Australians at War Film Archive

In Townsville. I was born in a house there in 1956. There have been many changes in Townsville since when I was a young fellow. The school I went to is just

over ten minutes’ walk from here, Helen Park School. After school I started an apprenticeship as a baker and pastry cook.

My father passed away when I was quite young so my mother had to bring up

myself and a younger brother and an older brother and an older sister. In those days money was a bit short but we all had a good schooling and a good upbringing. In this neighbourhood there seemed to be a baby boom because I grew up with a variety of twenty boys and girls. We

all knocked around together and went crabbing and fishing just near where the house is now, just over the back. There used to be mangrove swamps and we’d go there fishing and swimming and crabbing. Now it is a highway that goes through there, progress. With the kids that grow up nowadays there is nowhere for them to play.

Small whiting and bream and mud crabs. Sometimes I used to have safety pots in there to pot them like you use for crabbing. They can get in but they can’t get out. Sometimes I used to go and check them before I went to school. We all had them and it was a good place for seafood. Consequently, I still love crabbing and

fishing nowadays.

No, very rarely. The backyard had three mango trees and soursop [custard apple] trees and fruit trees. I used to do a lot of gardening. I had WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s [fowl], nowadays you sort of

really can’t have WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s in suburbia. We had a cyclone that knocked a couple of trees down or two trees down so there is one mango tree now. You came home from school of an afternoon; you would just climb the tree and have a feed of mangos and a bit of a snack.

One of the boys who went to school with me, his parents had a fish and chip shop up on the main road up there. We would walk home from school and in those days they wrapped the chips up in newspapers. You would go and ask them for some crumbs and they would give them to you. His mother and father used to keep them for us. Crumbs were the little bits of batter that break off the fish when it is getting cooked or the

breadcrumbs that are deep fried. We used to have a feed. Where he lived he didn’t have a mango tree so I used to take his mother up mangos or soursops. A soursop is like a custard apple. Their yard was pretty small and they didn’t have a lot of fruit trees but I had a lot of fruit trees here. I have still got some. As you know, with fish and chip shops they like their lemons with their fish and chips. We had a lemon tree so I used to take

up a whole bag of lemons and that. In those days they didn’t charge you for lemons they would just give it to you. If you were only just getting a small amount of fish and chips they would cut the lemon in half and put it in with the fish and chips. That’s gone now. They charge you sometimes a dollar. I have seen them charge a dollar for one lemon in a fish and chip shop.

Townsville was a bit of a bushy town, it was only on the verge of booming. Where the suburbs are now they have stretched that far out from the centre that where we are now really was only fifteen minutes walk to the centre of the CBD [Central Business District].

You would go out in the suburbs and it was all just bush. One of the suburbs near the Dalrymple Hotel there used to be an old American airstrip. It was Aussie/American and they used to have old igloos there. We used to go scavenging in the bush there looking for anything and we came across an old belly tank on day. That is one the

Americans used to put under the wings of their plane as their fuel tanks. We couldn’t figure out how we were going to get it home. We came up with the idea that we would make a billy cart, a big one. We put the box on the top and spread it out and put timbers and it was quite large the belly tank. It was probably two metres long and a metre or so wide. It had the

connections on top of it to hook underneath the aeroplane wing, the fuel tank. We couldn’t figure out how we were going to do that. So we found an old axe and it took us about a fortnight to cut the whole top out. In those days there was no oxy-acetylene, the old gas axe, so we would all take turns about it. We would get the axe and we would wrap towels around the handle to stop the vibrations. One bloke would hold the

axe and another bloke would hold like a lump hammer, a bit of a sledgehammer. He would hit it and we would just move along, “Chop, chop, chop.” It took us many afternoons after school weeks to do it. We eventually got it done and we took it done the creek then. Where I live in those days I had to go through the yard next door and then I was down in a creek. If I wanted to I could hop into the canoe and I could

paddle to New Zealand because this creek connects up all the way through the Ross River and It comes right through the CBD in town there. A lot of the creeks in those days were all mangroves and now they are buildings and development and the mangroves are all gone. There is no place now for the kids. We have a bit of

progress and it is good on sometimes but on the other side there is nowhere for the kids to hang around except for internet cafes and skateboard places but nowhere else. There is no fishing.

As our boat. Once you had cut the top out of it we could fit easily four blokes in it, four kids, and we used to

paddle all the way down the creek.

Yes, it was perfect. It was shaped like an egg but it was a bit squashed. We had that for years until we grew out of it and we just passed it on to the next lot of kids. Where it ended up then I’m not too sure because I was sort of growing up then. We had

motorbikes. I paid five pounds for one. That was a lot of money in those days. I was probably only about sixteen or fifteen I suppose and I paid five pounds. I saved it all up selling scrap metal. I would take it to the scrap metal dealer after I’d gone to the dump. You can’t go down to the dump anymore. You get fined if you go to the dump scavenging. I would sell that and I got

the motorbike. I lived closed to the creek. At one time we used to have eight motorbikes under the house here. They were just old swamp bikes. You didn’t have to worry them about having them registered. You’d just ride them through the yard next door and down to the creek and into the salt pans. That was on the weekends and that. Our parents knew where we were and everything.

Some of the blokes that were with us some of their fathers were mechanics and they used to help us if any of them needed fixing. It was good because those fathers used to meet the other fathers and they would never meet possibly because we all met each other at school. When Jo Bloggs meets Billy Smith’s father and they sit down and have a talk and they said, “Where do you

drink?” And he says, “Such and such a pub,” and the relationship between the families grew. By doing that, as we grew older we got out of that part of the old swamp motorbikes we started moving up to cars. Our fathers would still help us. We would go to their place because there was always a mechanic, panel beater or a spray painter.

Our fathers knew where we were. It was always, “I’m going round to Billy’s place, Mum, I’ll see you this afternoon.” “Yeah, no worries.” We didn’t have any phones but they knew where we were. Our mothers would often bump into each other in those days, we didn’t have supermarkets like we have nowadays, we just had pretty well the one corner store. The mothers used to get together and say,

“Billy came around the other day. He fell off his motorbike.” Or, “He had a puncture and we had to fix it up.” Their wives used to have a chat and the fathers and husbands and that would probably bump into each other in the pub. That sort of snowballed then onto Jo Bloggs would say to Billy Smith, “Your son has got a

bit of a keen eye for mechanics. I think I know where I can get him an apprenticeship.” That sort of comradeship, just like I experienced in the army, has been there all my life sort of thing with meeting people who are friends for the rest of your life.

Yes.

Twelve.

He knew he was crook but he didn’t tell anyone. He had an ulcer, it was sort of like cancer as they call it nowadays. He could have been treated if he went to the doctor. He was a butcher by trade and a slaughterer at the meat works and

he was forever in and out of the cold room and that. When they had a shut down he had to clean it. From what I have heard of the medical things now, what is that stuff they get, the disease in the lungs?

Yes. That gets into your lungs and working with the insulation in the cold rooms he used to do that sort of thing.

In those days they didn’t know anything about it. I was twelve.

It was hard. He was a good father. Where the meat works used to be across the road they used to have a slaughter yard down there for one of the

butcher’s shops in town here. Where they used to keep the cattle out in the paddock there after the killing season, or even during it, he would get me to go in the paddock there and I would pick buckets and buckets of mushrooms. You pay nowadays seven bucks and in those days they were just growing in the paddock wild. I would give them to him and he would take them to his

mates and give them to them in the pub. His mates in the pub would take me in and I would have a raspberry drink. One bloke I remember in particular was a fisherman and he used to give Dad bottles of oysters. That is when I first started to like oysters. I love oysters. It was sort of like a barter system. This bloke got the mushrooms because he lived over at South Townsville and he didn’t have the access that I

had. Even today I love mushrooms.

Yes, a scrounger, in Vietnam too.

I hate to see things to go to waste if I can find some use for it. I’m a bit of a Steptoe [TV show ‘Steptoe and Son’] –

I collect junk. Someone is always looking for a piece of steel of some bolts. It is always handy. In Vietnam it used to come in very handy too because I’m a keen gardener and I’ve got a veggie garden. When we were in the bush and that, if we came to a village I’d always be scrounging for veggies because the Vietnamese are superb gardeners, veggie gardeners. Our

ration packs were good and I still like them, but with a bit of extra like some radish and some shallots and celery mixed in with it it became a restaurant meal then.

No, he was in that category where anyone was involved with the

land like they didn’t want, graziers and the butchers, because he was a butcher too.

Yes.

Small pieces but not that much though.

A lot of fortification was done on Magnetic Island and down on The Strand [road along Townsville’s beachfront], close to the CBD and not far from here, it would be ten minutes drive, there used to be a sort of an igloo, a bunker. It was just on the edge of town and we all found it when we were kids on our pushbikes because we would go

exploring. You would always find something. There was always a bit of scrap metal. You’d always have a carry on the back of your bike and you’d have a bag and that to put anything in. We pushbiked far and wide. We had a really good

upbringing. We weren’t home that often. The mothers and fathers liked [the fact] that we were hanging around in a group and looking after one another. Occasionally we might let a girl come along with us if it was one of the blokes’ sisters because the mother or the father would say, “You’ve got to take Joanie along,” or Jill along, or whatever her name was. We’d say, “No, not a female.”

We would have to take her along.

No, not that I can remember.

No, very rarely.

No, that was hardly mentioned or publicised. Borneo you heard a bit about, Borneo and Malaya. Apart from that the media wasn’t like it is nowadays. They didn’t think they would

bother about it. I might have read it in the paper but in those days it sort of didn’t strike me as should I be taking notice.

There was no Lavarack Barracks which is

a big base now. It is quite huge. I think down at Kissing Point they had a reserve. They had the CMF [Citizens Military Force] in those days.

The normal English and maths. It didn’t go down too well with me but I was good at what was called manual training like woodwork and sheetmetal and drawing.

Technical drawing, yes.

I used to like that, working with your hands and that and doing things like that. I had to go to another school for that. From Helen Park School I went on a pushbike at least once a week. It would have been ten minutes on a pushbike and once a week we would go. It was good and I enjoyed that.

They had it set up for it, yes.

We would get to take all the things you made home and you would skite to your mother and father. Dad was gone then. Mother thought it was really good because we would make baking dishes out of tin and we’d do soldering.

I don’t know if they have it at school nowadays. They might but I’m not too sure. That is where you met some other kids from other schools coming there too. We met a few different varieties. Sometimes you didn’t get along because where we live here we were surrounded with our gang of boys and that and the girls stuck with themselves.

Across the creek there was another mob and we didn’t see eye to eye sometimes and had the odd shanghai fight.

Yes.

Yes.

Not so much the birds. The ones that came around here

that we would have around the house were [Indian] mynah birds. They are pests they are. They get into the ceiling of your house. They will lay a nest and that or not so much lay a nest but bring in lice. The lice gets in your ceiling and it falls down. There might be a little crack there in the ceiling where a crack in the timber is and the next thing you know you’ve got lice in the house. It is like fleas or worse than fleas.

The old birds we didn’t go shooting any of them. I used to have them myself in a cage, finches.

Yes.

Yes and dogs and that. Recently, Nipper my dog now, the neighbour across the

road has got a cat and the cat wandered over here. Nipper wasn’t worried about the cat but some strange dog came around and Nipper was looking after the cat. The cat got away but Nipper ended up having a blue with the other dog. They got caught on the fence and he was limping around the place. I took him to the vet and he had a broken hip. The vet said, “How old is he?” This was about three years ago or four years I think. He was about ten I think. He sad, “Do you want him put down?” I said,

“No, fix him.” It cost me six hundred dollars. People said to me, “You’re mad.” I said, “No, one man, one dog.” I have had him for ages and he is fourteen now. He is very faithful. So is the cockatoo I have. I have always had animals but not so much cats.

Yes. I lot of people have said I’m a bit of an

animal person. I couldn’t get anywhere near a water buffalo in Vietnam. As soon as they smelled an Aussie or a Yank or anyone strange they didn’t like us one bit.

The older one, he worked in the railway yards at and then he ended up going to the public works. Then I hardly ever saw him because he was always out west. Public works in those days had to go and maintain railway stations and police stations and schools. Now it is all subcontracting work whereas in those days Public Works looked after all those. He travelled all through the west and came home occasionally.

My younger brother worked in a retail shop for a while and then joined the air force. He spent quite a few years in that so I hardly ever saw him. It was just Mum, my sister and myself.

I did with the younger brother,

but the other brother, Edward, he was older so he was out. He had a motorbike and he was out with his mates so we didn’t see much of him. The other one was younger and my mum would say, “You’ve got to look after your younger brother,” so I’d have to drag him along wherever we went. He is still here. He lives downstairs and I live upstairs. He is still single. He works in the construction game.

Really we’ve had a really good upbringing. We did some crazy things but I have no regrets really.

I started boxing when I was seventeen I suppose, or sixteen. I was still the same weight as I was when I was in Vietnam 35-odd years ago or whatever it was. I wasn’t built for playing football or anything like that. When I was even younger I was in the Salvation Army sports team

running and stuff like that and high jumping. Apart from that there was boxing and that would probably be it. Boxing would keep you pretty occupied with your training. Then we used to go away to different tournaments. The furthest south I went was

Bowen and that was a long way. The roads are bad now but you should have seen them then. Horse and buggy tracks they were. We’d go to Charters Towers to boxing tournaments and we would be away the weekend. We would meet a lot of people. About that time I think we were starting to notice the girls.

With the boxing, after you have had your bout and all the rest had theirs the boxing club or the town that you went to would then have in the hall there, or a marquee, biscuits and cheese. You wouldn’t eat that

much. You might have a light breakfast before your bout but you wouldn’t eat a big meal so you were chomping at the bit for a bit of tucker. So you would have a feed. The girls used to come with their fathers because their fathers would want to watch the boxing and the fathers wanted to keep an eye on the girls. The fathers wanted to keep an eye on the girls and keep an eye on us. They would say, “You stay away from my daughter.” I made quite a few nice

relationships over the years.

There were three two-minute rounds usually, yes.

No. The gloves are pretty well the same size now as they were back then.

Quite a few, compared to nowadays, I’ve been to one or two and it was nothing in comparison to the people who used to come in those days. Even the shows used to have them. They still have them now but back then it

was good fighting in those days. I used to go on a couple of those tournaments. You would win money. After a fight was over and if you put on a good show, the audience would throw the money into the ring and you used to go and collect it all. You would make some good money.

The first time it is but after that it doesn’t worry you that much because you are doing sparring with fellows who are heavier than you and lighter than you so you get to experience a bit of a

flogging. You’ve got to make sure you don’t get the small one and you don’t hurt him. With me, I’m thin now and I was still thin back in my younger days, so I was a bit like Cassius Clay [world heavyweight champion, Mohammed Ali]. I danced like a butterfly and stung like a bee. It is not so

much in those days about whether you put the bloke on the canvas, it was more the amount of times you hit him. I was fast on my feet and I’m still pretty fast I reckon for my age. I was fast on my feet and a lot of times the other bloke I would punch him. Before he had finished a sentence I would have hit him three times. The judges merit you on your footwork and your punching. I made sure I kept out of his

way because at my height some of the fellows were short and stocky and I had to make sure they didn’t get in under my guard and that because they’d pulverise me. I had to make sure I kept away. I would use the whole ring.

I then carried that on. Once I started working I went into a few tournaments then and eventually I was going out and partying so I slowed down a bit. When I went into the

army, because we were pretty fit after a while there, I gave it a try with inter-company sports.

Determination and

physical fitness and eyeballing the other bloke. When you look at him and when you go up and touch gloves you just say, “You are mine.”

Yes. I went in quite a few different sports in the army. I went in the inter-company sports. I think I was in

B Company at Singleton. They have A, B, C and D companies. I’m pretty sure they were betting. I heard rumours that the company commander and his company had a book going. B Company commander said to A Company commander, “My boys are better than yours.” “Put your money where your mouth is.” It was probably the same with the sergeants.

I went in the boxing tournament there. I fought a civilian; he wasn’t army, because they reckoned I was a bit too experienced. They had to get an outsider for my weight. It used to be New South Wales and I think it was lightweight. Eight stone or something it was. They have changed all the

weights around nowadays. I fought him. He was good, very good. He won on points. They gave him the trophy. He got a beautiful trophy. They gave me a free air trip anywhere on the east coast of Australia, TAA [Trans Australia Airlines]. I was happy. The other bloke I fought, he was happy and the company commander was happy. I went on the obstacle

course myself and another Townsville bloke here and another fellow that came from Rockhampton. The obstacle course was hard in those days, it was pretty hard. I have seen them at Canungra and the wall they go over now is sometimes a bit bigger than a front yard fence. The one we used to go over you’d have to get two blokes and just

throw the first bloke up to the top. He would get to the top and the rest of them would use his body to climb up over him. We won that one. This other fellow who was with us in the obstacle course, he was a dark fellow, he was a really top bloke and I often see him in Townsville here. He runs Butler Safari Tours here. He won the

javelin throwing and the cross-country run. Our platoon won the march-out. Once you do something like that the officers

have got all your paperwork from when you first come into the army, like who you are and where you come from, and they know everything about you. It is good that they didn’t let on that I volunteered to go into National Service.

Yes.

It was that far away that we sort of said in some ways it doesn’t really concern us. But as it sort of

started to step up when the training teams all went over and then the troops started going. Some of my friends in Townsville, the people I grew up with, some of them were in the first call-up. When they came back I was pretty well just keen to go sort of thing. They told me all about it and what it was like

out there because they were all in different situations. One was in artillery and another one was like in the service engineers they call it. I had it pretty well figured out with what was going on and how bad it was and how bad it was going to get.

No that was about the first. Back when you were young there was no army presence and there were not many people talking about it.

The main road just along here in town there used to be a shop on the corner. It was only a little corner shop run by a

Chinese gentleman. In those days you could buy firecrackers; he had them in the window. One day a few of us went along and we had this nice beautiful big magnifying glass we picked that up when we were down at the back of the railway yards looking for

scrap metal to take and sell. It had come from an old railway lamp and it was beautiful and a big one. We went down to this shop that had all the firecrackers in it with this magnifying glass. We just sort of waited until the sun got to the right angle and we used the magnifying glass to put the spot right through the window onto the firecrackers. The next thing it ignited and we got

one going. The next thing, ‘bang’, off it went. It nearly blew his window out! We took off. In those days most of the time the cops, or some of them, had an old utility. Sometimes I even saw them on pushbikes. So by the time by the police arrived we were long gone.

He must have thrown water on it or something but from then on he never put firecrackers in his window again. He used to put veggies there. Then he ended up getting a shade so that the sun wouldn’t get on his veggies. We never got caught. We were very lucky though. It was stupid – we could have burned the shop down. There were just normal other things. The

headmaster, I’ve forgotten how many times his letterbox got blown up by different people. Once you found out where a school teacher lived that you didn’t like and it was easy to find out where they lived, you’d follow the home or whatever and, ‘bang’, it was their letterbox too. You can’t buy firecrackers nowadays.

I wasn’t too keen on schoolwork and they knew that. I used to wag school a lot. In those days I could somehow just sign my mother’s name and sign a letter. I wouldn’t just take one day, I’d take two or three. You would make up anything like your mother was

crook. My younger brother went to the same school as me and the teachers would ask him and he’d say, “Yeah, Mum’s crook. She has hurt her leg and Barry is staying home and looking after her.” I would go fishing and crabbing. And there was some other bloke and he did the same too. I didn’t like schoolwork that much. I was in charge of

garbage detail. We had a yardsman but I think he was an old alcho [alcoholic]. He used to hide in his shed all the time. The only time I ever went near him was because in those days we used to have to make ink. It used to come in a powder and we used to have to make the ink for the inkwells and stuff. It was my job after lunch to go and pick up all the bins and I used to have my own gang,

hand picked. They didn’t like schoolwork that much either. You had the bin for the scraps and the papers and the one for the scraps was pretty close to the old incinerator that we used to use. We used to burn all the papers and the pig man used to come and pick up the scraps every day.

It would be always at ten or something for the paper because at school in those days we used to get free milk in small bottles. They used to have a little foil-like top on them. Every two or three weeks we would have to clean out the incinerator. That would take us nearly all afternoon. It would certainly take us a while to dig the hole. We used to dig a hole down in the

back of the playground area because there was a bit of a hollow there and bury all the bits of tin or bottle tops or whatever. Then we would have to take them back. The bike shed where you put your bikes in

was where the tap was to wash all the bins out. One day one of the blokes in my gang brought this spanner to school, a shifting spanner I think it was. You didn’t have spanners in those days, it was rare. He must have borrowed it off his

father. I said, “What are you going to do with this?” He came up with the craziest idea. He said, “We’ll go into the girls’ bike shed and we’ll pick up the girls’ seats.” Just beneath the pushbike seat there is just one bolt that goes right through it. We got that out and we turned, I don’t know, before it looked like we’d get caught about thirty bike seats back to front and

tightened the nuts on them. So when they came out they couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t turn them or anything. No one ever found out who they had done it but they had a funny idea it was us. Someone couldn’t have done it in their lunch break because they’d have been seen, they reckoned. We didn’t get caught.

Yes. There was quite a bit. I’ve forgotten that. It was no big deal. You hurt for a minute or so. You had to make sure you didn’t laugh because he used to get real cranky. It didn’t happen to me but it happened to this other bloke. I was outside waiting for my turn to come.

