experience I had on the ground.

Just instinctively. Down on the deck…The training that they put us through

went back to the 1940s, and it must have worked because they didn’t change it. But the idea was you hit the deck and crawl somewhere else real quick. Don’t stay in that spot, get somewhere else then have a look around and see what you can see. That is basically what we did, and we all did it, and I was quite pleasantly surprised that everybody had done it. So that was a good thing; that made me feel good.

No.

I thought,”That was a shot. It came from over there. That was a village we just went through. It was only one shot and if it had been meant for any of us, we would have known about it.” That’s the sort of thoughts that go through your mind, and I’m not making myself out to be anything special, but that is the sort of thing that goes through, and it goes through, bang. And you have that thought

and then you relax. So after a couple of minutes, when there were no more shots, we stood up. There were no more shots, so we went off through the paddies and got back onto the trucks.

Very little, very little indeed. The small villages that we went through, or that we were familiar with in that area,

were well and truly familiar with us as Australians, not necessarily with us personally. They knew that patrols came through there from time to time. They probably ignored us more than anything else, because I can remember several times stopping people working in the paddy fields and looking at their ID cards. They would just hold them up and get back to what they were doing. It didn’t worry them, during the day.

I guess the big change for me was when they said to me, “Would you like to train as a door gunner on the choppers?” And I said, “Yeah, beauty.” That’s when things started to get interesting, because we were obviously a lot closer to the action, simply because of that work. Our role as defence guards at Vung Tau was very close to being static.

But the helicopters were much more of a dynamic force.

Yes.

Not really, it was a long time ago. But we were taught the different types of explosives, high explosives and plastic explosives.

We were taught how to set explosives for different types of structures. We were taught different types of detonators to use, and which ones you used for which type of explosive or which particular purpose. It was all…When we did it, it was probably very exciting and interesting, but I don’t remember much about it.

I think it was just to round out the course,

and to make us slightly more experienced, if you like, than your average infantry soldier, because our role was similar, in parts, to the infantry soldier but it was also quite specific, in the fact that we only had one job to do and that was to defend air fields. So the whole idea of, say, demolition would be a good thing

if we came across a whole heap of people trying to get in and they came in trucks, and we could destroy their vehicles. If they dug a weapon pit or something, we knew different ways to destroy that and neutralise them. That was the whole idea. We also learned First Aid

to a much greater degree than they would teach it to infantry soldiers. On some of the joint exercises that we did, those guys were quite amazed at the depth of the First Aid knowledge that we had, compared to themselves.

Oh yes. It took me, gee, at least about thirty seconds to say yes.

That’s an interesting question, or it’s a good question, because there wasn’t any specific training as such. It was all on the job training, literally. My first experience with it was when one of the pilots said to me, “Okay, come with me. I will walk you through the aircraft.” And he took me from nose to tail, underneath, inside, in the cockpit, up on the roof. Did the lot.

He showed me everything, told me exactly what it was for. Then he said, “Now, don’t touch anything.” I still remember him very, very fondly; he was a hell of a nice bloke. But he was very thorough in his approach to the job, and he literally showed me very nut and bolt on the aeroplane and said, “This is what it’s for. This is what it does. You don’t touch it.” Fine.

This was an Iroquois UH1.

Okay, it’s a helicopter, it’s called a UH1, which is a utility helicopter. It had a rounded nose and great big buggy eyed windscreen on it. The pilot sat on the right hand side, the co-pilot sat on the left. There was an instrument panel…

They each had their own doors by the way; they could enter and leave through their side doors. On the inside of the door, we had a sliding metal plate, and once they were in, and strapped in, we would pull this plate across in front of them, and it came up to about shoulder height, and it was about that thick, solid steel, and it was pretty much their only protection, apart from the armour under their seats.

So we would pull that across, close and lock their doors and then we’d get in. All the instrumentation was pretty much duplicated on both sides, so that either of them could fly the aircraft. In the middle there was a big radio console. Behind that there was a space probably about a metre wide, and the full width of the aeroplane. That was just checker plate flooring, it had ring bolts and things in the floor itself.

Then there were collapsible nylon seats across the front of the engine bay, at the back of that open space, and then down each side of the engine bay there was room for one person to sit. Then the crewman sat on one side and the door gunner sat on the other. And we each had a…in what we called the ‘Slicks,’ which were the cargo choppers,

we had an M60 machine gun mounted on a swivel on either side. And we wore an armoured vest, like a bullet proof vest, which we called a ‘chicken plate.’ And we had a canvas webbing belt which went around our waist, and hooked onto an eye bolt at the back. That stopped us from falling out or jumping out.

Beside us we had a rifle in a bracket, and on the wall there was mounted another bracket with about four different coloured smoke grenades on it, and we used those quite a bit for different things. It was a little jet engine, twin bladed prop and one twin bladed rotor blade at the back. And that was pretty much it.

I fell out of one once, but apart from that, not a great deal. We had actually flown as troops in choppers at various parts of our training, and that was my only experience with them. We had done it in the CMF and I don’t think, strangely enough, in the air force I don’t think I ever saw a chopper until we got to Vietnam. But we had done some fairly intensive troop training in choppers, in the army.

It was on the ground, I tripped. But I had always had this ambition, if you like, to be a door gunner on a chopper.

It was full of glamour, think of all the girls. Why not? It was just something that I wanted to do.

I think there was very little difference between what the crewman did and what the gunner did. You were just basically there to protect the aircraft. Your job was to act as an observer, and a gunner to shoot things if you had to. Fortunately we never had any problems from the air to air point of view, because we didn’t have any aeroplanes,

so most of our stuff was air to ground. And we did some…They chose ADGs as gunners because we were very familiar with the weapons involved, that was our job.

Oh yeah.

We trained with them. I’d first become involved with them when they were first introduced into the army. So I was relatively comfortable with them.

And then when I went up and did my ADG training, that was our basic section weapon anyway, and then the M60 was mounted on the choppers. That was why they chose us to be gunners, because we knew the weapons. We were comfortable with them and familiar with them.

I don’t remember, but it was probably just something as simple as flying up to Nui Dat.

The first six weeks or so of any new gunner’s life was to simply shadow the gunner on board. So we actually had a crew of five when you carried a trainee gunner. You didn’t do anything; you’re just with this other guy and sort of soaked it up. And you were told different situations and what to do if this happened. You learned a lot about being part of a crew, and you learned the different techniques

and tactics and so forth. Then one day they said, “You’re ready to go,” and you joined a crew as the gunner, instead of the trainee.

Oh, it was just another part of life to me. Training was training. You never stopped training for something when you were in the services, and this was just another aspect of training as far as I was concerned.

I got to wear a flying suit and boots with zippers up the sides and that was pretty cool. And I got to do a lot of flying…Well, a lot of travelling in helicopters, yeah.

I think I was fairly keen, I don’t know to what extent, I don’t know how I could describe that. I was fairly keen to do something

and see some action so that I could tell my mates that I had been there and done that. Yeah, I guess fairly keen.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it wasn’t something that we actually did. If they wanted to talk about it, you listened.

But it wasn’t considered to be very good form, if you know what I mean, to go and question somebody about their experiences so far in life. You just didn’t do it. I remember after I had become a gunner … (BREAK) Yeah, I remember after I had been flying and had been a door gunner for quite some time…

Very rarely, very rarely. As far as we were concerned, it was a job that you did and you went and did whatever you were tasked to do during the day and you came back. And some people went away and flew in helicopters, and some people fixed helicopters.

We didn’t really talk about our roles. I was going to say that there was a young fellow, one of the younger guys came up to me one night in the bar, after we had both had a skinful [drunk] and he started talking about what it felt like to kill people, and I said, “Look, I’m not going to argue, I’m not even going to start talking to you about it because it is not something you need to know about unless it is something that is about to happen to you.” So he said, “Oh, okay.” And then I burst into tears,

and to this day I still don’t know why I did that. But it was basically to try and convince him that I was sincere about my not wanting to talk about it. So he went away and…That was the only major experience that I ever had of that. But no, we didn’t talk about it all that much, not even amongst ourselves. If we did, it was to joke about it.

There were times, for instance, when if we were tasked to put in an SAS patrol, which was normally a fairly hairy [hair raising – frightening] sort of thing, or had the potential to be fairly hairy, we would say things like, “If you don’t come back, can I have your watch?” And all those sorts of things. Or somebody who was just going out on a fairly heavy sort of a job, you’d say, “Here’s that two dollars I owe you,”

just before he got on the plane and things like that. Yeah, we always treated it as a joke more than anything else, because the alternative just wasn’t something that you wanted to do.

Not consciously. It was probably there, But I never thought consciously about it….Except after I came back to Vietnam

from my R & R, I was one of the few people who actually came back to Australia instead of going to the flesh pots of Singapore or Penang or wherever. And I came back and I had my ten days’ R &R and then I went back again, and about two days afterwards I was back in the air. The only time it ever consciously struck me was then, and we were flying somewhere, very low,

and we were on an angle, curving around, and I was looking straight down at the ground, and I thought, ‘Somebody could shoot at me from here.’ And that was the only conscious time I ever remember thinking about that sort of thing. Apart from that, no. It was something I did because I enjoyed it, I loved it, and every day was a challenge.

It was fairly humdrum, it was a fairly ordinary sort of a life in those days, those early days after I qualified, if you want to use that term. Most of our work was in taking supplies out to troops in the field, and that was

food ration boxes and fresh water and things like that. The other big things we did was moving troops into a new area, and sometimes that was really exciting because you could have anything up to ten helicopters operating in constant shuttle backwards and forwards, carrying an entire battalion of troops into the bush. And the first landing with the first troops was always fairly interesting,

depending on what the intelligence was. And I must say that the intelligence that we got as aircrew every morning was so much more detailed, and so much more deep, than the briefings we got as ground troops, because we had a whole different focus. And the intelligence was pretty damn good for that era. We would know

pretty well if there was any problems, if there would be problems going into a particular drop zone or landing zone, so we were always well prepared for it. And if there was any element of doubt at all, we would just start opening fire as we came in and keep the fire up until we got onto the deck. It was always frowned upon to keep firing while the troops were trying to jump out of the aeroplane, because you might hit them. I almost did do that once.

That stayed with me for a very long time.

Yeah, it was what we called a hot extraction, where we had to pull an SAS patrol out of a fairly unpleasant situation. We had only just put them in probably half an hour before and they ran into a group of people that they didn’t want to meet, and they got chased back.

We had a situation where you always picked a landing zone to put them in, and an alternate landing zone if we couldn’t put them in there, and we also had an emergency pick up zone if we had to hurry to get them out. So there was anything up to four different places that you could go. So this crowd got on the deck and went into the bush, and as I said, they got into trouble, they headed for the emergency pick up zone, and we knew straight away because they had what they called a beeper.

And as soon as they activated that, we got it through our radio sets on the helicopter, and you just followed the signal back to where they are. We landed in a clearing, right in the dead set centre of this very long clearing. And I still, to this day, don’t know why the pilot put it down exactly there, because the guys were right down the far end.

It was a very long narrow clearing, and he landed across the middle of it, right in centre. Which meant that they had to run halfway up this clearing, probably three or four hundred metres, in the wide open. I’m sitting there facing the enemy and watching these guys come running towards me, the SAS guys, and they were in a heck of a hurry. The next minute I started to see little puffs of smoke

coming out of the tree line. And I said over the intercom to the pilot that we were taking fire. I got no response. So I said again, “We’re taking fire here.” And there was still no response. So I said to myself, “We can either sit here and be shot at, or I can shoot back.” Normally we weren’t allowed to fire on our own bat. But I figured I told him twice and I got no response,

so the third time, instead of taking fire, I said, “I’m opening fire on the left.” And I started shooting and the next minute one of the SAS guys, he was from here to here away, and he’d made tremendous dive to his left because I just hadn’t seen him. I’m going, bang, bang, bang, and this guy is thinking, ‘Damn, if they don’t get me, this bloke will,” and he took a dive to his life and then leapt up and got in.

Then we took off. We got them all in and we got them out safely enough. That stayed with me for years and years and years. I couldn’t believe that I could have been so stupid as to do something like that, and if he sees this he will probably come and hit me. But at the time he was more anxious to get out of the joint than to do anything else.

