Australians at War Film Archive

Well summarising it would be in two or three minutes. I arrived in Australia ten years old in 1949, result of the Second World War, as a displaced person. I think I was born in Russia,

then again in subsequent camps I was allegedly born in the Ukraine, then to get away from the Russians who were going through British displaced persons camps and taking their citizens away, somehow I became a Pole. In fact that’s what’s shown in my pass…, Australian passport now that I’m,

I was born in some place in Poland, for me it doesn’t really matter. Even my birth, date of birth, 8/8/39, it’s probably questionable, wouldn’t have a clue, no problem. Arrived, yeah three year’s in Hitler’s camps, three years... no, sorry, I was three years old when I was taken to

Germany by cattle trucks. Three years in Hitler’s camps, so that made me six when the war finished, ending up in a British occupation zone. Four years in displaced person’s camps, waiting to be sent somewhere as a refugee. In the end when it came to my lot, there was a choice of either Morocco,

Argentines or a place called Australia. So we worked out Morocco was full of sands and Arabs and figs and camels, no good. Argentine was full of Amazons and bloody anacondas or things similar, no good. Where’s this place called Australia? So everybody rushed to the world atlas, you know, the ball, looked at it and said, “Geez, that’s the other side of the world, away from Uncle Stalin,

that’ll do,” right. And that’s how, you know, we took the choice of Australia. Arrived in Melbourne September ‘49 and as I said, ten years old. All I could speak was, English was, “Gimme, cigarettes and chocolate,” although I forgot about the chocolates after the trip over here. That was ‘49.

Did my schooling, did rather well, learned the English language, did rather well, even became dux of the local school, by the time I finished, ‘59 I joined... Finished schooling and went into the public service down in Victoria, didn’t like it for various reasons and joined the army

and, the regular army in the end. And finally after twenty-one years of regular army, nineteen years of reserve, I pulled the pin in ‘98. ‘98, yeah. and retired to the sleepy hollow of Halifax in North Queensland. And that’s my life.

Basically, well the two campaigns, wars, confrontations if you want, were in fact Malaya or Malaysia at that stage, ‘65 to ‘67, which included a five month stint in Borneo, Sarawak Borneo, against the Indonesian infiltrators

yeah, confrontation. That was basically a platoon commander’s war and I was a platoon commander there. Home in ‘67 and then ‘69, ‘70 Vietnam as an advisor, part of the Australian Army Training Team, Vietnam. And have no intentions of going overseas again, even on holidays,

cause every time I go over there’s some bastard shooting at me so, and they finally got me in Vietnam thank you very much.

Well see there were lots of lies being told and of course

it was all sort of bound with, nobody wanted to go back behind to Uncle Joe, to Stalin. So of course people took on different nationalities and trying to get as far west as possible from their place of birth, because in Stalin’s era, even returned prisoners of war,

let alone refugees, were all being either executed, prosecuted or being sent off to Siberia. So of course everyone tried to pretend as much as possible that, you know, they weren’t Russians. My, and in fact one British camp we were in, where they were allowing the Russians to come in and grab their nationals,

they were there three days going through the whole camp and rounding up people. My grandmother could speak nothing but Russian, so we had to hide her under the floor boards of the barracks for three days. Even as a, would have been about five, four-five at that stage, I could speak virtually all the Slavic languages, so I could pretend to be a Pole,

like everybody else could pretend to be a Pole.

Oh, flashbacks, only flashbacks. People find it amazing but I do even remember, I do even have a flash back of being in the cattle truck, going to Germany.

Just one incident, you know, just one flash back. There were other flashbacks, of course, bigger and stronger, of the camps.

No. Well even going back to the place where I was allegedly born, there’d be no

records, all those towns, all those cities were razed [burnt] to the ground, no drama. As I said I was ten years old when I arrived in Australia, I’m now sixty-five, I’ve been in two wars for Australia, I think I have the right to consider myself to be an Australian.

Well, if anybody out there wants to have a go,

come and see me and we’ll have a chat about it.

Okay, I’ll settle for interesting.

There was one, towards the end, well must have been at the end. We were held by the Germans in a camp which contained many, many... it was a railway siding and there were concrete blocks, buildings, excuse me, right over the railway siding,

full of ammunition, artillery shells. And I could still see those, they were taller than I was, right, and we were sleeping in amongst all this lot. And all of a sudden the Germans disappeared and from about a kilometre away, through the pine forest, there was this

huge roar, which we... hang on...

which we worked out subsequently was a

POW [Prisoner of War] camp of allied troops who must’ve cheered like buggery when they heard the war was over. That’s enough of World War II.

Four years in a displaced person camp, not the refugee camps you got today. Quite, well not the, sort of the (south...UNCLEAR), they moved us to various camps. They were quite civilised about it, there was no barb wire round the place, people were, sort of understood that you either played the game

in these camps, and waited for your turn to be moved on somewhere by the United Nations or if you, you know, if you screwed up, you know, you were sent back, you know, sent back to the east. So you know, people knew where they stood and people just waited. As I said, by the time it came to our turn, the quota for America,

for Canada, for Britain had been filled, and it was only, ‘Here’s where you can go, take your pick.’

Four years.

So I was six years old when I went into displaced, that was ‘45, yeah and then four years and came out here in ‘49.

Well firstly you were free, and you weren’t being terrorised, you weren’t being brutalised. Secondly, they started a,

a boy scout organisation, they started a school, but then again that was in the Slavic languages, that was Ukrainian. In fact 1947, yeah, two years before I came out, I was even baptised as a Christian. I mean all you lot get baptised, you know, the day after you’re born, I was seven or eight before I got baptised. Now I can go heaven, see, with all you Catholics.

But apart from that, yeah, yes, finished up in jail cause we were hungry and, you know, the kids that is, well everyone was hungry, so the kids went out and raided some farm and stole a couple of cabbages. Before you know it, the military police got hold of us and cuffed us round the ears, threw us in jail over night, you know,

and let us out the next morning, yeah. But of course by that time, you know, we were all little gangsters anyway, we’d been through hell, so a night in the cells didn’t bother us. That’s my criminal past.

Acquaintances, we were

all acquaintances, nobody wanted to make friends, nobody had friends. Nah, they’re alright, kids, kids are kids.

Oh there’s be some rough games, yes, yeah fine. Used to play soccer, and everybody

else in the gravel. And of course you get, go and back, find some German kids to beat up, yeah right, yeah good stuff, yeah. Learn, you know, somebody got hold of a bicycle somewhere so, you know, and I’m talking about an adults bike with a crossbar and, you know, and one was too young or too short to actually sit on the saddle so we learned how to ride a bike

with your feet straddling underneath the crossbar. Try it these days and see how you go, without your bloody training wheels. Oh yeah.

My grand mother who was deported the same time as Mum, well she was deported, I was the attachment, basically. My father allegedly was a Soviet

pilot, allegedly, who got shot down somewhere allegedly, I don't know. And at the end of the war when I was six years old, this woman appeared out of nowhere and claimed to be my mother, and so, and I think she was my mother. My grandmother accepted her but of course by that time I was a six year old going

on sixty-five, so discipline and sort of parental control was totally unacceptable.

Not really, no. No that’s probably one reason why I joined the army, I said, “Bugger this,” and, “We’re in Australia Mum”

Yeah. Well yes, she married a Russian or Ukrainian POW, of the Germans, who’d been released, and so we came out as a unit.

Nah, not that I wanna talk, not that I wanna talk about, no.

Well we were told that when you arrive in this place called Melbourne there was naked blackfellas walking round with spears, there’s these huge animals that roam around the place with, you know, on

their hind legs. And when you reach Melbourne you’ll be issued with about a month’s supply of rations and what not and maybe a couple of shot guns and sent out in the bush to be on your own. Fact, this is 1949 I’m talking about. So it was quite amazing to actually sail, you know, sail into Melbourne and see two-storey

buildings and streetlights and what not, that was all most confusing, still, one survived.

The only thing about the trip itself, twenty-eight days on an American destroyer that’d been converted into a cattle truck

for refugees, having never eaten a peanut, chocolate or an orange before that, and as I said, you know, I’m ten years old. Obviously the American sailors, bless their hearts, wanted to look after, you know, the refugee kids and feed ‘em up. And we had this particular big black Negro, or Afro-American as they are now, huge

bugger. Every time we stuck our head up above, up on deck, he’d grab us by the scruff of the neck, and start shoving peanuts, oranges and chocolates into us, and that, certainly out of goodwill. To this day mate, fifty-five years later, I cannot stomach a peanut, orange or a chocolate.

Yes.

Well we arrived in Australia onto a truck, a truck... a train, shipped off to Bonegilla, a migrant camp. From there of course the, part of the passage deal was that the adults had to work a couple of years under contract to wherever the government that assigned them. So

Mum and Dad were assigned to jobs in Melbourne, so we were moved back to Broadmeadows, a migrant camp. Lived there for a couple of years and then they bought their own home in Coburg in Melbourne and that’s where I had my, you know, early childhood,

as such.

Well camps were camps to us, you know, you gotta understand I’ve done nothing but camps all my life, up to that point. Camps were camps, and of course these camps in Australia were five-star compared, you know, to what a man, a boy had been used to.

Not only decent feeds but recreation halls, amenities that you never had before, no comparison. Oh yeah they looked like dumps to your five star tourist, or your do-gooders who were complaining about the refugees of today and how they’re being treated, but to us they were five

star bloody accommodations, and quite grateful for it, no problem.

Oh wog, dago, I suppose, you know, New Australians. Which brings me to a point later on when I changed my name by deed poll in 1965,

by that time I’d already been in the army for years. Cause I got sick and tired of people, you know, and there I am, I’m a second lieutenant in the Australian Army. And at various social gatherings someone would say, you know, you’d tell ‘em your name and they’d say, “Oh, say that again?” And so you’d tell ‘em again. “How do you spell it?” So you’d go through the process of spelling it.

And the final insulting question was, “How do you like Australia?” Go to buggery, that was it, so I paid my five shillings and changed it by deed poll.

You’re not gonna... you got five shillings?

No.

No.

Cost you five bob.

Basically waiting. I’m sorry, the Bonegilla one was basically waiting. Well, the adults were sorted out as to who was gonna go where, what job, type thing. I think they spent a couple, two, maybe three months in the Bonegilla camp. And then down at Broadmeadows

where, as I said, for a couple of years before they, you know, scraped up enough money to start paying off a house. Actually there were two families scraped together to buy a fairly large house in Coburg until they paid that off then went their separate ways. Yes, started to go to school, so I would’ve been about

close to ten and a half by the time I started schooling. Yeah, took me two years to complete primary, oh the first six years state schools as it used to be in those days, or whatever you call it these days, primary school, state school. And then onto Moreland Central School to start my high school education.

Told ya, good enough.

Survival.

Kiernan, survival,

drives you. It’s amazing what survival or your desire to survive will do for you.

By Intermediate, I was the dux of the school.

Actually got to, so smart, I thought I was, nothing could stop me, that I failed the next, I failed matriculation. Cause I didn’t bother studying, I was too smart, you know,

and that’s why I joined the public service. A few years of that and the six o'clock swill across the, you know, after work the six o'clock swill amongst all these blokes that were bloated, seeing myself being imprisoned behind a desk for the rest of my life, didn’t interest me, so I went for the officer cadet school.

Well there you go, you see, I was under military control all my life.

Oh yes, and of course there’s only one

part of the army and that’s the infantry, the foot soldier, and everything else is there to support the foot soldier so I chose the corps of infantry and remained in the corps of infantry.

Whilst at school,

would’ve been towards the, oh, last year or so, I wanted to be a pilot, everybody wants to be a top gun. But and that’s why I joined the air training corps, which I enjoyed, you know, it’s like your army cadets, air cadets, navy cadets, whatever, boy scouts.

And in fact wanted to become a, in those days they had sergeant pilots as well, so I sat for the tests and my eyesight was proved to be not good enough to be a pilot. Okay, you know, you’ve gotta accept the facts, you can’t, you know, fight the inevitable, not good enough to be a pilot,

let’s go infantry.

Well yes, you know, in those days of course I believed it, I still dunno what to believe, what not to believe. Yeah, that could’ve been part of it, then again, hey, show me a boy that doesn’t want to be a top gun, right, zooming around in the, you know,

in an aircraft. Much, much cleaner living conditions that infantry, you know, I can assure you.

Well no.

You had no interest at all, at any time of being a pilot?

Well there you

go, you proved my point.

What films? Right.

Oh well here in Australia yeah, down at the old cinema in Coburg, yeah. And get thrown out by the ushers for rolling jaffas down the aisle or trying to grope one of the young girls, yeah. Good old days,

yeah.

Yes, yes, yes. Some are still doing time in Pentridge, or is Pentridge closed?

Oh mate, yes. Well you got your gangland killings going on in Brunswick at the moment, right, that’s the next suburb to Coburg, in case you don’t know Melbourne.

You know Coburg.

Well there you go. What can I say?

Yes.

Well I imagine there’s a limit of, what is it, statute of limitations applies or anything, you know.

No.

Yes,

yes.

No, no. No. Not really, no.

Yeah.

How about we have a break and I can go and have a fag?

Seven minutes to go is it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t know that the tape...

Okay, yeah.

Well that fizzled out, it had to fizzle out yeah. I certainly didn’t wanna be ground crew, you know, fitting out somebody else’s plane, if I couldn’t

fly it then, you know, jam it, don’t want it. And that attitude of course applied when I joined the army, if I couldn’t be in the front line then there’s no point in being anywhere else, right?

Oh yeah course you do, you go through everything, medicals, applications. See there’s two aspects of this. Firstly I joined the CMF [Citizens Military Force], and

that’s, that was in ‘59. I did, what, four years, basically four years in the CMF and that was the City of Essendon Regiment down there, in Melbourne. Got to the dizzy rank of second lieutenant in the CMF, whilst in the public

service and whilst working. The CMF, of course, was your army reserve of the day then. And sick and tired of public service, decided to join the regular army. All these bloody veterans from Korea in those days used to tell me not, ‘Don’t join the regular army with your CMF commission,’ you know, ‘Resign from that

and go get a real commission,’ right, ‘in the real army,’ right, ‘in the regular army.’ And being stupid enough I did just that, I resigned my CMF commission and that started all over again, in the regular army. The sad part is that all those officers from the CMF who walked in the back door in the regular army with their…, with

their commissions, were promoted years and years ahead of me, because I was starting all over again. You know, you win some, you lose some, okay.