I heard ‘whack’ for the first one because he was getting two cuts. The next thing I was waiting for the second one and I thought, “It will be my turn next.” The next thing I heard was him bellow. I thought, “What the hell is going on in there?” The next thing the kids came out. The headmaster came out of here and I think he might have sworn too. He said, “Youse two get the hell out of here!” We bolted. I can’t think of the kid’s name. I said,

“What the hell did you do?” He said, “When he was going to hit me the second time on the other hand I pulled it away at the last minute and he hit himself in the leg with it.” This kid, they watched him then, they were sweating on him. I always remember that one and we told the rest of the kids in the class. The teacher found out. The teacher was right onto him then

too. After a while they forgot about it because the teacher saw the funny side of it. As well as clean up the bins downstairs we used to have to clean the teachers’ staff room out of all the rubbish and that. We’d sometimes have to go up early. We only used to have an hour, I think it was. We would stand outside the

door before it was time to go up there and we’d listen to what they were saying. It would have been probably a week later and they were still talking about the headmaster. They said, “He’s all right but he’s a bit strict.” I think it was probably one of the teachers, I don’t know, but they were having a good old giggle and a laugh about it. The teachers were young and he was pretty old, the headmaster.

Where the school room was it was just like a normal everyday school with a veranda around it. This one was built off from the veranda so they couldn’t see us coming. They only had a window that was poking out onto the parade ground. So we could just stand outside the door. We would find out what was going on and when we were going to have a

sports day. They used to take us swimming. We used to go down to the pool by bus once a fortnight, I think it was, swimming. We would tell the kids that there would be a sports day. The kids, just like any school, it was like the bush telegraph and everyone would know. One of the kids might

say, “What time are we knocking off class?” to whatever class it was where the teacher may be teaching. “We’re going to play sports.” He’d said, “How did you find out?” “Billy Smith told me.” “How did he find out?” The next thing was he would go through the whole class asking, “How did you find out?” Someone said, “It was another fellow in such a class.” He’d go, “How did he find out?” “I don’t know.”

He was confused. With me, even when I was a kid I used to like gardening. The person next door was a gardener but I used to do more veggies and he used to be into flowers. I would flog some flowers out of his garden and I’d take them and give them to the teacher. She thought it was

Mickey Mouse [grouse – wonderful]. She knew I was getting out of her hair. I was on garbage detail and if the yardsman needed a hand for anything they’d come and get me or he’d ask for me. I’m sure he used to have some grog stashed in his shed.

Yes, and I still do now.

It was brown-nosing all right but it got me off a lot of times. There was one time she didn’t take too kindly to. Every Christmas when we were breaking up you’d have ice creams and all that. In those days there weren’t any eskies. The esky was a

green canvas and it would have been about a metre tall and about six hundred across and it was insulated. It was heavy-duty canvas. We two kids would be flat out picking one up. At that time they used to keep ice creams in it and that. We got into the store room this time and cleaned it up. The blokes I were with, my gang, we were going to scare the pants off this

kid, this girl. She was a bit of a hoity-toity one. I said, “Righto, you go and get her.” I climbed into this esky and put the lid down. The lid was about one hundred ml [millimetres] thick at the top there. She didn’t come in. They were going to tell her about some ice creams or something and whether she wanted some fruit or lollies or something. My gang didn’t go and get the

girl, they went and got my school teacher and she came in. Just as she came in I split the lid back and I jumped out. She nearly went flat on her back. I really got in shit that time. Then she saw the funny side of it and the rest of the mob saw the funny side of it and I saw the funny side of it so everything was all right. She gave it to me for a little while

but she didn’t dob me in to the headmaster.

If it was another teacher I would have been in deep trouble.

No. The only thing I had like that was when I was in the Salvation Army sports team.

We had parade each morning. Up went the old flag.

We would all get in the parade and the headmaster would get on the grounds there and he’d say a bit of a speech then we’d all march off to class.

Yes. Nowadays, too you often hear about it that the kids want heaters in their rooms and air conditioning. I can’t think how we were affected by it in those days. Air conditioning was like putting someone

on the moon, it wasn’t even thought off. There were no ceiling fans, it was just open windows. They were big classes too in those days. It was a more casual approach I suppose. I don’t know what it s like now, but if

you were getting behind or you didn’t understand, the teacher didn’t climb on your back. She’d say probably, “Stay behind after school,” or at lunch hour or something like that. You would stay and she would explain it to you and she’d try and make out that it wasn’t just you, it was someone else who couldn’t understand some part of some subject or whatever it was, and it was good.

It was called Grade Eight. I don’t know what it is call nowadays. I only spent six months I think at high school. A fellow down the road, he worked in the bakehouse. It was an old

wooden one with an old wood-fired oven. With my father being a butcher I might have inherited some of that from him. The bakehouse also had a bit of a butcher shop. That is where you used to go and cut the meat up and mince it. The meat would come from the big abattoirs or butchers or whatever and then you’d have to cut it

it all up to the right size for the pies and the sausage rolls. I picked up handling meat pretty well. I was still going to school and I used to go there at the weekends. It was a double-decker oven and I was still a bit short. In those days the Coca Cola used to come in bottles and in wooden boxes of twenty-four. I used to get two wooden ones to stand on

to give me the height to get into the top oven. The peel would have been probably this big pot about five metres long like they have in a pizza shop. It was five metres long this one in the bakehouse and you used to have to slide these things into the oven.

Yes, like a pizza shop when they slide it in.

At weekends I would have to go and light the fires for the ovens. There was one big one. The wood used to get delivered. I didn’t mind doing that. We used to put all the cakes on display in the front window. They got me drunk one day, the older ones they were all adults, and I went to sleep so they picked me up and put me in the window where the

cakes were. They put cream all over me. It was great fun. Across the road was a wine cellar. The bloke who ran the bakehouse was a German. He used to send me over there sometimes to get some wine for him, it used to be in these huge big wooden casks, I would go over there and get it for him and he used to give me a

sip of it. I didn’t like it that much though.

Mum said I was hanging around all the time and they didn’t need one there, but through them and another fellow down the road they got me an apprenticeship at another bakehouse right in the heart of town.

Yes. You had a lot of free time. When you are young you don’t need much sleep and that and if you started at three in the morning you could be finished at ten o’clock. You would have the rest of the day off – you would go and sleep and go out. A lot of

times I used to leave a party and I would take someone home, a girl home, and then go straight to work.

Good parties. There was a bit of drinking and a lot of music.

It was like they play nowadays, the old rock and roll. They are reviving it again, they still have it. They might have the rap music and that but they still have the oldies, especially up north here; they play them all the time. There were the odd drugs around. There was one they used to call purple hearts.

I remember that one, that was probably equivalent to drinking a dozen beers or something with the purple hearts you would get pretty hooked up. There were no really big drugs, there was nothing, no hard stuff.

Similar, yes.

They were good clean parties. There were pretty well an equal number of male and females. With Townsville being small in those days a lot of blokes had a steady girl. They tended to stay with them. There were

one or two who just didn’t want to go steady and they played the field the same as a lot of us did too.

A lot of the hotels had cabarets. Some of them used to charge a cover charge for

entry into them. They had good bands; DJs [disc jockeys] weren’t even invented in those days. They had live bands and they had like a DJ, but not like they do nowadays. Music was always loud.

There wasn’t much traffic on the road in those days and we were probably drink driving but there wasn’t any traffic. You would stay pretty well at the one place nearly most of the

night. After it closed there would be a party at someone’s house. You would stay there. Or if someone’s parents were away you would party there until some ungodly hour.

I was driving.

I was the show pony. I had a white Triumph

Spitfire sports car. That is probably equivalent to owning a flash car nowadays, the latest model Falcon or a Jag [Jaguar]. It was a sports car in those days.

No. After that I think my mum had money saved and I think my

mum helped and I paid it off. It was a nice one too.

Yes, the ladies like it.

Yes.

The next door neighbour, her son, we used to call him

‘uncle’ because he would have been the same age as our father, and they had a hut down there right on the beach type of thing. We used to spend a lot of time there in the school holidays and even when I was working. People I knew had a place up at Saunders Beach and two other people I

knew had one down at the Houghton. Even now, with the fishing club I’m in with the RSL [Returned and Services League], we have a hut down the Houghton and we go down there quite a bit. I went camping. It wasn’t so much out in the scrub part but more fishing and crabbing. Where there are swamps around there are always crabs.

It was beautiful but nowadays it has all gone. In those days you could go over in your tinny [aluminium fishing boat]. You didn’t have to worry about the coastguards. You didn’t have to worry about flares and trip sheets. In those days you would whiz over in your tinny and park it on the beach and go to the pub and have a few beers and sleep on the beach. They’re gone. They’re all gone.

It’s a thing of the past. I can remember Mum took us there when I was about twelve, I suppose, and it was beautiful. There were jellyfish around. I can’t remember about these other stingers that kill you. I can’t remember any of them being around because we used to

swim out in the ocean all the time. Even when I was a kid I used to be in the Boy Scouts and we used to go over there to Florence Bay. They built a resort and it’s gone broke. All the wildlife and the bird life they had over there has just changed. It is not for the better, either. It is a

shame really. They may as well build a road over there and class it as another suburb of Townsville.

That’s true. I was always out, I was hardly ever home. I was always at home on Sunday evening because Mum used to make a

baked dinner every Sunday. I miss that baked dinner. I am a pretty good cook and so is my brother. I miss Mum very much. We were very close, very close. When she started to get crook my relations wanted to put her in a

home. I sort of told our relations in a not so polite way where to go; consequently, they don’t talk to me any more. I’ve never heard from them since. She has passed away. So for two years I slept on the floor beside her bed and I washed her and bathed her and fed her. There were three nurses coming every day because they used to have to give her needles. It was just old age; she was

eighty-six but she had a good innings. She was born and bred in Groot and that’s about an hour’s drive from here. The old man came from west at Woodstock and that’s about the same, an hour’s drive. That is where I get my love of the bush, from the pair of them. She grew up on like a dairy property. The three nurses reckoned I was the bees

knees for looking after her like that. As I said to them, “You can have plenty of fathers but you can only have one mother.” And they said, “Yes, that’s true.” She was a really beautiful woman.

Even from that early stage I knew how it was affecting some blokes, especially this one with artillery. Some parts I was asking him about and other parts he would tell me about out in the bush, where they set up a fire support base and how they’d go to

town and how the Vietnamese were sometimes. There were pickpockets over there. You’d be talking to one and the next thing you know your wallet had gone out of your back pocket. It affected him. He ended up committing suicide – he blew himself away. To this day

I we wish we had have known what was going on, but we didn’t. He shot himself. The other one didn’t see much bush life. He was mainly in the base camp, Nui Dat. He was just like a bowser boy and would fill up trucks and helicopters. He didn’t

do much time out bush. He turned into a real dead-set alcho [alcoholic]. He met a woman and he came good and got married. He is all right.

The people. I wanted to know a bit more about the people.

Both, so I knew when I went through rookie and corps training what to expect. In Vietnam, the artillery fellow would have probably been out in the bush with the fire support base that they built. He was telling me about how there were a lot of swamps over there and the

river system was the same as here in Townsville, which they are. The beaches are the same as Townsville here. He told me how he had heard of other battalions and how they were ambushed and

how they went out bush with helicopters or with APCs [Armoured Personnel Carrier]. I knew – and I’ve got some slides of it – he said, “Don’t sit inside an APC. Always sit on the back.” Every time I went on one we always sat on top and never inside because if you got hit with an RPG [Rocket Propelled Grenade] it goes right through the sides and it kills you instantly. If they do fire [the RPG] and it hits it [the APC], half the time if you are sitting on top you get blown off, but at least you might survive.

You’d go to a fire support base, and if you went into a Yank one to get a resupply you would just grab your water and your tucker and clear off because they had a good reputation for getting mortared. Even though they are over in Iraq now, they are getting mortared and mortared because they don’t know where they are coming from. We used to go to the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] base and the fire support base and get some supplies, Aussie ones too. We would get supplied and we’d duck off back out bush again. We felt more

comfortable.

We were all pretty well the same age. He might have been a year below me or a year older than me, but we all seemed to be getting called up. Some were missing out, some were getting

called up and some joined the regular army. One bloke joined the regular army. I felt like the odd card out type of thing but I kept it to myself. I only told everyone at the last minute. They said, “You’ll be all right. You’ll end up in the catering corps.” I said, “No way. I’m going with the boys.”

A lot of it was probably the media too because at that stage you were listening to a bit and watching a bit on TV [television] and you were taking it in. It could have been one of my relations. My mum’s

brother, he got killed over there too in some part of Egypt or somewhere over there. My brother, the older brother, he had done time in was it Wakol [Brisbane army camp], down south. They had a National Service in those days and for him it was only three months or six months. I felt like I was the

old true-blue ocker Aussie, “If they are going, I’m going.”

No. I can show you later on. They sent me a piece of paper that said, “You are indefinitely deferred.” I hummed and haa’d and I said, “Bugger it.” I went in there and it used to be the employment office

in town there. The bloke there said, “Are you sure you want to volunteer?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Righto.” Then I filled out these forms and I’ve got them there and I’ll show you later on. He said, “I’ll let you know when they’ve got the forms.” I went in for a medical and I passed the medical.

That’s when I think I might have told the boss then. He went off his rocker a little bit. “You’re mad, you’re mad, you’re mad.”

My marble didn’t come up [his birthday was not pulled out of the barrel]. A lot of people would have loved to have got that, the old ‘indefinitely deferred’. I’d been a bit of a

cheeky bugger most of my life and that’s why I caused a bit of strife. When we left here we went by train. We had some parties before I left here, quite a few parties. I even had the boots they wore in Vietnam that they didn’t have here in Australia, the GP [General Purpose] boots. I had them. What we had rookie training they had –

what do you call them? – the ABs [?] with the gaiters and I couldn’t wear the GPs. I was the only one who had them. The only ones who had them were the sergeants and the rest of them who had been to Vietnam. The only time I could wear them was when we were out bush. Everyone was quite envious.

Two years, it is on your discharge certificate.

There were parties and then we left by train. It started in Cairns, I think, and it picked up blokes all the way through. Everyone was getting grog smuggled on board. Then the arguments started and then the fighting started, the brawling. The train got a bit of a caning. When we got to

Brisbane there they got us all out on the platform. I can’t think what rank he was but he had cops there and everything. And he was a big brass, a captain or something or a major, and he went, “Who has trashed the train? Who wrecked the train?” Everyone was looking at each other. One bloke steps forward and another bloke steps forward and I step forward and another bloke steps

forward. The next thing the blokes behind us are stepping forward and then everyone is stepping forward. This bloke from the hierarchy took a step back. He said, “Righto you smart asses, who wrecked the train?” The same thing happened again and everyone was stepping forward again. By this time it looked like he was going to fall over onto the railway tracks. So he bailed out the Australians with the cops and I forget what he called us but it wasn’t very nice. We went on the

buses and we got to Enoggera.

I spoke before about the trip down in the train and the bit of fun and

games we had at the station. Then we got to Enoggera on the bus, they lined us all up and we had all our paperwork that was given to us in Townsville here like a train pass and everything, they came along and collected it. I think he was a sergeant and he just ticked it off and then went to the next bloke and ticked it off. He came to me and I handed him my paperwork. He

said to me, “How did you get down here?” Being a bit of a cheeky gentleman I said, “On the train. How do you think I got here?” He said, “You are not supposed to be here.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Look at this. You have been indefinitely deferred from National Service.” I said, “Sorry, wrong one, this one here.” He said, “Smart ass, eh?” He just

wrote something down and I didn’t find out until a long time later what he wrote down.

“Private Clarke has got to be watched.” He put down, “Volunteer.” He kept it to himself; he didn’t tell the rest otherwise it could have been a little bit embarrassing for me. Even at that stage the

blokes were still tied to their mother’s apron strings and a couple did bolt from [the camp] when we were there.

I didn’t know their names but when it came to ticking our names off, because we went by train from there were went to Singleton – not Singleton itself but another town, there’s a railway station close by –

it could have been Muswellbrook – anyway one of those towns close to Singleton itself – and it might have been a sergeant or it might have been a corporal and when they were doing the roll call this lad wasn’t there, he’d done a runner. Even in rookie training some of them did too; they just couldn’t handle it and they just took off. A lot of them were

caught but what happened to them you never found out. No one knew. They would have probably been sent to Holsworthy for three months or six months of their time there and then they’d be discharged. I was in for the long term so I didn’t worry about those blokes. I sort of kept away from the ones that were dead-set against it.

It is like I mentioned before. I already knew what it was going to be like from my mates here in Townsville. They had already been there and seen it and done it. So I knew how the locker situation was and inspections

and the crazy antics that the corporals and the sergeants used to get up to. For me it was a breeze because I already knew how to handle it. For instance, you see it in the movies about how you’ve got to make your bed and everything. It has got to be Mickey Mouse spotless. Mine was Mickey Mouse spotless because I never slept on it. I took a sleeping bag and slept on the floor. In the morning when everyone was running around making beds mine was already there and my locker was Mickey Mouse clean. I would just stroll over to the showers and have a

shave and a shower and come back and go to the mess hall and have breakfast. These blokes were panic-stricken because they probably had their mothers to look after them all those years and they couldn’t handle it.

And my corps training. I’d sleep in it [bed] on the weekends when you knew they weren’t going to do an inspection.

No. When I was a kid

that is all we had. We didn’t have sleeping bags, we just had blankets. Even nowadays I have got a you beaut army sleeping bag. Up here I just use it as a doona because it is too hot to get into. Down there I had a good army one so I was pretty well organised in that department.

To me they were a breeze. They would get you to come out in your underwear. They issued us with this sort of winter-type underwear. Later on we eventually ended up using that to clean with. We’d clean the toilets with it and the baths and things like that.

It was like you see in the western movies. They were long johns and things like that.

They would get you outside your hut and we had PT [Physical Training] gear and long johns and a slouch hat back to front. In thirty seconds you had to be in and out. Some of the blokes were a little bit overweight. Some of them just didn’t take too kindly to it.

If you were late, that is where the army comradeship started. We had one bloke and he was exceptionally big. How he passed the medical I can’t fathom. We used to help him get his gear on and get him out. We would help him because if it

took too long he’d think up some other crazy idea like one thong on one foot and one sandshoe on the other foot and your ABs, your normal bush boots, you would have them bow-tied around your neck as a bow tie. This could go on, depending how slow we were, but we eventually formed a team in our hut.

In the hut there would have been probably fifteen or sixteen I suppose. We worked together. I knew how to clean my buckles and spit polish my shoes before I went there from the blokes here in Townsville so I used to show the other blokes.

With spit polish and new boots, some of them used to not put enough polish on. You spat on the toe of your boot and that. I said to them, “You’ve got to get it so it is a pretty light cream so just leave it in the sun a bit.” It gets pretty cold down there in Singleton. It is just like

using anything that is cold, like paint or… If it has been sitting in the fridge, you can’t apply it. So with boot polish there are small little tricks with your boot polish. With the ironing I used to do a lot of people’s ironing. The blokes here in town showed me how to iron. You could make up your own starch.

You buy it in like a powder and put

it in a spray bottle or whatever. We folded everything in there as well. When we went out we were only allowed to take one small suitcase. We weren’t allowed to take anything and you weren’t allowed to take any vehicles. Another fellow, he comes from

Townsville too, and he knew a lot about it too the same as I did. He was in my company but in a different hut and his relations lived in Sydney. We weren’t allowed to have a car on the base so we had one stashed over in the scrub outside the base. Whatever we wanted in there, we had it there. It could be grog or food or extra boot polish whatever and it was stuck in the car. So when we went off on leave –

we didn’t sneak out that much because we couldn’t – but we always had a car there.

For some of the blokes it was really bad but for me, once again, I knew. They would try and make you or break you. They would break you and then try and make you. You just don’t let them do it.

You just toe the line; it is quite simple. You just try to work together with the other ones, even though you might end up never seeing them again once you leave rookie and corps training. You might end up never seeing them again in a lot of the different units or wherever you go. But at the time you were there you all had to work

together. It would probably have been in the first couple of weeks when the most of the recruit training was pretty hard. When we came back for corps training we were switched on and that. You had your march-out parade. You only need one bloke to balls it up and you

throw everyone else out. Your officers and sergeants or whatever, they jump on not just the one bloke. They jump on him but they jump on the lot of you, and that gets you to get this bloke organised and help him. We did that and tried to show him how to reverse arms; that is that upside down thing with our gun, you do that for funeral services. I got really rapped over the

knuckles. It was rookie training or corps training and they took us down to Newcastle, Swansea I think it was. Some bloke got killed, he was a digger up in New Guinea. They took us down to the funeral march because our platoon had won the march-out parade at the end – we were the champion drill platoon. We got down there and we had the

gun carriage and the coffin on it. They picked me, they must have thought I was potential material, to start the march off. Anyway, Louis is down there in front of me and he has got his sword out. I sort of glanced around and thought, “They’re all right.” I went, “Psst,

go.” He bails out and we march off. Lo and behold, the blokes who were going to pull the gun carriage, we left them behind. We had to stop and wait until they caught up. You did this slow mach with the slow foot. It must have been about two kilometres that we did this with this coffin. I got really rapped over the

knuckles for leaving the coffin behind.

Of course it was.

Yes. That’s why they gave me a stripe not long afterwards. They gave me a stripe, yes.

No, I played it by ear day to day. It’s a bit like I’m doing now. I play it by ear day by day – tomorrow is another day.

Corps training and rookie training?

I think I mentioned about going in the boxing tournament.

Coming from up north here I had handled firearms quite a bit when I was a kid and everything. So

dismantling any sort of gun really was a breeze. Some of the blokes there and quite a few in our mob were all Queenslanders. I think Victorians and West Australians, a lot of them went to Kapooka and there is another place there. A good percentage of us

all knew how to handle weapons quite well. There was grenade practice. I think all the kids had rock fights with someone in the neighbourhood so throwing a grenade was good. They had a big tractor tyre out at like a mock bunker and you dropped down behind it when you threw the grenade. If you could get the grenade in the tractor tyre

your platoon would get a weekend pass. A platoon was thirty blokes or whatever it was. I thought I was a pretty good rock thrower. With throwing that grenade I had three attempts at it and I couldn’t get it in the tractor tyre. None of us did.