I got in a bit of strife when I get back, actually, for opening fire without permission, but I explained to him that I tried to tell him two or three times that we were taking fire and he’d ignored me, and I wasn’t just going to sit there, and he said, “Oh, fair enough.” He said, “Were you absolutely certain that we were taking fire?” I said, “Yes, I saw the flashes, I saw the smoke,” and I said, “Here’s a bullet,”

and I showed him in the side of the…slide back door. I said, “Yeah, there’s one of them there as well.” He said, “Oh, okay.” And that was it. He was a bit dirty on me in the first instance for opening fire without approval. So, yeah, that wasn’t a good one. I didn’t like that.

Not a word.

Those guys are professional soldiers; they’re used to that sort of thing. And I figured if he hadn’t of been a professional and a very, very highly trained one, he wouldn’t have dived off anyway; he would have just kept on coming. But he knew exactly what he had to do and he did it and then he got on. He accepted that was part of the deal. As I said, he was more interested in getting out than he was in having a shot at me for anything that I might have done wrong.

We would usually be woken up by the guy who was designated as duty crewman. We had a duty pilot and a duty crewman, each day. The duty crewman would come around and wake you up, usually at about four thirty in the morning, and he would stand well clear and pull your foot or your big toe or something,

because a lot of us woke up very quickly. Then you would go and you would have an early breakfast, you would shower and shave and do all the things you’d normally do, then we’d drive down to the flight lines, we’d get our briefing for the day, which was usually about six-ish. We had a roster laid out exactly a week ahead, exactly which aircraft you were flying with and who and what the job was.

Each chopper in the squadron that was operational was designated a different number depending on the task. For example we had 01 through to 08, and 01 had a specific task which was…I can’t remember, quite honestly. 02 was always the

SAS insertion or extraction aircraft, so if you got 02 that was what you did, and you basically didn’t do anything else all day except sit and wait for a patrol to be inserted or extracted. 03 was the command and control aircraft, so whenever there was an operation on, that was where the big nobs [officers] hung out.

04 and 05 was general duties stuff for delivering supplies or troops. 06 was always set aside for the Australian military commander, that was his aircraft. 07 was the standby and 08 was the four hour standby. You would just work your way through the roster until you got to the end of the week, and then you started again. You got a day off sometime, and then you started the roster again.

So you always knew what your job was going to be for the day. After the briefing you would go into the armoury, pick up your guns, take them out, load them on, fit them, load your ammunition belts. The pilots would come out and do their pre-flights, and then usually you would just take off in a gaggle and head up, fly up to Nui Dat and land on the field there, and wait for our jobs,

whatever we were tasked to do that day.

We were usually briefed by Australian army intelligence people, very rarely by Americans. But every morning we got this very intense briefing by Australian army intelligence officers, who seemed to know exactly what they were talking about, and most times they were right.

In general terms it was exactly the same format. Our troops are here, our troops are there, the enemy was seen here last night, our troops engaged the enemy at this place, we believe they were this particular unit and we believe that so many people were killed, and we believe X number were wounded or dragged away to die somewhere else. That sort of thing. It was in much greater detail, to the point where they could tell us

the unit designations of the enemy groups, and in some cases who was in charge, and the names of the people involved, and whether they were Vietcong or North Vietnamese Army. All those sorts of things. It was very, very comprehensive briefings all the time.

After six months on the ground, I went to the choppers and trained as a door gunner. I think I had been doing that for probably two months, maybe three, so yeah, we would be around…I know when it was, it was March of 1970, and I was due to come home on R & R somewhere around about that time,

and my friend Trevor, who I’ve spoken of before, was getting married, and he wrote to me and he said, “We want you to be best man, but we’re not going to get married until you come home.” I said, “That’s interesting, considering I’ve never met the woman, “ and I don’t like her because she is marrying Trevor and so forth, he’s my mate. I said, “I will try and get home in February or March

and we’ll see what happens.” They said they would not set a wedding date until they knew when I would be home. And I thought that was pretty good. I think I came home in either February or March; it’s a bit hazy at this stage. And Trevor and the other guys met me at the airport in Sydney, and they said, “Hurry up, hurry up, there’s not a moment to lose.

We’ve got to have a beer.” I said, “Okay.” So we had a beer. I said, “What else do we do today?” He said, “We’ve got to go and get suits and then we’ve got to go and get married.” I said, “Not all of us.” He said, “No, only me and Jenny.” And at this stage, I had never met Jenny because he had met her after I’d left to go overseas. So we went and had a beer and then we had some lunch and then we went to a suit hire place

and we got the suits and got all dressed up and went to the church. We were sitting in Trevor’s car out the back of the church waiting for everybody else to arrive, and I said to Trevor, “How are you feeling?” He said, “I’m okay, I’m fine. I’m as cool as a cucumber.” We thought, ‘No, cucumbers aren’t cool. What’s cool?’ “Water rats.” He said, “I’m as cool as a water rat.” So that was good.

The first time I ever met Jenny was when she actually walked down the aisle of the church and I looked at her and I thought, ‘I really should hate you, but I can’t because you look like a nice person.’ So we had the wedding. She was from New Zealand and she had come over with her sister, and they were on a working holiday and they were going to spend a little bit of time in Sydney, then travel to Europe. But she met Trevor,

and her sister met one of our other mates and they ended up getting married to each other. So that was good. When the reception was on, it was all done very much on the cheap because it was a very fast wedding. And that was another reason why I felt I should hate her, because she had obviously trapped him into marrying her. I’m going to clarify all that later on…

Anyway, I spent a couple of days here in Sydney, and then after the wedding I flew up here to Brisbane to spend some time with some friends up here, then I flew back to Sydney, I spent a couple of days with Mum and Dad, then I went back again. So that was either February or March of 1970 when I came back. When I got back I knew I had three or four months, not much more than that to go, so that was fine.

That was basically what happened. Probably about two months before I came home, we had the big drama, helicopter crash, which is when I hurt my back, and I still…I’ve been trying to find my old log book, but I can’t, it’s disappeared, so I couldn’t give you exact dates. But it was probably March or April…

Yeah, it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. We were flying, I think we were flying commander control which was 03 at the time, because the squadron commander was the pilot and normally that didn’t happen, unless we had some major activity going on. So I’m pretty sure we were flying in the command and control ship on that day.

Apart from that, it was just a fairly normal day. He had to stay up at Nui Dat for a commander’s conference that night, so he said, “You guys go back, I’ll stay here overnight and I’ll pick you up again tomorrow morning when you fly back up for the next day’s work.” So our co-pilot, who was relatively new, which is not to say he wasn’t a good pilot, he was just new to Vietnam.

He stayed in the left hand seat, which again is quite unusual because the command pilot usually flies in the right hand seat. We took off about four o’ clock in the afternoon to head back down to Vung Tau, which is about twenty minutes, half an hour flight. We had on about four or five Australian soldiers who were coming down to Vung Tau for some leave.

And we also had steak, trays and trays of steak. I can’t for the life of me remember where it came from; it certainly wasn’t from the Australian army. But we had half a dozen trays of beautiful rump steak on board because we were having a squadron barbecue that night. So it all went on board, it was all covered in clothes and things, and we took off and we were heading back and suddenly

I knew something was wrong, it just didn’t feel right. I called out over the intercom, I said to the pilot, “Is everything okay?” And he said, “No, it’s not. She’s not flying too well at the moment at all.” He said, “I hate to say this, but I think we’re going to go down.” I said, “Oh, all right. How long do you reckon we’ve got?” He said, “About now.” And she just started sinking very slowly down, and the engine cut out completely.

And he said, “You better let those blokes in the back know what is going on,” because obviously they couldn’t hear anything, there was a lot of noise, and we were on intercom and they weren’t. And by the time I had said to the fellow closest to me, “Hang on, we’re going to hit the deck,” we’d hit the deck. It was all that fast. That was how very quickly it happened. We went down in the mud, in the middle of the bay

to the north west of Vung Tau. The tide was out, so splosh, we hit the mud. It was very hairy for a moment. Fortunately we were flying company with another helicopter, because you very rarely flew single missions. So they came over and had a look.

We had to get everybody out and get everybody onto dry land fairly quickly, before the tide came in or before the thing sank into the mud. So we all had a bit of a conference about it, and we agreed that if we tried to winch everybody out, we were going to cut them to pieces because they would have had to come up through the main rotor.

That was fairly dangerous because those things are pretty heavy. The only way anybody could be winched out, obviously, by the other helicopter hovering over. So our main rotors were going up and down, up and down. And the crewman and I climbed up onto the roof and tried to figure a way out of this. And we figured the only way would be to grab hold of the rotor and hold it steady while each of the other guys was lifted out. So he said,

“You can’t just hang onto that rotor because it will throw you around all over the place. You will get bucked off.” And we couldn’t climb out on the tail boom, because it was six or seven hundred centigrade out there. So he climbed back down and he got some of the webbing seatbelts that we used, and we made a harness. And the idea was that we were going to throw these things up

over the rotor blade, catch it at the other end, pull it down, click them together as you do with seatbelts and hold it steady while all the other guys were winched up. So he said, “You climb up on my shoulders, grab hold of the blade and wrap your arms around it and your weight will pull it down. I said, “Yeah, that’s a sensible thing.” So I did that. As soon as I got my feet

onto the actual roof of the helicopter, he ducked down to get some more seat belts. And I’m standing there and the other helicopter was directly above us, and of course the down draft was pretty exciting, and this rotor blade was going up and down, up and down, and I’m hanging on and I’m thinking, ‘This is going to hurt in a minute.’ And I looked around and on the roof is a whole heap of different type of radio antennas,

and one of them us a U-shaped one. I thought, ‘Perfect.’ And I hooked my feet in underneath that, which is one of the first things that I had been told never to touch. So there I was, and I’ve got my arms wrapped around this thing at the top like that, and I’ve got my feet hooked, anchored at the bottom through this FM radio antennae and the rotor is still going up and down, up and down, and I’m stretching in the middle, and I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t fun.’

I’ve had fun and this isn’t it. So we finally got everybody out. We got the pilots off, and there was only the crewman and I left, and I said, “Well, now we’ve got it locked in and tied down, we might as well get off as well.” So they winched us out one after another, and the only thing we didn’t save was the steak. And we were in deep trouble by the time we got back to the base. But it was all very exciting and so forth.

The medical officer there came down to the flight line, and he said, “You guys okay?” “Yeah, fine.” He said, “No problems? No aches or pains?” “No.” And that was good. So they got some steak from somewhere and they had the squadron barbecue that night. The next morning when they came to wake me, I couldn’t get out of bed, I literally couldn’t move. And I went down to see the doctor

and there was another senior medical officer there, and he said, “But you said you were okay yesterday.” I said, “Yes, I was yesterday, but this morning I’m feeling a bit of pain.” So he went over me with a fine tooth comb. He asked a lot of questions and he wrote down a lot of things on this bit of paper, which went into my medical records. And it turned out that somehow while I was being concertined up and down, I’d…

not ruptured a disk, but…I basically slipped a disk right down in the lower part of my back. We didn’t know this at the time, but fortunately he had written down a whole heap of stuff, and he just told me to take a couple of days off and stay in bed, and take Panadol [painkiller] and so forth,

and it was okay, it was fine after that. So that was my exciting time. I’m still cranky about losing the steak, but that’s how it goes.

Interesting question. It happened very, very fast.

By the time I had told the guy next to me to tell everybody else to hold on, we were already down. And I’d sort of instinctively unbuckled my seatbelt and got out, and the first thing that we always did when we landed was open the pilot’s door and slide back that armoured plate protective thing. And I had done that,

just without even thinking. I’m staggering along the skids there, trying not to fall in the mud. And I got the door open and pushed the thing back. And he and the crewman were just sitting there, not moving, just sitting there. I’m thinking, ‘C’mon you fools, we’ve crashed. We’ve fallen onto the ground.’ And it wasn’t until a long time later that I realised that they must have been talking to each on the intercom.

It just didn’t occur to me. I had thought to myself that in a situation like that, you move fast, you do stuff, and I did stuff without even thinking that they might be thinking what to do. So that was pretty unfair of me at the time, but later on I worked out what the problem was. Yeah, that was where we went. There was no fear. We all knew helicopters well enough to know that

in most cases you can get them down without doing too much damage. And that’s what happened in this case. He got it down, it was good stuff, it was good flying. He got it down okay, we got out of it, we didn’t save the steak but we did save the guys.

Reasonable enough. He was as nice as 99.9 percent of them.