I liked it, the camaraderie, the training, the discipline which, you know,

was there and, you know, you either accepted it or you got around it. It was a challenge. The whole aspect of being in the army was a challenge, adventure, even weekend or fortnightly camps with the CMF were a challenge in many aspects. Excuse me.

Well within four years I was a, you know, an officer.

Must’ve got alright. And as I said, got selected for Portsea which is the officer training school for the regular army, it’s in January ‘63.

A year later graduated and in 4RAR [4th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment] which was a battalion marked to go to Malaya, as a platoon commander, and that was the start of it.

Oh not happy, not happy. Mother wanted me to be a doctor, I think

everybody wanted to be a, wanted their son to be a doctor. Not too happy about it.

Well I can’t remember now what she said, but we weren’t happy. And of course breaking away from, you know, from parental control.

Yes.

Yes, something like that, yeah.

Honestly I can’t recall now. No, just fitted in.

Oh recruit training, course it’s all part of the thing. Yes, yeah, but that’s, you know... Year’s later of course as a major, and this is in the 80’s, I had a company of, recruit company of Kapooka, of regular army. In fact in my company I had A Company, seven platoons, each of forty-eight to fifty

recruits. Yes and there were various stages of training, it was, I think the common term was, it was a sausage machine, you just getting in one end and eleven weeks later churning ‘em out, sausages, the next day sort of thing, you know, fully trained... fully trained soldiers, yeah. Yes, shouting goes on, yahooing goes on, yes,

yes, yes.

No, no, she found us in Germany after the war.

Oh she settled in quite well, she was an extremely capable, you know, capable woman. She, her first job, of course, was with

Arnott’s Biscuits on the production line of packing ‘em or stacking ‘em or cutting ‘em out or whatever it is you do on a production line. Having fulfilled her obligation of working where she had been sent, she then became a nurse, and worked as a nurse basically, well for the rest of her life.

Well she married this bloke back in Germany after the war. Here in Australia he died first, no, she never re-married and then she died, years ago.

Cultural.

Totally different, totally different. However for people like us, certainly for myself, it was either a case of assimilate or perish, simple as that. Excuse me. Oh yes there were Russian communities or Ukrainian communities, you know, when I say communities, clubs, as such. Much the same

as you have your Italian clubs these days, you know, Australian Italian club or something. But that doesn’t mean that it’s an enclave of totally their own. No, in fact, our generation of migrants, we’re grateful for the fact that, you know, we were taken in and they certainly had no intention and no hope,

no desire of ever going back. By that time of course the iron curtain had descended right across, you know, right across Europe so there was no intention, it was assimilate as much as possible.

As a child, no... as a child, no. I told you, it took me two years to learn English and another four

years to become dux of the school, so that was it, mate, you know. I, you know...

Thought we’d been through that. Yes.

Yeah, okay.

Survey draftsman in the titles office in Melbourne. My job, at that stage, was to... I don't know whether you’ve ever seen the deeds of title for a block of land, but normally they got a little diagram of a site, the actual piece of land that you own right, on it. Which in those days was sort of drawn in

with black ink, right, with the dimensions put on it and it was a red wash colour was used to paint the actual block in. So, settled down to that, survey draftsman. And before long I was called up before the boss of the section for being a naughty boy.

I was producing more in a couple of hours than they were used to producing in a day. Fourteen was the, you know, the quota, what was I trying to do, sort of screw up the whole deal by making everyone work harder, type thing. Yes. Then of course break for lunch,

the pub across the road, get a belly full of slops, beer. Back, right, work slower. Work ‘til five, or there abouts, waiting to clock off then back to the pub for the six o'clock swill, right, to get as many beers into your system as you could in an hour,

in the big rush. Then hop on a tram, right, and ride all the way out to Coburg, from the heart of Melbourne. And that was life.

Obviously not.

Well like, obviously gonna spend the rest of my life, sitting behind a desk, painting little pictures on bits of paper. And then, you know, and at the end of the day, running across the road to get a belly full of grog, you know, to go home and collapse.

You know, there had to be more to life than that.

Yes.

Oh, it was hard, it was a twelve months course, right, and basically we, my class was the biggest class that they had at that stage, I don't know if they

ever had bigger classes after that. Up ‘til then they had an intake of forty-seven or forty-eight every six months although, you know, there was the junior class and there was the senior class, you did six months as a junior class then six months a senior class before graduation. Our class was close on a hundred, if not over a hundred, or it was certainly

in the nineties. It’s only years later it was sort of worked out that, you know, that was ‘63, it was only years later that we’re surmised that they, the government must’ve known that it was going to need more canon fodder to send to Vietnam. And this is well before the Australian government was allegedly, allegedly asked by the South Vietnamese to come and help us. If my cynicism is starting to show, let’s go.

No, no, no, no, what’s there not to talk about. It was hard, it was fast, I personally feel that I was being, you know, there was bastardisation, yes, and I got my fair share of it.

And in the end, I think it was all designed because I was destined to go to 4RAR, which is the 4th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, which was to be raised at the end of ‘63 beginning of ‘64, which could’ve been the first battalion to be sent to Vietnam, could’ve been. And they wanted capable,

tough, mentally, mentally tough apart from physically tough, young officers to command thirty men. So in fact yes, bastardisation was in but I could handle it, you know.

It,

those that couldn’t take the bastardisation fell by the wayside, they simply weren’t tough enough to accept and survive the military life, particularly in the frontline. It’s as simple as that.

Well,

I would, you know, the instructor would walk up, do an inspection of you, of you in your equipment, and he’d look, wouldn’t look into your water bottle, he’d look at your water bottle, and he’d say, “I can see from here that the water bottle is half empty, take seven days confinement to barracks.”

Course it wasn’t half empty! To me it wasn’t half empty, right, you know, but I was only a cadet, he was an instructor, so he must’ve, he had x-ray vision, I didn’t, right, so you went along with it. You just finish your seven days confinement to barracks and the last parade’s about

half past eleven at night, you’re all standing up there and the duty officer has inspected you, gone right through you and checked you out. All he’s gotta do is say, “Dismissed,” and you’re finished, that’s it, you’ve done your time. And then the officers mess door would creak open and the chief instructor would, about thirty yards away, right, and you were standing under one light, right,

half past eleven at night. And he’d say, “Oi, you!” “Yes sir.” “I can see dust on your trigger guard from here, take another seven days.” “Yes sir.” And this went on and on and on. He finally came out, you know, and there were a bunch of crims, you know, alleged criminals, you know,

all doing penance. And by this time I’d done fifty-six, fifty-six straight days, right, of confinement to barracks. He finally, and there’s a line of us, see, all lined up, and the duty officer had gone through us and eventually the chief instructor decided he’d come out and have a geek, right, and he’d carry out an inspection. So he started on the first bloke, I was in the middle line there somewhere.

Started on the first bloke, checked this, checked that, and said, “Seven days.” Then the next one, “Seven days.” “Seven days.” “Seven days.” Came to me and I’m standing rigidly to attention. He must’ve spent five minutes, it would seem like an eternity, walking around me, looking for faults, and left me alone. Went on to the next bloke, “Seven days.”

“Seven days.” “Seven days.” Got to the end of the line and he says, “Prove all those who got seven days,” so course everybody rose to their arms, except me. “Right,” he says, “all those that’ve got nothing, prove.” Me. “Well you take fourteen cause I missed ya.” “Yes sir.”

Seventy, seventy it finished up love, seventy straight days.

Yes. But then again, I graduated amongst the top of, high up enough and was sent to the battalion, three of us were sent to the battalion that was going overseas. All the other battalions were staying behind, right.

And quite frankly it proved to be worthwhile when we got to Borneo, which you might ask a bit later, where, yeah.

Yes I was, I think. I was, they couldn’t do anything to me in junior clothes. Don’t forget, as I said before, I’d already served as a,

as an officer in the CMF, right, and resigned my commission in the CMF to start all over again, so obviously they were gonna put me to the test and break me if they could.

Yes. No, no, no, no.

I changed my name

when I got to 4RAR in Woodside, South Australia.

They used it, but not on me. See what they did, this is the instructors, and this is, the bastards know who I’m talking about. One of the things before any junior cadet could go on leave, was to be able to spell my name.

Yeah, so even though I changed my name, all my class mates, right... and we had a reunion, a fortieth year reunion down at Tweed Heads. So last year, forty years after the event, they still know how to spell my original name.

Oh well depends on the character doesn’t it? Some,

no, some... I don't think, I don't think we had time to feel sorry for each other, right, as cadets. Oh yeah, well of course there was camaraderie , of course there was a feeling of fellow sufferers, yes there was, you know.

No, what to sling off at me being a wog or something, or something similar? No, no. No. No. And if they, if there was any occasion it was certainly in good humour anyway, you know, sort of, with no animosity or no, yeah, no, no, but...

No problem, no problem whatsoever.

What, of army train, of officer training?

No, no, I can’t... yes, well physical. The two-mile run that had to be done in, you know, with my short little legs, I’m certainly not a runner, right. The two mile had to be done in sixteen minutes and that’s, you know, in battle order, with equipment and rifle.

The, for a recruit in the army as a soldier, had to be done in eighteen minutes, officer cadets had to do it in sixteen minutes, right. That took quite a few attempts, quite a few attempts.

I got there. And it,

again, this is a story towards the end of the training, must admit with the help of a few of the mates, fellow cadets, which of course the instructors could see me, they could see this. But, you know, towards the end of the run, say, the last half mile or so when a man’s buggered, wouldn’t collapse but I’d, you know, someone would grab me by the belt or by the strap

and drag me faster, but we did it. So that was part of the camaraderie.

What social life? Well there was social life, yes, before my seventy days and not much after because I finished my seventy days virtually on,

almost on graduation day in there somewhere. Oh the local pubs, local girls, sport. Had to partake in sport, I was on the soccer team, actually became a bit of a hero, somehow accidentally, somewhere, somehow beat the, I think it was either

the air force or the navy, you know. I headed the only goal somehow or other, don’t ask me how I did it, but I was the hero for the day, didn’t stop me from continuing my CB.

Well infantry corps, well posted to 4RAR,

and that was end of December, December ‘63. January ‘64 ‘til September, September ‘65 continuous training for overseas deployment, with the battalion at platoon level, company level, battalion level,

there’s lots, you know...

As the most junior officer for the first six months it was painful, being the most junior officer, and with a funny name, painful, yes. And coming from Portsea, painful, cause of course in those days Portsea cadets were

looked down upon by the four year Duntroon graduates, who by the way, only spent one year doing military things, the rest of, the other three were at university, but that’s neither here nor there. They were promoted to lieutenant while we were second lieutenant, you know, one pippers, so they were three years senior to us automatically, plus one day. The, yeah, first six months was

difficult.

Well being the most junior you finished up with all the shit jobs. But then six months later another young fella graduated from Portsea so I handed over the poo-poo bucket to him, you know.

Oh investigations, pay officer, as I said duty officer

on occasions when things were happening around the place.

Not unexpected, but you know, certainly not soul destroying. You asked me how it was, I told you, okay.

There was still time for fun, there was still time

for socialising, yeah.

As time progressed it became easier, yes, okay.

Yes, well that was the other thing I buggered up, you see, I got married as a second lieutenant, against the colonel’s wishes. That is,

the colonel at that stage, who’s now retired as a brigadier, was very much of a Pommie [British] tradition, you know. He believed in the Pommie attitude of, as far as marriage was concerned, that lieutenants will not marry,

they’re just too young, too inexperienced, they’ve got lots of things to do, captains may marry and majors will marry. The philosophy there being if a major’s not married, then people start looking at him, ‘Oh allo, allo, is he,’ you know, ‘is he one of those?’ You know, ‘Doesn’t like women or something,’ you know, ‘homosexual, or something.’ So that was a, that was the general

attitude. And I, of course, against his advice got married, so that sort of put me on a, you know, on a off-ish list. In fact it was so bad, see we at least, if we were going overseas for two years, we could take our families with us to Malay, Malaysia, Malaya. But we served, as I say in the 28th Commonwealth Brigade, which had a,

an Australian battalion, a Kiwi battalion and a British battalion, to make up the Commonwealth brigade. And I befriended a lieutenant, British lieutenant over there who had also married against his colonel’s wishes and he had to pay for his own family to come overseas, he had to find his own accommodation, he was totally and utterly refused any recognition

of his, of his marriage, until he was promoted to captain. All of a sudden, you know, ‘Allo, allo,’ you know, ‘Fred’s got a wife.’ You know, strange people.

At a party, in Melbourne, on one of my weekends. Cause I

used to drive across from Woodside to Melbourne, you know, spare weekends. In those days, could work all day, drive all night on the Friday and yahoo, party... party, party, party, and drive back to South Australia and get up at five in the morning then carry on. Those days are over mate.

Nothing. She was a young lady living the life of Reilly. Actually, when it comes to wives, I’ll get it over and done with and then we’ll leave it alone. She lasted three years and then she died in an accident. Three years later I married again, she lasted three years

and died of cancer. Three years later I married again, she lasted twenty years and died of emphysema three years ago. So, you know, unless you want to be wife number four, with my luck with women, don’t, don’t, leave it alone.

Yes dear, as I said, it’s time for the fourth, but no thank

you, no, no, enough’s enough. I’ve got two children, two daughters. One’s from the first marriage, one’s in Melbourne with three children, the other one’s in Sydney with two children. Never produced any progeny after Vietnam, cause God knows what sort of nasty stuff is in the system after Vietnam and all the agent, agent

oranges and gizmos and what not, whether I’d be producing two headed monsters or not, so never tried.

Just, just leave it all alone.

Yes, well that was it

you see. We’re in Malaya, and we were sent down to Singapore to do some course, for some reason three young officers we were down there. We finished up in some bar, okay we were in civvies, you know, time off. Now you must remember I’m married

for the first time and the wife’s up in Malacca, three hundred miles away from Singapore, and at this stage we had the first daughter. Anyway fortune-teller spotted us sitting at the bar and sidled up and he said to us, “For three dollars, for three Malay dollars,” which was about ninety cents or something, “I’ll tell you your past.”

Well of course my past being somewhat different to your average Australian I said, “Yeah, okay, let’s go.” See, fella he could work out, even though we were in civvies, he could work out that we were Australians and he, maybe even officers. But, “Righto, sonny Jim, tell me something about my past, and he did, told me quite a few things that nobody else has known. This is after feeling bumps and reading palms, you know, and scratching my left ear,

whatever it is they do. So...

Well he told me things about my past, you see, which as I said, we’ll leave alone, going back many, many years. He, then he said, “Well if you want your future, it’ll cost you thirty dollars.” Well of course by that time he had me hooked. “Okay,” thirty dollars.