Only about thirty metres. It wasn’t

that far. But with the grenade throwing the first time, a rock was different to a grenade, it was a totally different weight. The first bloke threw it and it landed about ten foot in front of the bunk house and the block that we were hiding behind. I dropped down behind it. You had Louis there and he’d stand there and say, “Ready, throw!” You would just drop down behind this concrete wall. One bloke threw it and it landed just over the front and you

could feel the vibrations coming through the ground.

The weight of it, it feels like you are trying to throw half a dozen reef sinkers. It doesn’t look much. It is small and you don’t throw it like a

rock you more bowl it like a cricket ball. And trying to bowl a cricket ball that is twenty times the weight of a cricket ball it doesn’t work that way. You have to sort of half pitch it. You only had three goes. I tried to tell the other blokes, “Just check the weight first.” Check the weight, meaning if you hold it in your

hand and just get the weight. It’s like when you were going to throw a rock on someone’s roof when you were kids you just get the rock and think, “Righto. I can put this right on top of that roof.” You feel the weight.

No. It was only a couple of times. It was expensive I think.

We spent a bit of time on the rifle range.

It is similar to like most of them you see in the movies nowadays. They had like a pop-up target. You walked through in the late evening and they worked

electronically. They would like pop out of the ground. They were in civilian army uniforms.

Yes. At the range itself it was normal. You would block, load and fire, and check your weapons.

All of us were basically good shots. You had the ones that were above average but there were no Davy Crocketts or anything like that. Sometimes for me it was getting a bit boring because I’d done it since I was a kid or sixteen and seventeen years old.

I was taught then when I was a kid. The woman next door, Ally, her brother taught me. I knew how to be safe with a gun.

Not in my lot, but I heard of one bloke dropping a grenade in the actual… I think the sergeant or the corporal was with him showing him and went to help him, and one of them got pretty well wounded and hurt. It went off in a confined space.

Yes. When I was at the range, rifle range, or when there were firearms about, I made sure that I kept on any of these blokes that I thought might be a bit dicky about doing that sort of thing.

It was the same thing. If one bloke balls it up, the rest cop it. You only nuggetted one bloke once. He was a bit of a dirty grub with the way he used to do his locker and that. I’ve got a photo of it. He lives in Townsville. I have been threatening to show his wife. Six of us grabbed him and there was the old boot polish and it was off with his shorts and he had it all over the crown jewels [testicles].

Nuggetting it is called. The only way you can get that off really is you have to use some sort of spirits and once you do that it burns a bit. The old crown jewels get a bit cooked. He came good in the end. He came quite good.

Yes.

I think it was part and parcel of what I knew joining the army and what would be expected

of me. I think I realised that and accepted that it would be ‘kill or be killed’. It is probably not a nice thing to think about I suppose to a lot of people, but it is survival.

A few of them asked me, we had a boozer there, and they’d be questioning me about it. Some of them, and one in particular, he came from Longreach and he was really bush oriented but he didn’t know anything

about the services. He had probably only seen the ocean twice in his life. He used to ask me a lot. We are still good friends – after all these years he still pops in. He lives at Rubyvale, out in the sticks, and he calls in when he’s in town. He listened to what I used to say and then he’d tell some other people.

We would go and do the obstacle course for toughening up sort of thing. With the bigger blokes I would tell them how if you were going over a trench, water, and how to go across with the

ropes. “Don’t take too big of a pace with your hand. Just have your hands pretty well going straight up and down and just work yourself across this trench.” A lot of them used to try to copy me whereas with my build I was quite fit. Another one was when you got the rope with your hands and you had to swing your legs and cross your

legs over it near your ankles and pull yourself across. A lot of them couldn’t do it. I used to say to them, “Just arch your body and bring your legs up in front of you and then swing them back hard and come through and make yourself like a pendulum and you can get your legs up.” They were just little small hints. Like your

basic weapon, when it comes to it you have to put it all together and wear it so that it is comfortable on you. If you are going on a forced march if you have got it hanging too low and it is on your hips after a while it can become quite annoying. And with your pack on your back, I can’t remember the corporals and sergeants showing us how to really pack what

you needed. There was your ration packs that we used to take out bush and our sleeping gear and they didn’t show us how to pack it so it doesn’t annoy your back.

You just lay your pack down flat, the part that is going to go near your back. Then you lift it up like an envelope. You open the flap like an envelope and then you put your

bed roll on that. Then you put your dixie and cleaning gear and ration packs and all the stuff that had edges or was going to annoy your back if it was poking through your pack into your back. You would pack it so that it was flat and the

weight was evenly distributed. Even now – and I’ve seen it hundreds and hundreds of times with some of the kids wearing backpacks going to school – I can see them years down the track going to see a chiropractor with what they put in them and how they wear them. If you are at a fast pace and you are jogging and you are

carrying your weapon and you’ve got your pack on your back, if you are uncomfortable it is just like really wearing oversize boots. I showed a few blokes how it was quicker to make a bed hospital style but no one ever slept on the floor. They used to say, “You’re mad.”

I’d say, “See you in the morning,” and they’d be there fiddling around.

If anything they were sussing us right out. First up they knew that I’d have access to what was going on there when they saw me front up, and they had a look in my locker and that.

We didn’t know how they wanted our gear stacked and your clothes and everything and your sandshoe boots. They said, “Ah, GPs eh?” They quizzed me about that and where I got them from and I told them. So they knew that I had been talking to a vet [veteran]. I told them there were three that had come back that I knew and some had already gone in and some were going in. So they knew. And that is probably why they singled me out sometimes and said,

“Go and fix him up and show him.” If the corporals went and did it, the bloke who was making the balls-up probably would have felt down by having someone. The other blokes used to go, “Yeah, you’re going to pull us down.” Someone like me would go along and say, “Hey, Billy, do it this way,” or something like that.

That would have gone down on my records too – they kept track of everyone. I think I was on guard duty the time I was there. They would say, “I want two volunteers.” They would look around and no one would say anything and they’d just go, “You, you and you.” If it was me they would say, “Volunteer,” and I would say, “Yes,” and I would step forward every time. I was lucky.

I got the first one and it was a beauty. I spent quite a lot of time in the officers’ mess. I did bugger all dixie bashing. I was helping the cooks, being a baker and pastry cook. That was at rookie training towards the end of the year there. We were at rookie training at the beginning of the year and corps training at the beginning of the year. They had their Christmas break-up and we had ours and I was over at the officers’ mess. In the baking trade it is

called pastry margarine and you buy it in a big box. I got that and I carved out a Father Christmas out of it. I used six lobsters for the reindeers; I used celery and shallots for the reins and powdered it up with icing powder. I put it over the margarine because the margarine was a yellow colour. I got these big baking dishes and sat it on that and just

decorated it with lettuce or whatever and different coloured veggies. That was the centrepiece for the officers’ mess. They reckoned because of where I came from, the officers there, and my company commander said, “That’s my boy, Private Clarke.” “An ex pastry cook, eh, a baker? You can go in the Catering Corps.” I said, “No.”

They wanted to put me in the Catering Corps.

“No way. I’m going with the men.” So when the dixie bashers finished, because the officers used to stay there sometimes until two in the morning drinking, I would just stay back with the cooks. I had good tucker like steak just like the officers were eating. When they cleared off I would give the cooks a hand to clean up the tables. They might have kept one dixie basher there

and we’d hop into all the leftover wine. We’d be waltzing back to the barracks. The other blokes, they didn’t know, I didn’t let on to what was going on. They said, “You’re mad.” I used to get picked quite a bit to go to the officers’ mess. Recruit training was quite good.

The SLR [7.62 mm Self Loading Rifle]. I don’t know if they are still using them

now, but they were still using them until only recently, it is a good weapon. There was the M60 machine gun; they’ve just got an updated version of that one, the M60.

The machine gun? Very good.

Because of the amount of firepower it had and because it had a link of ammunition. You always carried one hundred links when we went out bush. In Vietnam we used to carry at

least two hundred links. They are quite heavy too. That was your firepower.

Yes. That was another trick I learned. In Australia in your army issue gear you get your poncho and you get like an

air bed, a small one and a black one. It’s a blow-up one. We never used it. It used to make too much noise. It used to creak and squeak and everything. We cut it in strips and we’d slide the M60 rounds of link through it and connect it up again. Then they wouldn’t get tangled up in the scrub or get tangled up in the mud or anything like that and they were clean. The other gun was an M79. That was

more like… It fired a shell that was about the same size of a fifty-cent piece. It was an explosive one. It was a shotgun shell. I think it had nine ball-bearings in it. They were huge ball-bearings. With the rifle and that I used to be an average shot, but with this M79 I excelled beautifully in shooting. You don’t just line up a target and look down the barrel and shoot, you

aim the barrel up in the sky and you fire the barrel up over the tree and down it comes. You might have seen that bloke in the movie Apocalypse Now at that fire support bloke. The Viet Cong is out in the scrub and he’s like, “GI, GI, go home.” The bloke comes out and he puts the M79 to his shoulder and all you hear is ‘bip’. The next thing there is no more VC [Viet Cong].

You judge the distance. It has got sights on it that are about eight inches long. You use them sometimes but you just try to judge the distance. When I first fired it a couple of times when we were out in the open for some unknown reason I had an uncanny way and I could just pick the distance. It was right up through the

trees and just lob it however within about twenty metres of who I was aiming at or even closer.

I don’t know. Even the instructors and that they were quite surprised. In Vietnam

I could use a rifle even just lying down. I could line up a target even lying down and was just an average shot, but not with this thing. It was only about a foot long. You often see them in the movies or even nowadays there are clips of the wars and that going on and that is the main weapon that a lot of them want to carry. They only use it for show ponies.

I ended up carrying it. Once you carried it you had to carry the ammunition that went with it.

In like a bandolier. With the SLR you didn’t have bandoliers, you had pouches.

You had six twenty-shot magazines and one clip on the gun. With the Armalite [rifle], mostly the forward scouts and the platoon commander or the section commander carried them. The riflemen only had SLRs. The forward scout, I played that part once or twice, you would carry anything from

a couple of bandoliers… Dementia! You would probably carry anything from twenty to thirty magazines. There were twenty shots in a magazine for an Armalite because it is very fast and you’d use them up in next to no time – it was automatic – whereas the SLR was semi-automatic;

we weren’t issued with them. It was only the hierarchy that had Armalites. We would have loved to have one of them but we didn’t get them. Their firepower was unreal; the SLR travels at two thousand and seven hundred and fifty feet per second whereas the Armalite travels at five thousand two hundred and eighty.

That is nearly double and consequently it used up a lot more ammunition than an automatic. The power of them all, and the M60, so you had quite a bit of firepower when you were out bush in Vietnam, when you harboured up and camped for the night. You were

mostly travelling in a section or in a platoon, depending on the terrain and where you are going. Sometimes they would split you up and some would go one way and some would go the other. You would use one area as base camp. It would probably be like the principal of a pushbike wheel, the headquarter group would be where the main

sprocket is on the bike and where the spokes go out one lot goes out along the distance to where the other spoke meets and then comes back in again. So where the spokes make a triangle you would cover quite an area, plus you are in contact with the headquarters in the middle. There were smaller groups – all of us used to love travelling in a small group, in a section, because you travelled faster and quicker and quieter.

Yes.

If you were at the back fence or if I’m at the front fence we keep eye contact. If I’m the forward scout and I see a track or a tree that has been cut down probably to use as a

bunker and there could be tracks going left or right or straight ahead and I can’t decide.

It was similar. If I wanted to see you and you are in eye contact I would just tap the top of my head and go like this – put my fingers round my eye – and that means, “You come here and I want to show you something.” Other sign language, if I just wanted to talk to you – fingers around mouth. See – fingers around eye. Come here – tap on top of head.

If I am not too sure about this track and whether to go left or right I would just go, “See,” and, “Come here.” If I wanted to talk to the lieutenant, he’s got the bars so I tap the top of my shoulder. It was three fingers on the top of your arm for a sergeant, two fingers for a corporal and one finger for a lance corporal if I wanted to talk to one of them. They would come up and they’d go, “Yeah, yeah, fine. Let’s get the sarge [sergeant] up, eh?”

By that time, this happens in minutes, there is a voice back to the company through the sergeant to the lieutenant. He has got the radio there and he is in contact with another company. It could be three hundred clicks, a click is a grid square, he could be three hundred clicks away

or three thousand clicks away. He would just whisper in the radio, “Possibly contact ahead.” So he could be talking to that one up there or if that one does the same and be talking back to you so we were in contact.

Yes. At

Singleton they took us out into the scrub and we’d make a bunker like they had in Vietnam. Once again, my friends in Townsville had told me how to build it the same as they did over there in Vietnam and the same as what they did when they went through Singleton. So the officers and the sergeants said, “Oh yeah, Private Clarke is cheating again”. I knew –

I was forewarned and forearmed.

Yes, it was very good.

They didn’t tell me about the bloody weather in Canungra. It was cold and you had cold showers at

Canungra. That would be the worst place. They take you there for jungle training before you go to Vietnam. It killed one bloke – he had a heart attack. It was tough, that place, and I mean tough.

No, he couldn’t handle the pace.

No.

It was fast. There was training and running and the obstacle course.

On the obstacle course there was one bloke – he wasn’t in our mob – and he refused to go on it. He had seen what we had to do. They had walked him past it and they had what was called a bear pit. There was a bit of a wall there and you had to go through this bunker and over this wall and drop in this hole there – it was just mud. Whoever was looking after it, probably a lieutenant or a corporal or a sergeant, they would go for a drive up the highway looking for a bit of a

road kill – it could be a wallaby or a possum or a bandicoot – and they would throw that in there. It was just rotten. This one bloke refused to jump in there – it stank to high heaven – but then the faster you’d run. You then had to go across and jump off this tower. About five years ago I went down there when I had to go for a 6/5th reunion. The tower, instead of a drop of about

twenty or thirty feet or something, it is only about ten foot now because someone nearly drowned. They are no longer allowed to put dead animals in the bear pit because somebody nearly got his lung punctured or something by a rib off one of the animals. They are not allowed to do that any more. I had a good old laugh when they told me about it. The tin shacks that we used to shower in, they have kept them there. They knocked all the other places down there and all that’s left there are

tents for one section just to show the public and the tourists that come through what we used to sleep in. Now they have beautiful red-brick buildings.

Like it is for the tourists.

It had a concrete floor and it slept about six or four blokes just on a camp stretcher. You were in a sort of valley there in Canungra in the mountains and it was cold.

I was clued up again in Townsville. Before you put your what’s-a-name down, your swag or your bed and that, on your bed structure, you would scrounge around in the canteen or wherever and get magazines or paper and put that down first on the canvas. That would keep a lot of the cold from coming up through the concrete. You would get some more in between your blanket or whatever and lie newspaper and that there too. Once again I

already knew about that. The officers who we were going through, they would have a clipboard all the time and they’d be writing things down about different blokes like, “He’s a grub,” or, “He’s clicked on, that bloke. He knows what’s going on.” They would be writing it down, so once again they were keeping tabs on you all the time.

They just disappeared.

Yes. They had a nine-mile route march up through all the mountains and everything and one of the blokes passed out. There were all different blokes going through there. There could have been cooks and bottle washers and tank drivers and all different mobs going through. But I was

infantry so I knew what was going on. One bloke, he just sort of passed by the way. He would plonk himself down on the road and that. You’d come back and go, “Where’s Joe Bloggs? All his gear has gone.” You didn’t know and you didn’t ask. With that case there I kept my mouth shut because you didn’t want to let them know that you were a Nasho [National Service Soldier], a volunteer. I

kept that bit about the newspaper and how to pack my gear all to myself.

I would have got rubbished well and truly. Even today some blokes even say when they found out that I was going to Vietnam, or when I came back from Vietnam just recently, they say, “You’re mad.” I said, “You went to Vietnam.” And he said, “Yeah, but I would never go back to the

place, never in a million years.” I said, “You never had to go in the first place.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You do your rookie training and your corps training. You start your rookie training and you get tired of all the bullshit and all that crap that goes on sometimes and you just walk around the parade ground and around the lines and you find a bloke who’s got the most bird shit on his shoulder, nothing below a sergeant, and belt the crap out of him. You get three months or six months in Holsworthy and then you’re out with a dishonourable discharge.”

This bloke said, “No, no, no.” I said, “I’m a true-blue Aussie. My cobbers wanted to stick up for me,” and that really pissed him right off.

Yes and no. It sounded like they were split down the middle and some wanted it and some didn’t. In the north here, once the people sort of realised and found out that I had volunteered and I was going, then that part about, “You’re crazy,” and all that

changed the other way around. They reckoned, “Good on you.” Townsville was a small place in those days and the other blokes were being called up, my mates. While they were over in Vietnam I would go around to visit their mother and that because a lot of them over in Vietnam used to write me letters. They were totally different to what they used to tell their mother because they couldn’t tell their mother what they told me. They would say, “Hop around and see Mum for us.” I would go around with a

six pack [beer] because most of them lived around this area here, and sit down and have a chat to her and talk to her. They would lie to their mother just like I lied to my mother in Vietnam. I wouldn’t tell her what we were doing over there. I felt a bit embarrassed with it. The mothers used to say,

“You’re lucky you didn’t get called up.” The father would say, “He’s all right. My boy will handle it. He’s one of us.” With this conversation I felt left out. I don’t think that helped change or helped make me decide to go or not, because if I had told the truth they wouldn’t have taken me

anyway. I had got two broken collarbones and I didn’t tell them about that when I went for the medical. When I got to Vietnam – and I didn’t find out until we had been in Vietnam about the gear we had to carry. That’s when I told them. They got all my army records and everything and I gave them a false statement. They had to get me an A-frame like the backpackers use to take the weight off my shoulder blades, off my

collarbones, because the weight sits more on your bum. Everyone wanted one then. If they had given me a proper medical they wouldn’t have taken me in, so I lied. I didn’t tell anyone.

Yes.

You go into the unemployment bureau in town and the bloke looks at you and shakes his head. Then you tell them you want to volunteer and he gives you the papers. I still have the papers. They send you out a letter and you have to

front at the same place and the same building for a medical. You pass your medical. Then they let you know and I think they tell you to let your place of employment know and,

naturally, let your parents know. It goes through the chain then and you end up with the paperwork sent up saying, “Report to the train station at such-and-such a time.” They tell you what to bring. It is one suitcase just with bare essentials.

Mother dear knew what I was like from a

kid. She said, “You’re mad, you’re crazy,” but she thought it was good.

Yes. They would have told them they were truck drivers or bowser boys or

cooks. We never told our mothers what really went on over there and what we did. It was a no-no.

Yes, that they were in camp and didn’t go out bush. The letter writing home becomes boring. You write to your mates but with your

mother you are trying to think because your mind is that keyed up with what is going on over there, like, “Will I see another day out?” You would write letters when you were out bush and that and when a chopper brings in your resupply you would send them back out again. Every so often they had a chaplain that came out, a padre, as we used to call them. They were good. They were more scavengers than what I was. They used to find the

cash, weapons, clothes, rice and food and cooking utensils. A lot of times we would bash, burn and bury because we couldn’t take them with us. The next thing you would hear ‘whoosh, whoosh, whoosh’ and it was a bloody chopper coming in. He would get on the horn and ring up headquarters and all that gear would be taken back and given to the orphanage. It was quite good.

From Canungra? We went to Singleton and to Ingleburn and we stayed there for a bit, and that’s when they sorted us all out. That is when they said, “Where do you want to go? We want cooks, bottle washers, truck drivers and infantry.” They said “Infantry, step forward.” “Who wants to go to Vietnam? Step forward.” That is when I let a few people know that I was a volunteer because they wanted to go to

Vietnam. The rest were standing back there. They just said, “You’re going, you’re going and you’re going.” “Oh, no, no, no.”

It was.

I didn’t know a lot of them and a lot of them did a runner. Then the blokes that I was with there we sort of stuck together

then. They wanted to go and I knew I was going anyway. A few of them like Jo Bloggs, he comes from Townsville and it was like, “What school did you go to?” Then I got to know them and we started a bit of a clique going. It didn’t always end up that they went with me sort of thing because they went to different battalions. Me, it was quick. I went to Ingleburn and we stayed there two weeks or a month or

whatever, then it was Canungra. And I never want to see that place again. It nearly killed me and I was pretty fit in those days. From Canungra I caught a train or flew back here to Townsville. 6RAR [Royal Australian Regiment] was based here at Lavarack [Barracks]. I had a nice big party and farewelled everybody. They all thought I was going to be in the

Catering Corps so surprise, surprise! I flew from here to Sydney and met up with some others there. It was Sydney to Darwin, and Darwin to Singapore, and from Singapore to Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City. From there I flew up to Nui Dat. I was in Nui Dat, 6RAR lines for about

a week or two weeks before 6RAR arrived from Townsville here and marched through the city and they were on the Vung Tau Ferry, [HMAS Sydney] an aircraft carrier.

They were based out here, 6RAR. All their blokes had to go on pre-embarkation leave as it was called. They went on leave. I thought, “Where am I going to go on leave?” I live here and was born here, I was there before them. When we came back, I flew earlier when I came back

because when they got back here, 6RAR were based here again and they went straight back into the lines out at Lavarack and they went on leave. “Where do I go on leave? I lived here!” I was down at Lavarack Barracks, there was just a handful of us and we had the run of the place. I took civvies out there and cleaned them up and shaved them and they had a haircut just like us. They lived and slept out there and went to

parade of a morning. We had this dickhead, straight out of Portsea Army Officer Training School. He had never been to Vietnam, he was a greenhorn. All he did was parade in the morning, tick us off, and parade in the afternoon. I was a lance corporal. He would say, “Lance Corporal Clarke, have you got a couple of boys there? Go and do some weeding and fix up the ground. You take the blokes you need.” “Yep, no worries.” I had these civvies there because

they were wearing the same gear that we would wear out at Lavarack. This officer didn’t know because we would get the roll and just write these blokes’ names down. We would just disappear. One day we went on parade and we had our slouch hats on back to front, everyone on parade – there were probably about thirty of us – and he didn’t even realise.