They were all fairly good guys. They were all about our age, young, mostly intelligent, bloody good pilots, which you have to be. They used to say that you have to be slightly dyslexic to be a helicopter pilot, and they were all very dyslexic, because I never met a bad pilot, never knew one. They were all outstanding.

Probably so. They would do their basic flight training, then they would go to 5 Squadron, which was the helicopter training flight, and they would do their conversions and so forth there. And then depending on the time frame, they would be posted over to Vietnam, because that was the only place that you went, unless you went to search and rescue or something like that.

So they were all pretty young, they were all pretty fresh, but in general terms they were very, very good pilots, every one of them. And what they didn’t know when they got there, they learned very quickly from the other guys.

We couldn’t have done it without them. It was one of those things where you had to have them, because there was no way safe way travelling to and fro on the ground, except in secure areas.

So to move six hundred men to anywhere, you….could use eight or ten choppers, rotating, working in a circular pattern, or you could five hundred trucks and run the risk of running over landmines or ambushes, all those sorts of things, which simply didn’t happen with the choppers. You could move anybody and anything from one point to another very quickly.

That’s what it was all about, it was about mobility.

Not a lot of wounded. We didn’t do a lot of dust-off [helicopter rescue] work.

I did do one that sort of sticks in my mind, but not all that much. It was a night dust-off, which were always the really good ones, especially when you’re going into a man-made hole in the jungle to pull somebody out. Yeah, we did that one night and we pulled the guy out and got him to hospital. There was another one that I don’t sort of like to think about,

and it really did give me a lot of trouble for a lot of years. Where we had to do a dust-off in a part of the province to the east of Nui Dat, in the mountains there. A mountain range called the Long Hai Hills. And it was notorious because it was full of land mines. We were called in to collect a guy who had actually trod on a landmine and had both his legs fairly badly damaged,

and we couldn’t land, they wouldn’t let us land because there were too many landmines around and they were frightened that the down draft would set them off. We were twenty or thirty metres up and it was the first time I had ever used a winch, because that was usually the crewman’s job. But the pilots of the day were pretty good guys and they said, “Do you want to do the winch?” And I said, “Yeah, fine, I’d love to.”

I never had any formal training in it, but away I went. I got hold of the winch and we sent the hook down with the stretcher, Stokes Litter…While we were positioning to send the winch down, there was another guy on the ground, a soldier, and he was waving us to the point where he wanted us to be.

That was fine, and I was telling the pilot, “Move left ten feet, hold it there,” and so forth. And I was watching this guy on the ground, and he was looking at me and doing that, and I was telling the pilot, and he took a step backwards and trod on another mine. And I thought, ‘Oh, terrific.’ So he’s got no legs and the guy we came to pick up has got no legs. So we brought the first bloke up, then we sent the stokes litter down again,

and they loaded this poor second fellow in…Actually, he didn’t lose his legs. He just got both his legs very badly shattered. So they put them him into the Stokes litter and we hoisted him up and we whipped them both off to Vung Tau to the Australian Army Hospital there…

Oh yeah, yeah that happened, and it wasn’t very pleasant.

Not a lot because the helmets cut out the noise.

You could feel it rather than hear it, and it was like being hit in the face by a lump of wood, so God knows what it was like for that poor fellow. The interesting thing is that about five years later, I was in Greenslopes Hospital, having another operation on my back and there was a young fellow in the bed next to me from Okie,

and we got talking about different things, and he was the second guy. So yeah, that was a very interesting coincidence. He was not handling life very well. He still had both his legs, but they never healed very well, and he had bad osteoarthritis in one leg, and he said it had got to the point where he quite often considered putting himself out of his own misery.

And I said, “Mate, if you think I went through all that, just to let you go and do that to yourself, you go to buggery because I don’t want to talk to you.” But he was fine, after that. We had plenty of time to have a bit of a yak [talk] to each other. It was one of those funny coincidences that you only hear about once in a hundred years. Quite amazing.

Quite honestly I don’t remember a lot about it. I know that there was this sort of fountain and dirt and gravel and so forth that came up. I remember seeing him blown over backwards; he didn’t fly fifty through the air

or any of those sorts of things, and there wasn’t huge gouts of blood. That is all I basically remember seeing, and it just left me completely speechless. The pilot was on the intercom saying, “What’s going on? What do I do now?” And all I could say to him was, “Hang on a second,” and I took a deep breath and got on with it. We did the job and got out. It wasn’t pleasant.

Oh, all in a day’s work, pretty much. I know it sounds callous but that was pretty much it. It was the same when we brought in guys who had been killed in the bush; it was all in a day’s work. We didn’t dwell on it…

Yeah. We were sent out to bring in a fellow who had been killed. He was an armoured personnel carrier driver, I think,

but they had run over a land mine and he was killed. That was sad in itself. But when we went to pick him up, they hadn’t told us he was Australian, they just said, “We’ve got a body to be picked up and brought back.” For some reason we just automatically assumed he was Vietnamese

and it didn’t worry us. So we just tossed the thing onto the chopper and took off. I was sitting in my position, which was always on the left hand side of the chopper, and I had my foot resting on the Stokes littler, and what I didn’t know was that the crewman on the other side also had his foot resting on the other end of the Stokes litter…He was covered with a ground sheet, so we couldn’t see the poor guy involved.

But the crewman took his foot off the litter and as he did so, it jerked. And I had a fit. And I said, “I think this bastard is still alive.” Then the wind blew the ground sheet back and I saw that he wasn’t Vietnamese, he was one of ours, and I thought, ‘Oh dear God,’ I shouldn’t have said that. But then I had a closer look and there wasn’t no way that he was alive.

That one sticks with me as well, because I got such a fright. You know, “They thought he was dead, maybe we can save him.” Then I looked down and no, there was no way, he was well and truly gone.

No, I had seen enough even to know that they’re dead. Most of them, and this isn’t bragging or anything, but most of the dead bodies

that I saw up until that time had been Vietnamese, from either side, because we often had to go in and take them out and take them back and put them in the morgue or whatever. So it wasn’t a new thing for us…

Oh, it depends. There was no average.

Sometimes we might have to pull out two or maybe three Vietnamese. We very rarely took out any Australians at all, and when we did they were in ones and twos, mostly just single bodies type of thing. I’m starting to be very conscious that I don’t want to upset anybody who might ever watch this.

I think I was pretty lucky. I don’t think we ever pulled any more than two in one go. I was pretty lucky. There were guys who went in to clean up, I hate to use that term, went in to clean up after Long Tan, the Battle of Long Tan, which happened the year before I went over, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be there for that. That would have been absolutely horrible.

They were pulling them out in bundles. It wouldn’t have been very pleasant at all, but I was spared, thank God.

I guess so, yeah. That time in the Long Hais with all the landmines, yeah, that wasn’t real good. The crash wasn’t pleasant.

There was one time that literally scared me witless, when we were doing one of those perimeter patrols out of Nui Dat. There was a little bunch of hills off to one side, about five or ten ks [kilometres] away, that we used to call ‘The Pimples,’ it was just three little hills. And our patrol area was at the base of the hills,

and it was very, very dense vegetation there. And on this one particular patrol, I was the lead scout. I was right out the front, breaking the trail…I was walking along, very quietly through this really dense undergrowth, and for some reason I looked at a bush and I thought, “There’s somebody behind that bush.”

I don’t know why, but I just at that bush and I had the feeling that there was somebody behind that bush. So I told everybody else to stop and I just sort of circled around it, quite a way away, because I was frightened witless. And there was somebody there. It was a little old man who had stopped to squat. And I think he was more frightened than I was.

I said to him, “What are you doing here?” And he told me, obviously, what he was doing there. I said, “Okay, next time wave the flag or something.” He frightened the hell out of me. We moved on after that, but that was pretty frightening at the time, because you just didn’t know. But he was all right, he was just a little old man, one of the paddy field workers.

Yes.

Yes. Most times, actually…I mean, when they went out there, it wasn’t just to spend a couple of days out in the bush, they went out there to do a job and when they did the job they came home again. Interestingly enough, while I was there, one of the guys that I had been in the CMF with, and his brother,

they were both there and we carried them any number of times out into the bush. I used to always feel a little bit more worried than usual when that group was going out. But they all got back okay. The worst casualties we suffered as Australians, in that particular area was mostly from landmines, rather than actual hand to hand combat, or genuine combat situations.

And that was the hard part, because those poor buggers didn’t know from one step to the other where they were going. We always knew that there was a fifty-fifty chance when we put SAS patrols in, for instance, that we’d have to go back in a hurry to get them. We always had to be prepared. Once we dumped them in there, we then had to go off a couple of miles,

and just circle around for half an hour or so before we left them, just to make sure that everything was going to be okay. Because it was fairly accurate to say that if something was going to go sour, it would usually happen within the first half hour or so. They had some incredible tactics. Like, for instance, when we used to take them to do a reccie of the area,

we would take out the patrol commander and his 2IC, but we never went directly to where we were going to drop them. We always went somewhere else, somewhere where they could see where they wanted to be well enough to get an idea of the land, but we never flew and orbited that area. We always flew close by and orbited an area so that they could have a look from not necessarily overhead.

Some of the things that we had to do were just so clever, by my standards, because everything was all about deception. Like, for instance, if we had to go in and get them out, this was when the smoke grenades came in, because they would all carry a different coloured smoke grenade with them when they went, and when we had to go and pick them up, the best way to work out exactly where they were

was to get them to throw a coloured smoke grenade, which they would do. But we would never say, and they would never say, that they were throwing red smoke or yellow smoke or blue smoke or whatever. They would throw the grenade and then they would say, “Smoke’s gone.” And then we would have to tell them what colour we saw. And mostly we were right. That was to stop

any nasty people who might have been in the area from throwing smoke as well, because they were the guys on the ground and only they knew what colour smoke they were throwing until it came up. And then we would tell them what colour we saw, and they would say yes or no. If it was a no, then we would know that we had real big trouble and that was when we would call in the gun ships in to smarten the place up a bit. That didn’t happen all that often, thank God.

Not to me, personally. I know of other people who did have that experience, but they didn’t muck about. When they said, “We’ve got the wrong colour smoke…” We always had hovering over there in the background, we had two gunship helicopters, and they would just go in and towel the place up and they didn’t leave a thing standing. When that was done,

then the guys would go in and pick up the patrol and take them out….That was interesting.

No, no. A couple of reasons for that. Firstly, in general terms it was only a very small area and the maps were very good, everybody was trained in navigation anyway, and you couldn’t get lost flying there

because you had the map and the ground was right there in front of you, so you knew exactly where to go. When the new pilots arrived in the squadron, they went through the same kind of training that all of us did, and they were taken around virtually all over the province and they were shown all the towns, all the landmarks, how to fly here there and everywhere, what height not to fly below, all that sort of stuff.

So they were pretty well trained in that area. It was virtually impossible to get lost.

Oh, quite a number actually, because as well as taking troops to and fro, and taking food and field supplies to and fro, we also used to take the civil affairs people into a lot of the little villages

and some of the larger towns, and we’d take them in and bring them out and so forth. We would take in medical supplies and medical teams. Yeah, we got to know some of the people quite well. In fact, just after I started on the choppers, and we had to take a medical team into a little village that was built out on a lake,

it was actually built in the lake, and they lived in houses on stilts and they were fishing people, very country folk type of thing…The helipad that we landed on was also built on stilts, on the lake, and there was a walkway to come out of it made of bamboo. Of course you never really trusted how well that would hold up. So they would just hover that high above the pad while we were doing unloading and so forth.

And I remember my crewman looking out the other side, and looking back through the door, and he said, “There’s a whole bunch of kids running down the walkway towards us.” And the pilot said, “Okay, just keep an eye on them.” And the crewie said, “If any one of those little bastards walks into my tail rotor and damages it, I’m going to kill him.” That was what you did.

If you didn’t throw some humour into it, you never got anywhere.

No. The policy was that we would go up to Nui Dat in the mornings, do whatever tasks we had and then fly back, that night, and spend the night at our own base. We very rarely stayed out of Vung Tau over night.

And when we did visit the towns it was basically in and out. It was just to take people in, take people out, drop supplies off or something like that. They were very fleeting visits, we didn’t have much to do with them at all.

Oh, totally different. Nui Dat was an army base, and it was in the middle of tiger country, if you want to call it that, so things were always just a little bit more tense.