So I paid him and he told me, he told me there, “You will be married three times.” Don’t forget I’m still on my first marriage, only about two years at that stage of the game. “You’ll be married three times, you will have two daughters, you will live a, there will be serious illness but you will live a long time.”

I thought he was referring to me being seriously ill with something or other, but no, as I said, three years of cancer and ten hard, ten hard, ten very hard years of emphysema, with the last five of wheel chairs and bloody oxygen bottles, oxygen concentrators and what not, so must have been referring to, you know,

illness, illness in the family, not to me personally. And with the luck that I’ve had of various battlefield encounters and experiences, I’ve survived and I’m sixty-five. And you know, I tried to pin him down to an age and I think he said eighty-one and a half but then again he could’ve been saying anything to get rid of

me. So if it’s eighty-one and a half I’ve still got sixteen and a half years to go, having just turned sixty-five. Problem is of course if he’s been telling me lies, I can’t come back and sort of find him, wherever he is. An old Sikh, with a turban and just a dirty towel wrapped around his loins, bare feet and what not. Okay.

No, no. Leave it alone mate.

Leave it alone and we’ll finish off with the children, right, that I have a fifty percent success rate. I don't know how many parents these days can actually claim fifty percent, right. One daughter’s turned out extremely well, and the other one’s gone feral, and let’s leave it at that.

We’re talking about a year and a half, why don’t you read the book?

The book, well in fact I mentioned it to Elizabeth, I’m sure it was Elizabeth when she first took notes, called the,

‘Our Secret War.’ Which in fact talks about the build up of 4RAR and our deployment to Malaya, our battles in, well battles, our campaign in Borneo, the fact that many of the missions were in fact illegal, all sorts of secrecy acts and what not. We,

we were ordered to conduct cross border operations against the Indonesians, but it’s only recently that the thirty year ban’s been lifted so this bloke wrote the book about it. Build up, infantry, see again the, we had a lot of, in the Australian Army as a whole, had a lot of jungle warfare expertise.

This is from World War II against the Japanese, the Malaya emergency against the Chinese guerilla communists on the Thai border, so in fact Australia was recognised world-wide. This proved to be a problem for me later on in Vietnam,

this reputation that we had, as jungle fighters. And we were good, we knew the jungle, we knew the tactics, the techniques, oh yeah. I don't know whether the expertise is still in the Australian Army, but no we were... and yes, it took a lot of training to carry out some of the manoeuvres, to carry out operations, yes, it was train, train, train, train,

until you, you know, until you became perfect, or as perfect as possible. There were still foul ups. I remember one exercise where the whole battalion, now you’re talking about, at that stage five to seven hundred men. The whole battalion is doing a night move through the jungle without any lights.

And of course it’s all in single file, one behind the other, and you virtually hang onto the man in front of you, some part of his equipment, you know. So, and the leading, the lead man’s supposed to be one of the best scouts and mapreaders and what not, compass workers. Cool, you know. Except that about, after a couple

of hours, the last man in the battalion felt someone was following him, right. Now this is an exercise in Australia so he wasn’t gonna turn round and shoot the bugger, you know, cause it, you know, still in training. Sure enough, it was the lead man of the battalion, the whole bloody battalion had formed a circle. A hoopla. Oh yes, yes, there were problems, yes, which had to be ironed out,

before you go overseas, before you get into operations, yes. Course there are, like any, like anything else, you know, yes.

Briefings for what?

Yes, yes.

Take, well family-wise there was, take the essentials, cause the houses were fully furnished over there, same as the married quarters here were fully furnished, some years ago when we, when I was in charge of the barracks, prior to ‘84.

You know, knives, forks, everything, cutlery, everything was there. Just take your bare essentials, you know, for yourself, the bubs, this is the family-wise, you know, your nice dresses. But then don’t forget over there everything’s cheap as buggery so, you know, within a week or two you’ll be, you know, you’ll have more clothes, beautiful clothes than you had back in Australia, type thing.

Each house had a servant, oh yes, you know, the families were well looked after.

Yes, they were all looking forward, yeah, course they were, all looking forward. Yes dear.

It was hot, very hot. And again, not much time to sit back and ponder about anything, it was all, once you were on the ground with a formed unit, training, assimilation,

conversation, getting used to the climate, training, training, training. And of course for the first time we were, we were looking at live ammunition. Cause this was join... see at that stage, although we were in Malaya, Malaysia had been formed and if you know anything about the confrontation, Indonesia didn’t like the idea of Malaysia as a

federation of state, and this is what the whole broil was all about. The Pommies under, of whom we were part, Commonwealth brigade, were on the side of Malaya, Malay-si-a right. Excuse me. So when we were not sort of defending places in Malaya itself, on the

peninsula, we were over in Borneo, in Sarawak and other places, you know, stopping the Indonesian terrorists you could call them these days. Infiltrators, trying to get in and upset the apple cart by blowing things up and doing nasty things and, you know, that sort of thing. So...

Well as I said, training, preparing, living, enjoying, you know. Yes, all your last vestiges, you could say, of your

British Raj type style of living, you know, the magnificent officers club, swimming pools and all sorts of things... oh, very nice, thank you.

No, no, yeah, yeah, but then don’t forget by this time I’m well and truly... plus the fact that it was different overseas to what I’d come from. No, it was quite acceptable, quite nice thank you very much.

Borneo, again, once on the ground, the battalion had a very, very long piece of dirt to cover, along the border. So it was really company bases with battalion headquarters set back. Excuse me. Rifle company bases

with battalion headquarters set back, and each company would send out two platoons of patrolling the border within their sector, while the third platoon was held back as a reserve within the company or to protect the base, right, cause company headquarters only consists of about eighteen men, but that’s including

all the bloody cooks and bottle washers. So, you’d hold a platoon back which was... and then your platoons rotated in and rotated out. And the fourth company, yeah that was three base camps, and the fourth company was held back near battalion headquarters , as the battalion reserve, the whole company. So was patrols,

normally lasted seven days out, two days in, seven days out, two days in, seven days out, two days in, seven day... I could go on all day for you, right, the patrols we did. Sometimes the patrol would be extended, because of certain information, good, bad or indifferent, and so you’d be out there chasing fireflies and you know, old bush tracks, for ten, fourteen days. But normally seven

days out, two days in. The two days in were supposed to recuperate and re-equip and have a bit of rest, but again, depending on the circumstances you could be back for a couple of hours and all of a sudden be called out again, to go off again. My platoon, as I said to you before, I was, by the

end of the five months I was down to eleven men, you know, from thirty. Now, you could say, ‘Geez, you must’ve suffered some casualties.’ Not one angry shot, not one contact with the Indons [Indonesians], right, don’t get me wrong, so I’m not pulling any heroics here. Shear exhaustion, accidents of, you know, of fallen branches, of killing, breaking, couple of family problems back in Malaya

where in fact the soldier had to be pulled out and taken, you know, back to Malaya. The rest was shear exhaustion. And this is where, you know, the toughness of the platoon commander came in. Even one of my corporals, a seasoned veteran of... went down on a, with heat stroke,

in the middle of one of these long, hard patrols, went down with heat stroke. The medics said to me that if I don’t get him to medical facilities within an hour, he’d be dead. There was no chance of calling up a helicopter to take him away because we were in the lowlands and the headquarters was over a couple of mountain ranges somewhere. No chance of any. Luckily we found a waterhole,

ripped everything off him, I took up a platoon defensive position around the hole, and we sunk him in there for the rest of the day. One of his soldiers holding him up by his ears and short hair, just to keep the nose out of the water, until, sort of restored him to some form of you know, sanity of physical being.

And then we kept moving, and for the rest of that patrol, he was physically buggered. Other soldiers had to carry his equipment, carry his, carry everything for him, and he was... yeah. So after the patrol, off he went. Another one of my corporals finished up with leptospirosis, that was the end of him, hospital.

Leptospirosis, you have it here in North Queensland. Basically rats urine in water, contamination, and it... naughty stuff, get someone from the medical field to tell you about leptospirosis. But that was the end of him. Another one of my soldiers, you know...

The leeches, and when I’m talking about leeches, leeches, poor bastard got a leech up the eye of his penis, right, and then of course it bloated itself, there was no way of getting it out. I, luckily I wasn’t on a mountain range at that stage, we called in, he had to be pulled out by helicopter, right, to be taken back to hospital.

Yes sir. In my case, I had my sergeant who looked at me he said, “Sir you got,” you know, “Stand still.” I stood still. I had blurry vision, I thought I was tired and he had seen, a leech had stuck itself onto my, the pupil of my eyeball, right. So course the

old soldier’s trick, light a cigarette, end of the cigarette to the leeches bum and, off it comes. But, you know, and after that, poor bugger with the leech up the eye of his old fella, we started wearing condoms on patrol. Not that we were, you know, expecting to get any slap and tickle round the place, no mate. So it was condoms on the

end of your old fella and a condom over the rifle barrel too keep the rust and rain and yuk out of, yeah. Tell me about it, you know, that was it, shear utter physical exhaustion. And when they were writing that book that I’m telling you about, Our Secret War by Brian Avery, they wanted me, they wanted my input, for some reason or another. As I said, the colonel didn’t

particularly like me, and he was the sponsor of the book, so I’m wondering why do they, you know, what do they want from me. And they gave me four years of misery in 4RAR, what do they want from me. Then it came out, in the war diaries apparently my platoon is written up as having conducted the longest non-stop patrol of thirty-seven days. Which of course, you know, buggered us,

buggered the platoon and left me with eleven men. Yeah, that was Borneo.

Re-supply, yes. Well normally of course if, once your patrol, your scheduled patrol was over and there was only one helicopter there that sort of operated for the whole battalion or looked like

it. You’d sort of make the designated pick up point somewhere in a, somewhere there was a clearing, then you could come down there with your whole platoon and put one section on at a time to send ‘em back to base. If, on the other hand, instead of picking up your soldiers out came rations,

then you knew you weren’t going home, were you, you getting given more rations and there’d be coded bloody, you know, code of bloody orders, what you were supposed to do next. Of course the helicopter having landed right there in the middle of the jungle somewhere, thus compromising the position, you had to pick up your bits and pieces and run or get the hell out of there before the Indons could find you.

And settle down on some hill somewhere, in a defensive position where you work out what rations you’re gonna keep and what you’re not gonna keep, and read your orders, as to what you’re supposed to do next. Yeah. On one occasion they were gonna re-supply me with ten days rations, this is during that longest patrol, ten days rations. So instead of ten combat

ration, ah, twenty-four hour ration packs per man, they dumped, at that stage I had twenty in the platoon, they dumped twenty boxes of ten man ration packs. Now I don't know whether you’ve seen it, right, a ten-man ration pack, I’ve got a photo of it there somewhere. This poor bastard, you know, one of my forward scouts dragging it up the hill, had to get out of there, you know, that’s an extra thirty or thirty-five kilo

on top of whatever you’re already carrying. Had to pick it up get the hell out of there and, you know, do whatever a man had to do.

Yes. Well, what you couldn’t carry you obviously had to bash, burn and bury, simple as that. You couldn’t leave it, for

two reasons. Firstly the feral pigs would dig it up unless you actually had destroyed it, and buried it so that the Indonesians, who might be coming through after you’ve been, see it, you know, they can work out who was there, who’d been there and what not. So in carrying the loads,

we got to the stage, where even our toothbrushes, you know, your toothbrush, you’d cut off half the handle to save an ounce. In the end we didn’t... you know, you had two pair of socks, those that wore socks. One was on your feet, the other pair was hanging off your pack drying.

Okay.

Oh yeah.

Challenging. Challenging, yes.

Well firstly you’re carrying live ammunition and live grenades and yes, different.

Well we did at times, yeah, at times we did.

Well they helped, they were good bush trackers, they also knew, it

was their neck of the woods, they knew... most of them could be trusted, I can’t recall any that I wouldn’t have trusted, not unlike later on in Vietnam, but no, yeah, when we had ‘em, we had ‘em. We also had our own recon [reconnaissance] platoon which was part of the battalion,

with sniffer dogs which were deployed, on a good track, you know, something worthwhile. There were a few contacts, you know, my platoon missed out, you know, fine, there was nothing, there were a couple of decent stoushes [fights] but, okay.

Well up and down the border to some extent, and also acting on information but... And of course, I think the secret’s out now, as I said, it’s been over thirty years and what’s his name, Brian Avery has written about him in the book, The Claret Operations. Where in fact the SAS [Special Air Services] had crossed the border which was what SAS do, and

either found evidence of something being there or something having been there, or something about to be there. Then an infantry platoon would be sent across to have a closer look, and get more details. Infantry platoon being much stronger, that’s a full platoon and an SAS patrol of four or five men.

You’ll probably get the SAS chappies arguing that point, right, all being bloody superheroes. I’ve met some of those superheroes, thank you. Yeah.

What, to uniform or something?

As quietly as possible and without being seen. 3RAR [3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment] who were there the year before us, cause in fact 3RAR was in Malaya while we were in Woodside in South Australia, and then we swapped over, we took over from 3. Three [RAR] had

been in Borneo before us, and they had a couple of close calls, right. In fact Lieutenant Doug Byers MC, got his Military Cross for, you know, at the time written up, ‘That having mistakenly or accidentally strayed across the border, he encountered some Indonesians,’ right.

‘With a couple of wounded, two or three wounded soldiers he carried out a magnificent withdrawal, back to the border, having accidentally strayed across the border,’ right. Yeah I’ll tell you, Doug Byers, who in fact was my senior class from Portsea and finished up with 4RAR and we served on many years later. He’d set an ambush on the other side of the

border, right, that he had accidentally strayed across. Now a platoon can normally ambush a section in the jungle, so Doug did that and opened fire on a section of Indonesians. Yes. Not realising that that section was the forward section of a whole bloody company of Indonesians, who immediately went into a

well organised, a well organised anti-ambush drill, right, and started giving him buggery. Firing mortars into his position and then chasing him all the way back to the border that he accidentally strayed across. And Doug got his military cross not for his, not for his ambush but for in fact the

well conducted withdrawal and bringing all of his wounded back. Yes.

That’s right.

Yes, there were close calls.

Yes, no, you know we, on another occasion I was sent in, I’m up in the mountains with the platoon, and you get the, get the bloody coded signal saying, ‘A helicopter will pick you up, the whole platoon and drop you down ex number of kilometres from this village. You are to ambush this village because there are nasties in this village with, going to meetings so we understand, and what

not.’ Fine. So what do they do? The helicopters pick us up alright, and drop us right smack into the village that I was supposed to be ambushing, right. Well that sort of, you know, destroys the whole, you know, element of surprise, so I might as well, you know, ring up the helicopter and say, “Come and get me out of here, there’s no point in being here.”