We used to get into the car and have a few beers and come back. Seeing I liked gardening, out in front of the boozer I made a nice stone pitch garden out of rocks. We would just go and I would tell him – I can’t think of his name; it was lieutenant something – I’d say, “I’m going to build a rock garden for you.” He said, “Very good, very good.” “I need a vehicle to go and get the rocks from up the hill.” He would say, “No worries.”

We’d tee her up and off we’d go, we’d drive into town in a Land Rover. We were still in uniform, nobody took any notice and they didn’t know anything. I built the rock garden at the front of the boozer and it turned out quite well, and once again I got a pat on the

back. Then slowly the blokes started trickling back in that had finished their leave and then were pretty well back up to full strength. It must have been how the army had rigged it or something but it seemed like I was out there three months or something. I forget exactly how many months I was out there

but over some of those months the blokes started to trickle out. They were discharged. As they left a few new ones came in. It was strange – it felt like losing part of your body when your mates left. They

come up to you now – every now and again they come up north. They will be passing through in the next couple of weeks going up to that Bandanas Park [Atherton Table lands ex-veterans’ retreat] with Higgins or whatever his name is. That retreat that they have got up north there. One is from Tasmania and there are three from Victoria and one from Perth. It was very hard saying, “Hooray,” because you knew you probably

wouldn’t see them again. We all kept in touch, though. About two years ago we had a bit of a get-together and one of them I hadn’t seen since Vietnam because he left before we left over there. It was just like you’d seen him in the supermarket the day before. You would sit down and say, “Geez, you’ve put on a bit of beef, haven’t you? You’ve got a beer gut on you?”

I remembered them when they were all slim. They would look at me and say, “Yeah, you skinny prick, you haven’t changed much.” Just before I got discharged we had to do a CGS [Chief of General Staff] [Command Post] exercise in Canberra. That is like where they play NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] war games. They all come from all over the world, like England and America and Indonesia. They get in the big room and they play the war games.

Anyway, they said, “Delta Company, you are going down as security.” I thought, “I’ve never been to Canberra. I wouldn’t mind seeing what it’s like. Beauty!” They said, “It will be cold.” I said, “Yes, I know.” Anyway, I was living here at Lavarack Barracks and I had a room out there. I get over here and Mum says, “All right. What have you been up to this time?” I said, “I haven’t done anything.” She said, “The

cops were here today.” I said, “I haven’t done anything. I’ve got no fines.” “No,” she said, “they were commonwealth cops.” I thought, “I know what they are after.” I was there all night sweating, sweating and sweating. I got out to work the next day and the old CO pulls me up to come into the office. I was there sweating and sweating.

He said, “We’re going to Canberra.” I said, “Yes, sir. I know.” He said, “You’re on Security Det [Detail].” I sad, “Yes, fair enough.” He said, “You might get a visit from the Federal Police.” I said, “I already have.” The old heart went ‘boom, boom, boom’. All they wanted to do was, seeing I was on security,

they wanted to know who my mother’s father was and who my father’s father was and how he died and where he died and everything about our background. They were doing a security check on me, ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation], and that’s all it was.

Because I could pull up a five-star general and say to him, “Excuse me, sir, could I have a look in your briefcase?” They only had six of us there and we just rotated around, two each time. If he said, “No.” I could say to the MP [Military Police], I would just point to the

MP and say, “This gentleman won’t let me have a look in his briefcase.” If I didn’t do that, and he decided to be a smartie, he could pull one on me. The lieutenant at that time was Ballantyne and he’d say, “Hey, Ballantyne, your security was pretty slack. I just strolled in with my briefcase.” Then I would get the kick in the butt. I used to enjoy pulling up all the brass. I would do it politely, though. So I’m on ASIO files now.

No, there was no leave for me to go. There was nowhere to go.

They called it an advanced detail.

They go down there and set up everything for them and

take over when the other blokes leave. They are still there in Vietnam and when we arrive there the blokes that are already there, we live in their tents and everything. They are a rear detail. There are only probably fifty of them or something. They are left there while the other mob have already gone home. They are left there and they show us all the ropes. It is the same as when we left Vietnam we left some of our blokes behind.

They didn’t leave me behind because they wanted me over here at Lavarack.

It was sprawling and humungous and huge. There were people and planes and helicopters flying everywhere. There was hustle and bustle everywhere.

It was beautiful. It was amazing. It was a big base and it was amazing.

The heat was similar to here in Townsville. There were airstrips. It was on a rubber plantation. We flew in a Caribou and you can’t look out of the

window so you didn’t really have a good chance to have a good look. Over the next few days I was there the blokes showed us around.

Where the PX [American canteen unit] is, that is like a Woolworths store and where the best boozers were to go on a raid. It wasn’t so much ours but the Yank ones. They had an artillery

base there. They showed us where the headquarters were and everything about the whole camp. Some blokes who went over there, they just came back – they didn’t venture out of [the base], they just stayed in their lines, a lot of them. They read books and wrote letters home. I used to disappear a lot and go bush.

I helped in the kitchen so I knew where everybody was going. As soon as they arrived at Nui Dat and our Delta Company lines, with Delta Company there were three or

four of us, I think, that flew over there, and we got to know each other. As soon as they arrived and the trucks pulled up we were there – Delta Company, 10 Platoon. I was 10 Platoon Delta Company – and I was yelling out, “Over this way.” Some of the blokes I didn’t know from a bar of soap. They would follow me and I’d show them. I had already picked out my

tent. Delta Company had their lines and there was 10 Platoon, 11 Platoon and 12 Platoon. It was all organised. I may have gone back or someone else might have gone back. The cooks would probably have come in the first load and the cooks would have been shown the kitchen because they’d have been hungry. The diggers

weren’t too impressed with some of the tucker on the boat, from what I’ve heard. The officer would be there. The officers would come in so we’d show them their lines. With the officers, their batmen would come with them and the officers would probably just disappear into the boozer and have a drink. The barmen would be already there. Again, the Townsville vets that had already been over there told me, “Get in sweet with the batman.” He is just usually a private.

And the batman has got to look after the CO and the lieutenant and he is his boy. He cleans his boots and he does his washing and everything. He knows what is going on, he knows when they are going to go out on operation and he’s the one that know when there is going to be a surprise inspection or something like that so you get palsy-walsy with him. You also get like that with the cooks and the storemen. They were both drunks, the storemen, like a lot of them there.

They were good blokes. They were on their second tour. And one of the cooks was on his second tour of Vietnam too.

They’d already been and done it so I was one step ahead of everyone else. When I met the cooks and the sergeant cook… I saw

him about a year ago out at the RAAF base so he is still getting around. He married a Filipino girl. He liked the odd drop. I got to know him in the kitchen there. He saw how I worked my way around the kitchen and he said, “Have you been in a kitchen?” I said, “I’m a baker, pastry cook.” He said, “What the hell are you doing here?” I said, “I volunteered.” He said, “You volunteered!” I said, “Yeah, I volunteered to go in the army and I volunteered to come here.” He said,

“You’re mad.” He told the cooks and by this stage a few of the other blokes were getting to find out. They couldn’t really say anything because we had a bit of a mixture of regular and Nashos.

Good, very good. We were like a family – it was better than a family.

There were

four to a tent, they are just like the normal tents you see in the army. There were wooden floorboards and you got a locker and there was a cupboard made out of junk timber. It gets passed down from one battalion to another battalion and one company to another company. I had the pick of the lot.

No, I didn’t know Jock Clark – he was one of the ones that got killed – I didn’t know him from a bar of soap. He came from

Victoria. And the other bloke, Sleeman, he came from Bowen. I knew Sleeman because he had come from Bowen but he had to come up here [to Townsville] to do his Electrician and Technical Course.

Once again I was oriented because it is called a TAO patrol.

Total Area of [Operations] – it is called a TAO patrol. The second day I was in Vietnam, before all the rest arrived, the blokes from Townsville, and said, “They will send you out on a TAO patrol just to get the feel of it.” You just go out one thousand metres and camp the night and come back one thousand metres.

You would just stay in the bush and get you oriented into the jungle and the villages and the noises. On the way we came back through a village, just to get you oriented to the smell. If you have been through a Vietnamese village, some of them smelled, especially if they were near a river and they’d dry their fish. I was pretty well oriented there.

I was quite surprised. I had heaps of photos of the villages and the only thing I hadn’t done was talk to them. I knew some little bits of Vietnamese.

From the books that they had brought back, the blokes that had been to Vietnam.

They were survival books. Some of them are right behind you in that bookshelf there and they were given to me by them. I already knew not to drink the water. A lot of places there could be – not so much at where we were at Nui Dat – there were no landmines around that area, but at other places you could go

could be mined down near the Horseshoe.

You’d be alert. You didn’t get much sleep. You were really switched on.

I might have had two pairs of jocks on that night just in case.

Truly, yes. Only a fool would say he was not.

When you go on TAO patrol there is usually a machine gun, and I think we had a machine gun this night. There were probably ten of us. There were three blokes who were on this TAO patrol with us and they were going home in a couple of days’ time. Every time you would see them back in Nui Dat they would walk past and they’d yell out

because I was there before the rest arrived. Everyone had a calendar up there – some of them had a nude woman – and it was the days of the year and they all had numbers. By the time you had finished it off the picture would be like a crossword thing. By the time three hundred and sixty-five days were up the nude picture would come into existence. It was normally just a big jumble of numbers. If they walked past you going to the mess or the boozer or anything they’d say,

“Three hundred and sixty-four and a wakey.” That means, “I’ve already been here one day.” The next day it would be, “Three hundred and sixty-three and a wakey.” They would sing, too. They’d sing, “Leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when we’ll be back again.” Even when you were out bush

they would introduce you and show you a bit of indoctrination. They would take you where people had been the night before, sort of thing. You could see quite a fair way. It was near a rice paddock and no one could come anywhere near you; you could just talk within yourselves. They would tell you that this part of the bush is semi-j [semi jungle] –

it has overhead cover and there is not much moon shining through. The ground was pretty damp. They’d say, “Don’t think about getting out of here. No one’s going to come near you but don’t take your boots and that off because the leeches are bad in this area.”

Around the perimeter they had built like bunkers. They’re like you see in Australia there’d be bunkers, and you’d see them in the movies and that.

There would be a machine gun in there. There would be sentry posts and most of them were around the whole perimeter. Everyone had to go on picket duty; you would go and ‘sit on the wire’ as they used to say. You would be sentry and you might be on at different times depending on how many of you there were. If there was a platoon or a section it might be that one would only be there for a couple of

hours and two of you would be asleep, or one of you would be asleep, but it would always be manned.

You could walk down between them, yes. At Nui Dat in my time there no one tried to breach the wire at all. It was pretty well clear all the way around. There was an artillery battery there – the Americans and Australians. We also had a

mortar section there so if anyone came pretty close – I think the closest they got was when they had the Battle of Long Tan.

Not in my time, no. If you did let your guard down you could be responsible for quite a few

deaths, quite a few.

If you were caught sleeping you would be charged automatically.

Probably a loss of pay as you couldn’t really say, “Confined to barracks,” because you are there. When the others went on leave you probably couldn’t go. It was probably no grog and no cigarettes.

You couldn’t go to the boozer. There would be things like that. That was a no-no. There were nearly always two of you there awake, and even when we were out bush there was usually two awake or one awake, he would be right beside you. You had to, especially with me, because I had a bad habit of snoring. I’ve forgotten how many times I got punched in the ribs with them going, “Wake up, you’re snoring.” My

snoring wasn’t too bad but another bad habit is – I talk in my sleep. Over the years it has been rather embarrassing if I’m with a woman and we both nod off to sleep and I wake up in the morning and instead of calling her Jane I call her June or something. I start talking about her in my sleep and I get another bash in the ribs then. It can be embarrassing.

No. If you did you would wake up. Like me, I was with Jock nearly all the time, you didn’t feel like sleeping until late. The part where you did feel like going to sleep was just on daybreak, say at half past four to about half past

five. That is when the Viet Cong used to move in, too, around then.

Some blokes used to tie themselves together. When you are within reaching distance you didn’t have to walk at all. You didn’t move. Once you had camped there that was your perimeter of a night and that is where you stayed. If you wanted to go to the loo, that is where you did it, right

there. No one walked around. People have been known to get up to go to relieve themselves and they might have said to the picket with the machine gun that they’re going out for a minute. It would be pitch black and they could have been in really heavy bush, jungle, and they’ve come back the wrong way and they’ve been shot. I heard about one bloke I knew – he was in rookie training with us, he wasn’t with me in

Vietnam he was with another lot – he didn’t come back in the right way. We stayed in there and it depended on the situation and the terrain whether in the morning you were going to clean up and shave and have brekkie and whether it was all right to have a hot meal or a cold meal.

No. It was pretty well right where you were. It doesn’t sound hygienic or anything but you couldn’t go wandering around.

True.

Somebody could probably think that someone was ‘inside the wire’ as we call it and in the pitch dark a silhouette is a silhouette. If he didn’t sort of answer your call and that because he could still be half asleep you could end up being shot accidentally.

Yes. But after a period of time and when you’d been out there for quite a bit your body knows when to be awake and when to relax. In some ways you could say it was when you were back at Nui Dat at your base camp and you’d had a few beers

your body would start to unwind then. Sometimes you weren’t back that often, you would just get clean clobber on, rations, you’d check your ammunition and then you’d be back out again. It might only be for one day or two days. I think the shortest one we

went on was when we went out to the Long Tan Rubber [Plantation] to put the Long Tan Cross up. I think we were there for two days. We were Delta Company, second tour, and the first tour was when they had the Battle of Long Tan. It was like our job and we had to go out there to the same place. We secured the area. It was spooky, too, for some there because you knew those eighteen Aussies were killed and you are

lying in the same area. You didn’t get much sleep that night. In the morning they brought in a helicopter. I have got some photographs of it. It was emotional. You saw the helicopter and the wash of the blades and heard the noise and slowly it just lowered the cross down. We had the engineers in here. The sappers had already dug the hole

and we put the cross there. We had like a church service with the bagpipes and it was very, very moving. Then we disappeared again. We went back to Nui Dat and had a few beers for the boys that lost their lives there. There were some in Delta Company who were there, the original ones from the Battle of Long Tan,

and it was emotional for them too. We sat and talked and had a few beers and it was good. We had photographers there taking photos. All the time we were there in Vietnam I can never remember

cameramen or anything coming out bush like the Americans, never. I can’t even remember an MP, Military Police, coming anywhere near us. We would see them around Vung Tau on leave. We would go down there for two days, go in the morning and stay the night and come back the next day. It was a

seaside town, very nice, it was beautiful. It was strange. We had killed a Viet Cong in an ambush and the Viet Cong were very meticulous about keeping all their paperwork to show their hierarchy where they spent their money. I couldn’t read Vietnamese but our interpreter could speak it as well as read it. He was an Aussie.

This Viet Cong was in Vung Tau at the same time we were buying this radio or getting it fixed. I could have passed him in the street and I wouldn’t know. It was crazy.

No. The closest from the

wire would have been probably three thousand clicks. I think I only went on two and that was when I arrived there earlier than the rest of 6RAR. That was more to give me a bit of acclimatisation and let me see the bush sort of thing. The blokes I was with were getting ready to go home so they could tell me that I wouldn’t need to put my hootchie up that night because it wasn’t going to rain.

With the wet season – and the dry season came with the wet season – you could set your clock to it. It was at four o’clock in the afternoon. It would just come down in buckets. In the dry season it was dry, really dry.

I think the first one I went on there would have been probably eight or ten of us. The forward scout who was

leading us had done it before. I was the rifleman as well as number two on the gun so I used to carry a bit of extra link for the machine gun.

Yes, single file.

There was the rifleman and you could have a second scout or just another rifleman. There were two riflemen and the machine gun.

There would be the corporal and with the corporal would be the radio operator just in case it looked like there was going to be a contact with the enemy so he could ring them and tell them and call in artillery or mortars or a gun ship or whatever. I would be in that group there. We would have been staggered and quite well apart.

It would be thirty metres or more depending on the terrain. If you were going in close and really dense bush you might only be ten metres apart, but when you were going across the paddy fields or open ground you spread right out.

Yes, they were quite spread out, not like you see in the movies.

Just on dark and then we’d come back in the morning. We’d be listening to the radio because the other ones that were out on TAO patrol would report in.

That would be hard to figure out with the size of the area. It was like a normal suburb in a town. It was huge. There would be patrols out everywhere.

No. I never got down to the whole lot. There were a few and they were pretty well positioned. They called it their ‘cone of fire’. The cone of fire means where your bunker is and your machine gun can traverse like in the shape of a

cone. There is a centre point and that is where your machine gun is. He can traverse left or right so he goes left and the other bunker becomes right. So with his fire, my cone is there and his cone is there, so they interact. When it is going like that across each other no one can get in. So if someone on my left starts trying to get through the wire I can see him, but the bloke who is in the next bunker

further down the track has got a better aim of fire. So if the bloke that is trying to get towards the wire travels that way more to my left he cops it more so because round to my left is another bunker. He can do the same too. If he goes right, my left-hand side has got him in the cone of fire so as soon as he comes around me I just follow him all the way. Whichever way he went we were crossed with the cone of fire so it was pretty hard and they couldn’t get in.

No, some of them would be closer than that.

They are right on the wire and all around that the whole area is cleared of vegetation. There might be just low scrub.

There is the normal camouflage net. You couldn’t see them from a distance but we knew they were there. When we came back in we’d go to the rifle range. To a civvy or a Viet Cong the only way they would get to know anything like that would be from the air. They had no air power, none whatsoever, so they would come through the ground. They would be

spotted because it was very busy, that place. They always had like an RAP [Regimental Aid Post], like a semi-surgery, just in case someone got wounded or something. They had doctors there.

There was just the one main one.

No, it was inside the perimeter. They had their own helipad for the dust-off helicopters, the Medivac. They had a special cross painted on the

side and the Viet Cong weren’t supposed to shoot at them but it was open slather. The [medics] had their own bunkers there too, at the back of our tents. Where we were we were way back from the wire. I think I only did picket duty once I was there because we were all back closer to the chopper pad. I think they classed us as a

‘ready to react’ company. Quite a few times we would have all our gear and we’d be sitting in the tent and writing letters and listening to music and talking. That part used to get to you after a while because the adrenaline is building up and you’ve got to sit there and wait because someone might have been in trouble. There were usually two battalions over there and a platoon or company might be in trouble. ‘Ready to react’

means that it was five minutes from here to the helicopter and ten minutes to where they were having a skirmish depending on how far they were. Twenty minutes was probably the tops. The choppers would go like the clappers and would travel at treetop level so they wouldn’t get shot at. We only had to do that once. That was when the SAS

boys, the Special Air Service, got into a bit of trouble. Usually in an SAS team there are four or six of them. Anyway, they stirred up a hornets’ nest, which they are known for. They create havoc and then bunk out. They were doing a hot extraction this day. How hot extractions worked, from what they were telling us, is the chopper comes in, they are talking to the

helicopter pilot and he’s coming in, at the last minute when they are ready to go out they say, “Throw smoke.” And it is green or whatever it is and you see it going up through the trees. That is the dangerous part then because the Viet Cong know where you are, or even the North Vietnamese if there are any regulars around. It depends what part of the province you are in. When the cable comes down it has got a ball on it and it penetrates through the canopy. On it it has got

cables, something similar to what sailors use, it is like a harness type of thing, and you clip it on on the front of you and on your waist. When the ball hits the ground, bang! You’re out in a couple of seconds. One bloke one day didn’t buckle on and to this day we don’t know. As he was going up through the canopy something happened – either he didn’t clip on or his belt clip was

faulty – and down he came. We had only just come back, I think, from operations and we had to saddle up again and go looking for him. We never found him. We combed the place everywhere. I think there were five Aussies not accounted for. I think there were four or five and he is one that I know of. So where he went, no one

knows. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, when they had a contact or a battle they might leave some of their gear behind, they rarely did, but they would always want to get the wounded away, even the dead. They would take them away and drag them. They would say, “Body trail,” or, “Blood trail.” You would see where they had been

dragging the body along. We would know by instinct which way they were heading and by then there was another ready reaction company ready. They would say, “Delta Company has combed the area

and the enemy is headed north-east,” or whatever. They would send another company out as a blocking one. We would keep chasing and looking for them when they disappeared. You even leave a bit of a trail – there was a broken branch or you could see the dirt. Even if they travelled in creeks you can come to the creek and see how dirty it is because it shouldn’t be that dirty. So you follow the creek and they are walking up the

creek.

Yes. They are the blocking force. So we keep going forward and then they’ll spread out into a half-moon shape. This time we looked and we couldn’t find him. With the SAS blokes you’ve got to be three parts Superman before they’ll accept you.

No one knew whether he was dead when he hit the bottom. I think he just got through the canopy or the canopy would have broken some of his fall when he was coming down. That is what they are trained for, survival. On the ground nothing was found there whatsoever. There was no webbing or ammunitions or weapons, nothing.

Mostly we were on the cook’s tour, the guided tour. I think there were three.

There was myself and the other two new blokes and the rest of them their time was up and they were going home. It was a rubber plantation but it hadn’t been worked for years, I think they relocated the people who used to work it. That is where some of them had the Battle of Long Tan. The rubber plantation hadn’t been worked and the

branches, when they fall down it is like when twigs fall down. When you are walking through it is pretty well impossible not to make a noise because there are that many twigs. You hear ‘crack, crack, crack’ and in the dead of the night sound travels. Where we camped that night was in there. There was a track going past that led into a small little

village, a hamlet. We checked that out the next morning. The diggers who were with us were just sort of showing us the ropes.