There was a lot of army there, and we were air force, so things were always a little bit more tense. Which isn’t to say that we didn’t get on well with them. The SAS guys still, to my knowledge, think the sun shines out of our backsides. We worked a lot with the New Zealand troops. But yeah, the atmosphere in Nui Dat was always just slightly more tense. And we didn’t care,

because we didn’t have to stay there. We just flew up there, we did our jobs and then came back again to clean sheets and beds again. Those poor buggers didn’t see a sheet for twelve months, which was another reason I joined the air force. Clean sheets.

Oh, I think it was just a little bit more close to the action, if you know what I mean. Nui Dat itself was a huge base.

It was very, very big and the perimeter was massive. There were rubber plantations on both sides, and in those days the VC loved rubber because it was good cover and they could get close. So you never knew when there was going to be a mortar attack or a rocket attack…I think it only ever happened once while I was there anyway, and it happened away from where we were.

But that was the atmosphere that those guys lived under every day. You just didn’t know when something nasty was going to happen. Whereas in Vung Tau, we had our rocket attacks and so forth. But for some reason we always had plenty of warning, that it was going to happen, and I think that is principally because they used Vung Tau as their recreation centre as well. And it wasn’t unusual, so I’m told,

for VC to come and spend a couple of days R & R in Vung Tau, then go back to the fighting. But while they were in town, it was hands off, do nothing, don’t draw attention to yourself. So that’s what they did. So we didn’t get so much of the hassle as they did in Phan Rang, or even Nui Dat.

The first we would know about it would be a phone call from…wherever, I never bothered to find out where we got the phone calls from. We had one helicopter always standing by for dust-off, at night.

Now during the day we didn’t bother with one dedicated chopper because we had had eight or so in the air at any one time or available, so any one of those could be used as a dust-off chopper. But at night we had one dedicated one sitting on the pad ready to go, and one crew sitting in one room, all night, waiting to go just in case. So the day time ones were fairly simple. You would get a radio call or a telephone call from the army,

who would have had a radio call from a unit out in the scrub, and they would say, “We’ve got wounded,” or whatever, “We need dust-off to this particular place.” They’d give us all the details and whoever was available in the day time would go out there and just basically pick up the injured party and take them back to Vung Tau to the hospital. Then we’d go back to Nui Dat and just get on with life. And it was really,

in most cases it was fairly straight forward. It was go into a place, pick up a person or two persons or how many people, and then fly off into the sunset sort of thing. Night-time was slightly different. Bad things happened at night up there. I only ever did a couple of night dust-offs, and I was never really comfortable with them, because I’m a day person. And what we would do, the dust-off crew

would go up and have dinner, go up to the flight line, and there was a room with five beds in it, we had a medic with us as well, and it was air-conditioned and it had a TV and so forth. And we would sit in that room with the air-conditioning and the TV going and hope that the phone didn’t ring. Eventually we’d all go to bed and wake up in the morning and either have the next day off or whatever.

When the phone did ring, it was basically, “We have a dust-off for you, get going.” And that was all the information we needed, because we would be out of bed, into our flight gear and we’d be into the chopper and we’d be going. It would already be pre-flighted and everything, ready to go. Then we’d get off the ground and then we’d get the details.

Because the important thing was to be on your way, and in general terms, the province that we operated in wasn’t huge, we didn’t lose much time. But if we mucked about trying to find out all the details before we actually took off, well, those minutes could have been very precious. So we would get into the air first, then they would tell us where to go. It wasn’t a major problem to divert a degree or two either way.

If it was a fairly straight forward one, it wouldn’t be a problem. They would have flares and so forth and we’d go in and pick up the guy, or guys, and take them to hospital, and again, get on with life. But just once in a while you would get what they called a hot extraction, where you had to go in and pull guys out under fire. So that was it. In some cases you couldn’t actually get on the ground.

You had to hover and send down the Stokes and pull them out. And it was always fairly exciting because they weren’t showing any lights on the ground, except maybe torches and things like that, shining straight up. But we always had our navigation lights on or the landing light or the search light, so we could see what they were doing, rather than them compromise it themselves.

I know it sounds a bit contradictory, but that was the way we did it. We had to fly with landing lights and so forth. So eventually we would either land and pick up the injured guys and take them away, or we would winch them up, one or the other. There wasn’t a lot for us as the crew to do except fly there, and keep our eyes open.

What happened down there while they were winching up the patients wasn’t our problem. It wasn’t the pilot’s problem or the co-pilot’s or mine, it was usually the problem of the medic or the crewman who operated the winch. So the job for the three of us was to stay where we were and keep an eye out for anything that might go wrong. The pilot’s job was to sit there and keep the damn thing in one spot long to get these buggers up and out.

Yeah, that’s what happened.

Yeah, yeah, I guess in retrospect it probably was nerve-wracking. We were always nervous when we were doing that sort of thing, because it is dark and sometimes it is difficult to work out where you are and where you are, and there is the noise and there is the extra stress of thinking, ‘I’m a target.’

Ninety percent of the time we weren’t really targets, we just needed that adrenaline rush. But we managed to get most of the guys out.

At that time? I guess probably we were looking for flashes, firing flashes or things like that from the bush. You can tell in most cases if somebody is about to

fire a rocket propelled grenade or something like that at you, or you could usually tell just after they’ve done it, not before. You can tell if somebody is shooting at you, to some degree. If you’re really, really careful and you don’t look at the light, depending on how bright the moon is, you can pick up movement, maybe, where there shouldn’t be movement. So all those sorts of things and you just look out for them.

No, because I wasn’t there, it never happened.

No, that was on the base itself. They were rocket rockets.

That was nerve-wracking. Because what they would do, we would get an announcement over the PA [Public Address] system that there was a possibility of rocket attack,

which was not all that common, it was very rare. Because even the bad guys didn’t want to get the people of the town offside too much. We didn’t have a huge amount of problems with rockets and things like that, but occasionally there was a rocket attack and we would get these announcements over the big PA system.

And we all had assembly points that different groups of people went to, and we would stand there for a while and maybe there would be a boom! somewhere in the distance, or maybe a bit closer. And maybe there wouldn’t. More times than not, there wasn’t, because nothing happened, but we would stand about and wait for something dreadful to happen, and nothing dreadful ever happened. So after it was all over we would get the all clear

and we would go back to work or go back to bed or go back to the bar, or whatever.

Yeah, sure. Okay, my principle job as the gunner was to keep an eye out on my side, because the pilots,

they were flying the planes and operating the radios and talking to the guys on the ground, and the crewman was on the other side, and he was doing pretty much the same thing. His job, as mine was, was to be lookout, to make sure we didn’t fly into any trees, to make sure we had clearance all around us, so we could actually land the chopper. There were four hundred different things all going on at once. The pilots were talking to the guys on the ground; the guys on the ground were usually…not panic stricken, because

ninety nine times out of a hundred they were SAS troops and they were very, very good at their job. So understandably they were nervous and they were pumped up, but nobody ever panicked. They just did the job. The pilots flew in, and we looked around to make sure that everything was safe. The SAS guys would jump on board; sometimes we would take a bit of ground fire,

either going in or while we were on the ground or just as we took off. You did that and you got away. But everything always happened so fast. And everybody had so much to do, that you didn’t think about it until afterwards. I remember one of the gunners coming back after a hot extraction and

he landed back at Vung Tau that afternoon, and got out and he swore blind that they had taken some ground fire, and the pilots didn’t really pay much attention to it, but they got out and they did a walk around and they found bullet holes all over the damn things. And he just stood there and pointed at these things, “Hole, hole, hole,” that was all he said.

He just was completely shattered. But he was fine the next day, it was just one of those things and he didn’t realise until afterwards that this had happened. He had an idea that maybe they had taken some ground fire. And that’s what it was. You don’t consciously sit there and say to yourself, “I’m going to die,” or, “I’m not going to go home,” or, “We’re not going to get out of this”. You never consciously think that.

You might have a worrying moment or two after it’s all over, while you’re sitting there changing your underpants. Everything seems to happen very slowly, at the time. It’s all in slow motion, and you think about it later on and it’s only seconds, literally, between the time you’ve gone in, and the time these guys are on and you’re gone and that’s it. And once we’re out of the way.

the gun ships would go in and towel them up and we would all applaud and go home for a beer.

I can only speak for myself. I don’t know what went through the other peoples’ minds in that situation. But for me? No.

By the time I got back to Vung Tau that evening, if something unpleasant had happened, and we’d land and we’d take the guns off and the ammo boxes and all the rest of it, and we’d do a walk around and make sure everything was okay…By the time we’d done that and put the guns back in the armoury, and got back to the compound,

I had totally forgotten. I was at that age when nothing really worried me. I was twenty four-ish, and…even though I felt pretty mature at the time, heh, this was all just a part of my life, this was the job that I did. And I never dwelt on anything at all, except for maybe those couple of very small events that happened here and there. But most of the time, I can’t help thinking

that I wear some of those ribbons and things under false pretences, because I didn’t really do anything out of the ordinary. I just went there and did my job and came home again, and that was the way I always thought of it. I’ve never considered myself to be anything special from that point of view. It was a job and I went and did it, and if I hadn’t, somebody else would have. I never dwelt on anything for too long.

I think I’ve told you one story where we had that hot extraction and I opened up off my own bat. There were a couple of other occasions where we knew there were VC in a particular area, either because we had taken fire or one of the other helicopters had and we would go in and give it a bit of a brassing [shooting] up.

Yeah, in very simple terms we’d be told, “Go to this grid reference on the map. There have been some reports that there might be bad guys in there. We think that someone is there because they keep shooting at people, which means they’re probably not friendly, so you better go and have a look.” So we would go and we would pick a spot

and the pilot would say, “Okay, this will do.” Sometimes he would say, “That group of trees over there, just give it a good hosing down.” And we’d do that. Or sometimes he would throw a smoke grenade out the window and he would say, “Just sort that place out, where the smoke lands,” and we’d do that.

Oh, it could be anything from fifty to two hundred rounds, it just depends on the circumstances at the time. They would leave that up to us. They would tell us when to start firing and when to stop.

Noise, it’s very loud. The ones that we had had been modified

so the butt bit that goes into your shoulder had been taken off and been replaced with, what they called, two spade grip triggers. And you’d hold onto the spades and put your fingers around the triggers and pull them back. Because of the noise of the helicopter and the noise of the wind and all the other stuff, you didn’t get all that much noise. You knew that you were firing a fairly large weapon.

Yeah, it was mostly noise, there was a little bit of vibration. But they were mounted on swivel poles, so that absorbed most of the shock. We wore flying gloves and so forth. There was one really exciting time, nobody believes this, but it was true. We were doing some live firing somewhere…I can’t for the life of me

remember whether we were just doing air to ground practice gunnery or whether we were actually trying to hurt someone. And I had been firing, and as you fire these things the empty cases come out of a thing on the side, and there are little spring steel clips that hold each round to the next round that make up the belt. And these little spring steel clips come out through another slot.

I was firing away and I had both triggers pulled back like that, and one of these little belt clips came out and lodged itself down behind the triggers, and when I let go, to stop firing, the gun just kept on firing. And I thought, ‘Oh, there’s no drill for this!’ And without even thinking I just lifted up the cover at the top that feeds the belt through and just stalled it basically.

Nobody believes me, they say it’s not possible, but I’m here to say that it did, and it would have been very exciting under different circumstances, particularly if we were coming in to land…Actually, it wouldn’t have. We had a rule that whenever we were coming into a friendly base, and we got below I think it was about a thousand feet, we actually took the barrels off the guns.

You just pull a lever up and pull the barrel out and put it down beside you. and that was to stop any accidental firing going off in a friendly area. So that was a very important thing that we all…I’d totally forgotten about that until just then. So we had to declare that the guns were cold, which meant that the feed cover was up and the barrel was off. Particularly when we were coming back to Vung Tau at night,

or after a day’s activities, we had to do that. So that other situation would never have occurred in a place like that.

Oh, very little, very little. And that is probably a good thing. If we were firing in vegetation, that is what you saw. You saw trees being chopped about

and being whipped about a bit. What happened under the leaves, who knows? I don’t know. They had what they call “sniffer missions”, which was a fairly interesting sort of a thing. We had this machine that actually mounted on the floor, in the cargo area, and it had flexible hoses that came out of both sides,

and it literally worked by sampling the air directly underneath where you were. And if it picked up…any sort of trace of something that wasn’t normal jungle stuff, the needles would go this way and that, and the operator would call out, and we would throw a smoke grenade,

and directly behind us would be a gun ship. And as the smoke grenade went out and marked the spot, they would just go boom, and destroy everything that was there. Even so, we didn’t know if it was a wild pig or a battalion of VC. It just wasn’t part of the job. All we knew was that was a place where bad people might be.