Close calls.

Called military intelligence, how do the two words compute in the same sentence. Think about it. No I’m being facetious. Oh stuff up somewhere in the briefing of the pilot, you know, they should’ve told him that, you know, “Pick ‘em up from here and drop there.”

But somehow the village must’ve been mentioned, right, and the pilot with the rotor blades going, so, you know, in all the confusion, might’ve heard, you know, “Drop ‘em in the village,” to which he said, “Yes sir,” and drops them in the village. How did I get ten, ten man ration boxes instead of, you know... someone zigged when they should’ve zagged, you know. Oh yes, yeah.

Military SNAFUs, you’ve heard of SNAFU?

No. Situation Normal, All Fouled Up. SNAFU. Well, yeah, it happens.

Yes. Except that

certain SNAFUs are deadlier than others, right, you know. Yes. In fact when Brian Avery was writing the book and got on to my ten man ration pack drop, he was telling me that he’d ordered, encoded, ordered a thousand rounds of something or other, right,

of some weapon, yeah, and a thousand boxes arrived of suppositories. What he and his platoon were going to do with a thousand boxes of suppositories out in the middle of nowhere... yeah, righto, I didn’t ask any further questions. Yeah, righto.

Well of course security or secrecy had to be maintained, so if we had to go and ambush a particular track on a particular mountain range, we’d drop, oh God, ten, twenty kilometres away from it somewhere, right, and then have to haul ass to,

to get up there to do the job. And of course the high ground was the only place where you could really get communications with the old, the radio sets that we had. But, I don't know, you, once the helicopter had landed in the particular spot, that spot was compromised, that’s it, you know.

You couldn’t stay there cause if the Indons came in, in sufficient force, you’d be in trouble, you know. And secondly there was no point in staying there because they’d know that that’s where you were, see.

So for insertions, you had to be inserted miles and miles away from wherever you wanted to be. For extractions,

no problem, they could pick you up from where you were cause you weren’t staying, you were, you know, going, where you’ve been relegated. So okay you’d be picked up from there to do, to target something else but again you’d be picked up from where you were, but you’d be dropped miles and miles and miles from where you were supposed to be, what we’re going to.

Oh mate, the only other place that’s even comes close, is basically similar, is New Guinea.

Hard yakka, hard yakka. And of course, you know, the fact that most of your tracks were along mountain ridges,

you know, so that’s the places that had to be ambushed, were mountain tracks. But there’s no water up there, right, the water, well zillions of gallons is down in the low lands, the creeks, the rivers, the waterholes. But to do a protracted ambush of a week or so, you know, we used to carry, Christ,

eight, ten water bottles each, which is more weight, of course. But that wasn’t enough, you’d go through eight or ten water bottles a day, with the, through dehydration. So every so often, virtually on a daily basis, you’d have to send a section, a full section of men, armed, with all the water bottles on belts, around their necks or around their shoulders, down into

the lowlands to fill up the water bottles. If it rained, you were lucky enough to be in a situation that you could put up a hoochie [plastic covering], fine, you collected water the water off your hoochie, you know. But if you were actually laying along the track in ambush, well you couldn’t have a hoochie up could you. So, you know, you’d be laying there all day in the rain.

Oh well I told you, the disease and oh, mate, as I said, not one shot fired but from a platoon of thirty in five months, down to eleven, you know.

Heat, disease, accidents. Easy

enough to fall over, to stumble over carrying this huge load, you stumble over a mangrove root, well you know, a jungle root, breaking an ankle is no problem. And once a man became a casualty you had to carry him out, you know, some spot that you could call a helicopter to, to take him away. And there goes your, you know,

more physical resources, you know. Well you’d get this from World War II diggers from the Kokoda Trail, and at least they had Fuzzy Wuzzies, we didn’t, you know. You’d have to stop the whole operational requirement to take care of your casualties every so often.

Oh we found holes, you’d find a hole. If we couldn’t find a hole

you’d, we used to, you could set up a balloon through the jungle canopy and he’d lower a rope, a doo-dad, a winch, and pick up say, two soldiers at a time and winch ‘em out. Yeah, and the same for, you know, if they wanted to drop us somewhere in a particular spot, you know, same.

But normally, normally you’d find a hole somewhere. Certainly down in the low lands, right, you know, you’d make your last radio contact, ‘This is it,’ you know, ‘be at such and such a spot by seven or eight in the morning.’ “Yes sir,” right, and that was it. That spot was

down in the low lands somewhere so you had to haul ass and be there by the required time. Helicopters are normally late anyway, so.

Wild pigs, yes. There was one, either someone in a platoon or a,

3RAR, I think it was 3RAR got mangled to death by a rogue elephant. Another story about a carpet snake or a huge boa constrictor, whatever they are, grabbing the last tail end Charlie in a patrol. Fireflies, now, they were amazing, fireflies.

Cause we, we had pencil torches, pencil torches with just a little light. And the amount of ambushes that were sprung by somebody who’d see... tired, in most cases, tired, and he’d see a firefly flying in front of him, and he would swear to God that someone was walking along the track with a pencil torch, right, so they’d spring the ambush,

firing at nothing, right. So there was no point in staying there any more is there, you know, you’d gather your pots and pans and keep moving. Yeah. Amazing the fireflies, yeah. Yes, yeah, great fun.

Well yes, yes, same as your kookaburras and, round here, you know. That’s bloody a daily routine.

Yes. Yeah.

Well very little experience for me

personally, you didn’t get involved with them. Sure you were friendly with them, course we weren’t there to rape and destroy, you know, they were the nationals of Malaysia. No problems there. And you certainly didn’t, you tried not to upset ‘em, you know, or make enemies out of ‘em, so, you know.

We had, we’d have at least one soldier semi trained in Malay or Indonesian, and of course the occasional tracker that we had. Yeah.

They were people, sort of think about ‘em, you know, they’re living their lifestyle, they seemed to be happy, in their long huts.

Yeah, well that was the long one, the last patrol of course was,

we were pulling out of Malaysia, altogether, the whole effort was pulling out and the orders were to destroy everything, for some reason they gave you, nothing left that had been ours, wasn’t gonna be left for the Malays. I don’t, as a platoon commander, as a lowly lieutenant, I wasn’t involved in the politics of wars.

But as bases were being blown up, it was decided to send out a patrol or a couple of patrols from various places, I know I was one of them, right on the border, right, to keep an eye out for any Indonesians that might decide to take the opportunity to sneak in and create havoc. So there I am with my eleven men sitting on this

bloody hill, we’re right on the border, and we can hear the explosions sort of behind us getting fainter and fainter and fainter. At that stage we were in radio contact, then there’s no radio contact, and the explosions are, you know, are going further and further back as they’re withdrawing to Kuching. And we’re looking at either other saying, ‘Hope to Christ there isn’t another SNAFU and they forget about us,

we’re stuck here.’ But eventually the helicopter arrived and picked us up and took us straight to Kuching, which is the capital, to Sarawak where the rest of the battalion already was. You know, sitting and saying, ‘Am I taking on the might of the whole Indonesian Army, or something? Not good, not good.’

Well they would’ve known that, you know, on the political side, they weren’t stupid either. In fact that, in a lot of ways I’m glad the Indonesian Army wasn’t too keen on confrontation, you know, we might, people might rubbish ‘em but they’re damn good, they are damn good, and hope I don’t have to fight ‘em one day. Plus the fact that of course

their special forces have been trained by our special forces. That’s another political bit of, bit that I can’t understand with... yeah, okay.

The operations that, where platoon

commanders had got involved with ‘em, gave you that impression. As I said, Doug Byers with his ambush, told us about it, you know, those fellow platoon commanders were, you know, and they were good. They carried out as good a drill as the Australian Army would’ve done, immediate, automatic, automatic reaction. Others, in fact the,

the five Indons that were finally captured, well, captured... well, caught up on the hill that were being attacked left, right and centre. Now those five died, you know, they fought off quite a few of our battalion, did extremely well before they were finished off. They’re not your

peasant, you know...

They’re not a peasant army, no. They’re cool, yeah.

Well mental strain I presume, it is hard, you know, how can I explain it... just physical exhaustion,

to where the body was no longer capable of operating. For some.

Yes accidents, there were lost of accidents. There was even a suicide in the battalion, where in fact, it was in

bat, yeah it was in battalion headquarters in fact where one of the soldiers in the middle of the day, walked into, back into his barracks, where you know, three or four others were sitting down relaxing playing cards. He just sat on his own bed, no one took any notice of him, you know, his own bed, he put the barrel of his rifle in his mouth and pulled the,

pulled the trigger with his toe. And that’s all she wrote. Yeah, course you do, you get breakdowns, well, like any physical exhaustion can lead to accidents. You get tired, you were more prone to accidents, you get physically exhausted you get prone to accidents and irrational thoughts and then you know... course you do.

No, no, wasn’t one of mine. Sorry, no.

No, wouldn’t have a clue.

I had my own problems thank you very much and the problems of my soldiers, and what sir was going to ask me to do next. Don’t forget, as I keep telling you, I was only a lowly

second lieutenant and then eventually got promoted to lieutenant while I was there, which didn’t really sort of put me in amongst the general rank.

Oh a few marital problems sort of coming up in the mail. But again, you know, you had to identify

and see whether the man was fit to go on the next patrol. No, I had no discipline problems, they were bloody well trained, regular soldiers. We’d been in training for so long that, you know, we’re still a well-oiled machine, bit rusty round the edges.

Yeah of course they did, you know, I started off with thirty and by the time we left, I had eleven.

Well... whose, mine or theirs, or the eleven, or my eleven soldiers?

That’s right, well, not happy. Not happy but what are you gonna do?

Well, now you lost me there somewhere

with that question, but, you know, what would go through my mind would be to say that the next time I lead this bunch, what’s left of ‘em, I don’t have to give orders or instructions to three separate corporals who then pass them on to each one of his eight men. I just gather the eleven of ‘em together and tell ‘em all what’s happening, what we gotta do, and give individual orders

to the forward scout, who’s gonna do this and who’s gonna do that, right. Also, you know, getting down to that size you’re, means that when you take up a defensive position, you take up a smaller area. What else did I, you know...?

No, I don't know where you’re leading me.

Well that’s one way of looking at it, yes, okay, righto, yeah. We’ll run with that, yeah righto.

Well as I said, leptospirosis, malaria, just to name a couple. I mean, you know, name it, we, if I didn’t get it in my platoon, somebody else got it somewhere else.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not just my platoon that suffered, you know, the whole battalion went through something to a greater or lesser degree, every platoon was, you know, had the same problems to a lesser or greater degree. All I know is that by the war diaries I had the longest patrol out there, right,

that’s why they wanted my input, okay. Right, it’s in the book, my name’s in the book.

Yeah well Bau, Bau’s a, there was

a Bau and there was old Bau and there was a little township of Bau, a kilometre or two outside the base. Where occasionally with, you know, given half an opportunity on our rest days, the alleged two days rest, we’d be allowed to send a couple of blokes out to buy some tin, tin food or

even vegies from the locals, which probably had a disease too but that’s... you know. But at least it was a variety from the constant army rations that we were eating, out in the field. Got to the stage, you know, you’d get a twenty-four hour ration pack, now that is designed, I think it had, could be wrong, but somewhere in the

vicinity of three thousand calories, which was estimated by all the nutritionists, experts, and all you scientists and boffins that that’s what a soldier needed to keep him going, right, in the bush, a day, a minimum of three thousand calories, to burn up. But of course when you’re being sent out on seven days, to start off with, but we maybe even longer,

and you got a small pack, you’re not gonna take all the stuff that you don’t, normally don’t eat, right. For instance the ration packs had tea and coffee in ‘em, right. I’m a coffee drinker, you’re a tea drinker, right, so we’d swap. You like your lollies, I don’t like lollies, I don’t want lollies, so either you take my lollies or I hoy ‘em, there’s no point in me carrying stuff that I,

that I don’t enjoy or don’t use. But of course in throwing those lollies away, I was throwing away part of those three thousand calories that’ve been, you know, estimated as part of the nutrition, dietary that I needed. And it’s the same with, you know, there are only three basic tins of meat, piddly [inadequate] little tins, they’re dog biscuits.

They must’ve come from the Boer War, they were as hard as bloody, you know, as rocks. Some loved ‘em, you know, crazy bastards, but okay, you know. So in fact by the time you’ve finished packing your pack with necessities, right... and as I said, two pair of socks to last you seven to ten days, one on your feet

rotting away, and the other one on your, strapped to your pack, drying out, after being on your feet the day before, sort of thing, if you were lucky and if it didn’t rain, right. With the monsoon rain there all the times, who you know, didn’t really matter whether you had ‘em on your feet or not. Got to the stage where some soldiers didn’t even bother wearing socks anymore. So you made lots of... one uniform, right, you couldn’t, you just didn’t have room

for an extra shirt and pants, right. Now, if you tore the arse out of your pants on day one well that’s the way you walked around for the rest of the bloody patrol. Sleeping gear, oh yes, the army had some magic, beautiful sleeping gear, right, with your Li-lo blow-ups and oh, all sorts of things, but somebody’s got to carry it. The more you carry the more you,

the less you can, other things you can carry. Essential was a, batteries for the radio, that radio, one radio per platoon, that was a life link for that platoon. That was it, that was the link with the outside world, without that radio you were buggered. Now fair enough to say that each battery is supposed to last twenty-four hours, right.

So good. You know, simple mathematics, you’re going out for seven days, seven batteries, one for... you know, the radio operator can carry, he’s got one in the radio, and the other six you distribute around the soldiers. Logic. Except quite a few radio batteries were duds, didn’t work, right, so out of the six, you might finish up with two don’t

work. You’re out there for seven days you’ve only got four days radio batteries, right. So to me, as a platoon commander, it was more essential for every man to carry a radio battery and I didn’t give a bugger what rations he carried or whether he carried an extra pair of socks, as long as each man had a radio battery. That was it, without the radio we were stuffed. Ammunition. You had to carry your first line

ammunition, a hundred and fifty rounds of rifle ammunition, a few grenades, then you had incendiary grenades, and you had phosphorous grenades, and you had signal grenades. Then of course you had three machine guns, and there’s belts of ammunition for the machine guns. The machine gunner can’t carry all the belts of ammunition so belts of ammunition are distributed throughout the section as well. More weight for the

soldier to carry. And by the time you’re finished with it he’s a bloody pack, you know, is a pack-horse.