Yes. There are breaks for different plantations. Some of the villages or hamlets we went into had either

been owned way back by the French. Some of the buildings were quite nice houses, nice for the bush.

No. This was outside the perimeter.

Yes. The perimeter is here and we are out there somewhere. In the morning we come back in and it depends

on who is in charge, whether we come straight in or go through the village and make a beeline for where we came out from. That is always number one. You let them know where you are coming back in.

Yes.

It was right around the perimeter. It was no man’s land.

No, not when I was there, no. The blokes on the wire might have. They were there most of the time. But in the

time I was there I never heard of it. There was firing going on quite a bit because where we were in our Delta Company lines it was five minutes’ walk to the wire through the bunker and there was a rifle range there. If someone did go snooping around at night it was just open slather. Through the day you didn’t take any notice because it was somebody at the firing range.

Yes, that we’re going out and coming in.

To both.

There was a sort of barbed wire concertina and there were pathways through it. The bloke in front he would be probably

taken through it by the bloke he replaced from the battalion before.

Yes. If they had have had air power or helicopters they’d have seen it but the only way you could see it was from the air. If you looked at it face on you just saw masses of barbed wire.

There were claymore mines and they were positioned and there were trip flares. Quite often they would blast up the area because an animal might wander through. A pig would smell someone cooking inside the perimeter area or probably a snake would just set off the trip wire. We blew up a pig once, it set off a trip wire and blew itself

up. With the trip wire you just have normal trip wire between two stakes or trees or whatever. The trip wire is connected to a flare and the flare goes off and the flare is connected to a bank of Claymore mines. You have probably seen in the movies. They are shaped like a shoebox lid, they are green and they’ve got eight or nine hundred ball bearings in them. So on the track they are all stashed and outside the perimeter it is the same thing. It is automatic, it

goes off and everything that is in the killing zone, they are dead. I have heard of some blokes getting a bit jittery and they see lights out there in amongst the grass or way over there on the rubber plantation. Some of them on purpose just have a shoot and they would wake up the whole camp. The officer or the sergeant would come over and say, “What happened?”

“There are lights over in the rubber three there.” “Are you sure?” “Yes.” They would just be shooting away and busting the boredom and breaking the boredom.

It could have been a kilometre. We went out and across.

That might have been when we were out further, further than what I thought. There were two major towns. There was Baria and Dap To and they were pretty close but there was another one close. They were just little

shanties.

Grass and bamboo and anything they could scrounge.

No, not with us. There might have been

with the Yanks. The only time a Vietnamese came any near Delta Company was our Kit Carson scout, bush man and scout. He was a defector from the Viet Cong and he was our scout – sorry, our interpreter. We didn’t trust him. There were no Vietnamese in our lines, ever. They ran the PX where they sold transistors and watches and that. They were run by the Vietnamese.

Twice I did that but the rest we went way out by helicopter.

As far as I could see it was good.

They became used to it. The way we camped that night and the other blokes who took us out they were just getting us acclimatised and showing us around. Nothing happened, it was boring. I only did it twice.

The first time I was a little bit worried. I suppose that’s normal. The second time would have been after I’d been there a while I think and after we’d been out bush.

Yes, we’d radio back for clearance.

Yes. I think they did both. I’m pretty sure they did both.

They tried to bung it on me to be the sig [signaller] but there was one bloke who did it nearly the whole tour.

Yes, as well as your gear and the batteries and you’ve got to be hanging around with the brass all the time. You would be there with the lieutenant or the sergeant or whatever.

A lot of times the one I knew, Jensen, he used to leave his with the sergeant and say, “I’ll be back.” Then he’d come wandering over and talk to us. Out in the scrub they’d be all there in the centre together. Also, he’s one of the first to get zapped in an ambush. They didn’t want the forward scout or the second scout or the rifleman. They wanted the machine gun and the machine gunner has got the fire power. The machine

gun group was usually the headquarters. There were usually ten there. There was the sergeant and the sig and there could be an interpreter there too. There was also the forward observer. He is sort of separate from all the sigs depending on where we were going. Sometimes we’d go out and we didn’t take one. He [the forward observer] calls in the artillery. They are superb those blokes. They are magic at their job. So the Viet Cong would wait for

you to go through the ambush before they set the ambush because they want the machine gun group.

Yes. They would take the machine gun out. With the machine gun goes the radio man so they can’t call in air support or choppers and they can’t call in artillery.

Because he’s usually with them. They kill the lot of them.

I’ve learned a lot since then. If the enemy takes out the fire power and take out the brains, who is going to run the show? Your lieutenant is dead and your sergeant is dead and there is no operator so you are on your lonesome. Everyone says, “Forward scout,”

so I explain to them why it is the best place. If you’re the last one you’re the last one to get killed anyway.

Booby traps, yes.

There were mines that were triggered by trip wires and bungee pits,

that was a hole in the ground with bamboo stakes, sharpened bamboo.

It was very, very hard. When you see them it is not natural. You become sort of used to it after a while. It is a bit like me growing up in Townsville because I can go down in the swamps and the

river bank and you have probably heard of people hooking crabs and using a hook. I can pick a hole that has been worked. It might look like all the rest, but you can just see how the different colour of the mud is. If the ground looks a bit different and the leaves don’t look right – it’s usually nice and brown but some of them are a different colour – you flip them over.

The sun bleaches some of the leaves and it is a lighter colour than the bottom of the leaf. You see it on the ground and you think, “The leaves don’t look right so something is buried there.” The trip wires are the hard ones. That is where the Claymore mines come in.

They made their own. I saw one where they had cut the bottom out of a forty-four gallon drum and they got Chicom explosive (that is Russian). They just put it on

this thing and they got bits of glass and bolts and rocks and nails, anything. They just put it all together and they made their own. It was the same as they made their own Bangalore torpedoes. I have got a photo in the book outside there. You have probably seen in a John Wayne movie, The Green Berets, how they blew all the barbed wire away. We fond this cache there this day with

weapons. We couldn’t get it in because it was in the mountains so we had to blow it all up. You heard the explosion. Bangalore torpedoes are about one metre long and the size of a fifty cent piece or a bit bigger and there is thread one end and it’s got male and female ends. You just crawl up to the wire and there might be a whole string of them. The blokes just pass them up one by one by one and you screw them together and

slide them up. When they let it go it just peels the barbed wire back and they just come running through.

If you imagine a one kilo fishing line. It is like sewing cotton, it is that small. You can hardly see it. Our was

good. We learned quite early to make sure you put them up high instead of down low because the pigs over there are like Shetland ponies. One of our mob put it down too low and the pig set off the rip flare and set off the Claymores. The old pig was splattered all over the bush.

There was the bamboo, the sharpened bamboo clipped on a sort of spring trap, a rat trap type of operation. You set off a trip wire and it would come out of the ground with sharpened bamboo spikes.

We travelled on tracks but we mostly made our own way through the bush. It was a bit like the roads and that. They used to mine the roads and the tracks so we tried to stay off them as much as possible.

From an average household yard front fence to the back fence it could be five minutes to twenty minutes if it looked like it was going to be booby trapped or mined.

If it was in an area where there were mines, our battalion commander they took him out to where a couple of fellows stepped on mines. When one went to help he got hit too. Even Butler his name was he went out to help and he got hit as well as the doctor. They are deadly. They are jumping jacks. The

Aussies made an awful mistake. They planted thousands of them and they were going to make sort of a fence at a place called Horseshoe down near the beach. They cleared all the lands and they planted all the mines. The Viet Cong used to come in and pinch them and use them against us. I saw one of our fellows, I was at an outpost and an Aussie who was with us, he was in the

Mortar section, he was going out and he got hit with shrapnel from the jumping jack and he lost one leg. We were teaching the Vietnamese and these two Vietnamese copped the brunt of the blast. We were in the middle of this outpost, in the centre, and the South

Vietnamese Army was supposed to be on sentry. They didn’t see these people sneak in through the night and plant the mines. They went out first in the morning, going out on patrol. We thought with them being local, they might have

realised that dirt had been moved or dug. There was this wide track and it was the only way in and out of the perimeter. It wasn’t zigzagged like a lot of them were. This was pretty well a straight track. They didn’t recognise anything being different and [got] the first two, because they seemed to be just ambling out of the

compound where we were. There used to be an old French type Vietnamese hamlet and we just took over the shed part of it with the mortar section. There was only our section and the mortar section. There was a galvanised iron roof.

We had a few drinks this night, the next day those blokes got blown up. The Vietnamese were having a bit of a celebration, the South Vietnamese Army. I don’t know whether it was their family or their brothers or what but it was strange because there were sometimes hardly any uniforms. The boys with the

mortars blew the roof off the shed and they forgot about the elevation. They got into a bit of strife about that one. That whole time we were there, which was probably for a month nothing really happened. It was pretty quiet.

They could have been better trained.

We didn’t have time and a lot of them didn’t want to be trained.

If I had the choice I would rather we just stayed to ourselves and let them go and do their own thing. They made too much noise. At that place, Horseshoe, which was another outpost there were Americans there.

I didn’t like being there. One Sunday all their families turned up at the gate. It was a couple of hundred feet high this bit of a hill and it was shaped like a horseshoe. It was good. Choppers could land there and we had a good view of the whole area if anyone tried to get past or anything. There were all these kids and women and old fellows down at the

gate who’d come to see the South Vietnamese Army husbands and brothers and that. You didn’t know who they were. The Viet Cong could have been there amongst them. It was crazy but we couldn’t do anything because the Vietnamese brass said, “Yes the women can go there.” Even the American

bases had the Vietnamese going in there and doing their washing and doing their cooking. The only time I ever heard of the Vietnamese was in the army hospital at Vung Tau. There were two Vietnamese

women and they used to do the washing and that in the Army Hospital at Vung Tau. They could have been coming in and looking around the places and saying, “Twenty paces from the first building,” because twenty paces from the first building there was a mortar pit or a gun position. They could be

not drawing any maps or anything but just stepping it out. The Viet Cong used to use the mortars quite a bit because you had this hunk of pipe and throw a round in it and off it goes and they just bolt and disappear. By the time you’ve called in artillery or sent blokes in there to look for it they are gone. That is why a lot of the area was

cleared nearly all of the places and that’s where the TAO patrols used to come into effect.

Cautious. Some blokes freaked right out. They had seen some of their friends killed and they used to take an instant dislike.

One Aussie lost a mate, not in our company but another company, and went in to town. He had a few too many beers and he picked up a bar girl and he just took his frustrations out on her. He beat he up something shocking.

Some didn’t like it and some just shook their heads and turned away and just turned a blind eye. With me, after Jock and Duffy and Bob were killed, Brownie, I’ve got him in some photographs there, he’d been on the first tour of Vietnam. He sort of got me

aside and we had a few drinks and he just talked to me and that. It sort of gets your mind out of the cloud sort of thing and it’s done, gone and finished. You’ve got to get on with the job. That was in a lot of ways counselling which was very helpful. Some blokes didn’t have that.

Truck drivers, if their trucks were blown up, they were in a different group to us. We probably in some ways classed them as pogues [see below]. They just had a camp to come into at night at Vung Tau or a fire support base or Nui Dat. The truck drivers

usually had a hot meal to come home to at night because you didn’t drive trucks around at Vietnam at night.

I asked a few people and it is a nickname for a bloke that spends a lot of his time in the camp. He might be a storeman and that. We still needed them over there whether they were truck drivers or cooks or anything. They hated being called a pogue.

It means he had never been shot at or he was likely not to get shot at. We were out in the bush quite a bit of the time and they used to sort of grumble to us about having to drive us when we had to go out of the camp on patrol somewhere and it was close by. They wanted to dump us off and get the hell out of it back to

camp. But the APCs were different, they had the firepower and they would carry spare ammunition and sometimes they even had grog stashed on there so we used to get along well with them. Normie Rowe [Australian singer, celebrity], I worked with him. He was our troop commander, old Normie.

Yes.

Helicopters were beautiful, I loved going in helicopters.

No. The trucks were open to ambush and they were the worst, the trucks.

With APCs you could hear an APC coming a mile off. They were only used if we needed to get to a place in a hurry in the bush and that. The Viet Cong in more ways than one didn’t like to tangle with the APCs because APCs were where the troops were. And the APC had a 50 cal machine gun and he’s got fire power.

And with us on board too they didn’t really like to tangle with it.

It could have been that there was no choppers available because they were working with another battalion. The terrain that we were going through

was going to be used. We ended building fire support bases all over the place and when one shut down we would move to another one. We could have been using the APCs to find a direct route off the road. We’d have a compass and we’d head straight for that area. There was a little knoll or an open area

where the fire support base could be built. To fool the enemy we would take off from one camp, one fire support base, in the APCs and we would head to maybe a couple of kilometres away to an area where they would think we were going to go. It might be five or ten kilometres

and we’d go through the scrub and we’d get to this place and we’d make sure in the jungle and in the bush they couldn’t see us but they could only hear us. You would hear the sound of the motors revving and the back dropping down and troops piling out. It would only take a couple of minutes.

Then they would hear the APCs back up and close the doors and off they would go back the same way they had come, but we didn’t get off. We would go five clicks down the road. We’d been out ten clicks but we’d go five clicks back down the road. They wouldn’t stop. They would just slow down. There might be a small river or a gully and the Viet Cong knew there was a gully there. It was like their own back yard they knew the place so well.

We would go down to the gully. We always used to sit on the top because we used to hate sitting inside and we’d just pile off and they would just keep going. We would just merge into the bush and we’d go our own way then. We’d either go left or right because we had already been up that path five kilometres further up. We would go left or right and we’d beetle off in there and set up tracks and find ambushes.

We went to the Long Hai Mountains and the Nui Mae Towers and they could sort of drop us off. They would do the same thing at the foot of it and we’d get off at the mountains. That was spooky going to the mountains.

There were too many places where you could get ambushed. That is where we lost one of our other fellows over there, Jock Buckham. There was an ambush, it was really rocky and spooky, there were

quite a few trees. Early in the morning and the mist was all over it. It was covered in jungle and vines and there were a lot of animals. That is another one with the animals – you’d go into the village and do a coordinated search of a village. Just about every

village had geese. I don’t know if you know geese but I had to have a couple of pet ones and I had to get rid of them because they were attacking everyone. The geese and the ducks and the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s they would smell you or the water buffalo would. They are like a normal household dog and they can smell. The next thing, the whole place started with the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and ducks and geese and they probably had goats and pigs.

You would have to make sure which way the wind was blowing so you would come upwind and have the wind blowing in your face. That is when you would smell the village. There were no press-button latrines over there in the bush.

If he has got his missus and a couple of

kids and that and he’s got a forty-four gallon drum or half a forty-four gallon drum full of rice you think, “Something is wrong here. How is he going to use all that?” She has got a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK yard and she might have twenty WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and geese and you just have a look in the kitchen and that. You lift things up and see that there are no tunnels. She has got just two

eggs sitting on the table and she has got about twenty or thirty animals that can lay eggs. She’s only got two. The interpreter, the Vietnamese one or the Aussie, would just start questioning her like, “What are you doing with all the rice?” and, “Where have all the eggs gone?” “I’ve taken them to the market.” “There is no market here, the next market is in town.” There would be

hardly any young men and they would just say, “In the army.” You didn’t know whether he was in the army or he was a Viet Cong. You have got no way of finding out.

You would surround it in a company form.

We would try to do quite a bit of PR work with the Vietnamese. That is where you sort of got to know what the people were like and what they ate and everything. I quite like their tucker. Everyone says, “You’re mad eating all that.” It’s all right and I still like it. We’d probably take in probably a doctor and two dentists. They were good because you knew they were doing all right. The doctors would check the kids. We would be

around the whole camp. We would go there in the middle of the day. We weren’t going there to surprise them. We were there and we would stay the night. In some ways that probably stopped the Viet Cong coming in and just taking their rice which they did quite often. The people couldn’t do a thing about it, the farmers.

Yes. We couldn’t understand what they were saying amongst each other but you’d get that funny feeling that they in some ways resented us but they accepted us.

We knew what they must have been thinking. One of them could have lost a son and either he was in the Army or Viet Cong. The interpreter was trying to talk to them about it sometimes. We used to call them the old Mama San because they all looked like the old Mama Sans. She’d go off her trolley. She would get up the interpreter or even

us and we couldn’t understand what she was saying. A lot of times the interpreter would just walk away. At other times he’d say, “This place is worth it.” He would go through the chain and tell the lieutenant, “I think we should come back and pay this place a visit another day on the quiet,” which we probably did. We did do that quite a few times. You would come back two days or three days

later and the half forty-four drum of rice would be gone. We’d say, “You had thirty WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s when we were here last. You’ve only got ten now. Where did they go?” “To the market, the market.” “Yeah,” right. You would go away and you would probably set up an ambush around the place on the roads and tracks and you would just wait. Sometimes it was a waste of time and sometimes it proved quite successful.

I would say nearly all of them, I wouldn’t be one bit surprised. Some of the villagers helped and some of them didn’t have any choice.

Some helped them and some didn’t have any choice. It was like a Catch 22 situation. They couldn’t do a thing. We tried to help them. After a while doing things and that you thought, “What the hell are we doing this for?” We took out these engineers once and they fixed up the roof of the school. We used security again, we circled the village. We [the engineers] fixed up the roof of the school

and they fixed up their windmill. We didn’t go back but we heard about it through some other people that the Viet Cong came in there and pulled down the windmill and ripped the roof off the school just because the Aussies had done it. It was a bit disheartening especially for the blokes that did it, the engineers.

For most of them it was pretty hard yakka when they were poking around. When you are up on the roof you can’t have your basic weapon or your rifle hanging off your back pocket. They would be stripped down. Some of them had pistols but they relied on us to look after them.

Yes, if you went early in the morning. We never went in the night time, there was no night time travel in the villages, that was a no-no.

I think it was in a coffee plantation. We dug in this night,

and with digging in, there were two of us and we just dug a trench deep enough so they can’t see us. When we would dig it we would make sure that you couldn’t sort of see us from the track. We were off the track probably about six metres. There were two of them and it was similar to us. He was up front.

He was sort of like the forward scout and the other one was quite a way back. The next morning after we killed him – It was just on dark. It was our curfew. The bloke out the front was where the main picket was out the front in his position he would just yell out, “Vung Laui.” In Vietnamese that means, “Stop.” This bloke was carrying a

weapon. It turned out that he was and he just turned ready to bolt and that was when he was shot. The other bloke was up the track and one of our blokes yelled out, “Vung Laui,” and he just took off into the scrub. We didn’t go out, they knew we were there because of the contact so we stayed where we were until the next morning. Then we went out and checked him and he was

dead. They checked his pockets and that for documentation. Then we saddled up and fixed our holes up and had a bit of brekkie. We just had something out of a tin or whatever it was. Then we went back up the same track. It was the same track that they had come down and it turned out from their footprints that there had been probably about fifteen of them. They would do the same as we do with two forward scouts or one forward scout and the rest of the mob back up the

track. We could tell because there was a bit of a drizzly rain and they wear those Ho Chi Minh sandals and you can tell by the marks where they had just hid at the side of the track. It is the same thing we do. We don’t know how long they stayed there. It was until probably

after the first bloke was shot and until the second bloke came back up the track. He would have told them what was going on. They could have stayed there but by the looks of it they didn’t stay there long. The drizzly rain washed out any hope of telling us how long they stayed there with damp grass or the grass being laid down or anything. You could tell where they had jumped into the scrub but they could have left twenty minutes after the contact or they could have left early the next morning.

We don’t know. They could have sat there and waited for us but we weren’t coming out in the dark. That is a no-no.

That was

when Jock, Duffy and Bob were killed. They were with the machine gun group. I was rifleman that time. The forward scout I think was Noel Sleeman.

We had reports that they had seen enemy activity

in that area. We used to get a lot of information, some of it was from the locals that we didn’t rely on or the RVN or from SAS, mainly SAS, or spotter planes. SAS was the one that used to give us information mostly. We were camped near this river bank in an ambush position. That is when

headquarters got in touch with our boss. We saddled up and move out of the scrub onto the road. It was a pretty busy type of road with a lot of traffic. It was not so much us or the yanks but locals. They were just going to different villages and that. We went up the road a bit and crossed the road and went down into the scrub again and it was pretty dense. We were

only in there five or ten minutes I think. That is when they opened up on us. We were in a staggered position like normal. I reckon they were set up in an arrowhead in reverse.

The arrowhead was up there. They let the forward scout get right into the arrow shape. The ones on either flank they picked out the machine group because they targeted them straight away. As soon as the fire opened up we did the normal thing. The machine gun went to the left and some riflemen to the right. I went to the left too. We could see

the men hitting the deck. You could tell by the rifle fire there was an AK47 by the pitch of it and the crack of it. You didn’t hear a heavy machine gun. We talked about it afterwards. They were a hit and run group. They targeted the machine gun group. Within

seconds they took them out the three of them, one after the other. They were set up and waiting and waiting. They did it beautifully. Duffy was on the gun – the old Aussie spirit. Duffy was on the gun and they’d have been down low shooting. They weren’t up on a knoll or up high or anything. They were pretty much level with us. He got hit

first and then Jock rolled him off the gun and Jock took over. Then Jock got hit. At the same time Bob Powell got hit. So Corporal Ashton then grabbed Jock off and he took over the machine gun.