Never. It wasn’t something we were all that interested in. All we knew is that if we went back there and the machine didn’t pick up any more trace smells, than whatever it was wasn’t there any more.

For us, yes. For the army, it was a different thing, they were on the ground. But we would never know.

They were the same type of helicopter, but instead of being cargo carriers, they were decked out purely as offensive weapons. They had two what they called mini-guns on either side of the cockpit area, and those things fired…in the thousands of rounds per second.

When they fired at night, it was like a solid red line going down from the sky to the ground, and the sound was like when you pull your zipper down really, really fast, that was what it sounded like. And it was…brrrrt, done, and there could be ten thousand rounds on the ground. As well as that, they had a rocket pod on either side

that fired two inch rockets. I think there were ten, I could be wrong, but there were probably ten in each and they just fired them off, fizzled off, one after another. And if they needed to put some rounds on the ground in a particular area, two or three seconds and you’ve got rid of thousands and thousands of rounds. And we always used one hundred percent tracer ammunition,

instead of as the army did, one in ten or whatever. Every round we ever fired was a tracer, so that was there you got that red…It was almost like a laser beam if you watched it at night, it was incredible. Very pretty, bright red.

So we could see where the shots were going. That was the only reason. It was very hard to correct your aim, for instance, if there are good guys in the area. You try to avoid them.

But you need to know where your shots are going all the time. They don’t just fire one after the other directly in a straight line, they actually spray the rounds out, so you’ve got to be able to know where they’re going. A hundred percent tracer is the only way to do it.

Not always. On the sniffer missions we did. On the SAS

extractions, we did, always, and extractions. But for general troop movements or re-supplies or things like that, no, we didn’t need them. They would take off and they would hover around…The weight that those guys carried was just incredible. So they were constantly going back to refuel. They couldn’t carry a lot of fuel because they carried so much ammunition and so much weight in armament and so forth. They refuelled twice a day more than we did.

So we only ever used them if it was a hundred percent necessary. But they were great guys, they were terrific.

Oh, it was just exciting. You’d go to Nui Dat, for instance, and you would land on this big field that they used to call Kanga Pad,

and I reckon it would have held two hundred helicopters, it was so huge, and we had eight. And the troops would come out and they would get on board, and there might be…depending on the operation that was involved and how long it was going to be, there might be two hundred, three hundred, anything up to six or seven hundred troops to go out, plus all their ancillary stuff like artillery and sometimes vehicles.

The big choppers, the Chinooks, would carry…they’d just sling-load the guns and take them out and they would take out the Land Rovers or whatever. Normally, probably half a day before we would do a major troop insertion, the artillery would have a go, and they would literally clear the area by fire. And that in itself was good, because quite often we would have

all the directing staff up in a chopper directing all the firing, and co-ordination and the planning that went into these things was amazing. You would hear the artillery officer and he would be talking over the intercom to the guys on the ground. And he’d say, “Okay, last round on the ground in ten seconds.” And ten seconds later, boom, would be the last shot from the artillery, and up would come the troops.

They would be in the air as he called last round on the ground. So the time frame between the last artillery round hitting the deck, and the first troops hitting the deck was worked out to the second, literally. The other thing that always impressed me was that the Salvation Army guy was always in on the second chopper, and he had the fruit juice and the tea and the coffee and the bikkies [biscuits].

By the time they’d set up the perimeter, he had his stove going; he was making tea and coffee for the troops. An absolutely wonderful man. Getting back to that thing, you would take off and you would have eight troops. I don’t think we ever carried more than eight at a time, because they were pretty big, and if they were going into the bush, they’ve got a lot on their backs. So you haven’t got a lot of leeway from a weight point of view. And we’d go out,

and we would what they call ‘stream.’ So eight choppers would take off and fly to the point, and we’d go in, dump them on the ground, they would set up their defensive perimeter, we would turn around, go back and get another eight each, come back and pick them all up. Sometimes you’d do that for two or three hours, non-stop. But it was very exciting, non-stop, just great stuff to do. Because you knew that without you,

it would have been a lot more difficult to get the job done.

It was just so good. If you forget where you were and you forgot the fact that some people might not be coming back, and you never thought about that side of it, or very rarely, but it was just such a tremendous feeling to be able part of that.

It was just so beautifully planned and beautifully co-ordinated and everything worked. There was no hassles, things happened because that was the way they were meant to happen. I’ve got slides that are on the computer of major troop movements with helicopters all over the place. It’s just amazing stuff.

No, not really. They were soldiers. You go on an active service operation; you expect that someone might get hurt. After it was all over, when the dust had settled pretty much,

then you could hold a small service if you wanted to. But again, I can’t speak from personal experience of what those guys did on the ground. I really didn’t have a great deal to do with…

The usual post-mortem autopsy type things

at Vung Tau, because that’s where the hospital was. As far as I’m aware, very few Australian dead were actually brought back to Australia. Most of them ended up in the war cemetery at Penang, in Malaysia. That was about as far as they got.

I think we generally tried to avoid thinking about it. It was, again, something that happened, some poor Digger got killed, oh gee, okay I’m sad, and I’m upset that it was an Australian guy and not a Vietnamese, but it’s done now, let’s get on with it. You can’t dwell on it,

otherwise you are going to go crazy, and I think that is where a lot of my compatriots had their problems, because they dwelled on it and I tried not to.

They were a relatively new aircraft in the ’60s. They were the first general purpose jet engine chopper, and they were, so I’m told, they were so much easier to fly than the earlier piston engine ones that were pretty big and pretty lumbery and pretty slow. So yeah, that’s about it. I think they were easier to fly, they were certainly far more versatile than the earlier choppers,

and the fact that they had that jet engine made such a huge difference from the point of view of speed and power and all the rest of it. So yeah, that is probably all I can think of.

Virtually none. It was, “Take a couple of days off, take some Panadol and go to bed for a day or two.” And I was fine with that.

From memory I don’t think we did any x-rays or anything like that. The senior medical officer asked a lot of questions, he had a look at my back, he asked me to show him where it hurt mostly, he drew some pretty diagrams and pictures and so forth, and wrote reams after reams of stuff and put that in my medical records, which was a God send at the end of the day, but from that point of view…

Two or three days and it was fine, I was back on my feet and it didn’t worry me, until after I got back to Australia, after the second tour.

No, no.

Yes.

Diarrhoea. There was nothing special in that, everybody got it sooner or later. It could have been anything from as simple as a bug in the water, to eating

something local in town. But virtually everybody I know at some stage had some stomach bug that ended up having them in the hospital for a day or two.

Yeah, it was a low set place, single storey. The nurses were funny people. It was just like any public hospital…the old style public hospital

with rows and rows of beds in the ward, a row down there, a row down there and a big open section in the middle. You had to lie to attention in bed when the doctors came around, because they were officers and they had to be treated with due respect, whether you had a broken arm or a broken heart, it didn’t matter. When the doctor came, you lay to attention, and you said, “Sir.” Most of them didn’t care,

one way or the other, but most of the nurses, particularly the older nurses used to sort of punch it into us. The younger ones, they were good, they were a lot of fun, and we had some great times in the hospital. I know it sounds disrespectful, but we did, we had a great time.

It was just fun. They were great people and we were pretty much the same age, we were all in a similar sort of situation. They were nurses, we were blokes.

Nurses and blokes get together, get stuff.

No, no. I couldn’t be bothered. I had two experiences on both tours overseas, both with girls back here in Australia, and they both ended in total disaster while I was over there, so I didn’t bother.

Oh yeah, it was an Australian Base Hospital. They were all Australian. There were no Yanks or Vietnamese or anything like that.

I remember being absolutely terrified on the first day back when Trevor and the guys met me at the airport…

And it’s amazing how quickly you become used to different situations. We came out of the airport into the car park and I got into the wrong side of the car, because over there we drove American vehicles and everything was left hand drive and they drove on the right hand side of the road. And I got in behind the driver’s seat and tried to figure out why the wheel wasn’t over there. Then we got out onto the road

going out around pass Botany Bay there, and I was absolutely terrified. Everybody was driving on the wrong side of the road and they all drove like lunatics. I was used to a fairly disciplined military style driving experience, by then, and it took me days to get over it, it really did. I was frightened of the traffic.

I couldn’t look around quick enough to make sure we weren’t being stalked or there weren’t people lurking in the bushes trying to kill us. It sounds like platitudes and it sounds like something from a script, but no, I was quite nervous for the first couple of days, until I remembered where I was. I was fine after that, I even actually drove a car.

No problems, no problems at all. During the R & R, I slept like a baby, probably because I was very, very tired. All my time in Vietnam, during both tours, I never had any problem sleeping because we were all exhausted by the time we got to bed, and we had sheets…So yeah, that wasn’t a problem.

My downfall came after Vietnam, and I think I can honestly say since 1972, I haven’t slept all night, ever. I’ve never ever gone to bed and slept all night and then woken up in the morning. It’s most usual for me to stay awake until two or three o’ clock in the morning,

and I will get to sleep and I get into that deep sleep zone somewhere between three and six. That is my sleep period. I feel guilty if I stay in bed after seven o’ clock, which I seem to be doing more and more often these days, but I’m old, I’m allowed to. But no, I haven’t slept…and I don’t…I don’t read too much into that. I don’t know why, but it just seems

too much of a coincidence to me that this should have started after I came back from over there. Because up until then, when I went over there, I was a world champion sleeper.

I guess so. I don’t want to over dramatise that side of it. We were in a secure area; we slept in proper beds in proper buildings,

we ate proper meals and most times our lives were pretty well regulated, and we were made to keep busy. There was very rarely any period of time where you had time to lie in bed and feel sorry for yourself. And I guess that is done on purpose. We had plenty of time to ourselves, but at the same time we were kept pretty busy, so we would sleep at night, I guess…

How I came to go again? Yes. After I came back from the first tour and met another woman and got into another disastrous relationship…though it wasn’t disastrous at the time, and I think it was October of 1971,

just after the Bathurst races, so that’s how I put the time frame to it. And we were all lying about…We had been out in the bush on a training exercise for about ten days, and we had just come back and we were waiting for the word on whether we were going to get some leave or not. Because in those days, we used to get half a day off for every day that we spent out in the bush, which meant we only worked for six months of the year, it was great. And we were all lying about, or sitting about

or standing about in the sunshine, and I heard the boss’s phone ring in the office, and I heard him say, very indignantly, “Of course he’s fit. All my men are fit.” Then something mumbled in the background for a little while, then he hung up and he opened his door and he called my name, he called me in, and said, “You’re going back to Vietnam. You are fit, aren’t you?”

I said, “Yes, I’m fine.” He said, “Good. Do you need any shots?” I said, “Well, I don’t know, I’ll go down and I’ll check up.” So I went down the medical section and I said, “Am I due for some shots?” Now that is like a red rag to a bull to some of those guys, they love it. The head nurse down there pulled my card out and she said, “Oh yes, you need this and this and this.” I said, “Oh, okay.” She said, “You better come back tomorrow and we’ll knock them all over.” So I said right, and I went and saw the boss and told him I had to have some shots tomorrow,

he said, “Good, because you’re going in a couple of days.” I said, “Give us a break. I’ve got to have my pre-em leave.” He said, “You can have that when you come back.” I said, “Right,” so I went in the next afternoon, which is all they could fit me in for, and I had about four shots, all in one go. There was yellow fever and dengue and measles. You name it, I had it.

They jabbed the lot into me. And I don’t know whether it was the shots or nerves or stress or whatever, but I was up all night, and I had the most incredible diarrhoea and I didn’t stop all night. It was incredible. The next day I turned up at the defence section of the base, and I got all my paper work, and he said, “Are you all right?” And I said, “No, I’m not. I’m completely dehydrated. I think I better spend a week in hospital before I go.”

He said, “No, nice try, get going.” So I had a couple of days off, then I went to where…the girl I was travelling with at the time was and I told her. The day before I had to be in Sydney, something went wrong with my car. I don’t know what it was, but we ended up driving her mother’s car down to Sydney.

It was a Mazda 1000, and that was a good run. I think we got there about an hour before the plane was due to leave. It was a rotten trip down. She was nervous and desperately trying not to be nervous and not to be frightened and so forth. And she was running around like a blue tail fly, trying to make life easy for me.