And then some. And then they drop a ten man bloody ration pack on each one of us, another thirty-five kilo, right, where they have to struggle with that on top of our packs, up a hill to get away from the landing, where they drop the packs.

So course all this adds up to pain, misery, depression.

Well you curse the commanding officer to start off with and then you work down the line and curse everybody, and fate, and occasionally have a go at God.

I just told you, I just spent the last five minutes telling you about all the shit I had to carry. Where are you...?

Well you get depressed about the SNAFUs or the mishaps that were occurring, right. Now one of you, as I said, corporal would go down with heat stroke right, so that’s, upsets the operation, delays it by twenty-four hours, right

well you’re ginning around with him, restoring him back to health. And then when you have restored him to half health, you gotta distribute all his gear amongst the soldiers who are already over laden. Course it leads to depression.

They treat him as they would want them to treat him if he was in the same situation, right.

What somebody else’s misfortune was affecting everybody else. You’re a team, you’re a team, right. Once that team spirit starts

breaking up, you might as well pack up and go home, you know. No, no. No, no.

Of course it is.

Firstly I think it goes back to the basic training of a soldier, right, the yelling and the screaming and the,

your mate was talking about, of making a soldier. And secondly the continuous training together of that team. How do you make a football team? How do you make a gold medal winning hockey team. Tell me about it. The cyclists that’ve just won a medal, you know, the gold medals

in the Olympics, a week or two ago they were being cursed and being maligned for all being drug cheats or something, or allegedly being drug cheats, yet they pulled together as a team to do their thing. The army’s no different.

Yes.

Yeah well whatever, well no we didn’t do that.

I’d have to think about that, alright. Occasionally, you know, during your rest periods, get together, have a few beers and tell all, you know, and get it all off your chest, right. And

listen to ‘em bitch and moan at each other, tell each other, as long as it was done in good spirit.

Thank you. I don't know where you were taking me there, but...

Oh, social life, there was no social life, what are you on about? No dancing girls, no bars and bordellos, no casino. No TV [Television], I think somebody might have had a radio but then again, you know, a normal type radio. You went back,

you came out of the jungle, buggered. First thing you did was de-brief, re-arm, re-supply then you had a tub. And if still time left, and you were guaranteed that you wouldn’t be called out before the next day, you’d have a couple of beers. And of course, you know, the army’s worked on the principle of two beers per man per day per-haps. Well that

doesn’t mean that while you were out for seven days your two beers per man per day accumulated, no, no, no, no, no. And quite frankly, even, you know, us hardened alcoholics, after seven days of being in the scrub and totally dehydrated and physically exhausted, two beers was more than enough thank you very much to virtually

knock you out and let you sleep quite nicely. Very cheap alcoholics. That’s if there was an opportunity to have a couple of beers, right. But, you know, re-arm, re-stock, re-, get the equipment sorted out, make sure everything’s honky dory then go and have a tub, have a shave, have a shower, have a feed.

The cooks back in base, they were dismayed, you could see ‘em being driven to tears. Every time we, a platoon would come in, they’d prepare lavish meals, they really would, roasts and curries and you know, all sorts of beautiful things. But our stomachs had shrunk to the size of golf balls, we, you know, we’d look at all this beautiful food, you know, take a little

morsel and that was it, that was enough, we couldn’t eat anymore. Talk about your, you know, what are they called, stapling your stomach, right, if you wanna lose weight, go and spend five months in the ‘jay’. Guaranteed.

Well yes they’d hear. Occasionally they,

of course the mail would be there waiting for them and you know, everybody wrote home. Some had cameras and take a few piccies or have a piccy taken, the film was send home. And some would hear from, most would hear from their wives, all sorts of nice things, some would get ‘Dear Johns’ which you know, sorta didn’t help. There was one young fella,

who was in, not my platoon, sent back from Borneo, back to Malaya, and shipped out of Malaya because his wife was naughty, you know, doing naughty things with civilians back in Malaya.

Ah... it was supposed to be working here in Townsville, right, so someone’s taking it to Malaya, and I think they even had OMO in Malaya but if they did, yeah okay. I mean it’s, I’ve never seen it, right, but it’s been spreading through the army for years and

years and years. In fact OMO meant, On My Own, right, welcome, and a packet of FAB meant Fat Arse Back, right, so don’t bother, right. furphy as far as I’m concerned, you know a good, good old bit of legend.

Good story, yeah, right. Good stuff for Anzac [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] Day, right. Particularly when we’re in the bar, Anzac Day. You know, for most of us that are bitter and twisted about experiences, and we have got experiences, fine, we go through the ceremony, we go through commemoration, we go through the parade. Then we gather at the pub, the publican knows, right, we’re gonna be knee deep in blood and guts, we, there’s gonna be knee, oh

thousands of grenade pins and oh, chest deep in spent ammo cartridges, and the stories and the bullshit will flow, but at least we know we’re bullshitting each other, right. Cause basically, see your OMO and your FAB, yeah righto, I’ve heard of it, yeah of course I’ve heard about it, never seen it. And at one stage I was in charge of the fifteen hundred married quarters here

in Townsville when they were fully furnished, right. I’m not saying it, they didn’t exist, but I’ve never seen it... heard about it.

No, as I said, you know, before you get onto Vietnam or back to Australia, Borneo,

Borneo again, was a different war, right, as I said before, all wars are different. There was sneaky Pete dodging, not dodging each other but trying to find each other in the jungle, and it was a platoon, a platoon commander’s war, you know. The platoon commander was the man on the ground with his platoon of soldiers. You get this, you get to Vietnam you’re looking at

companies and battalions, but Borneo was definitely at platoon level. Yes, occasionally the company commander with his headquarters would venture outside just to have a look around, you know, have a walk in the sun and he’d go with one of the platoons. But in essence it was all platoons, they did all the work, reacted to all the information, and there was a lot of

old information coming to battalion headquarters , coming from various intelligence sources. And it’s no good telling us about trenches that are on the border at such and such a grid reference if they’re two years old and no bastard’s been there for two years. Who cares who dug ‘em two years ago right, and, you know, that sort of thing. But somebody, we hear of a rumour from one of the Dyaks or

one of the civilian police who’d heard from somebody else, who’d heard from somebody else, who’d heard that, you know, there was an Indon at such and such a village. Right, well you’d react to that, and you’d find, yes, there was an Indon there two years ago or three years ago. Woopy duck, right, well, not this village, he means another village, right.

So that’s where it was, it was a totally different war to other wars. It was physically destroying. I won’t say mentally, but physically, yeah, destroying. And we were all glad to get back to Malaya, back to civilisation, back to the families.

Unfortunate, and this is fact, this is not your ruse, they made a mistake, see. They made a mistake in they brought us home oh, about midnight, the whole battalion, right. And by the time, and put the whole battalion, that’s right, we were shipped to Singapore and from Singapore we were put on a train to Malacca for three hundred miles.

And we arrived in the battalion parade ground about midnight or one or two o'clock. Then they started mucking around with demobbing and this, that and the other and it wasn’t, about five o'clock in the morning before they let us all go home. And of course all the husbands, after five months absence, are knocking on the front doors of their houses and there’s their wives just out

of bed in warm negligees. Well one thing leads to another, right. Nine months later, nine months later they had to empty the military hospital at Terendak of all the sick, lame and lazy, to turn the whole bloody hospital into a maternity ward. Three hundred births in the space of about, you know, whatever it takes, a week or two.

Three hundred mate. And I think they worked out that out of that, don’t quote me on the figures, but only about half a dozen, no more than half a dozen were boys. So of course the rumour spread or the word spread that it must be the fault of the paladrin pill, the anti malaria pill, right, which of course would have led

to other dickheads not taking their anti malaria pills, in case they wanted to conceive a son, right. And that’s how your bloody rumours start, right. So next, yeah, some moron would hear about this FAB or OMO, right, the first thing he’d do is rush home and see if there was an unopened

OMO packet in the laundry, and if there was he’d probably beat the hell out of his missus, right, cause he’d heard that OMO packets, you know...

As I said, five o'clock in the morning, they were all steaming hot in their negligees. I think the second bang was the pack hitting the ground, floor.

That’s when my second was, yes. I can’t

deny that, yes. Yes and she was amongst the three hundred, yes, yeah.

Oh well that was, had some problems. The first thing was to get used to the currency, you see, cause 1966 when Australia changed over to the decimal currency,

we were still in Malaya, and when we’d left Australia when it was pounds, shillings and pence. Then Australia changed over to decimal currency, dollars and cents, excuse me, and we came back in September ‘67 by which time all the local natives, right, were used to dollars and cents. We weren’t, in fact, you know, every time we spent an Australia

dollar, the old idiot box would sort of try to calculate what that meant in pounds, shillings and pence, so that was the first problem. Secondly for the wives the problem of course was that no more servants, they’d got used to their Bridge parties and the, you know, the gin parties and the, you know, well the amahs were, looked after the brats and all the housework. That was a bit of a,

a let down. The uncertainty as to what’s going to happen next, but then again, you know, we’re back to the, to a barrack situation. No hue and cry, nobody really gave a damn, we were all regulars and regulars were being left alone. It was, you know, on the basis that, you know, you being regulars, if you wanna be in the army and commit

suicide, well that’s your problem. Your anti-war demonstrations only started with the introduction of national service, you know, ‘You’re taking my son away and sending him away to yap, yap, yap, yap.’ You don’t see too many anti-Iraq demonstrations at the moment, right, everybody says we shouldn’t be, shouldn’t have gone there, but you don’t see any huge anti-Iraq demonstrations, do you, in Australia?

Have we? Big ones?

What, led by the local rag heads. Yeah, that’d be right. Osama’s [Osama Bin Laden] probably in amongst that lot somewhere, directing it, see. Probably edit that out won’t ya, yeah right.

Thank you ma’am. I’m joking Osama, I’m joking, if you ever take over this country,

as yours brother. I’ll pray to Allah five times a day and won’t go to the pub... that’s gonna piss me right off, but, you know.

1967, September ‘67.

Oh Vietnam was well and truly on by then.

Yes we heard, we heard that in fact 1RAR [1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment] was already over there. The training team had been there since 1962 in bits and pieces but the first real full size battalion was 1RAR going

over on, Jesus, I think it was ‘65, I think, right. Yeah, would be late ‘65 I think. Oh yeah.

Yeah, well if the war lasted, yes, no doubt, no doubt we would be.

What do you mean, what happened?

Well we’ve come back.

I was posted to 9RAR [9th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment] which was just being raised, at Woodside again, to go to Vietnam, right. See by that time, don’t forget there’s only three, or there was only three regular battalions,

1, 2 and 3, then 4RAR was raised, so there was 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, 6, 7, 8 were being raised and I was posted to 9 which was being raised. Yeah, she was filling up, yeah, she was, you know, good stuff. However, as they were forming up

my first wife had the accident and leaving me with two babies. So the army was nice to me and compassionately posted me to a headquarters in Victoria and I looked like being compassionate from then on with these two, you know, babies. They were babies. However two years later I, you know,

managed to get ‘em established with mother, you know, and went across with the training team.

The, how can I explain it to you Kylie [Interviewer], how can I explain that? I think I said to Kiernan outside, the, I volunteered for the most dangerous unit known.

Oh to go over...

and die. Being a hero. So no bastard could kill me. I zigged when I shoulda zagged. No, quite frankly, I’d had enough, yeah, so I’ll volunteer for the most dangerous unit.

No just leave it, leave it at that.

Yeah fine, did the six-week course, in fact I did the parachute course before that. Did the six week course for advisors, started doing the language course at the intelligence centre, three week intelligence course, lasted three days because the bloke that I was scheduled to replace in Vietnam in six months time had become a casualty. So

I was sent home to have my seven days pre-embarkation leave and get all the needles in one hit that I was supposed to get in the six months period, put on the plane and pissed off to Vietnam.

Yes sir.

No the, well,

what was cut short for me was the language training. So, you know, I managed to get on without all the language training that they were giving us, the three-week course. But the other six weeks was, firstly well re-training in jungle warfare but again, see Vietnam was different in that

the training theme was spread all over Vietnam right. From the north of South Vietnam, from the border, from the DMZ [Demilitarised Zone] from the border, all the way down to the Mekong Delta, that is four districts or corps as they were called, 1 Corps, 2, 3 and 4. The terrain in each one is different, the troops in each one are different.

For instance there were more regular Vietnamese battalions and rangers and that sort of thing in 1 Corps 2 Corps I think had more Montagnards in them, the mountain fighters. 3 Corps were, God knows what 3 Corps was, I never served there. And 4 Corps was sort of basically

regional force companies and popular force platoons. That’s where I finished up for the last seven, ah, five months. I started off up in I-Corps, seven months with a regular battalion and then down to the night operations in the Mekong Delta. So all those aspects of training had to be covered during the preparation.

The American speak had to be, you know, had to be taken on board because, you know, calling in fire from American gun ships, helicopters, jets, artillery, mortars had to be

in the American terms rather than Australian terms. When you were close enough to the ocean you were even calling in naval gunfire from American ships. You were dealing with American Marines, American Army, American Air Force, so all those terms had to be, you know, you had to know who you’re dealing with. They wouldn’t, you know, you’re the only Australian

in a thirty miles radius...

Yes they, in fact most, most if not all had already served so, you know, at that stage they were starting to get the system organised and

so it was in fact training team veterans who were doing the instruction. As I was saying before, it wasn’t just getting used to the American system but there was also getting used to the Vietnamese system. Their organisations, their methods, their tactics, their weapons. In fact after the training there was the three-week language course which I had to cut short,

and after that there was at least a week of foreign weapons instruction, but of course I missed out all of that and I had to pick it up on the bounce when I got to Vietnam. Because in most cases you finished your training, if you were successful, you were told what unit you were going to, who you were going to replace. And at the same time you were sent back to your Australian unit knowing that you’d be replaced,

I mean within six months, you’d be replaced again. In my case, he became a casualty so I had to go.

Yes, you were told specifics of the areas, but then they couldn’t cover the areas for each individual, right, that was going on that particular course. Because as

I said before, you know, spread right through Vietnam, so one province was different to another province, so much of it had to be picked up on the go. And plus the fact that if you, when you got there you normally had about a week or so to take over the ropes from your predecessor, this is what happened to a bloke who followed me.