By this time the others are coming up behind and they are pouring quite a bit of fire power into the whole area. That is when they packed up and they bunked out and left. It came so quickly but it seemed like a lifetime. Jock was gone and that was bad. You were still keyed up. When we went over there I couldn’t get over to

him. After they took off we got configured in an extended arm as they call it. Whoever is left you just go forward shooting and shooting. They had gone and left. There were no blood trails and no drag marks. They had done a good job on us. The rest of us we

circled up into a perimeter around the dead and the wounded. That is when we could see how Duffy was shot first because when you’ve got your machine gun and the machine gunner he is firing and he is on top of you. On the left hand side is your number two, and that was Jock. He feeds the link ammunition into the machine gun. When I went up

there Duffy was on the right side of the machine gun and Jock was lying over the top of the machine gun and Bob Powell was lying there just beside Jock. There was the three of them and Jock was on top of the machine gun. So Jock had pushed Duffy off when he was hit and he took over but then he was hit. So they had targeted them quite well. After that

we had to get a chopper in. I remember I had to wrap Jock up in his poncho. It was like a tent, a plastic thing, I had to wrap him up in that and they got a chopper in to take him out. I was cut up and I think it was the sergeant – I was cracking up a bit and he got up me. He made me clean the gun and that was hard. I had to pull the M60

apart. When they were hit Jock was hit in the neck and as you know if you get shot in the neck blood just pours out of you. The blood was all over it and I had to strip it up and down completely. It was semi dry weather and wet weather and the ground was hard and I got his

blood all over me. There was a really feeling that you don’t want to go through it again, it hardens you after a while?

It was the best thing you can do for someone. It is like when you get kicked off a horse. You kick the horse in the guts and you get back on and ride it. If something like that happens it is the best thing for it.

Yes.

I remember when we went back to Nui Dat I stood at the tent there and he yelled out to me, “Skinny,” or they used to call me ‘Chicken Man’ over there; that was another nickname I had. The lieutenant told the sergeant and the sergeant

told me that I had to go and pack up all his gear. Jock slept there and I slept there so I had to get his foot locker out and get his clothes and I had to pack up his bloody locker. He had a lot of photos of me and I had a lot of photos of

him and that hurt that did. That was another sort of something that you had to do. I had to do it and I did it. I took it up to the Q store and then we had a few drinks. They knew that that was the best thing like after you

had got him out of the scrub and you’d packed his gear because everyone knew how close we were. The lieutenant came to see me the next day. That’s another good thing, we were only back there one day and then we went back out bush again.

It didn’t sink in for quite some time. The next morning I looked over and Jock wasn’t there. That was hard that was. Then the Lieutenant came to see me and he said, “How’s it going?” I said, “No worries. I’m all right.” He said, “We’re going out bush again.” And I said, “Yeah, let’s get out of here.” I didn’t sleep in my tent that

Night, I couldn’t. The next day the Lieutenant said to me, “Can you write a letter to his mother?” I thought about it and I thought, “I’ll do it. I’ll do it” to this day I still haven’t. I didn’t really know what I’d say and how I’d say it.

That was one really bad, bad day that one.

We went to Taipei. It was thought there

was only one person per section that could go on leave at any one time. But his name was Clarke the same as mine so we both ended up going at the same time. We stayed in the same hotel room and we partied together.

It was after six months I think.

Yes. I knew when he had his first woman and he knew when I had my first woman.

No. That was in Australia here.

Yes. When we were out bush we would all just talk about anything like politics or religion or whatever came along. That’s how close we were. We’d go on leave in Vung Tau.

Yes, to Taipei, you just put down where you want to go. When they found out that the two of us put our names down we both went.

I think it was. I’m pretty sure it was.

Yes. You had to get a passport and your photo taken. By that time all the wheels were in

motion and they couldn’t do much about it. We were only gone five days.

No we went from Nui Dat back to Saigon and we flew from Saigon straight to Taipei.

It was beautiful. It wasn’t commercialised back then, I would hate to see what it looks like now days, they were very nice people.

You would see the old temples and that nowadays on the movies. They shoot a different film with a beautiful setting and it was like that. The people were very friendly. I got to know the receptionist. We came back late on night and

she was working at the hotel. Through the day she went to Uni. I got quite friendly with her. She said she was going up to see her parents who lived up in the mountains in like a fishing village there. There was sponge diving. There were a lot of women there.

We all pooled a lot of our money in because there were some other blokes in our group. We hired this gold automobile, a Tornado, a big American car. We had it each for one day. It was my turn this day and she was going up there and I said, “You can take me up and show me.” It was good to get out of the cities and see how the real people lived. She said,

“No problems.” I said, “Have you got a friend for Jock?” She said, “Yes, I’ve got a friend for Jock.” I said, “Righto. We’ll go in the morning.” That night I got talking to this American and he was on the same floor of the hotel. It was a big hotel. He knew a bloke, another American, who worked in the PX. The PX is like a big supermarket, Coles or Woollies, and there is everything in there. He said, “I’ll come and get you in the morning and you can get your car and we’ll go to the PX.” So we went to the PX and were in the

loading dock. I just loaded the boot up with some soap powder and some tinned food and some wine. It was just in the boot of the car and we took this up to this mountain village. She directed us all where to drive her. We drank and when we got up to the mountains it was exactly the same as that

show that was on TV years ago. That show with Bruce Carradine, ‘Kung Fu’. It was the same as that. There was this village on this little hillside. And there was a monastery or temple with all the old monks. Down below was a fishing village. She took me and introduced me to the head man or the Mayor or whatever they call them. I gave them all the gear that fell off the loading dock at the PX and he thought it was

great. We stayed there the whole day, Jock and I, and I got some really good photos. They ended up taking us to this canal and we hired this gondolier type of thing. The only time we went out with the bar girls, Jock and I, was through the day time. They both went to Uni and they worked. Because we only had five days we

spent two days with them. That was the weekend we spent with them. We got there Friday I think or Thursday and we had to leave on the Monday or Tuesday. We had a really good weekend with them. The other two days we spent out in town with the bar girls. They had like the Uni students have in Australia but in those days it was a good flash one. Taipei is a very

beautiful city.

Yes, they were. I don’t know about the other Asian places like Hong Kong but in Taipei they didn’t have any copyright laws. I don’t know if they still do it or not, they probably still do but

an LP record of the latest hit tunes would be twenty cents or eighty cents or something. I brought some of those back. You would get a whole set of encyclopaedias for probably about fifty dollars. They were worth about two grand but you couldn’t carry them. You could get gold and silver. I just brought some records back and some clothes. Jock and I took photos everywhere.

Yes for quite a bit of time out bush. A lot of people like other diggers used to say, “What are you carrying a camera for and taking photos?” Even now blokes come around and want to borrow my slides or my battalion books. I say, “No, you come around here and read them or have a look at the slides around here because they’ll disappear.” When the blokes came back from Vietnam they moved all around

Australia but I lived here so they knew where to send me a book, my battalion book. They asked us before we got our discharge if we took any photographs out bush there in the scrub to send them in and they’d put them in a book and send them back to me which they did. The photos I took out there are in the battalion book. Jock did a lot of photos too. When I packed up all his gear I

didn’t want to take anything like his photos and that. I intended to write to his parents and explain how he was killed. They would have seen the photos because there were a couple of ones there that were full and still to get developed and she probably wondered who this bloke was. She didn’t know how to

get in contact. I’ll tell you this next story about Bob. I thought if she got in touch with me, because the army would tell her where I am and who I am and that. But over the years and a couple of months after it happened, when we got back to Australia I said, “I’ll write.” I tried a few times but I didn’t know what to say. The one about Bob Powell, the

other one who was killed is that, just recently we had the unveiling of the War Memorial in Canberra. The blokes came from all over Australia and I met up with a lot of the blokes from my company and my platoon and my section. One of them, Hargraves, he comes from Victoria and he said, “Skinny, there is a bloke I want you to meet.” We’d all had a few drinks ready before we marched off for the parade and the old

heart went and my mouth just dropped open. It was Bob Powell’s brother, the one that was killed in Vietnam, it was his younger brother. When we went to Vietnam his brother was only a little one, like a baby, a kid, now he was grown up to a full adult and he looked exactly the same as Bob. The old heart went. He introduced himself. Just then the Parade Marshall yelled out, “Form up.” He had the flag,

the 500, he was carrying it for his brother. So I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. I said, “After the parade?” He said, “Right, yeah.” He was up the front carrying the flag. After the march I tracked him down. I had told him where I’d see him. He introduced me to this mother and his two sisters and that. She said they had been trying to

get in touch with the army. They had given up until I told them. When it happened at that time, that year and she couldn’t find out anything about how he had died. I said, “I’ll tell Bill and you can go and watch the finish of the parade.” They were still marching.

It was a pretty big parade. So I saw him down and I told him exactly how it happened. I said, “Now you can tell your mother and you can leave out what bits you want to leave out.” He said, “No, I’ll just tell her as you told me how it happened.” They came back and we sat and talked. Somehow somebody smuggled in some beer from somewhere and we sat on the flower beds here and had a

talk about what he was like over there. He was a bank Johnny, he worked in a bank. And Duffy, I think he was a builder. Jock was just a roustabout. It was really good meting them.

The ghost appears. It was very funny it was – not funny but emotional too. It was very good. I was happy that I could do that and tell him.

No, it is good. The whole story or the situation of how it happened just

poured out of me. The brother was just all ears and he was listening very well. I knew I could talk to him about it being a male. He would have been twenty something I suppose. It was a bit hard to tell. Then he could tell his mother, if I had sat down and tried to explain it to the mother and the two daughters and the

son it would have been hard. With him, when they came back from the parade they sat down and he started telling them. Someone appeared out of the blue with a six-pack of tinnies. We all started to move around. We had said we would all double back and we’d meet where all the fat cats where, the politicians and that. We said we would meet opposite there.

We had the beers and we were getting ready to head back to a pub or a club or somewhere. We finished the beer and I said, “I’ll go over and talk to Bob’s mother.”

A couple of them who were in my section and platoon they came over too so it was good. It was quite good. It was a shame I didn’t get in touch with Jock or Duffy’s parents. Back in those days I hated writing

letters. If I had found some way to ring them on the phone and talk to them and that but time went by and it was a shame. Then when I was in Vietnam we found a cache of rice and clothes and that. They got the chopper in. The padres came around and said, “You’re going to be hunting me down.”

They used to swear and drink the old padres. He got up me and he said, “You haven’t had a lot of…” They were Salvos not padres. When I was young I was involved with the Salvation Army Sports and that and she probably got onto the Salvation Army over here in Townsville and they got onto the padre over there. He said, “You haven’t written your

mother a letter for a month or six weeks or something.” When you were out bush and that and it might have been after Jock was killed probably. I was still keyed up after he was killed. He said, “You haven’t been in touch with her.”

I couldn’t write a letter there. We were getting ready to load up as soon as the chopper arrived with the rice and clothes that we found we were getting ready to move out I didn’t have time to write a letter. I said, “Flowers.” He said, “Flowers?” He teed it up through Interflora and I told him to go and see Squizzy at the Q Store and get the money out of my locker. They were beautiful. I said, “Get a really good beautiful

bunch.” I’ve got a photo of it sitting there, Mum is sitting there with a bunch of beautiful flowers. He did that, the old padre. I think he had a few words to me too about Jock and Duffy and them. It is good when you have someone like that to talk to and get it out of your system.

A lot of people probably won’t agree with that.

No. It is quite easy. Your mind is on the job.

I didn’t go back as forward scout, they sent me back again as rifleman.

We all sort of work as a team the riflemen. There are the machine gunners and there are three of them within the group. When we harbour up for the night that means we camp somewhere in an ambush position, we all have turns on the machine gun.

If you have a contact and someone wanted to get into your area it is usually they – Jock and I were on the perimeter there and he is a rifleman the same as me. He might be there and I’ll take over the place of the machine gunner, number two. Another bloke from one of the

others, it could be Sleeman or Steve Mann or one of them and they might swap with me when I finished my hour or two hours or however long I was on sentry or picket.

Yes, even in day time. It was a very wide open space for it not to be manned. There was always someone

there, always. There was nearly always someone with the radio.

The radio man would be in the middle. He’d be with the sergeant or the lieutenant and he’d be in the middle, that is we were in platoon strength.

Yes. If we were in section formation. We would nearly always try to harbour up at night with the full mob, the full platoon. If it happened that the whole company was

out that was where there’d be in an area and you could be more relaxed because, even though the Viet Cong knew ninety per cent of the time where you were, they weren’t game to come anywhere near you because of the amount of fire power you had. We would always make sure that where we were going to

bunk down for the night was a good area. A lot of times the battalion commander he would come in in his own little personal chopper. He was a bit of a morale booster and he’d talk to the brass, the lieutenants and that, and discuss where we were going to go. He would very rarely stay for the night. I can’t remember

him staying. He would leave and fly out and we’d move out or stay there and just use that as a sort of headquarters. Then we would fan out all over the province we were in.

That’s right. They call them tail-end Charlie. It has been known and they have been hit too.

No. You are just looking everywhere. Even though the forward scout went past he might have just missed something that you pick up. Even the radio operator could just glance left or right.

He could even look up in the air and he would tell someone who was near him and they’d just stop the whole section. There were little things the forward scout might have missed. He would say, “See over there, look.” Everyone would be dead quite and probably just the sergeant would come up or

we’d go to the ground and just squat. I could be right down at the back end as tail end Charlie and the forward scout could have just glanced up at the tree there and it could have been a big gum tree, they had heaps of varieties of trees over there, they could see like a platform being built up there. That would probably indicate there could be snipers up there or an early

warning post. They were the two options: if it was a sniper that meant he was going to hit and run, if it was an observation platform it would probably just be a hunk of wood and you’d see a few scratch marks where he’d gone up the tree and then someone gets an early warning. Then we knew there were some people in the area that didn’t want to be seen. We have got a

variety of options. We could just stop there and call in a spotter, sometimes they used helicopters and sometimes it was a really light-weight plane. They would just fly over the area and say, “Not much there.” Or they’d say, “About another half a kilometre up the track there is a nice good opening there where a couple of choppers could drop in.”

Half the time we didn’t know that this was going on and I as still sitting there and I’m looking behind me and the forward scout is doing the same so there must be something going on. You can’t go up there and say anything. You’ve got to stay where they are. We didn’t know what was going on

the bloke at the front and the bloke at the back. The sarge might come sneaking up to the back or sneaking up to the front to tell us what was going on. He would say, “Just to the left there, there is a tree and there it has got a platform up top there so there could be a bunker system around here so we’ll just lie down here and wait.” We didn’t know how long it had been there or the hunk of timber had been sitting there. It was quite

concealed and it was just by chance that our radio man had seen it. No one is perfect when you are a forward scout, things are easy to miss. The area up the front there seen by the spotter plane would be ideal to bring in some choppers. So if anyone was in between that kilometre away, in between there, because we were bringing some choppers in. There might be B

Company working in a different area close by. We’ll send choppers in and they’ll pick them up from that area and drop them in, in front of us, so they’d be a blocking force again. Then they’d slowly move in towards us. Both of us would work together. We know how far apart we are and we keep in contact so we don’t shoot each other up. Whoever is in there, if there are no bunkers they have to go left or right. At the same time

with the Viet Cong, just in case they are there in the bunkers, they don’t know what that plane is up there spotting. They see planes flying over every day, there are thousands of them. They could be up there and as we get closer they decide to move out. If not and they want to stay and fight that’s when we back off a little bit. He backs off,

the other ones that were choppered in, and the boy upstairs just gives the coordinates to call in an air strike and the gun ships or artillery if it was handy and close by or we were near a fire support base.

No, we’d wait until they moved first. The bloke in the plane will let you

know. As soon as he does that to either our group or the group that is well in front of us may have spotted something. If not it is a false alarm, it could have been sitting up there for months. There are small little things that you’ve got to go and check out. It mightn’t sound like much.

They would wait until we were just about on top of them. They had their little spider holes and things.

They were the scary things, the tunnels. They would go down the tunnels and disappear and they’d come up to your left or your right. You could walk right in on top of one.

Some of them were quite well concealed. Some of them had been there for yonks.

Some of them have got interconnecting underground tunnels. They probably have a main one that is close to an area where they can do the most damage to your section or your platoon. They could have sort of like open trenches. When one bunker looks like it is going to be taken out they can run through these little small trenches, because they’re only little people, into the next bunker. They can open

fire. That bunker system could be shaped like a horseshoe and you walk right into the horseshoe. They will have tracks going out. If it was a horseshoe shape the blokes that got brought in by helicopter are going to run into them at the end of the horseshoe, the main part of the horseshoe, whereas we will walk right into the ambush. We will get it from both sides.

Then when they’ve had enough and they think we’re going to get air strikes in that is when they do the runner. They can go either left or right and that’s when the bloke upstairs, the bloke in the plane, will say, “They are on the move.” He will see them, they will come through the bush or our radio operator will be in contact with the other radio operator and he’ll say,

“Yes, they are going left” or, “They’re going right.” Hopefully we are still alive. Then the spotter plane will do his bit.

It depends on the type of terrain. If it is really thick jungle you could just about walk on top of it or within a couple of metres.

If it was a rather big bunker system you’ll see through the bush and that. You might just see a small sapling that’s been cut down. There are no leaves and nothing whatsoever. All you see is this little stump. They have got dirt and mud and something and water and they’ve just mixed it up and put it all over it to make it look like it is old and it’s been there for years

whereas it is only a fresh one. They won’t cart them down. They might walk five hundred yards or a thousand yards just to cut one tree and then they’ll cart it back. When they build them they just dig their hole and the dirt is at the side. They use a

criss-cross type of thing with their logs. I have seen them where they just meld in and it looks like just a small rise in the hills there. They are just mounds of dirt. They are very hard to pick until you are right on top of it.

They are very small just openings. There is like a little slit going out and up. That is where they pop down there. They have got a little slit facing you with their firing position.

They can fire on you if you are right in the midst of them and right up close. They can fire on you and you react straight away. You are on the ground. You might have an M72 and that is like a rocket launcher and before you get up there and shoot that someone gets in there and puts a grenade in there. They will scoot out of the

back door sort of thing and have gone into another one. That could be to your left or to your right whichever way they think we might go. They are very good at it.

Tunnels? Sometimes you wouldn’t even know they were there. The Americans built a base camp on top of a Viet Cong tunnel system.

They built it on top. They couldn’t figure out why the planes and things were getting blown up. The Aussies had special tunnel rats and they were very good. I know one of them. He lives on Palm Island. He is a dark bloke and he’s a priest now. He was one of the original tunnel rats.

They were a special bred they reckoned.

They’d go down these tunnels which were full of booby traps and all you had really was a torch, a knife and a pistol. You would feel your way through. There could have been booby traps and snakes. They had been known to put snakes down there and spiders and bamboo. They would have like peepholes. You would be

crawling through a tunnel and the bloke could just be inches away. On the other side there was another tunnel going down the side. There were two tunnels together. The Viet Cong was in one and you were in another one. He just sits there and waits. Some of these tunnels go down quite deep and some of them are shallow. I have got photos of them there and they’ve set up hospitals and

first aid stations. They lived in there and cooked in there.

I didn’t get down very far. We were working and the blokes went down one time. There was one time that they went down and had a look around and by the area of it it might have

been the size of a block of dirt that you’d probably put six houses on. It was fairly large. We propped around the hole and circled it off. They decided that it was a bit risky going down or they wanted to go and chase something else up. That is when we brought the engineers in and they blew it

up. A lot of times they went down there and they found caches.

Yes. I can’t remember anyone that I worked with or even spoke to being killed or anything. I think a few did but not in

my time over there in Vietnam. That was nerve racking that was worse than being forward scout being a tunnel rat.

No we would have a look ourselves first. We would go down and fan out in a circle completely around the entrance. We know where that one is marked. It is in my battalion book. We found it in this

cocoa patch I think it was. It was a little hole just like this. We were camped in the hamlet. We’d been down there and it was just by luck that we found the entrance. It is still in the battalion book. The RSM reckons he found it. He came in by chopper to get his photograph taken.

If we reckoned it was not our bag of fruit type of thing or it looked like it could be a rather big one we would get the fellows to come in. We would go in there and have a bo peep [look] and a lot of times you could tell if it had been worked or if anyone had been there recently if it was mouldy. Sometimes you could smell cooking but a lot of times they had

air vents. They had air vents coming out where they cooked and slept. They had one there I had to go and visit one day, Chu Chi Tunnels. I think there was two hundred kilometres of tunnels in this area, it was huge. A lot of it they blew up. They tried gassing them but that didn’t work because the Viet Cong were

able to build sometimes like an escape route. They would dig along in a tunnel and then they would go down and dig underneath and then they’d come up and they might be only two metres

apart from that hole where it goes down underneath and comes back up again. Then they would start digging again. In that hole that comes up again they fill that full of water. So, whenever smoke is pumped down there or gas it can only get so far in because it can’t get through the water. It is the same with the shockwaves. The shockwaves can’t get down through the water and they get out that way. They have other holes

where it goes down and you look down it and you can see where it might go to the left or right or straight ahead. No way in the world can the normal Aussie get down there because the Vietnamese people are only short. He can get down there because he knows the place. For one of us to go down there

you’d have to go down head first because the hole is down about one metre deep and then it branches off. You had to go down feet first or head first. Now if there is someone down there that is nerve racking. It happened to a lot of Americans that they were stabbed in the groin or face or back. It was very, very spooky.

They are a different breed the tunnel rats.

If the forward scout saw it first up – I found one that consisted of probably ten bunkers. One bunker would probably hold eight

people or ten people. We would circle the place. We didn’t go right around it would just be a half moon shape because we always wanted to leave ourselves some way to back out if we had to in a hurry. When I went through I noticed that where they’d done their cooking and that you could sort of still smell it, even though it was probably a day [old] you could smell it and it was still going.

So I just propped and that is when I just back peddled a bit. I wasn’t facing the entrance I was more to the side. I was on their blind side so they didn’t see me. I think I called up the sergeant then and he came up. I just stayed where I was and he went back and talked to the Lieutenant and that.