And in trying to make life easy for me, she got my passport and my travel warrants and everything and she very carefully stuffed them in the side of my zip up bag and zipped them up, and that went through into the cargo hold of the plane. So when I had to go through customs and immigration and I had no passport and I couldn’t find it anywhere, I said, “What have you done with it?” She said, “I put it in your bag. I didn’t think you would need it any more.” So they had to actually go down to the cargo area,

find my bag and I had to go with them, and pull my passport…And of course, I was flavour of the month because the plane was about half an hour late getting off the deck [taking off]. We finally found it, so I got through all that side of it all right. But it all happened so fast, that I didn’t really have much time to stop and think about it. In fact, I barely had time to ring my parents and tell them I was going away again.

So away I went, and it was pretty much a repeat of the first time. In the plane to Darwin to Singapore to Saigon to Vung Tau….The only difference principally, this time, was that I was posted directly back to 9 Squadron, whereas the previous trip I had only been attached to the helicopter squadron. But this time, I was posted into 9 Squadron as a member of the squadron. That was the only difference.

I didn’t do any of the ground combat stuff. So I went straight onto choppers as soon as I arrived. And again, the whole situation was totally different. There were whole new people in the squadron, and the approach and the attitude to everything was totally different, because by then it was starting to wind down. We only had, I think, one battalion left on the ground.

Whereas when I’d left the first time, we had two or three. The flying operations were very restricted. There was very little for us to do because everybody was in wind down mode, so it was a case of fill in the time until it was time to come home. So by the end of the tour, by February, we were probably only flying an hour or two a day, every couple of days.

We weren’t up in the air every day. And it was very disappointing to me because I felt if we were going to do the job, we may as well do the job properly. But cooler heads, and I knew what was going on. Then we got the word that everybody was going home, and if we didn’t want to take stuff with us, we should burn it or dump it or whatever,

but not leave it behind so it could be used. So most of the stuff….Most of our personal gear we got into our bags and so forth. And they said to us, “Okay, there will be a Herc coming in from Darwin tomorrow at ten o’ clock. It is going to be the last one and all you guys are going to be on it.” Or us guys, because by that time there was only sixty or seventy of us left on the whole base who were Australian.

We still had the headquarters staff in Saigon. They still had all the diplomatic staff and the headquarters staff in Saigon, but we weren’t concerned with them. And the date was the 29th of February, and they said, “The Herc will be there at ten in the morning,

so you better get yourselves well and truly packed up so we can be down there bright and early tomorrow morning.” And that was fine. We were lying on our beds that afternoon, because we had nothing to do, literally. There weren’t even sheets on the beds any more; there was just bare mattresses and so forth. Everything had gone, all the non-essentials had gone, and with the exception of two, all the cooks had gone, all the admin staff had gone, it was just us, left behinds.

And we were lying on our beds that afternoon and there was a lot of cleaning up and demolition going on, and there was this incredible loud explosion, and I think it was the Yanks blowing up one of their ammunition dumps or something. And the guy who was in the bed next to me, and I, leapt up and I said, “God, what do you reckon that was?” And he said,

“I don’t know. It sounded like an explosion,” overstating the obvious. So anyway, down we went to the airstrip the next morning, in the last remaining vehicle. We all got down there. And we knew that when the Herc came in we didn’t really want to spend a lot of time on the ground, because those people were getting pretty close.

We had all our gear packed on one of those big aluminium pallets that rolls onto the Hercs through the back tailgate. It was all packed and tied down and it was ready to go. And it was ready to go, and ready to go, and ten o’ clock came, and eleven o’ clock and midday and…no Herc. The thing finally hit the ground in Vung Tau about half past one, two o’ clock in the afternoon.

By which time we had nothing to eat, because everything was put away and packed up and nobody put rations aside or anything. So he landed and he came up to where we were at the end of the runway, and the load master jumped out and he came back and he said, “You guys all ready to go?” “Yeah!” “Okay, where’s your gear?” We said, “There on the pallet.” He said, “Oh, problem…”

Apparently the reason they were delayed, and they had been delayed in Butterworth Air force Base in Malaysia for several hours, was because they couldn’t get the bottom part of the tailgate to operate, and they had spent several hours trying to get it to work and it just wouldn’t go. So we had to unpack everything off the pallet, and we had to manhandle the pallet in through the tailgate, tie it down onto the runners,

hand load all the gear back onto it, through the side door, tie it all down, that was probably another hour…So we didn’t get away from Vung Tau until probably three o’ clock in the afternoon. And we thought, ‘Yeah, nice easy run from here through to Butterworth, and then we’ll stay overnight in Butterworth, then we’ll go from Butterworth to Darwin, then we’ll go from Darwin to Amberley.’

No, straight through to Amberley, no stopping. And if you’ve ever spent eleven hours in the back of a Herc you would know what I’m talking about…No, that’s not true. We did go to Darwin to refuel. And we landed in Darwin at about three o’ clock in the morning, after this run through from Vung Tau.

We pulled up on the air force side of Darwin Airport, and a guy came on board and he said, “Sorry to do this to you guys, but Customs want to inspect all your gear.” And I can understand why, we were the last ones out and they wanted to make sure we weren’t bringing any Vietnamese home with us, or any other souvenirs. We said, “Do you understand what that means?

It means that we’ve got to hand unload everything off here, put it on the tarmac, get the Customs to go through it, then hand load it all back on again, and tie it all down, and it’s going to take hours and hours and hours.” He said, “Well, I’m sorry guys, but that’s what has got to happen.” The Customs guy, who was only a young fellow, came on board and he said, “I’m sorry guys, but I really have to do this.”

And we said, “No.” He said, “Please, I’ve got to do my job.” And somebody said to him, “Well, why don’t you just select a few bags at random and go through them?” He must have thought that was a pretty good compromise so he did that. In the meantime, they got the cooks up from the base in Darwin and they got breakfast ready for us, a nice hot breakfast. So while he was going through some of these bags at random,

we all went into the mess for breakfast, and it was great. It was bacon and eggs and all that stuff. There was one particular cook who did nothing but bitch and whinge and moan and complain about how he had to get up at whatever time of the morning, just to cook breakfast for this bunch of bloody rabble. And by the time the guy in front of me reached where he was with the scrambled eggs,

we had all had a gut full, literally. He started bitching and moaning again, and the guy in the queue in front of me just reached out, didn’t say a word, grabbed him by the hair, slammed him face first into the scrambled eggs and said, “You cooked them, you eat them.” Then we just moved on, had our breakfast and got back onto the plane and took off. We thought we were coming directly from Darwin to Amberley, and we were about

two hours out of Amberley and the load master came back and said, “Change of plans guys, we’re not going to Amberley.” Which was an absolute blow because all our families had been told we were going to Amberley, and there were wives and families all over the shop, heading for Amberley to be there. We said, “Well, where are we going?” They said, “Well, we’re going to Sydney.” “What, Williamtown or Richmond?”

“No, Kingsford Smith.” So this poor, mud splattered old Herc finally landed at Sydney, at Mascot, and we got out and hand unloaded all our gear and went through customs and went through quarantine and immigration and all the rest of it. In the meantime, they had organised civilian air flights for us to get back to Amberley.

Why they couldn’t go directly, I still can’t figure it out, but again they know better than me. So they organised these civilian air flights for us to get back to Amberley and to wherever, predominately to Amberley. And that was fine. We’re talking now about eleven o’ clock in the morning, maybe midday, and the earliest flights out were at half past four. And we had to sit in the departure lounge at Ansett [Airlines] from elevenish until half past four.

We just kept falling asleep, and we’d lie down on each other. It was just amazing. We were absolutely exhausted. At one stage, when they called our flight, one of the hosties [air hostesses] came up and said, “Are you people all right? You’ve been sitting on those chairs asleep all day.” We said, “Yes, we’re tired.”

And she had no idea where we’d come from or what we were all about. Of course, by February, ’62, all the exciting parts had finished, all the other troops had been and gone and we were a non-event by that time. So we evaded all the protestors and all the rest of it. We snuck in, fell asleep until the plane left, then got on the plane and came back up here to Amberley.

That was my second tour in a nutshell. There was very little that happened that was worth thinking or talking about.

I think we were all a bit disappointed. In fact, one of my mates has a car with number plate frames on it, the plastic ones, and across the top of it, it says, ‘Vietnam Veteran,’ and across the bottom it says, ‘We Were Winning When I Left.’ I think that says it all.

Most of us were pretty disappointed that we hadn’t gone through and finished the job, and I think a lot of us were very, very disillusioned with our own government and the Americans because they literally pulled the pin over night and said, “That’s it, everybody go home. Game’s over.” And we did.

Most people in my situation would probably tell you that they were a little bit disappointed that it ended the way it did. It just fizzled out, and that is not the way things were supposed to happen.

You mean to us coming home or to the Australians…?

I think there was generally a sense of relief. It happened over a fairly lengthy period of time. We’re talking several months,

the period that all the guys came home. And yeah, I think from the public’s point of view there was just a general sense of relief that it was all over, that no more Australians were going to be hurt or injured or whatever.

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that.

I’m proud of the fact that I had a job to do and that I did it the way that I was trained to do, and that sometimes I used some initiative of my own. I’m proud of the fact that none of that training was wasted. And I’m proud of the fact that I didn’t disgrace myself or most of the other people that I was with. From the point of view of actually taking part in a war, no, I don’t feel any particular

sense of pride about that. I feel good on Anzac Day, because I can remember some of the good stuff. But I don’t generally walk around strutting and saying, “I’m a Vietnam veteran.” I don’t, I don’t worry about it.

All good stuff. We had some tremendous entertainment groups and people would come and put on shows for us. And we had some woeful things happen to us…Some of the people that came up, even Australian people….Particularly Australian people…

Oh, it was just the general quality of their shows.

We had…Lorraine Desmond and a couple of people of her vintage, for want of a better word, came up. Obviously they were thirty years younger than then they are now. They thought they were doing the right thing, and they put on what they thought what was absolutely a wonderful show for us. And we were so drop dead bored

and we couldn’t have cared less, because it wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted girls singing and dancing. And some of the better ones were so good, that it made these people, who were very talented people, it just made them look bad, because their choice of material was so bad. They were singing songs from the ’30s and ’40s. We didn’t want that. How did we identify with that sort of stuff? And they were singing songs from musical comedies

and musicals and things like that. We didn’t want that. We wanted music. On the other hand, we had a visit from a Royal Australian Navy band, and they brought the house down. They were so clever and their choice of music was just marvellous. And their whole attitude was, “We’re going to do this and we’re going to have fun doing it.”

They had fun and so did we. We had groups from the Philippines who came in, and we didn’t understand a single word they said, but they were very colourful. We had Koreans, we had Americans, who generally left us cold. And that was about it. We had a couple of British comedians come out, and some of them were very good. But it’s the bad ones that stick in the memory,

and that is more the pity. They all had the right intention, they all thought they were doing something good for us, and I guess in their own minds they were, but none of us really wanted to experience that.

Oh yeah, yeah. We had a football team, and we used to play the army. And we played Aussie rules, we played rugby league

and rugby union. We played cricket in the cricket season. We played lots of sports. And when we weren’t playing team sports, like football and so forth against the army, we would play volleyball, and there is nothing like it for keeping you fit. We enjoyed that, it was good stuff. Out the back of the main compound where we lived, they had two huge trampolines,

probably as big as this room, and it was nothing to see at any of the hour of the day or night guys out on the trampolines, leaping up and down, and working it out of themselves and having a great time. As well as that, we had the bar.

Not from a personal toursity point of view, no. There just wasn’t the opportunity, and

it wasn’t available to us to be able to do that sort of stuff. Tourism wasn’t exactly high on the list of priorities. So if we did any travelling at all, it was in a uniform with a weapon of some description. We travelled up the road from Vung Tau to Nui Dat several times, in military vehicles. It is such a beautiful country, it really is.

It is such a lovely country, but we weren’t in a position to enjoy it all that much. But no, we didn’t travel around as tourists, not in Vietnam.

Oh, she was a little, to us, she was quite elderly.

She must have been at least thirty. But you can never tell with the Vietnamese or most of the Asian types, because they do tend to look a lot younger than what they really are. So she probably was middle aged. She was a little lady about that high and about the same wide, and the most beautiful nature. Nothing was too much for her. She wasn’t above asking you to do nasty things, like get her black market cigarettes and things like that.