I had a week in which to, you know, bring him up to date and sort of introduce him to the local system. In my case there was nothing, I landed in Saigon, spent the night in Saigon after being briefed by my CO [Commanding Officer], told what he expected, this is the CO of the training team. Now he never commanded troops in the field, he commanded the Australian advisers,

basically administered and then farmed us out to the various Yankee and Vietnamese units. I was told where I was going, which I already knew anyway. Next day I flew into Da Nang and the local Australian major there at Australia House welcomed me, sort of told me that, you know, my American “loo-tenant” which is gonna be my

subordinate, is coming at six o'clock in the morning to pick me up, because we’re going straight out on a thirty day operation, right. Great. So, you know, got on the grog, got into trouble, collapsed, six o'clock in the morning the lieutenant’s shaking my shoulder, “Come on sir, we gatta gaw,” so we went. Had just sufficient time, twenty miles we had

to drive out of Da Nang into the country side. Just got to know the CO, the commanding officer of the infantry Vietnamese battalion, “G’day, how are ya,” you know, yap, yap. “Let’s go.” “Where?” “Just, we go.” So we went. My team consisted of, well there was myself as the senior battalion adviser, the captain, American lieutenant and two American

sergeants, was a four man team. Normally the lieutenant, but American “loo-tenant”, and one of the sergeants would go with the forward company, I was always with the commanding officer being the senior battalion adviser and I had the other sergeant with me. It wasn’t as a matter of choice, I would’ve liked to get up the front too, but

the Vietnamese and their funny system wouldn’t allow the senior advisor to go because that would make the commanding officer look like a chicken or something, or a coward, for not wanting to go forward. So the only time you could go forward was when he went forward, you know, part of the culture part of the custom. And you know, thirty-day operation, survived that.

Hot. No different to Malaya except the whiz bangs and the bangs, and the everything was on a much bigger scale. And of course the Americans were in and you know, they’re something else to behold. And to, you know,

a small professional army like ours they’re some, you know, the Americans are something else altogether. Yes.

Well I arrived, picked up at the airport, taken to the headquarters , briefed, told to behave myself,

told where I was spending the night and catching a plane tomorrow morning. So one of the officers of the headquarters took me out that night, got me drunk, right, saw the sights, collapsed. Next morning got up, on the plane to Da Nang where I was met by another class mate of mine in fact from Portsea days who’s, he’d been already in country six months.

So then we were taken to Australia House in Da Nang and briefed, at the end.

Not particularly, there was no point in telling me anything, cause firstly I knew where I was going and secondly what’s there to tell me, right. It’s hot and look at it, it’s full of bloody paddy fields and there’s jungle up there, and there’s mountains there, yeah, right, well do I really need to be told that. And they didn’t know what

the Vietnamese, you know, what my Vietnamese unit was doing anyway so what’s the point, you know. Righto, you see it, local rules and, you know.

No that night I didn’t see much, that night I stayed at the bar listening to all the war heroes that’d been there at least a month or so. Cause in fact, you know, again Da Nang, the Australia House in Da Nang

serviced about, oh shit, maybe fifty or a hundred Australian advisers in Vietnam, all over I-Corps [Corps of SVN] or 1-Corps used to come to, when they, you know, once a month, cause you’d be out for thirty days on operations, you’d come in once a,

you know, after your thirty-day operation. The situation allowing, to pick up your mail, write your mail, pick up your pay, you know, get a few drinks under your belly, tell a few lies, listen to a few lies, find out who’s been killed, who’s been maimed, who’s been, you know, whatever, cause there were quite a few being hit amongst the team. And you know, if you behaved yourself the major allowed you to stay there

three days, if you didn’t he could kick you out, so you went back to the boonies [bush]. So that first night I was there listening to all these war heroes, telling each other stories. My place just was to sit there, shut up and listen to all this. They even had a helmet turned upside down, which was the war helmet, you know.

Anybody that came in out of the boonies and wanted to tell their war stories, cause everyone had their own war stories, anyone that wanted to tell war stories had to put five dollars in the hat, right, which went to charity, and then he had five minutes and it was timed by everybody while he flapped his gob. Everybody else paid him, you know, gave him the respect of listening for five minutes. Wherever he was, he was cut off, he wanted to continue, put another five dollars in there.

That sort of, you know, philosophy.

Yeah well, they were what I expected, they were much the same as the instructors back at Canungra on the course. Again, one of the blokes that did the course with me had already done two tours of the training teams, so he was telling me just as much if not more than the,

the instructors were and bringing me in the line. So, okay, let’s go. And of course the next day up and atom, thirty days. And that opened my eyes.

The first one I had was an arrogant bloody white boy,

West Point, who hated niggers, right, that was part of his culture. In fact I found this, you talk about our racial prejudices at times, mate we got, we don’t even know what racial prejudice is when it comes to the Americans, which was very plain in the army, through out the armed services. And I had a bit of a problem cause

one of my sergeants was replaced by this big, black burley Afro American from Harlem, right, sergeant. So in fact I could never let those two out together as a team cause they would’ve shot shit out of each other with their forty-fives, cause if I let ‘em out on their own. One hated niggers and the other one hated honkies, and there’s no way in the world that you could... so I was stuck with him, the blackfella all the time. Okay

mate, he was good, he was a pro, I’m quite happy. As I said, cause his, the American “loo-tenant”s was, oh doesn’t matter what his name is, but his time was nearly up so he was replaced by another one, a nice bloke, too nice, and in fact couldn’t hack it. After his tour he went back to America,

we corresponded for quite a few years, but he, his mind turned to shit. I even tried to get him out here to emigrate to Australia, which he’d talked about and he was trying to save money and this, that and the other. Next thing I got a letter from his parents saying he’d blown his brains out. So win some, you lose some. But he was a nice young boy who, and some of the things we did, some of the things

we saw were too, just too much for him.

No problem. Mind you there was quite a few Americans who, you know, even now, firstly don’t know that Australians were in Vietnam, right. At that stage they’d know where Australia is and there’s

and some don’t believe that, can’t believe that Americans were under foreigners. Well that’s alright, I had three Americans under my command, but then I was under command of an American full colonel at regimental level. So, you know...

Operation.

Well we, the whole battalion, out we went on APCs [Armoured Personnel Carriers] and basically the job of my battalion was to be on what was called the rocket belt. Now the nasties, both VC [Viet Cong] and NVA [North Vietnamese Army], that’s North Vietnamese

regular army and VC being the Viet Cong, the partisans, had a habit of setting up rockets, within just about a twelve miles, twelve, twenty miles outside of Da Nang, which they fired into the city, to harass the city. So our battalion’s job was mainly to patrol that area, that belt, to you know, try and stop ‘em from

setting up rockets, and secondly from assembling into an area from which they could attack again. Okay, so off we set, all on APCs, the recon. company moving in on foot in between the APCs. And as we’re going along, nobody was in the APCs, the Vietnamese didn’t sit in the APCs, cause once an APC

blew up, everything inside turned to shit. So APC, everybody sat on top of the APC, never mind being hit by a bullet, nobody wanted to be blown up and turned into mince meat. Okay, I’ll live with that, I’ll sit up there with the rest of you clowns. Yeah, we’re moving along and one of the, one of the recon. company, young fella stood on a toe popping mine, right, and you know, he,

there he is, in front of us and his foot’s blown off, right, and the doctor’s sitting beside me. I said, “Where... you gonna get him a medic, you gonna look after him?” “No, I’m not getting down there.” I don't know how, but somehow I seemed to help the doctor down, off the top of the APC to attend to this bloke. That didn’t make friends with the doctor, the fact that

I’d accidentally bumped him off the APC, and he had to, once he was on the ground he had to attend to him. But you know, the attitude was, ‘No bugger him, I’m not getting down there.’ Which was a, you know, a wake up call to, ‘Allo, allo, you know, what’ve I walked into.’ Yeah about midday and we got all these APCs and we come over the crest and just over the crest of a sand dune,

and there, down there, oh, couple of hundred metres in front of us, must’ve been thirty or forty Viet Cong, out in the open, right. And all the machine guns on the APCs opened up, it was like a turkey shoot. Then all of a sudden they stopped. There’s two Viet Cong running around and running off, you know, a couple of bodies. And I said to the, said to the

battalion commander, you know, “What, what, why aren’t we shooting?” He says, “Oh, it’s lunch time,” he says, “we’ll catch up with them some other day.” I said, “You gotta be fuckin’ joking.” “No,” he says, “eh,” he says, “I’ve been fighting this war for twenty years, you’re only here for a year captain.” Di wee, which is the captain in Vietnamese. “We’ll catch up with them some other day.” And out come the cooking pots

and the rice pots and anything else that... right, okay, gotcha, yeah okay. That’s on day one. Day, ah, night one, we’re, we’ve stopped for the night, hub, in the sand dunes, that, because we were virtually on a border, a junction point between Korea, the Korean force, American marines

and another Vietnamese mob. That night we were shelled by the Koreans, right, friendlies mind you, and tried to stop ‘em from shelling, I couldn’t talk directly to the Koreans. I actually radio the headquarters back at base who then had to radio the mob in Da Nang, that’s, you know, who then

had to get somehow to the Korean establishment, right, to get back to the artillery unit, which ever one it was that was firing upon us, right, the good guys. So we got, you know, shelled by the Koreans, we were mortared by the US Air Force, right, ah US bloody Marines, they gave us a pasting with their heavy mortars. We were machine gunned by another Vietnamese unit

and then the bloody American Air Force dropped a five hundred pound bomb on top of us. All in the one night, wake up in the morning, I’ve got thirty dead Vietnamese around me and not one enemy, you know, seen in sight. I said, ‘Yeah righto, this is a different war alright, this is yeah, right, yes.’

Oh about five, six hundred, yeah.

Yep. All from friendly fire, good old friendly fire. Yeah would see more, you know, friendly fire over the next twelve months, yeah.

I’d say, what the... well, what the hell have I walked into here, this lot. But then I found that my Vietnamese mob was no different to any other Vietnamese mob. In fact

found out later that, when I got to know the Vietnamese commander and the, his officers that our unit, our battalion was considered to be a loyal battalion, a really good loyal battalion. He suspected that only twenty-five percent were enemy agents or enemy sympathisers, only twenty-five percent. Great, okay, good. Different ball game, right,

(UNCLEAR) of all that.

Sorry?

That was good apparently, that was shit hot

Well you slept very lightly and what’s more within a couple of months I found out that the price on my head, as the

senior battalion boys, was twenty US, twenty thousand US dollars, cash in hand, on my head. The lieutenant was worth fifteen and the American sergeants were ten thousand each. When you consider that the average Vietnamese soldier was paid a thousand dollars a year, when he was paid, there’s twenty years wages for chopping my head off and delivering it

to the bad guys, tax free too, cash in hand. So we did sleep very lightly, yes. Yes, and we travelled in pairs so that one of us, you know, wouldn’t have an accident, yes. Yes.

From the Vietnamese, from the Vietnamese.

Famously, well you know...

He was alright, he was alright, yeah, he was alright.

Okay, you know, we was sent there as trainers, Australian Army Training Team, dash, Vietnam. Fine. In some places you did actually train ‘em, and in fact when I, later on when I moved down to

the delta on night operations, yes, we were training them. But with a regular battalion, whereas I said, the battalion commander had been fighting the war for twenty years already, there wasn’t much that I could train him in, as such, or even advise. So in those cases I was basically fire support, and I had the means at the end of my

radio to, you know, to bring in the world of fire support. And in fact at that stage almost every square inch, certainly of I-Corps, was covered by fire from some fire base or another. And every time we went out on operations I had this big bloody, code book, signals book which, if we were here, I could work out where

the various support units were, artillery or mortar, right, or even naval gun fire if it was close enough, that could support us if we were needed at that time. The FACs, the Forward Air Controllers were a slow flying aircraft which communicated with us, right, the advisers, Yankee they were. And we would identify a

target for him, he’d circle it slowly, fire rockets at what we tried to identify. Once he was close enough to actually identify, then he’d call up the jets, the bombers and they’d come in and they’d paste it with bombs or napalm or whatever you fancy. So that’s, that was the value of being,

being the advisers as such. The Americans had call with military assistance which is more, you know, more correct in my opinion.

Well, what was the wash up, get the bodies out and continue, right. Bring in a couple of helicopters, put ‘em in the groundsheets and

have ‘em taken away, give ‘em back to Mum and Dad or whatever, carry on.

No, shit no. No, no, no, it was the norm. Well if there was it certainly wasn’t at my level, you know. I took note of my American colonel and he would’ve made appropriate noises but as, you know,

as one American told me after he’d lost five marines who allegedly, cause I wasn’t there, I didn’t see. But allegedly five US Marine Corps were decapitated by a helicopter, when they landed, their own blades, you know, I certainly expressed shock and horror at that, surely some bastard’s gonna hang for this. “Nah, you Aussies have gatta learn to bleed

a little.” Yeah, right, okay, well you do your bleeding, we’ll do our bleeding our way, thank you very much.

Well it made it easier for me, right in that because they weren’t really my soldiers. I was

there as an adviser, I was there as an assistant, I was there to provide you with fire support, if you lot wanted to blow your own soldiers up, that is basically your problem, right. Oh you had, you know, this is what you civilians possibly can’t understand, you have to be callous about these things, right. You know, start a bleeding heart campaign,

a man would’ve sat down and cried every day and every night, he’d be a basket case. And this is why you do have some Australians who are basket cases because they’ve lost too many personal friends. I was lucky enough not to be in that situation. Yes, I’ve lost a lot of Vietnamese, when I say I lost ‘em, I didn’t lose ‘em, I was in a unit that lost a lot. I was there to provide what was

needed, to advise that yes you can have fire support from here or from there, from here, for this operation, what you wanna do, right. Boss man, type thing, battalion commander. And of course my answer to his twenty... he’d look at me and say, “Ha, ha,” he says, “what do you know,” he says, “I’ve been fighting this war for twenty years.” And I said, “Well that’s alright dai uy.” [captain] because he was a dai uy too, “I’ve just come from a war where I

fought for five months, and we won that one, ah-yee-yung [?],” see. So he’d get the sulks, for a while, tough titty, he’d get over it.

Oh course we have banter. Yeah, they were alright, they understood, they knew, they knew they were gonna lose the war, they had

to know they were gonna lose the war, there was no, there was no question about it, because, you know, the Americans and our mob were fooling themselves. This is 1969, you know, Vietnamisation time, where we, I’ve gotta hand over the war to the Vietnamese, right. I mean what Nixon was saying, ‘What we’re gonna do, is seeing that we haven’t won this

war in all this time, we’re gonna pull our fire... half a million Americans out and help you win the war by yourself,’ right. Now, you know, if they weren’t winning the war with half a million yanks in there, what chance did they have of winning the bloody war without the half a million yanks. So, you know, you’d have to be, you know, a moron to, not to understand that logic. And everybody knew it, everybody knew it.