That is when they just spread out half moon shaped so we were blocking them. They still couldn’t see us because I was still up front and they were a way back so we were pretty safe there. Then we just slowly edged our way into it through the back door. I noticed there was no one in the first one. You could look through and you could see the

trench had been used but we weren’t sure if they were still in there.

A bit of both. Sometimes you’re just in a really low crouch and then when you get up pretty close to it you’d be laying right down. So for them to see you they’d have to stand up or come out of the bunker. Then once you approach it you clear one first and

then the first of them behind you are coming up slowly. Then you go to the next one and once you’ve got two you know you’ve pretty well got that area covered. They are in a circle or in or a snake fashion. This one was more in a snake fashion and there were so many ways they could have just disappeared into the scrub. They could have just left us.

Once we got the two cleared the rest came up and then we slowly moved down and into the snake section. At the back where they’d done a bit of their cooking and camped there on the outside because of being down in the hole in the bunker all the time. You could tell the fire had been recently used within a day or two

because it had been drizzling a bit of rain. I didn’t go there. One of the riflemen went there. I went to the left and he went to the one on the right. That is when he signalled, not me because I knew he was watching my back and I was looking at the front and I was checking this other one out. That is when he went click like that and then I

propped. I knew my back was all right. The rifleman went to the left. The rifleman had come up and he was looking at both his back and my back for anyone that might come out of the scrub to my right and to the other rifleman’s left. He was in the middle and he was looking at that part.

when I heard the click we were pretty close but not close enough for me to hear the one on the far right signal the bloke in the middle. The bloke in the middle just signalled me and with just a quick glance he just went like that (thumb down) and that means enemy. That is when the panic button starts. Then

I knew it wasn’t in front of me because I was looking into that bunker there and I didn’t hear anything and couldn’t see any movements or anything because I was pretty close to the entrance. If anyone popped his head out I would have got him. So we knew two bunkers were empty. He was checking the third bunker, the other rifleman, and I had this one in front of me and there were two more to go. I didn’t worry about what was going on behind my back because I knew at that time the

rifleman who was in the middle, he would have slowly moved down to the rifleman that was moving up slowly towards the bunker that was in front of him because he could hear sounds or something in there. It could have been an animal or anything. The rifleman up to my right and the other rifleman coming up behind he was still looking out on the front and guarding my right and the other bloke’s

left. At the same time the machine gunner was slowly moving his way up and he takes the place of that rifleman there. Now we have him and he has got the fire power. I’m thinking, “Yeah” because I know what has happened. I don’t even have to ask. So the two riflemen are looking after that bunker up there and the machine gunner is good. He can, if need be, if anything pops

up he can just stand up and left or right he can pull fire power in. And probably the other rifleman would have been with the radio operator. The radio operator already knew ages ago when I first spotted it what was going on. They would have alerted the artillery

and whatever else we needed to call in. It takes time to do all this. I would have stayed there until such time as when the rifleman went up to the bunker

and they checked the bunker. I just forget who went down. Someone came out. They didn’t throw any grenades or anything in. He went down, because it slopes down like that, and the only way anyone can shoot you because you can see the little slit part where they fire out that way – they’ve got no slit trench at the back.

They have just got the entrance into it with all the logs and the dirt and the leaves all over it. This was like a little mound of dirt. So for someone to shoot him they’ve got to stand pretty well in the doorway. He might have said, “Diddy” or spoken something.

It was a Vietnamese old man and he hobbled out of the doorway and then two women came out. One was wounded in the leg. We checked that was okay and we got them out. I still had the bunker in front of me that was clear. Then the

machine gunner he climbed on top of the mound of the one he knew he was on that was clear, we had cleared that one. And the one with the old man and the women in it was clear. He climbed up on top of the mound. I was down crawling along on all fours and he was on top of the mound so we had a clear line of fire from pretty well one eighty degrees right across. I just had

those two to go. I cleared them and then we relaxed a bit. They would just be left behind. They could have been Viet Cong. The spotter plane was going around overhead. He told us there was a bit of a clearing just near our

area. We took them out there and they were taken away for interrogation. We went out there and cleared the area for the chopper to come in. I’ve got a photograph. It should be here. I’ve got a photo of them. We got ready to put them on a chopper. I worked it out that they had been there for about two days before. The girl had been hit with shrapnel and her leg was a mess. The old woman and the old

fellow I think they might have been just caretakers. They always left caretakers to clean and make sure that when the boys were coming home there were no scorpions or snakes in their bunkers. Then we would probably continue on. That one was blown up. We found a few weapons.

They were mainly RPGs. They were like a rocket propelled grenade. They were a Russian make and pretty similar to the ones we had, the M72. They are very deadly. They are the ones they shoot up tanks with or APCs.

They used explosives to help blow the bunkers. The weapons would have been taken out by

chopper. A lot of the officers got them as souvenirs. The officers back in Nui Dat would get them and in their boozer they’d hang them up on the wall. We didn’t have any.

Especially the rifles and that, yes.

They could just get like an ordinary lawn mower motor. We had one years ago down at the hut. It was just an ordinary lawn mower motor with a drive shaft and you just put a pulley on it. And you get the alternator out of an old car. It is not a lot of power it is not two hundred and forty volts or something but you can use some lights and

possibly, well, maybe not a fridge but it gives you lights. It is petrol power. The cache we found in the mountains there that was a hospital and it had a dentist and a cache of weapons. I would say it had been there from

probably when they were fighting the French probably thirty or forty years or more because it was well established. It was very well established.

They just spread it over a period of time. You have probably seen in some of the movies about the Viet Cong,

they take it out and they have just like a scoop, a big soup plate, and they just lower the rope down and dig. Up it goes and they lower it down. It must take them years and years just to build them. They did a superb job. They did a beautiful job.

Yes. There were quite a few. A lot of them were new ones too that were built probably a few years before we arrived there. They were experts at camouflage, real experts.

They were good. It’s not many times you hear a bloke say that about the enemy but they were good. They were doing their thing and we were doing our thing. They were very good.

They were shit scared of us. True. They were frightened of the old Aussie. The Yanks they didn’t worry about and the South Vietnamese.

It was the Aussies and I think at one stage we had some Koreans there. The Aussies used to play their tactics the same as they played with us. Hit and run and ambush. And the SAS, they heard about the SAS and they didn’t like the SAS at all. They didn’t play fair.

It was a long time before I met a couple of SAS blokes. They kept to themselves. Right in the middle of Nui Dat was a little bit of a hill. It was called SAS Hill. You didn’t go anywhere near it. You weren’t game to. One of them knew Steve Mann and he was in our section. He came out and visited us one day

and stayed for a few hours having a few beers.

They have dedicated their life as we call it. When Steve Mann

who was the bloke in my section invited him down, Steve Mann was a regular soldier, and the first thing he said to the SAS man was, “Chicken Man (they used to call me Chicken Man or Skinny) he is a volunteer. He was a cook by trade and he didn’t want to go to the Catering Corps so he came here

to the infantry.” This bloke sort of said I was all right and gave me a pat on the back sort of thing. I was as good as a regular soldier. He said, “Are you a cook?” Then he said, “What are you doing here?” I heard that many times. “Are you a cook, what are you doing here?” “Are you a cook, what are you doing

here?” “I’m with the boys.”

In those days it was on the radio, AFVN [Armed Forces Vietnam] Saigon, which was a radio station. The Americans owned it and ran it. They played all of the good music, the really good music. There was a serial “Chicken Man.” I’d never heard of it. You ask Skinny who has been to Vietnam,

“What do you think about Chicken Man the serial on the radio?” They used to have this call sign and it was, “Ba, ba, ba, ba, Chicken Man.” It was on every morning on the radio. A lot of us had little transistors that we used to take out bush but we used to always make sure that we had our little earplugs were in though. Me and Jock this day we

shimmied up one of the rubber trees and were having some beers. We were getting slightly drunk and that was when I was screaming out, “Chicken Man, Chicken Man” and the nickname has sort of stuck ever since.

I was just telling him before. Over there I used to

go and raid the Yanks. In their lines they had like a communication mob there and also like a transport mob. I used to pinch their fire extinguishers. If I remember correctly it was called CO2 [Carbon Dioxide] gas to put out electrical fires. You always had stashes of beer buried everywhere. We copied that of the Viet Cong. We would bury everything and hide it in trap doors. So

you used to get your tin of beer and put it on the table and take the top off it and you would just spray it with this gas and you had cold beer, in an instant we had cold beer. Everyone had a stash of it. We didn’t have so much wine, we had spirits. I think it was two dollars fifty for a thirty or forty ounce bottle of Bacardi or rum.

We tried it in some of the villages but, no.

We didn’t need to, we could just buy it. I never heard of anyone making any over there. The villagers used to but I wasn’t game to try any of that. We’d eat their tucker because most of the tucker was cooked and boiled, but you’d never touch the water. We used to always put pills in our water and that.

The food, I quite liked the food.

Like they did then and they still do today; masses of fire power and masses of people and they make massive

noise and you can hear them coming a mile off. The Aussie he is very quiet and he operates small teams which are quicker and faster. When we leave an area it is always bash, burn or bury. If we couldn’t burn it we would make sure we bashed it to pieces so they couldn’t use it to make mines for us.

I haven’t seen one but I have seen photos of them and that. It was just a small tin and it was full of explosives and rocks and bits of steel and glass. It was just a trip wire and a fuse in it.

It had a fuse or an electrical detonator. They would get them courtesy of the Americans. When the Americans leave they just leave tins of food and cartridges and empty cartridge shells from a normal rifle to a middle artillery shot. The Viet Cong used to grab them and

use them wherever they liked. With the Aussies they accounted for everything. Whenever we had a contact you always picked up your ammunition and the spent shells afterwards. We looked after our gear.

They left it behind but I suppose I just turned a blind eye to it and said, “Make sure we stay away from them.”

Probably in

Vung Tau.

No. They didn’t come anywhere near us, not at Nui Dat, no.

Only to steal fire extinguishers, that was my mischievousness from earlier days and it came in very handy.

It was usually put on a hill if they could or higher ground because they didn’t have to worry too much about the rainy season. They tried to stay away from the mountains. They were pretty close but not too far away from the mountains. To get rocketed or mortared from a mountain that means you had to go up the

mountain there. Carrying a mortar tube with a base plate and however many rounds you wanted to let fly, twenty or thirty or forty or whatever, it is a bit of a job to get up the mountain to find the place where you can shoot up them and into the compound, the circle, and do any damage. In that time in an American fire support base there could have been a

chopper sitting there or a gun ship and he’s up in the air in a matter of minutes. The Aussie he would clear a fair bit of the undergrowth and the bush around him when he’d set it up. They would bring in the artillery first up and then we’d

be there before them. We would have the area pretty well encircled. We’d probably go in in battalion strength. We could be there for a few days while they set up their camp. The only time we ever went in there was when we needed water or to get some more ration packs. Then we’d come back out and another platoon would go in or a section might just go in and get the

mortar for us all.

Yes, we had a bit of a combination.

There was more of a variety. They were good. I still liked the Aussie ones. The Kiwi ones were good but you had to carry like a forty-four gallon drum on your back.

They were dehydrated in like a special alfoil [aluminium foil] packet. You had to rip off the top and put the water in it and you would mix them on the stove, the fire. They were quite good too. They had a good variety of chicken and beef and soups and curries. But with the water, you had to have miles of water. Even in the dry season you had probably six or eight water bottles.

That is a photo of me with the machine gun loaded full of gear. They wanted a photo taken to put in our Vietnam Veterans’ Association monthly book or newspaper they sent out. This was taken six years ago or probably longer. I was the only one that could still fit into the original greens. The other

blokes they had put on a bit of beef. They took me out to Lavarack Barracks, they had to chase up the army then because they don’t use the M60. It has been replaced by a different version now that the army uses. So they had to ask the army to get one out of the armoury. I already had my pack and everything.

They took me up onto the hill at the back of Lavarack base to take my photo taken. They made a bad mistake. While they went to the armoury they left me at the boozer. We had to meet the armourer and four o’clock or half past four and the boozer opened, the OR [other ranks], that is for privates and that. The boozer opened so I was there for the boys. I had short hair and all my gear on and they were checking me out and they asked me this and that, and could they have the water bottles. The next thing they gave me

beer after beer after beer and when they eventually came back with the machine gun I was three parts stonkered. I filled the pack up to the normal height that we normally used with newspaper and cardboard, that lump on the top of the pack is a Claymore mine. I’ve still got a bag here that the Claymore mine goes in. There is a lot that I kept from

Vietnam. I still had a pair of old GPs [General Purpose boots]. Nowadays it is all that camouflage gear. A few people I know have got out of the army and they’ve given me some of that to use when I go fishing.

They tried but they went about it the wrong way.

We were more laid back, Ocker, whereas the American if he went to fix up the roof of the school he would come in with bulldozers and knock it all down and the next thing you knew there would be a brand, spanking new transportable plonked on this sight. The windmill, he would probably

bulldoze that or blow it up and get on the horn and ring up and the next thing you knew there’d be a Chinook helicopter flying over with a huge windmill underneath. The windmill would only be for show because down on the bottom there is probably a 5KVA diesel generator. All the blokes have got to do is touch a button and there is water everywhere, the windmill is just for show. That is what they’d do.

They’d be questioning and that and push their way in and they’d do it in a matter of a couple of hours probably. The building corps would get the dozer to lift it out and take it away by helicopter. The building [corps] would come in and “boom” plonk it, done, and they’d be gone probably in a couple of hours. Their CO or their officer he would be

there and there would be TV cameras and they’d be taking films of him. He would be sitting there and he’d probably be talking to the locals. We would keep an eye [on] engineers who would be working and that and the kids would come up and talk to you. They used to love Jock and I because

Jock as you can see in the photos, he had reddish hair. They used to come up and with me, with my hair being short and wet, the sun bleached it blonde and it was real white. They would come up and the kids would feel the hairs on your arm. They would do the same with Jock. They would run their fingers through his hair. This other one in our section,

Macca, he lives in Townsville, I was just talking to him the other day. He had top dentures and bottom dentures. He had pyorrhoea or something when he was a kid, younger person, and he had top and bottom dentures. The kids would come around and he’d would just look and see them coming up to him. He would just wait until they came up to him or they were right in front of him and he’d take his dentures out. He would put in his fingers like this and go, “Grrrrr.” The next thing the kids would bolt because they’d

never seen them before. They’d never seen dentures. They were good the kids. When the oldies saw we were playing with the kids and that they would come and sit and try and talk to you and everything. Then the old Mama San would offer you a piece of betel nut to chew. I tried it

once.

It makes your teeth look nice and black.

A real raspberry and strawberry taste. They chew it all the time and they are forever spitting it out. I reckon if you got them to do it in the one area it would make a little bitumen space there.

I reckon it would have been rock hard. They were good the old mama sans. They even liked it better when you ate their tucker. I could use chopsticks before I went to Vietnam and I knew how they ate and that and when you sat down and that. I think myself and another one were the only ones out of our section and platoon who ate their [Vietnamese] tucker. They used to eat it when they were in town on leave.

I used to say, “It is the same stuff out here.” They’d say, “No, no, there could be anything in there.” I used to like what they called soggy rice. You would get rice and meat was scarce out in the little hamlets, but there could be chicken or pork. They would boil the rice and put the meat inside. Of they would half boil it and they would put the meat inside and wrap it up in a banana leaf and steam it. You can buy them at the Asian shop just up the

road and they’re quite nice. I would sit down and eat with them.

Yes. And you’ve probably heard about our ration packs and the biscuits in them; they were like dog biscuits, you had to soak them for about two days to get them

soft. I didn’t like them. Whenever we were in a village I would give them to the kids and you’d be curious to watch them. They’d be trying to chew on the biscuits and they’d be rock hard, they could taste them and they could smell the flavour, but they couldn’t get at it. It was like a dog chewing the bone, he can smell the marrow on the inside of the hollow bone but he can’t get at it, he can smell it and sniff it and chew, chew, chew.

You start off in nice jungle greens and everything, about every three days normally or sometimes more you get a resupply. We didn’t worry about it, you stank. The ones who

copped the most – this other bloke in our section he used to have acne. It is a wonder they let him into the army because he had to use this special stuff to wash his face with all the humidity and the dirt. We came across a creek and all you did was wash around your crotch and your armpits and around the back of your neck.

With socks, we always used to make sure we had a spare pair. If you had a dirty pair or something, sometimes when you were going through the scrub you came across a creek, when you were going through a creek it would only take you two seconds to just pull them out because you’ve got them in your pockets on either side of your legs. We used to stick them in there

just in case you had a contact, you went down to either your left hand side or your right hand side. I fired this side so I had the socks in my left hand side pocket so when you hit the deck there was a bit of support for you. You didn’t go smack bang right on your leg because you had your socks in there. Possibly too you had a book in there or something else. When you came to the stream you just pulled them out and for a couple of minutes, you just wash them in the

stream. Then you’d put one back in your pocket and the other one you’d put on the collar of your shirt and it was nice and cool. When that one dried out a bit you would whack that in your pocket and take out the one that was a little bit wet. In the end sometimes there we gave up wearing socks. We couldn’t get a resupply and it was raining and it was wet and the water was getting down there. We all suffered

tinea down there at some time or another. With no socks on, if your boots did get water in them all you had to do was to get down on your knees and put your feet up backwards and the water would just run out. If you had socks in there it used to chafe.

No, your feet got hard enough or mine did.

Three hundred and fifty one days I think it was out in the bush.

Fifty days, I think, fifty days.

The hierarchy and the

politicians and the bosses.

You probably start thinking your partner or your mate is a bit good looking. And they’d probably think, “It is about time to get these boys back to camp and give them a bit of leave.”

Yes.

I think I only went down there three times.

We would leave Nui Dat and we’d pass oceans of little hamlets and villages and small towns. We’d be on an open truck and the seats, we sat in them back to back. You had your webbing gear and you would

possibly just take a small little bag as a change of clothes but most of the time I went there I would go and buy them. All you needed was a shirt and it was probably fifty cents. You would only be there for two days and then you’d just throw it away or give it to one of the kids. I used to just wear my sneakers;

didn’t wear socks. You just wore trousers or shorts and your shirt. You would have your camera. You would get that out of your locker before you left and you would possibly buy a film before you left or you could buy it down there. It was called the Badcoe Club that we used to stay at. That was pretty close to the

hospital there. The rooms were good and the tucker was good. It had a swimming pool. We would play pool there. They had a shop there where you could buy souvenirs. There was a tailor there. I got a similar material to the South Vietnamese

Army rangers. It was like a tiger suit in similar green camouflage. It still fits me and I’ve still got it today.

The bars? A bar in Vietnam could be half the size of this house. If it was the size of this house, quite

large, you could make three bars out of it. You could cut it up in pieces and get three bars.

No, there were that many of them. Some of them were as big as this house. Some of them were upstairs and downstairs.

No, by the locals, the army didn’t have anything to do with anything.

They had Budweiser and

mostly a lot of American beer like Budweiser, Slitz was another one, and Black Label. You could buy spirits but most of the time I reckon they were probably watered down. With the humidity over here we didn’t trust the water. That is what they make their ice out of. They didn’t worry about refrigerating their cans of coke so you were drinking warm rum and

coke with no ice. You used to steer well clear of the ice because a lot of the blokes ended up with dysentery pretty bad. All of us would mostly stick to the beer. We used to have a hip flask. Some of them did sell cold cans of coke. You would get a can of coke and if you had a bag some blokes used to have their own Bacardi or

scotch and you used to buy a can of coke and just tip the rum in.

All the bars had their own bar girls in each bar.

If you went away with her anywhere, they would usually have a room somewhere, you had to see Mama San first and you had to pay her. And depending on what

area it was and what type of bar some were quite expensive. Others were five dollars or ten dollars. That was a lot of money in those days and it depended on how long you took her away somewhere. I would find one and take her with me if I wanted to go and do any shopping. I wanted to see where I could buy some

gold and get some rings. You would take the bar girl with you and she could do the bartering for you. You couldn’t speak the language and it really was an entertaining thing to do. The longer you kept her out of the bar and you probably stopped somewhere to have drinks and that, you had to pay Mama San.

The longer she was away she was making more money and you are spending more money so she wants to impress you by getting you a good deal. I think half the time they did. They could have been ripping me off but you didn’t mind because you knew you were only there for two days and then you’d go back and you’d be out bush again.

No. There were condoms. If somebody said, “Have you got a

rubber?” You’d say, “What’s that?” “It is a rubber.” “What, is there a new car tyre on the market or something?”

No, there was none of that. The [local] bands were trying to imitate the Aussie bands and the American bands and there’d be dancing. Jock and I were always

together and it was likely that some of the other boys too would come along with us and we’d meet up somewhere. Curfew would come. I think it was ten o’clock curfew and we’d meet at this place called The Flag. They had all the United Nations flags in this one centre in town and that’s where they had the bus come and pick us up and take us back down to the Badcoe Club. That was like an enclosed area too. All the time I was in Vietnam I never heard of anything getting mortared or anything.

We would often see the Yanks in the bar and they created a bit of a brawl there one time. With my nickname being ‘Chicken Man,’ I like climbing up trees. I’ve got a mango there in the back yard that’s got platforms. There’s some of them up there still from when I was a kid. We were in this bar one day with the Yanks.

Macca was just reminding me about it the other day. He’s this fellow in Townsville and I see him a couple of times a week. He was in the bar at the same time and he said, “Don’t forget to tell them the story.” We were in the bar there and the Yanks and Aussies were mixing. The bar girls were all drinking and everyone was partying and the music was going. It was a pretty big bar area. It had like a dummy ceiling with

rafters going across and then a roof. I climbed up and I was sitting up in the rafters up there. They passed me up tins of beer, the blokes I was with. I was going over a bit further and moving over. When they passed me up this beer this time I leaned down and something happened and the timber snapped and I slipped and down I came.