And every so often, the Americans in particular, because they were the controlling interest so to speak, they would suddenly announce that all the money, all the MPC was no longer valid. And then at four o’ clock that afternoon, we would have to go and hand over all our Blue Series, for instance, and get Green Series.

I don’t know how it got out, but all the domestic staff, they’d know about it before we did. They’d come up to us and they would pull out this horse choking roll of MPC and say, “Can you take this and change it for me?” “No.” “But it won’t be worth anything to me.” And we’d say, “Well, you shouldn’t have had it in the first place.” So you would take a bit

but not the whole roll, because people would ask some very awkward questions if you turned up with a pile of paper that thick, to change it over.

Just picking it up here and there from different…guys would give it to them. And every so often one of them would come up and say, “Can you get me a carton of cigarettes?” “Yeah.” So you’d go up the PX and buy them a carton of Malboro.

We used to pay a dollar for a carton of twenty packs of Malboro, five cents a pack. That’s was what we paid for cigarettes, and I was a fairly heavy smoker in those days. And you’d go back and you’d give her the carton of cigarettes and she would pay you in MPC, and it was totally forbidden for them to have it. They weren’t allowed to have it, and she would pay you for it in MPC. We never really questioned it too much, it was very bad security.

Because if the VC got hold of it, then they were using our money against us, that was the philosophy anyway. I will never forget the panic of some of these girls when they would just bang, cut off, it’s not worth anything any more, bring it back. And they would pull out rolls like that and say, “You change, you change.” “No.” Mostly we would take a little bit each from one of them and take it up and change it. And she would usually end up

with some good stuff out of it. They were good girls. They were mostly Catholic. The Catholic religion is very important up there. If they weren’t Catholic, they were Buddhist. Most of the people we had working for us were Catholic women, and mostly they were lovely…Well, most people are, it just depends

how you strike them, I think. We never had any major problems with them. We had a couple who always wanted to fight and argue, but it was always done in a good natured way and you just let them get on with what they were doing, and you couldn’t get too far on the wrong side of them, because they did all the washing and ironing, and changing the sheets.

Oh yeah, well, you see, I’ve slept on the ground a lot and I know the value of a good set of sheets.

Yes, on the army base at Vung Tau, on a place called Back Beach, it was a tremendous spot. It was like Bondi Beach and Southport and the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast all lined up.

It was just miles and miles of pure golden beach and surf and God knows what else, and the army built a recreation centre there called the Peter Badcoe Club, which was named after one of the Training Team, who had won a Victoria Cross. And he had been killed, so they built

this purpose built recreation centre with this huge Olympic sized swimming pool and little accommodation blocks and bars and cafes. It was very, very good for its time. It was great stuff. And once in a while we would go over there to swim in the pool at the Badcoe Club. It was primarily for the guys in the army, who would get

maybe twice a year, they would get three or four days to come down and unwind and let themselves go. And boy, did they what. They used to really let themselves go. We would get over there maybe every couple of weeks, and spend an hour having a beer or a swim or whatever. And it was a perfectly built pool, everything was right. They had a shop there where you could

buy all the latest electronic equipment and tapes and cameras and God knows what else, at pretty damn good prices. So we would always make a beeline for that place whenever the…What was the name of that ship? The Jeparit, it was an Australian merchant navy ship which was contracted to travel between Sydney and Vung Tau about once every two or three months,

and it would take stores and food and everything that army needed, would be carried on this ship. The guys who sailed on it were Australian merchant seamen and they just basically jacked up and said, “No, we’re not doing it any more. We oppose the war in Vietnam, so we’re not going there any more. “And the Commonwealth government said,

“No problem. You enjoy your life as merchant seaman?” And the Seamen’s Union said, “Yes, they’re all good guys.” And they said, “Right, as of midnight tonight they’re all in the navy.” And overnight it became the HMAS Jeparit. So that shut them up real quick, so we kept getting our beer and our food and all the other bits and pieces. They very cunningly always used to put the beer on the bottom, and then they would put all the other stores on top,

so you had to get everything out to get to the beer.

On a scale of one to ten? About twelve. We did a lot of drinking, off duty, but it was always…I was going to say sensible drinking, but that is not exactly what I meant. We all knew that if we didn’t have a day off tomorrow

that we had to fly, or we had a job to do, so it was very rare for you to be drunk, unless you had the next day off, in which case you really let it all hang out. But alcohol was very cheap…You could buy any can of Australian beer for ten cents.

And that was any kind of Australian beer at all. If you went into the bar and said you wanted a beer, you wanted A Four X, which came in a yellow can, you would ask for a can of yellow. You didn’t even have to know the name, you just had to remember it was colour coded. VB was green, Tooheys was red, Fosters was blue, Four X was yellow. So you would have a yellow and a blue and a red and a green. And that was what the end result was like

if you had too many of them as well. Multi-coloured.

I didn’t come home one night. I got very down over something that had happened at home, and I went into town…

I was already drunk when I went into town, because I had spent most of the afternoon drinking a full forty ounce bottle of Bacardi [rum] and I think there was about that much left when I decided I was going to go into town for a drink. I got on the bus or something and went into town. That was crazy in itself; that was a stupid thing to do, because it was at a time when things were very unsettled, and there was gangs of Vietnamese young people

just literally cutting a swathe through town, and if they found any servicemen there, they would knock them over and they’d rob them and so forth. I got knocked over and robbed and had my watch stolen and all the money that I had. We were always told right from day one, never put all your money in one pocket, never take your wallet with you, and always keep the hand with your watch on it in your pocket, and don’t wear a watchband with a buckle on it.

So we all did that. But when forty of them come out of an alley and jump you, and you don’t even know that you’d been knocked off, until you put your hand in a pocket to pay for a drink and it’s not there any more…So, by then of course, they knew all the tricks, so they went through every pocket that I had and they cleaned me out. Fortunately there was some Australian soldiers there

who chased this crowd away and they took me under their wing. They said, “You look like you need a drink.” I said, “Yes, I really need a drink, that’s what I need.” So they fed me booze for the rest of the night and they took me somewhere, and I still don’t know where to this day, but I didn’t go home that night, and I was in big trouble the next day when I was listed as missing. Because all leave officially ended at eleven or midnight or something…

I literally can’t remember. It wasn’t very nice, it was unsavoury shall we say. But there was a nice little girl who fed me coffee and cigarettes and pointed me in the direction of the flags and said, “You go that way.” So I did. Trevor, my friend, had a very, very similar experience one time when he was in Saigon. He had gone into town

and got totally legless and some little Vietnamese girl picked him up and had her evil way with him while he was helpless. And when she had finished with him, she took him down to the pick-up point where they would come in and pick up the Diggers in the truck and take them back to Bien Hoa. And she just propped him up and held him up…Trevor is like me, he doesn’t drink very much, but when he does, he drinks. So she just held him up, propped him up on the footpath until an Australian Land Rover

went past and they saw him and pulled up. The guy said, “What are you doing with that soldier?” She said, “I’m just holding him up.” So she said, “Are you Australian?” And they said, “Yes.” And she said, “So is he.” And she just hurled him in the back of the Land Rover. I didn’t get the luxury of being hurled into a Land Rover, I was made to walk all the way back to The Flags

and catch a truck back to the base. I got a slap over the wrist for that, but gee whiz, if that’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, what the heck. I was back the next morning by eight or nine o’ clock. Fortunately I had the next day off, there was no flying, so that was fine.

It’s not all that hard really, it wasn’t for me.

Again, being young and fit and well fed, what the heck…!

Yes. Many, many good men lost their wives and their girlfriends. I was lucky; I managed to repeat the episode twice, so yeah…I saw really good men whose wives just couldn’t handle it.

There was more men here than there was over there, which was a pity. But that’s life. It hurts…

Yep.

The first time I knew there was something wrong, even before I left, I knew there was a problem, but neither of us put it out in the open,

and it wasn’t until I had been overseas for two or three months that she wrote an told me that, “Maybe this is the time for us to think about moving on.” And that hurt, that really did hurt, because we were really close. The second time was really, really messy, and I learnt about it from a friend of mine who wrote to me and said, “Look, I hate to be the one to do this, but….”

And that was when I drank the forty ounce bottle of Bacardi, because that really hurt. That was one of the worst of the lot. But I figured, hey, I was one of thousands and I managed all right. I got out of it. I eventually met Kathryn. I came home in February of ’62.

I met her about eleven months later, January of ’63, and we were engaged of February, ’63.

Not a lot. I was still the air force, it was a secure environment, you always knew where your next meal was coming from, you always knew when your next pay was and how much you were going to get.

I never had any major trouble adjusting at all. I felt left out of it, because I hadn’t been part of these major protests that we had all heard about. I never experienced anything like that. So it was a matter of me coming back, having finished one job, and then moving back into the other job that I used to do. It was as simple as that. To me, it was like being posted from one base to another.

Yeah, that was when I suddenly realised what a great job I’d had in the air force, because suddenly I had to do a whole heap of things for myself that I hadn’t thought about before. All my clothes were shockingly out of date, because you never worried about civilian clothes in the air force, or any of the services, or you didn’t in those days. So I had to do a complete makeover,

and make myself back into a modern 1973 man, which took some adjusting. Then I had to find a job. And again, the air force was pretty good because they said to me, “Can you find a job for yourself, or do you want us to look for one for you?” I said, “No, I will have a look around.” And as it happened, one of the guy’s in the air force had a friend who worked for a frozen food company

here in Brisbane and they were just starting up a whole new operation and they were looking for people. So this mate of his organised for me to go in and have an interview with them. Which I did, and I got a job with them. And the good part was that the air force actually paid for my training in this new organisation. Not so much in cash,

but they paid me while I was doing the training. So I was still technically on the air force payroll, but I was doing on the job training with this other mob, so they didn’t have to pay me. And that was good from their point of view. But it was a very long working day, to pick everything up, and there was quite a lot of overtime involved as well. And as well as that, I didn’t have anywhere to live. So I ended up sharing a flat with the other fellow, who was with me the day I met Kathryn.

There was a hell of a lot of overtime involved, and when I finally separated from the air force, these people said to me, “Hey, we’re really pleased with what you’ve done and with your job and so forth, and the work you were doing. We’ve always felt guilty about not paying you, so we’ve calculated how much you would have earned in overtime and here it is.” And they gave me this huge amount of money…

Well, to me it was a lot of money in those days. And that was great. So I moved into the flat with the other guy and we just went about our lives. Once I got into the habit of not….not being pushed around, ordered around, and told literally what to do from morning until night, I had no trouble adjusting.

I just had to come back to the point where if a decision had to be made, I was the one who had to make it, and not rely on somebody else to make it. And that took a lot less time than I thought.

I really don’t know. I’m probably a lot more easy going than I was, because I can see that there is no point now

in getting stressed, whereas before, when I was younger, I was…everything had to be done a certain way, and it had to be done right, and it had to be done properly the first time. I’m still, to a degree, like that. But I don’t get as stressed now as I did when I was in the air force, and things had to be done a certain way and things had to be done properly. I’ve learned that

there is probably somebody upstairs, and I’ve been tapped on the shoulder two or three times and each time I’ve said, “No, I’m not going. I’m not ready yet.” And he’s gone away and left me alone. So I’ve figured there is a lesson to be learned there, and I’ve got to get out and do what I want to do, and if it doesn’t get done today, it will be done tomorrow. And the world will not stop if something isn’t done today. But when I first came out of the air force,

I still had that military mindset, and everything had to be done properly, and it had to be done in a certain timeframe and it had to be done first time. So I’ve got around that side of it pretty well. As far as my mental outlook on life is concerned, I don’t think Vietnam ever really changed me all that much, from a mental or psychological point of view.

I was young enough and silly enough to just simply accept that I had a job to do, this was what I had been trained for, and I went and did it. And when it was over, I came back. Okay, end of story. I hear the same thing nowadays from some of the guys who are currently ADGs in the air force. When they came back from Timor, and we were pretty

supportive of them while they were over there. And we said to them, on the first Anzac Day, “How do you feel? Are you okay? Are you having a good time?” And they all, invariably, said, “We feel good, because now we feel that we are equal to you guys.” And I haven’t seen any sort of major psychological dramas coming out of those guys either. And in all honesty,

they had it a lot tougher than we did. Their life in Timor was way harder than some of the stuff that we did. Yeah, I admire them; I think they’re great guys.

No, not at all. I occasionally, after a bad experience, I sort of sit down and have a quiet word with God or whatever it is up there.