I was starting to get the message when in fact Vietnamisation wasn’t working. I’d call for a helicopter to take away some casualties and the answer would come back from the American colonel, “No, let the Vietnamese provide their own,” right. And you’d get back to ‘em and say, “Well,” you know, “unless this particular occasion where he’s

lost both his legs and not taken out of here soon, there’ll be no point.” “No, Vietnamese provide their own,” right. So the poor bugger would die, right, and eventually six hours later the Vietnamese helicopter would turn up, be heard of, and that sort of thing. If an American got hit or if I got hit, I’d been on an operating table within twenty minutes. Guaranteed.

Operational, operating table of one of your, you know, MASH [Mobile Army Surgical Hospital] type hospitals, surgeries. Guaranteed.

Yeah well that was, yeah that was one of ‘em, where in fact I... What happened was I was in a convoy heading south on this very, very old

French road, highway four in fact, very narrow highway, what was left of it. And for some, a convoy of US range, ah, Vietnamese rangers, was coming back, was coming the other way in trucks, open trucks with about thirty in each truck.

For some reason, don’t ask me why, for some reason, one of my Vietnamese subordinates over took me, while I was driving the one tonne, one tonne truck, don’t ask me why. And then pulled off the road to make way for the convoy, and that’s where he hit the mine, right, wouldn’t have been twenty yards away from me. Destined for me obviously but...

Anyway the mine was heavy enough or being big enough to pick him up, the vehicle, his one tonne truck and wipe everybody off the back of the truck coming the other way. So there it is, so I got thirty, forty, dead, dying, you know, all over the road. I’m calling in,

the Vietnamese tried to call in their helicopters, sort of, no joy. I called in for helicopters and they provided me with one, which was gonna come, you know, sooner or later. First question was, “Any Americans or Australians, Americans in that lot?” The answer was no. And of course at that stage they were considering me as an American too, sort of thing, a round eye. I said, “No.” “Yeah, it’ll get there.”

You know, by the time the first helicopter arrived, I had a pile of dead, dying and slightly wounded, and I was playing God. Saying, “No, he’s just about dead, put him over there with the bodies. He’s gonna make it, dunno about him, I think it’s only light, yeah, he can get out next.” So a helicopter would come, take away the first load, as many

as possible, and I’d be playing God with the others, the dead bodies of course being left ‘til last. I think I said to you that one of those was the driver, in fact who’d over taken me. Lost both his arms, both his legs, face virtually blown away in, vulcanised, you know, burned solid. “No, no,” I said, “he’s dead.”

I said, “Put him with the bodies. The body’s still bubbling but he’s dead.” But he wasn’t. In fact took him out with the last lot of bodies just about, and he still survived in hospital for two, three months after that. So there you go.

No, first operation.

Yeah, this is another one, patrol.

Oh a couple of days later we, eh, we’ll be here all day if this, at this rate.

No, no, it’s not alright for me.

The, yeah couple of days later, we did, we cornered a bunch of ‘em. But it was... is it? No, no, I thought it’d finished

or something. The, yeah cornered a bunch of ‘em, surprised ‘em, started, they were in a tree, in a tree line. You know, started blowing ‘em to pieces and the FAC was over, called him in, he put the rockets in on ‘em. Eventually the jets came in, and they bombed the, you know, something shocking, bomb,

napalm, there was just one great big inferno. But it was getting close to nightfall and of course the Vietnamese weren’t gonna go in there and check it out, it was still burning anyway. So we put a cordon round it for the night, to let it die down and then in the morning we’ll go see what we bagged, you know, what the catch was. Anyway the next morning the

troops go in, I go in, cause I have to count all the bodies to report ‘em, and there’s only five bodies, right. That’s it, only five bodies, that’s the body count for the day, five bodies. The FAC, the slow flying aircraft came back later on in the day said, “Hey,” he says, “what’d we get yesterday?” He said, “What’s our share?” Meaning the air force, what do we get out of

that? I said to him, “Well there’s only five bodies, you can have the lot, right, you did all the damage, yours.” “God damn it man,” he says, “I’m not gonna tell the colonel that. When I got back to base yesterday, I told him there were thirty burning gooks [enemy] I saw down there. How can I tell him that after we spent all that ordnance, there’s only five God Damn bodies?” He says, “You bastards,” he says, “you keeping

the body count for your own Vietnamese aren’t ya? You keep this up,” he says, “and I’ll never support you again.” Question. Do I lie, provide him with more bodies, you know, non-existent bodies, or do I stick to dib-dib-dib, boy scout, honesty, truth and yap, and never get support from them again. And of course without

air support that particular battalion would be chopped to pieces, within months. So I said, “Righto, we’ll send back a patrol and see if we can find more bodies.” Yeah, he came back later on in the day, “Well?” “Yeah, you’re right Chuck, we found another twenty-seven bodies. Yeah, righto, that’s thirty-two bodies for you, you have ‘em, you tell your colonel you got the thirty-two kill.” Okay,

alright, I prostituted my principles, yes, and no doubt I have to live with it, and I’ll live with it, I managed to survive without committing suicide. Working on the principle that there must be twenty-seven rotting carcasses somewhere in Vietnam that nobody had found that day, so this mob might as well have ‘em. And that was what the body count was all about, so you had to show that,

that your efforts were worthwhile. You had to show that you’d killed more than they’d killed, and that was the American philosophy. In fact if you, you know, if you add up all the bodies that were allegedly killed by us, the good guys, I think we knocked out the whole population of, or equivalent of China, right, you know.

I’m being facetious, I know, but you know, getting close to must’ve been seventy-five million, you know, whatever, cause that was the requirement. Without body kills you, without a body count then you weren’t good.

Well it’s not proving your, proving myself. The Vietnamese, right, had to contribute

to the body count of the Americans body count. The overall theatre, the overall war, had to show that there were being more nasties being killed than goodies being killed, to satisfy the political masters, so of course it was inflated, inflated at all levels. Whereas our instructions as Australians were unless you can stand on the body,

do not count it, as a kill. Simple as that. And if you find a foot or a leg, it doesn’t mean that it’s a kill, it means that someone wounded has crawled away or it might even belong to the body over there, so it’s not two bodies, it’s one body, type thing, right. You know, might sound grizzly and,

but that was basically it, the Australians were trying to keep the system honest. But if you tried to keep the system honest, then, you know, you would lose, from the American point of view and from the American support. Later on in that operation, oh Jesus, towards the end of it in fact,

we were in the situation where the battalion was spread out over many sufficient kilometres. A Company, where my lieutenant and my sergeant were, were forward, I was with battalion headquarters, another company was behind us and the two other companies were on the flanks, left and right, oh, a couple of kilometres on each side through

fairly dense bush. And all of a sudden there’s rattle, rattle, rattle of gun fire over on the right hand side from where bravo or charlie company were, doesn’t really matter now. Hell of a lot of burst of fire and then deathly silence. So of course I had no advisers with that lot, or you know,

no, none of my team, two up front, two at battalion headquarters , so I asked the Vietnamese. And commanding officer, battalion commander says, “Oh, Bravo Company has just killed twenty Viet Cong, put them on your body count.” I said, “No, you know the rules, I’m not gonna put ‘em on the body count until I actually see the bodies.”

You know, “Let’s go now, I’ll count the bodies and I’ll put ‘em in tonight’s radio report.” “No, no, it’s too late to go, no,” he says, “too late. I will give you proof in the morning.” “Okay, righto, well I can wait ‘til tomorrow morning.” Sure enough in the morning, while we’re sitting having brekky, along comes a soldier from Bravo Company with a calico bag, right, like a pillowcase.

Battalion, talks to the battalion commander who’s sitting opposite me on his pack while I’m sitting on my helmet. And he points at me, so the soldier brings it over to me, I’m chewing away on me breakfast, out of a tin, and he spills this bloody bag of ears in front of me, right, to prove that, you know, here they are. So, you know, I told my sergeant to count ‘em, I wasn’t gonna touch ‘em.

The sergeant counted ‘em and there were forty-one ears. I looked at the CO [Commanding Officer] and I laughed. I laughed, I said, “Hey, firstly, there was more left ears than right ears,” right, cause I was counting ‘em as he was separating ‘em. I said, you know, “Some of those ears must have come from very small adults.”

I said, “What’s the extra ear for, is it insurance or a personal souvenir for me?” So he laughed too right, and, you know, the stale mate was broken, and he knew I couldn’t accept it as proof. And I’m sure to this day that there’s some village out there in the mountains where, you know, the peasants are walking round lop sided, having contributed an ear or two to save his face, right.

What’d I do with the ears, I left ‘em there for him to... what am I supposed, what did you want me to do? Put ‘em on a string and bring ‘em home as a souvenir for you or something? For God sake. What was I gonna do with a pile of bloody human flesh on a string.

Well, you got a sick mind child.

A sick mind.

That’s right because yeah well, obviously he got it on the Vietnamese net from the Vietnamese

regimental commander, this is my assumption of course, that you haven’t killed anybody in the last couple of days, you better come up with a few kills. Right, so, you know, bit of gun fire over there, whether they fired into the bushes or whatever they did, was to impress me and hopefully get me to put twenty on today’s kill, without seeing the evidence. And I, you know, had he taken me over there to see the bodies, and I worked out that they were

actually enemy soldiers and not children, women and children, then yeah I would’ve put ‘em on the body count. He didn’t, I said, “Well what about going and seeing them?” “No, no, we’re in too much of a hurry, we have to keep moving.” “Okay, no body count then, it’s yours.”

Well of course you don’t, course you don’t. Of course you don’t.

It was the American concept.

Telling lies?

I have no doubt.

I have no doubt. You know, I have no doubt.

No, no, well, you know...

Well you know, that’s about, that takes care of the thirty-day operation. I mean back to base, scrub up, no,

no operations planned for the next few, you know, the next week or two. It means a chance to get into Da Nang, yahoo, pick up a bit of mail, write a bit of mail, get paid, get drunk and get thrown out of town, back into the bush. Exchange a few tales with other advisers that might be in from the bush, for a couple of days.

Get back to work. Excuse me.

Australians, yes. Every so often, either they or I or one of us would bring his

Americans in as well, you know, into Australia House, give ‘em the taste of a real beer instead of the lolly water that the Americans were drinking. Show ‘em a bit of Australian hospitality and then back out in the bush again.

Describe to me the population

of Townsville. I don’t mean the number but the variety of people.

What, well, firstly the training team were all professionals, right, there were no national service men. all regular army.

Secondly they were all volunteers, right, whereas volunteers for the training team, right, for that job. Thirdly, well again, because of the American system of looking after officers and treating their

other ranks like shit, in many cases, they treated their enlisted men rather poorly. We had sergeants and even some corporals who’d volunteered for the team, were good enough in various positions, but couldn’t be brought in as enlisted men because they’d be lost in the American system of being treated like garbage, so they were made

temporary warrant officers, right. So the team basically consisted of officers, captains in the main, and warrant officers, because Americans treat their warrant officers, as officers, as commissioned. With me? So they were entitled to salutes, they were, from the Americans, they were entitled to officer,

officer club facilities and that sort of thing. So we were basically captains, with a few majors in various establishments and lieutenant colonel in Saigon. One lieutenant colonel, a few majors around the place, captains and the rest warrant officers. All professionals, all volunteers.

Well I told you, I didn’t work with any Australians at that stage.

The Americans, again, pros, in fact the Americans are far stricter in their, you know, sense of humour’s not there, right.

They’re, oh yeah, you know, you talk about discipline and being screamed at, I think that being screamed at from the day that they’re born, destined for the army or something. You know, you would’ve seen movies of various, you know, American boot camps, well that’s basically how Americans are, ‘Ah, yes-sir,’ ya, ya, ya. Nobody calls anybody by their first name, right, it’s all

surnames. Maybe because they can’t remember the Christian names of the... you know, surnames of course are printed on your uniforms, so Smith, type thing. Oh yeah, very, very, different people, but you get to know ‘em. Basically they had to get to know me, I’m the boss, this is my team. That was,

we ran along quite smoothly.

Well in my particular case, while I was, for the seven months that I was near Da Nang, I had bugger all training to do, really, right, of the Vietnamese. They were doing their own training

and they, you know, were doing it quite adequately, they considered themselves to be quite well trained. I didn’t start training people until I went down to the Mekong Delta, for the last seven months, ah, five months of my tour. On a totally different, well, I was no longer a senior battalion adviser to the Vietnamese, I was in charge

of command of night operations, the night shift, in a certain province.

Yes, if you’re finished with Da Nang.

Well...

Yeah, well, if you wanna, you know. Alright, well I did, as I said, seven months in Da Nang,

came home on R&R [Rest and Recreation leave]. Hopped back on the plane to go back to Vietnam, thought I might get a desk job for the last five months but not so. I was briefed by the CO at the airport, wasn’t even allowed into town. The brief by the CO at the airport, didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my Vietnamese unit, cause I thought I was getting back there. Hopped into an Air America

little plane and was flown down to the Mekong Delta, where apparently had been decided at much higher level, you know, the generals level, that because the, neither the Americans nor the Vietnamese would operate at night against charlie, charlie had the run of the police, who could move quite freely around the Mekong Delta

without any interference from the Americans or the Vietnamese, good guys. So I was despatched down there and given ten warrant officers, Australians, to set up a night operations centre and stop Charlie [Viet Cong] having the night to himself.

Well, like working the night shift and killing and garrotting and you know, operating at night and setting up ambushes and... Firstly we had to establish a reputation. It was all very well for, you know, for the hierarchy to, and I’m talking about American, Vietnamese and Australian hierarchy to sort of tell everybody that we, we’re sending down an Australian

team of honcho jungle fighters, you know, top gun night fighters. That’s all very well to tell people that. But, so we, we had to establish a reputation as being number one killers at night. And we were given a month in which to do it, right.

So one warrant officer acting as the gatherer of information, and gave him the job of going to all the intelligence agencies in the province and to get, you know, to get good targets for that night, if possible. And of course you’ve gotta understand that there was a US Army infantry

division down there, there was a Vietnamese infantry division down there, there was the navy, the air force, the bloody, their military police, civil police, armed propaganda units, provincial reconnaissance units. I mean Christ, worked out there’s about a hundred thousand armed good guys in that province, about a hundred thousand, right.