Of all things I landed smack bang on this table and there were two Yanks sitting there. One of them had his girl sitting on his lap. She is sitting there and he is sitting there and her legs are on the table. When the table collapsed it is a wonder I didn’t cut myself on the glass or anything because I just landed right in the middle. The table collapsed and it fell

down and hit the girl sitting on the Yank’s lap on her legs. She screamed out, “Break legs, break legs.” The next thing everyone stops and they are looking. I’m there and the Yank sitting opposite his girl was sitting elsewhere and she had her legs under the table but the other girl had her legs were under he table. When the table collapsed I was still lying there in the middle of the table and the Yank

over that side – they can’t have been very good mates – the Yank that side decided he was going to hang one on me and king hit. I could see it coming because I’d done a bit of boxing before in the army and in civilian life, so I just dodged back and it went sailing right across and he hit this bar girl that this bloke had sitting on his lap. He knocked her out cold. The Yank with the bar girl with the broken legs, she didn’t break her legs, said, “You mongrel, you hit my girl.”

So I just rolled off the table in good old army style and the two Yanks got into it. Then Mama San came out and she had a tea towel. She must have been wiping the bar or something and she was chasing me around the bar with this tea towel and telling me, “Deni Mau, Deni Mau” which is Vietnamese for piss off.

The next thing, the Yank’s (and they weren’t friends I don’t think) his mates came down to help and the other guy’s mates came to help and the next thing it was all on. The next thing a few Aussies decide to get in amongst it because they were getting knocked about because some of their drinks were getting spilt. The Yanks were brawling all over the place and they were getting upset and they were saying quite a few words to these Yanks so then the Aussies got in. It was an all in brawl before the old MPs arrived, because they were always hanging around

everywhere – there were Aussies too but mostly Yanks – I went out of the back door and disappeared and left them to it.

The bloke that stayed there, they ended up getting him but they just broke it all up and kicked them all out. I think the two Yanks ended up having to fork out money for the broken legs and the broken

tables.

Very much and especially when you are out bush.

Pretty well. You might have say thirteen and a wakey and you are extra, extra careful and I mean extra. I don’t think

when you were out there you slept much. You were full on three hundred per cent, not one hundred per cent. You would be talking amongst each other. That is when the comradeship came in. We’d say, “We’ll get together. We’ll all be back and meet in Townsville and we’ll see each other before we get discharged,” which we did. We talked about how we were going to get home. They brought us

into Sydney. They snuck us in early in the morning. The government did in those days because they would have had a protest or something mob of the front there if they didn’t. So we snuck in.

Yes. We had nowhere to go. We had money. Some blokes came back with thousands or a couple of thousand. All I came back with was a few dollars and

DFRB [Defence Forces Retirement Benefit]. That was like they take a certain amount of money out of your pay.

It was something like that.

Fifty bucks I think or something like that. All of us, a pile of us, went to Kings Cross then. Someone commandeered a bus from the airport and we got into the Cross.

Wild and good.

They had the money. We still had a good time. We hadn’t been with a woman for quite some time, you know a ‘round eye’ [Caucasian]. You had to watch your language and you sort of had to start behaving sort of thing.

It was very strange to get acclimatised and switched back on, especially in Sydney. Back in those days, the way people looked at you and that. We all had short hair and they didn’t know whether you were a Yank or an Aussie. They would look at you and you would say,

“What the hell are you looking at, you prick?” and they’d go, “Aussie, yeah.” I had a good time but I really just wanted to get home back up here. So we got a train to Brisbane and stayed there with one of our mob out of our platoon. We stayed there and I think I bussed it or came by train and came home then. That was when you really unwound then when you were home with all your family and all your mates

She didn’t even know I was arriving. That’s why they snuck us into Sydney.

There was Mum, and my old brother was back from Mount Isa. He was out there working and he was back in town for a week or something and there was my sister and Mum. They were all pleased as punch.

Yes. She freaked out. I didn’t tell her I was coming home. Being the small place that Townsville was the next door neighbour, he is just a year younger than me, Ronnie Rath. And within an hour it was word of mouth and someone gets on the telephone and rings and says, “Skinny is back. ‘Chicken Man’ is back.”

The next thing the place is people and people and grog. The next thing the kegs start arriving. The blokes who lived in town here, who I still know now who had come back too, we just fluctuated between different houses and the blokes who had been there and come back and it lasted about a fortnight. I had a

fortnight and then I had to front up out at Lavarack because some of them were still away on leave. I just tried to get back into army life again. I got offered another stripe and then if I had signed up I’d have gone with 6RAR who went to Butterworth over in Malaya there. If I had stayed in I would have been

walking around with the old bird shit on my shoulder. I would have been an officer by now because the blokes like I know that stayed in they’ve all got rank now.

I had had enough. I did my bit as they say but no regrets and I’d do it again if it happened.

I was at Lavarack about three or four months before my discharge. I was discharged in

Brisbane.

Yes, it was, because some of the blokes I’d had leave with were getting discharged and they were heading off. One went to Tasmania and one to Victoria. So we have sort of kept in touch. One of them, the one from Victoria, he was only up here

three weeks ago. He is going back down and the rest of them are coming up here to go to that Bendennis Park [Atherton Tablelands hospital] at the end of August. So I’ll see them again. A lot of them their kids are grown up and we still reminisce about the old times.

I was pretty well

sure that I wouldn’t be able to go back to cooking because I went back and tried it. I couldn’t be cooped up in a building. You’d just be coming home from parties and you’d have to go to work and they’d be still partying on especially when you had to work weekends. I went into the construction game.

Yes but my temper didn’t. It wasn’t so much my temper. It was towards the end of Vietnam where they hassled us to sign on and I started to turn against authority. Even today in the construction game, I’ve been sacked about eight times from and been re-employed because I was good at my job.

It’s authority, you know.

I think it happened in Vietnam. Two blokes I know, and to me I think they might have pushed the issue, these two blokes could have seen that it was wrong to send them both out

bush again because they were pretty well at the cracking up stage and when that happens that can be very dangerous out bush. It doesn’t matter what position you are in a section if a bloke gets ‘jump,’ people can get killed. They can mistake people, friendlies. I’ve heard of one, not from our mob but another one, they thought he had a gun this bloke, and it wasn’t, all he was carrying

was a shovel that looked like a gun. He was a farmer. After he was killed his family came out of the village all right and it was a farmer all right with a shovel. The interpreter then started yelling, “Doi!” “Stop” in Vietnamese and started speaking to him in Vietnamese. The bloke just sort of looked like he was scared because he saw the Aussies and the

Yanks. He might have heard too many bad stories about soldiers. It was just on curfew and he still had enough time to get home but they shot him. It turned out he was stone deaf and he couldn’t hear and he was half blind. All he could see was the shapes coming out of the semi darkness. The bosses sent out blokes in our mob that he shouldn’t have.

With me, with Jock and that being killed, they all sort of probably keep tabs on you in Vietnam. They know what you are like. They might have talked amongst each other with the priests and that and said, “That’s the best thing for him. We’ll get him to pack all

his gear up.” But it was hard, really hard. And then go back out bush again! I reckon it was good. For me to sit down on your bed and look across and it was empty. Jock and I had this favourite song. It was ‘The House of the Rising Sun.’ That was like our section’s theme tune. I will be in different places at cabarets and that and I’ll ask them to

play ‘The House of the Rising Sun. They just play it and I’ll be in a pub or something and I just yell out, “Shut up, my song’s playing.” “Oh, Skinny’s song is playing.” When that song would come on when we were in Nui Dat on the radio I’d sit there and go, “That’s it.” I’d dive over there and turn it off. I would go out and pull up the trap door and go, “Bugger it, I’ll drink it hot. Here is one for Jock. Jock, Duffy and Bob.”

Yes, especially when you might have had thirty days

left and twenty of those went down and you were getting keyed up and keyed up. Some of our mob, Delta Company, might have known somebody in B [Bravo] Company and he might have been going, “A wakey left boys, I’ve only got a wakey, a wakey.” He would just walk up and down the lines yelling out and you might have twenty days or thirty days. He was

sometimes told to leave or get back to his own mob. He might have fallen down one of the trenches we had around the place.

Yes, to adjust, very much so.

A lot of the same mob that I knew before I went to Vietnam. They were still the same mob, my

school buddies. I think in the army too I kept an eye out for the underdog. If I worked somewhere on a construction site there used to be this bloke who was doing the concreting bit but the old back has gone a bit there and he’s a retired pensioner. You see this bloke and he’s got potential and the boss was paying him a

pittance. I’d have a go at him and say, “He’s worth more money than that.” He used to look at me and say, “Stuff him, if he doesn’t like it, he can go down the road.” I used to get up the boss and he used to say, “Well, you can go.” There were little things like that. I even still do it today.

No, it was good here in Townsville. Down south they copped it bad down there in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and Western Australia but in Townsville, no.

It was a bit of both and even sometimes now, because there is always something to remind me of Vietnam.

How about I thought it was down

south I was very, very disappointed and embarrassed. I wasn’t embarrassed that I had been in Vietnam or anything else like that but I was embarrassed that a fellow Aussie would do that to another Aussie and put us down for being in Vietnam or being in the

army. I felt sorry for the blokes down south. All the time in Townsville, never once has anyone put any crap on me, I would have punched him.

Yes.

A mixture of good and

bad. When I watch something about there I feel happy or sad. With Good Morning Vietnam [movie] I think I have watched it about ten times. I love the music and he’s [Robyn Williams] a good actor and I feel like I’m sort of back there.

Friends, yes. With my family, Mum didn’t really [discuss it] but my brothers and sisters and that and relations inquired. Mum didn’t sort of want to go into it in detail. It was probably the younger ones that – I’m saying young, when I came back I was

only twenty-two or something. They would say the normal thing like, “Did you kill anyone or shoot anyone over there?” I’d say, “Kill anyone over there? Heaps.” And then I’d turn it around and joke and say, “I reckon I killed around forty or fifty or a thousand.” They’d say, “What?” Mosquitoes over three are like huge things, they are like bugs. I’d say, “Mosquitoes.” Then they’d laugh and the subject could be forgotten. I would talk my way

around. If it was a Vet who’d already been there or something, I’d talk to them because the ones that knew me wouldn’t ask me something stupid like “How many have you killed?” The young kids did and that was just normal.

How long?

Very. When I have rung up some of them and they would say, “I knew you were going to ring.” I’d say, “How did you know?” And they say, “I just have that feeling.” He’d say, “I’m glad you did.” And then we’d just start talking. I’d say, “Have you seen Henry lately?”

because they live in the same town or he lives outside of Melbourne. He’ll say, “No. I haven’t seen him but he’s been down at the club a fair bit because his missus is pregnant again.” There are just little things like that. It is a bond that can never be broken and it’s amazing. It is an Aussie tradition.

Yes.

I hide my emotions. It is simple, it is easy, I hide my emotions. I probably got hurt with Jock and one part there has just sort of closed off.

Yes and no. I wouldn’t handle married life. I am still trying to adjust because I know heaps of Vets, heaps of Vets. While you were away having lunch one of them called around.

He has gone through and just finished his second marriage. He’s gone through his second and somebody’s on his third marriage. The only ones that suffer are the kids, the kids suffer. Most of them that are getting married now don’t want to have kids. They just want some sort of relationship. I’m too late now to change. I’m set in my ways. That is why different people

over the years say, “Can I camp here for a couple of weeks while I find myself a new flat,” or him and his missus have just had a bust up I say, “Yes, two weeks and that’s it and then you’re out or I’ll throw you out.” They want to change my lifestyle. They want to watch TV but they don’t want to watch that channel and they don’t like the way I cook. I’ve been

alone far too long now to change.

They can come here all the time. Jane, who you met today, her father has got a property just out of Townsville. It is a nice beautiful big house in the hills. He crashed out here on Friday night. We went up to the

RSL and went to a party there on Friday night and he crashed out here. He woke up in the morning and went home and went work. The cops are really onto it up here now the drink driving.

Well, good experience for starters.

I have no regrets about going there to Vietnam or anything, or volunteering. I would do it again if it comes up again but I hope it never does. To me they are all a bit stupid. To me no one is a winner. The only one that is a winner

is the manufacturer who makes all the stuff to kill ourselves with. It made me a lot wiser not so much business-wise but with people and getting to know people and what they are like. I appreciate life quite a bit. I am careful with it.

My proudest day is Anzac Day when I put on my medals and I march down the street and it’s not for me it is for Jock. It is for Jock and Duffy and Bob. That is the proudest day.

Yes to get it off my chest and to know that it will go down and for people many moons down the track. They can see what a sook I am through losing some good mates and they can have an understanding of what it was like possibly, what we saw, what we did and how we tried to help the people.

In the long run no one won, no one won. It has left me with some good memories. Always when we meet the blokes that live in Townsville here, we very rarely talk about the bad parts we talk

about the funny parts, the good times.

I’m living day by day. I am going back to Vietnam in October back to Hanoi and Cambodia.

There is nothing spectacular at all, I’m just enjoying life. It has been good talking to you people. Hopefully some day, whenever, someone gets to have a look at it. With you doing this they could possibly

or Duffy’s parents or his brother or sister or Jock’s parents, he didn’t have a brother or a sister but he might have had a cousin, they might track me down. A bit of a talk would be good.

I had heard of other people going back and I talked to one bloke and he said it was therapy for him and it was good medicine. He told me the places he went out to, where the Long Tan Battle was and

meeting the people and going to the villages. He went back to have a look at Nui Dat. He was a bit of an educated bloke and he uses all these big words. He said, “It was like a cleansing of the mind.” He said it felt good. He took his wife with him.

Yes. It was good. It was a very, very good feeling.

Yes, I’d highly recommend it, the people were friendly and it was beautiful.

Yes. When I went there the bloke I am going with in October was supposed to come with me but his father had a stroke and was in hospital so he couldn’t come. It was about three days away before Long Tan Day on the 18th of August. So I put a poppy on the cross there for him and I told him about it when I came back. I put one there for Jock too and for Duffy and Bob.

Yes, all those years ago. It has changed. They pinched the cross

years ago but they got a replacement. It is pretty well in the same area within one hundred yards away or so. It was a pretty funny feeling going there too.

Yes. Only my tour guide knew because when I left I had to sign a Stat Dec [Statuary Declaration] stating whether I’d been to Vietnam before. That was on my paperwork when we handed it to them in Hanoi.

He accepted it, he didn’t mind. He looked after us quite well. He organises different places to go to meet the real people. Instead of being in the towns he used to take us out to the villages. I have got photos of there when we went to an orphanage. He took us to an orphanage.

It was very

hard at some places there, especially at the cross, I was keyed up there and emotionally really uptight. I felt like if I had had somebody to talk to it would have been better. I wanted to see it so I went down and saw it and then for the

rest of the day we went to Baria and different towns and they took us to this different temple. But I was just in a daze, at that, I just couldn’t be bothered. I wanted to have a chat with someone and there was no one. I felt like I was lost. They couldn’t understand the importance of a hunk of concrete in the middle of the jungle, “What was the big deal about that?”

With crosses, they had seen thousands of them, but that one was special because I was there when it was getting erected.

To some Vets, yes.

They just sort of

never mentioned it. Their wives never asked me either and whether they had told their wives or whether they thought that I might get upset about it talking about it [I’m not sure]. They probably told their wives, “Don’t go asking Skinny anything about it.” It was the opposite, I would have liked to have told them about it

because then the wives might have been able to understand that if the pair of them, husband and wife, went back there then they could probably understand the husband a bit more. People that I know have done that. It is a healing process for the pair of them. He would be able to

pour out some of their feelings and emotions and that about what he did over there and I reckon it would be a good saviour and antidote or help for their marriage. He has probably been clammed up for all those years and she doesn’t know what is wrong or whether she’s done anything wrong.

Probably some of them might be afraid of letting other people know that you don’t want to talk about it. Some people don’t even want to let other people know that they go to see a psychiatrist. They tell the psychiatrist or ask him can they go to his house to talk.

The one I go and see he says, “Do you want to come up to my house.” I still haven’t seen it. All I mainly talk about is the other fellows who I know who visit him and I talk about everything in general. He asks me how I have been and what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been up to and he is like talking to another Vet. He has even been in Vietnam himself.

He said, “I’ve heard about this place off you fellows so I’m going to go and have a look myself,” so he did. I gave him some business cards of people when I was there a few years ago. He went to see them because there were a few Aussies. One owns a bar in Hanoi and another one in Vung Tau.

My doctor suggested it because

it toned down probably my temper and that. I had been battling with authority and he said he would give me some pills. I tried them once but I never bothered with them after I’d finished. It slows you down and you are too dopey.

You want to get up and go and that. Really, I don’t like taking pills that much. Viagra is all right I hear. That is a top of the shelf one. Have you ever tried it, Viagra?

Yes.

One way I get out of being hyped up and am able to relax and that is helping a lot of the elderly people with the TPI and Legacy. We do a lot of work for them and take them places. We have a sort of a group and we specialise in doing the cooking and setting up the marquees for

parties and taking them away. One of them is in charge of getting the bus organised. Myself and another bloke we are in the cooking department. Just over the showground across the creek near the canal across the road we have got a bar there and the profits go to TPI and Legacy. We all have a turn in the bar serving there.

I tried it once but they haven’t asked me back because I get up the people too much and swear too much. I haven’t been swearing that much today have I? I’ve been good. When you are serving beer you’ve got to be polite. I see Jo Bloggs walking past and he’s a Vet and he might be with his wife or his girlfriend and something or he might be by himself and I’ll yell out over the crowd there at the bar, “Hey, you prick, come over and buy a beer.” And everyone looks and thinks, “Who’s calling who a prick here?”

“Skinny, tone your language down.” “Yeah, righto.” We do that and we take them further south. We’ve been with a bus load of the oldies bowling at Green Vale out west and Cardwell up north and Charters Towers. It is good because you can drink on the bus. You are not supposed to. You can’t smoke but the elderly people have got weak bladders so they’ve got to stop at all these roadhouses so we get out and have a cigarette and a beer. We get them a beer.

We just open the door up on the side of the coach and out comes the big table and the urn and the coffee and the sandwiches. We stay there for maybe twenty minutes or half an hour and stretch our legs. We got up to Carville and the people from Cairns, Legacy and the TPI and the DVA [Department of Veterans Affairs] they come down. We challenge them to games of bowls at the social club there, they call it the country club. We challenge them at bowls, darts and pool

and golf putting. They won’t let me play bowls though. They’ve got indoor bowls and outdoor bowls. They have seen me play on the outdoor bowls and they keep telling me, “Skinny, you’re not playing that Italian game Bocce.” They get the ball and go, “Vroom.” They say, “Just gently.” Then when you go inside it’s, “You’re not playing indoor bowls either.”

I probably treat them like I treated my mother. I miss my mother and they are like probably a substitute for me. I like listening to their stories. Some of them can drink grog like a thirty or forty year old, they can put it away, the women too. They are cooped up in some of these

retirement homes and villages and I’ve seen it time and time again. Ali next door used to work for one. They would bring the oldies in and the first weekend the family is there. The second weekend some of the family is there. The third weekend only one of the family is there and a couple of months down the track nobody is there. They sit in these little dog boxes. They enjoy themselves and they cut lose and they swear as well.

Good.

Down south possibly but not up here.

No, it was good here in Townsville but in the south though they copped it down there. I never marched through the streets like 4RAR I think.

Some woman threw red blood or pigs’ blood or WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s’ blood or something and that would have been bad. It would have been, “Break ranks and charge.” That means, “Get into them.”

Yes. I really wanted to go and meet the boys again. I wanted to go and see the boys, my mates, so it was special.

Even with the unveiling of the War Memorial it was to meet my mates.

There was a bloke I’d trained with in the army and we’d meet up with a couple of us and there was just an ocean of faces there with the one at Hyde Park. The other one in Canberra there, there were faces everywhere. So we just wandered, one of us, and said to the other, “You stay here.”

The army comes out in you again. I said, “I’ll go through that tree there and I’ll head through that tree there and then I’ll come through here. And Henry, Henry Higgins, said, “I’ll go that way there. I’ll head for that building there and I’ll cut across and I’ll come back this way and we’ll meet here.” In the meantime we’d probably meet somebody half way through and we’d probably tell him, “See this tree here that I’m heading for and see that tree at that building over there if you line up that tree and the building and you head straight through we’re smack bang in the middle there.”

It was just like with the pushbike wheel and the spokes and the hub in the middle because that’s where we met. When we were in the Welcome Home Parade, one of us got a carton of beer and just ripped it all apart and put all the grog on the ground there. We went up the middle of the hill there, I think it was in Hyde Park, we went up the hill there to one of the blokes’ wives and we got her lipstick and we wrote a big 6RAR and wrote it on the inside of the beer carton.

One of the blokes went and broke a branch off the tree and pruned it and we just held that up with the branch of the tree. The cops weren’t game to come and say anything or do anything to us. That is how we had our 6RAR sign up there and the blokes just came wandering in and wandering in.

I’d encourage them. There was one just recently. His daughter is in the cadets and she is officer material if I’ve ever seen one. I encouraged her. He reckons it is good too and she is officer material. She has just turned eighteen. She’s

probably been in the school cadets for two years or something and she is up in rank and up in rank. She will be down at Duntroon. Where do they send the ladies? It’s Duntroon I think, yes, for officer training.

Valuable?

Life is too short and enjoy it while you can and look after your mates because then they’ll always look after you. They say about Vietnam they say, “It’s a carbuncle on the back side of society. You can cut it out but it still leaves a scar.” It left a scar on all of us.

I have no regrets. I lost some good mates and made some good mates. You always think of the good times and the happy times.

It has been quite good, yeah.