I did have some fairly major health problems about five, maybe six, years ago, and I honestly thought that I was going to die. But again, the doctors were good and I was relatively healthy at the time, so I fought my through that one without any major hassles.

But I do remember wheeling myself up and down the corridor at Greenslopes in a wheelchair, and…I went past a chapel, at Greenslopes, and I thought, ‘Well, while I’m here I might as well wheel myself inside and see what it is like.’ And I did, and I went up to the little altar thing and I sort of sat there for a while, and I said, “Well, how am I doing, really?”

I didn’t get any reply, but on the other hand nobody said I was doing badly. So I figured that was as good as anything. I’m not even shallowly religious, let alone deeply religious. I couldn’t give two bob [shillings] for it one way or the other, I couldn’t be bothered.

No, no. Only to the God of Drink

to say, “Please, get me out of this.”

Yes, I did. I saw aircrew,

some pilots, that I was initially disappointed with, but on reflection I figured that, hey, they’re only human, and they were in very stressful situations and then they asked to be sent home afterwards. On thinking back on that sort of thing, I would have probably had to stop and think for myself where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do.

But there were a couple of them who were very, very badly injured, or shaken up in some way, and they simply wanted to stop flying and go home. You can’t force a pilot to fly if he doesn’t want to fly. In most cases, they were looked after. And most of them were very good, very competent pilots, but they had reached a situation

where they just couldn’t take any more. And I sympathise with them for that. That was a pity.

They were treated perfectly well and with great understanding and great compassion by everyone else, because they were members of the squadron first, and they were bloody good pilots, second.

And when we all sat down and had a think about it, individually, because we didn’t go into a huddle and say, “What a weak bastard he is.” But individually I think we all came to the conclusion that what happened to those guys was something that had to happen, and you can’t point a gun at them and say, “You’re a weak mongrel, get out of here. I don’t want to talk to you again.” Because everybody handles it in a different way,

and these guys had reached the point where they couldn’t handle it any more. Some of them were very, very badly hurt, and they just didn’t want to play any more.

Again on a scale of one to ten, I would say twelve. Some of the people that I worked with in Vietnam are still amongst my closest friends, and we have a very, very tight network with the association

that I am a secretary of, and it is a support group, to a degree. We don’t go into it to the same degree as the Vietnam Veterans’ Counselling Service, or something like that. We look on it as a family of guys who were all in the same boat, and if somebody needs help there’s always somebody in the family who will try and help them. I’m working through a situation at the moment with one of the guys who’s got cancer

and he’s not doing too well. So I’m carrying on this long distance support thing, at the moment. He is in Adelaide, mores the pity, and she is a very, very frightened lady. And I’ve never met her. But we talk to each other every day by e-mail or whatever. And that is the sort of thing that we like to do. We feel we’re obliged to do that.

We have a wonderful relationship within our own ranks, if you like.

I don’t know. I’ve often wondered about that. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the only war that we had. I really don’t know and I could never answer that if I sat here for a hundred years trying to figure it out. We were all young.

We all knew each other, basically, because the ADG grouping and the squadron itself were both very small organisations in themselves. So most of us knew each other. And you go into a situation like that, where you are under a lot of stress and you’re all going through the same experiences and the same stresses and the same tensions, and the same heartbreaks and all the other bits and pieces…You meld, you come together very quickly.

And it’s a bond that I think ninety percent of Vietnam veterans share, even though they won’t talk to each other about it.

I treat some of it with some scepticism, because it was made

fairly easy for people to go on pensions and so forth on the grounds of PTSD. I tend to treat some of it, only a very small percentage of it, with scepticism. People who were at what we used to call the sharp end, I can understand. But…I’m going to get into trouble for this, but clerks and cooks and store men,

who go there for twelve months, and do nothing more than they would have done if they had been back home, and then put their hands up for PTSD claims and things, I have to admit that I always feel just a little bit miffed about it. But then on the other hand, you have to accept that everybody has a different breaking point. And it doesn’t matter whether you were in a store room or a kitchen, or in the sharp end of a helicopter or whatever,

some people handle it and some people don’t…I don’t know. I’m probably prepared to say that a high proportion of them are, more than likely, genuine claims and a very small proportion of them are people rorting the system, but you get that wherever you go. And I’m not going to point the bone [accuse] at any particular group of people, so…

Only medical treatment. I visit a psychiatrist about once every six months, because it was recommended that I did that after I got my PTI [Psychological Type Indicator] pension for my back. And it’s more a pain management thing than anything else.

But I go along and I sit down with this guy for half an hour, once every six months or so, and we talk about when was his last trip overseas, and what kind of car are we driving now, and do you think the V8 is better than the V6, and that sort of thing. And that goes on for half an hour, and I get up and sign a bit of paper and I walk out and make an appointment for six months. And his parting words to me normally are, “You’re okay, you’ve got no problems at all. See you in six months.”

So that’s where we go. I don’t really…God, this is going to sound conceited, but I really don’t have any problem. I’m right; I’ve got everything going for me.

Not any more. I used to have a recurring dream about that particular incident with that fellow stepping on the land mine. That came back to me quite often, particularly in the early days after we were married, but it just went away.

It doesn’t worry me at all. I don’t dream about the war, I don’t dwell on the war…I very rarely think about it, except maybe on Anzac Day when somebody tells a funny story and I can relate to it.

First is excitement, I thought it was a really exciting thing to be a part of.

Second one is pride that I actually got to do the things that I did. I never ever cross myself and say, “Thank God I made it back alive.” Because it’s just not something that I bother to think about. And the last feeling I get is that feeling of contentment that I’ve got a great set of friends…

who went through the same thing with me. And that can be people that you don’t see for ten years. But when you do see them again, or talk to them on the phone, you just take up the conversation again exactly where you left it off, and to me that is a true friendship. My friend Trevor, who I was best man at his wedding, his wife died just a little over twelve months ago from cancer,

and that hurt me, all of us, more than any of my experiences in Vietnam ever did. To lose Jenny like that was just so hard for all of us. He will never get over that, and I don’t think any of us either will. Again, we had a very small circle of friends, but very close, very tightly knit. So we all suffered very badly when Jenny left, but…that’s how it goes.

I just left that up to Kathryn. She decided what schools the kids went to, and I paid the bills, and she decided what clothes they wore and what hand they used to hold their knife and fork, and I was just there to do the smacking. No, I love it. I love it. They’re tremendous kids, they really are wonderful children. They’re a credit to any parents.

They’ve all done quite well for themselves, and they’re all super intelligent, good looking and very successful.

What else could you ask for? Our daughter, she wanted to be a lawyer, she wanted to study law after she finished high school.

And that was fine; we didn’t have a problem with that. So about a…month before she was due to start uni, this used to be her bedroom, and we came up here…I was walking past with Kathryn, we were going out the back to do something or the other, and we heard her in here crying. So we knocked on the door and opened it and said, “What’s the matter, darl?” she said, “I don’t want to do law.” I said, “Oh, okay.

What do you want to do?” She said, “I want to do what Mum does, I want to teach.” I said, “Okay, so why are you crying?” She said, “I didn’t want to disappoint you.” I said, “Well darling, what you do is what you want to do, not what we want to do. If we wanted to study law, we would be stamping our foot and saying, ‘Hey no, you’re not changing.’ But if you decide you want to do teaching, you go for it.” And bang, that was it. But she was so…

distressed at the thought that we might be upset, that she just burst into tears. Anyway, she went to uni and she did her teaching degree, and she was quite specific, she wanted to do high school teaching and not primary school. And she finished, right up at the top. She graduated with an S1, which is the top level for teaching.

If you graduate with an S1, the Education Department comes to you, not the other way around. So they offered her first choice at a job teaching in the Education Department. She said, “That’s great. Where?” They said, “Ravenshoe, up in North Queensland, near Atherton.” And she said, “Oh, okay.”

And this was a week before her 18th birthday…They were born in January and it was early January when she was given this job. And she said, “How long have I got to think about it?” And they said, “Until four o’ clock this afternoon.” She rang me at work, and I said, “Well, what do you want to do?” And she said, “Well, my heart says take the job.”

I said, “Right, you know this means you are going to be away from home at your age, in your first ever teaching job, for two years minimum because you have got to do two years country service?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, what does your head tell you?” And she said, “Well, I was sort of hoping you’d tell me what my head said.” I said, “Well, your head says take the job.” And she said, “Right,” bang, and she took the job.

She actually flew up there because she wanted to have a look at the school, so she paid for her airfare up there and back, and came back and said, “Yes, it’s good,” so that wasn’t a problem, then the Education Department paid for all the removal and so forth. She stayed up there for almost three years, and then came back and taught locally and took a contract job down at one of the private schools,

down at Sheldon College, just down the road here. And then she really wanted to go overseas. She was with a man at the time who was also teaching up in Ravenshoe. He was a bit of a world traveller, so they applied for teaching jobs in England and they were over there for two years and then came back. And then they actually created a position for her at Sheldon College, which was great, because she knew she had a job to come back to, and she’s been there ever since.

She’s now figuratively a department head there and she is loving every minute of it.

No, not all that much. I have the same attitude towards it as my father. If they ask a question, I’ll answer it, and I’ll answer it as truthfully as I can. We’ve often sat down and looked at some of the photographs that I had, and some of the slides and so forth.

And they’ve asked questions and I’ve answered the questions…But I have never consciously sat down with them and said, “Sit down, I’m going to tell you all about the war.” No, I just don’t head down that track.

She’s learned more about it in the last couple of weeks, since the first time you guys contacted me, then I have every generally spoken to her about it. But on the other hand, she’s been more involved with it,

and with the guys and so forth, so she probably knows much more about it than even I think.

Good question. I think if you want to know what the real Vietnam war was like

from the Australian point of view, you should watch the Odd Angry Shot, with a grain of salt [scepticism], a very large one. If you want to know what it was like from the point of view of the Americans, maybe something like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, but I think Platoon. The real experience was somewhere in the middle between the two. And quite honestly, I don’t think

there would be no point in making a film about the real Vietnam from the point of view of a commercial film, because it would be dead boring, and there would be not a hell of a lot to recommend it to people to go and pay for a ticket to go and watch it. Really, it would be quite boring. It is the typical war thing, where a lot happens very, very quickly, and then nothing happens for a long time after that until something again happens very quickly. And people don’t want to sit through that in a movie, which is why they make movies the way they make them.

I think it met them. I didn’t go with any shining white knight in armour type of mentality. I went there because I was a professional full-time Australian serviceman.

I knew my job and I wanted to put that training into practise, and I did. All my expectations I think were met. Even to the point of coming home as a wounded war hero, everybody wants to do that…

People in general? I think I learned that most people are good.

Most people, you can depend on them in a crisis if you need to. Most people will be good friends to you if you want them to be, and you let them. Myself, I learned that I’m dependable, that I can do a job if I’m given and had the instructions explained to me very, very clearly several times.

And I also learned not to expect too much, that way you do get disappointed. So you accept what happens, when it happens, as it happens, then you move on. And that has been my philosophy for years and years and years. Do it, move on.

It gets up there very close to being birthdays that end in zero. Very important.

Anzac Day to me is not, as some people would have us believe, it’s not a day when you get together to glorify war. It’s when you get together to think about the good times and your friends. Anzac Day is a very, very special day, and I’m glad to see it is becoming that way again to much younger people.

I don’t think about anything specific.

I just generally feel a glow, somewhere between contentment and pride, that I was one of them. I feel content because it is great to see the way people are now reacting to Anzac Day. And I also feel very comfortable in the fact that I get to see people who I haven’t seen, sometimes, for a lot of years. And we get together and we have

one or two or three drinks, and we talk about stuff. I’m usually home here by four or five o’ clock in the afternoon. I don’t see any point in making a session out of it. I can have a drink any time I want.

Oh, that is so difficult. No, I really don’t. If I was to say anything,

don’t judge us until you’ve read all the stuff. Don’t judge us until you’ve spoken about what we did to as many people as you can and got all the sides of the story. History has a way of hiding some of the things that people do, or colouring it a different colour, and we find that things that are very fresh and clear to us, in our minds,

most young people today wouldn’t have a clue. They don’t know about the Vietnam War. But unfortunately when they do hear about it, it’s usually from that small percentage of people who are either politically motivated against it, or who are very bitter about some aspects of it that happened to them. So, that’s my comment. Don’t judge us unless you know the full story.

I’ve had a ball. I really have. I’ve enjoyed it. And thank you for your time.