And they sent us eleven down there, to show ‘em how to do the job. And to gather information I, you know, I’d send the warrant officer out to, he’d go to the US Army, the military intelligence cell and beg, being a pauper, Australian, sent down here on this miserable mission, ‘Have you got any

good targets for tonight?’ Course their attitude was, ‘Yeah we’ll tell you, but don’t tell the bloody air force or the navy or the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency],’ this is fact, you know. From there he’d go to the navy, ‘Yeah but don’t tell the army, the air force or the CIA. ’ And, you know, and this is why, quite frankly, in my opinion, why September 11 happened to the Americans. They all had bits of information, but they jealously

guard their information and don’t tell anybody. I found this out in 1970 thank you very much, down in the Mekong Delta, that’s a fact. So of course he’d go around, pick up bits and pieces here, what not, identify a target for that night, and we’d go out and play with the target.

Not really.

Suffice to say that by the, by the end of the month, we were accepted as super heroes.

Well, you know, they were not all successful. For instance, after that we

went out in teams to train the Vietnamese, local platoons, because they started to listen and course whilst we were training ‘em in ambush techniques and ordinance search and what not, you know, they paid attention and they reacted. Sometimes we did good, and sometimes it

failed. What knowledge was retained for later once we’d moved on somewhere else, God only knows. Then I opened the school, right, for night operations to which the Americans and the Vietnamese were sending their platoon commanders, for a fortnight, you know, class room work. And at the end of the classroom period, we’d take ‘em

out on a real ambush, you know, sometimes we’d succeed, sometimes we’d get our arse kicked, obviously hadn’t got through, right. Yes.

Well, ambush techniques, moving at night, firing at night, I’m not gonna take you through a recruit course,

you know, we haven’t got time today.

Yes they, well of course they had experience but they were not prepared to fight at night. The other thing of course is they wouldn’t fight on the weekend, they wouldn’t go out

on the weekend, right. This is supposed to be a war and they just didn’t want to play on the weekend. So, you know, me and my ten man team, all we could do was, you know, go to the club or revise our lesson plans or you know, scratch our heads and stay,

or do things on weekend, right. I mean if you don’t wanna fight your war and we’re here to help you fight your war, we’ve already proved our point. And you know, why the hell should I go out there if you don’t wanna go, this is your country, you know, you don’t wanna be in it. And that was the attitude that was prevailing. Excuse me. The Americans, God bless ‘em, I mean, you know,

and you can’t generalise, you can’t generalise with anybody or everybody. The Americans were the soldiers, new it was futile, or seemed to know or seemed to consider it was futile, they would start questioning orders as to why, you know, like their officers, “Do we really have to go out on this patrol?” “Do we really have to risk our legs

being blown off?” “Hey ma-an, I’ve only got two weeks left before I go home, do I really have to go?” Well, once you start getting that attitude, you know, bad news.

Yes.

Oh, you shame ‘em into it, you talk to the leaders, you... it’s the same as the problems that, you know, our trainers are having in Iraq at the moment. You know, ask them how they’re going, right, and quite frankly, they’ve got to get to the top man and convince him that he’s the one that’s gotta make his subordinates work. And this is the same with us,

it was a question of getting to the senior Vietnamese around the place and shaming him into performing, right, to save face, right. And anything that turned to shit in his unit, was his fault, right, and therefore he would go and sort things out.

Well telling him he’s bloody useless, right, and

he wasn’t paying attention, you know. One operation, in fact where that photo was taken, we had information that there was a tax collector, an enemy tax collector was going to be in this village, in this particular house on this particular night. However all the approaches to that area were hard to,

to get, you couldn’t get to him on land unobserved. So we formulated a plan, me and the Vietnamese commander, that in fact what we’d do is get as close as possible to the hamlet by land and block it off, whilst the main attacking force of us would slowly,

gently, row canoes down the canal, which was right at your, adjacent to the house. Until we were close enough to the house and we could, in the D-boat, and get in there and do nasty things to him. And it worked, up until about the last hundred metres, in the dark, right, in total darkness, yeah, yeah, it looked good. Then in

total dark... somebody in one of the canoes fired a shot, right, which started a panic. Every bastard started shooting, right, in the boats, and of course... in the canoes, and firing rifles and machine guns on... cause we, you know, the impression one got was that we’d been ambushed in the canal. I realised, you know, by this time, boats are

tipping over and blokes are up to their noses in slime and grime and buffalo shit. And I realised that, you know, there’s nothing coming in, it’s all going out. Blew the whistle, right, stop all this crap, stop the war, but of course it was too late, you know, the bloke, if he’d been there, was gone. Now at the post-mortem of all this,

right, so we went home with our tails between our legs. At the post-mortem nobody was gonna confess to have firing the first shot, and if they had, it would’ve, you know, ‘I thought I saw something on the bank.’ So the whole thing was a, I won’t say a disaster but it was a failure. We had just as many failures as successes, it’s only in the movies that you’ll get, you know, Clint Eastwood

and Rambo and all that, you get a hundred percent successes. Mate, we had just as many failures as successes. Alright, okay, you had a failure, back to the drawing board, and square, and sort it out. Now whether that shot was accidental or whether there was a nasty in amongst my mob, right, who

fired a shot to let the enemy know that we were coming, I’ll leave it up to you, to, you know, speculate.

Well if you know about night vision, and I’m not talking about devices but I’m talking about the human eyes,

you can see in the dark.

Field signals, a sequence of movements where in fact you know who’s where, what, where. Who’s forward, who’s left or right, depends

on the thickness of the vegetation too. Right, and thick vegetation it’s, as I said before, training for, you know, for Malaya. In thick jungle you, all you can do is grab hold of the man in front of you and, you know, Indian file. Another trick is, you know, little fluorescent strips on the back of each man, so those behind can see,

or white rags or something, right. Little fluorescent strips on the back of someone’s shirt, or someone’s helmet, that helps. Night vision, try it yourself one night. To acquire night vision you need about forty minutes of total darkness, total darkness, don’t just come out...

total darkness. And then you go out there and you wanna look at that door handle, you wanna see that door handle, don’t look at that door handle, look aside, and you see it out of the corner of your eye. If you look at something straight on, you got less chance of seeing it, look to the side and it’ll, should appear in the corner of your eye. Flares, lights coming on,

and you’ve just acquired night vision, if you see it with your eyes you’re buggered, for the next forty minutes at least. So if you must look at it, close one eye, save the night vision in one eye. Mate, before you know it, I’ll make a night fighter out of you yet, mate.

Low.

Of course you do. In fact the reason I started wearing glasses was at, on one operation, down there. We were getting close to our target and there was movement in front of me, you know, it was black or

pitch black, it was moving and it was armed, and I could see, you know. So would’ve been from here to oh, thirty or forty yards, so I let go with a whole magazine from my armalite from the hip, and missed, right. And somewhere or other, one of my warrant officers had stumbled in front of me instead

of being behind me, and that’s what I was firing at. Missed him, bugger. Shoulda taught him a lesson and hit him. But missed him, see. So next day I went to the nearest American hospital and I said, “Doctor, check my eyes.” And he said, “Yeah sure captain, you need glasses.” Well that’s it. So that’s how I acquired glasses. Again, operation blown because one of the, you know,

one of my super killers, you know, had blundered in front of me. How he blundered he couldn’t explain, okay so he, you know... it happens, shit happens, you know. And it’s not like the movies mate, you don’t win every one of ‘em.

We,

oh, how you get your aim? Well one trick was to set up claymores, and control the claymores along the track. And claymore mines, I don't know if you’ve talked to anybody about claymore mines, but a bank of claymores can be controlled from one spot. So anything up to six claymores that way and six claymores that way, you, all came back to the one central point, you wait until the, you know, track was full of people

and then blow them all to smithereens, pressing the doo-dad [trigger]. Very successful, if it works.

So?

Course you do. In fact you have warning parties at both ends, away, telling you, by radio, if you got the radios, and I managed to get a few radios, of warning you that, you know, so many are coming from

left to right, from North to South, whatever, see. The other method is to set up your claymores [directional mines], this is called the mechanical ambush, with a trip wire, right, so you wouldn’t even have to do anything. You could set it up and go away. Sooner or later someone would stumble along the track, trip wire’d go off, and half the world would

go off. This is how a lot of buffaloes, women and children were being killed too, which I was being careful of, you know. Of, there’s quite a few ambushes that I wouldn’t spring because by that time we got, I must admit, by that time we got night vision devices, you know, we got starlight devices attached

to our rifles, so we could see. And sure you could, you’d see a shadowy figure approaching and it looks like he’s got a weapon but you’d, you know, take a closer look and it’s some doddering old man with a stick who’s out hunting frogs, which he shouldn’t have been, you know, after curfew. Or you’d get a bunch of kids hunting frogs in the paddy fields, again, breaking curfew. Oh

yeah, you know, quite legitimate targets but not very good for public relations and wouldn’t achieve anything, you know, type thing, so had to be careful there.

Yes, yes. Day, night, twenty-four hours a day, except weekends when the Vietnamese...

I couldn’t get over it, no. But then again, you know, the whole system was turning to shit, at one stage there, we, we identified by radio location that about a, oh, a kilometre, running parallel to the road, about a kilometre and a half, maybe two off the drag, you know, was a tree line along the creek,

which, in fact, contained an NVA divisional headquarters . They were there, right, this is smack in the middle of the Mekong Delta in the South Vietnamese territory, they were there. The Vietnamese had tried to go in there a couple of times to clear ‘em out but they’d always bounce back. The Americans said, you know, ‘Stand back, we’ll show you how it’s done.’ Their casualties proved too much from

all the mines and booby traps that were set up. I kept telling my American and Vietnamese masters down there, that that’s a perfect target for a B-52 strike, right, it’s about a kilometre wide, and runs for about three kilometres, this tree line. Bring in a B-52 strike and wipe the whole bloody lot, right. But, at that stage of the war, it was politically

inconvenient because the world had been told that the Mekong Delta had been pacified, see, it was pacified. So to bring a B-52 strike in would’ve, well, would’ve been a no-no, politically. Tactically, it would’ve worked, it would’ve wiped the whole bloody divisional headquarters out, you know, of nasties, but no, righto, keep at it.

At this stage I’ve got a, what’ve I got, a month or so left. And that’s the attitude of one of the doctors in the end, right, ‘Oh God, you know, let me survive, what’s left of my time here, cause this is, you know, getting a man nowhere.’ So was nine months be... is it coming to an end or something?

Yeah, you know, just to

finish on that point, it was nine months before I was hit, right. Sure I’d been living with being bullet proof and gonna pull through it, and then I was hit. And okay, it wasn’t bad, you know, you bleed, you’re hurt and you’re not El Supremo [invincible] after all but... But the point that really struck me at that stage was, what

the hell am I doing here? This is all futility, we’re not going to win this lot, right, this Vietnamisation. Sure when they first sent me down there to the delta, and they gave me the jeeps, and they wanted me to do the task, but no bastard would give me the petrol. The Americans wouldn’t give me the petrol, saying that the Vietnamese

wanted this program so they’ve gotta give you the petrol, and the Vietnamese were saying, ‘Well we haven’t got any at this point but please do continue.’ And I find it very difficult to drive four or five jeeps without juice, unless you, you know, push the bloody things, or something. So, you know, it was that sort of attitude of, ‘No, no, we’re handing it over to the Vietnamese, they’ve gotta do it.’ And the Vietnamese would say, “No, no, no, lean on

the Americans cause we’re not quite ready or we haven’t got it.” Well yeah, they were gonna win the war on their own, yeah, and I’m gonna take a flying leap at the moon. You know, so in fact I was quite happy to come home, thank you very much. It was a lost cause.

Oh yes. Yes,

when, you see the, I heard about the battalion up north that I’d left behind, and they fought to the end, right. The last adviser to leave in ‘72 or ‘74 that flew over their position, he says, ‘They were being over run by NVA tanks.’

They fought to the end. That mob down in the delta, you know, maybe they got some guts, maybe they got some back bone after I’d left, or maybe something happened to ‘em, I don't know, but a year was enough, right. Particularly dealing with the hierarchy, where in fact, you know, it was all, you know, covering their own

arses in many respects. And then of course, you know, and I got a taste of the home coming when I came home on R&R, you know, that was, you know, a revelation. You’re home for five days, God knows why I came home, well to see the babies. So course it took ‘em five days to

get to know this strange man who’s been away for seven months, and just as they got to know me it was time to hop on a plane and go home again. And having sort of gone to the pub a couple of times while I was down there, all you were copping was abuse, from the general population, abuse for, you know, doing what the government wanted you to do. The fact that the, years later they proved that the government was

full of shit, had nothing to do with it.

Very basic Vietnamese on my behalf and basic English on their behalf, this is the yeah, the common soldiers. The officers all spoke

reasonable English, they certainly spoke French having served under the French. And I’m sure that after we got kicked out and the Americans got kicked out, they’ve all learned Russian, when the Russians moved in, very adaptable people.

Yeah, you know, yes.

Not to form close buddy relationships, right. But yeah, you know, you show ‘em respect, they show you respect, same the world over.

Yes, lots of local villages. You gonna ask me how many women and children I killed?

I’m responsible for quite a few actually I’d say. Cause yes, not personally bayoneting them or shooting them but there were occasions, which of course is to a man’s horror, where in fact you’d be fired upon from a village and, you know, the Vietnamese would say it’s

full of enemy, yap, yap, yap, and call in artillery or the jets, blow the place up. You’d go find two or three nasties in there and quite a few mutilated women and children. I think the Americans call it collateral damage. Yes, yes, and a man’s gotta live with that.

Well that’s part

of the game. Yep.

Oh yes, yeah, I’ve seen them killed, lots of Vietnamese killed, quite a few Americans getting, you know,

their body being put away in body bags, yes, yes.

What, like atrocities or something?

No, no. Heard about ‘em. Sure I saw a few heads sticking up on

poles. Yes, again, but this is more in the delta, where in fact, you know, Operation Phoenix which never existed, yeah, har-de-har, and that was an American... you know, I’m sorry if I’m dragging you away from Da Nang. Da Nang was a much cleaner, much cleaner military setting, right, than the dirt that went on at, down there, and particularly

with the CIA involvement, the bastards. The, you know, the system came up, they’d go to a village, out in the boonies somewhere, this is the good guys, right. And at a point, some villager as chief, right, ‘You are now the government chief of the village.’ And, you know, we’ll pay you a pittance, type thing, but you’re the boss round here. Which is all very well,

and then they’d move away. And doing the night, Charlie would come and lop his head off, his wife’s head and his kids heads and stick ‘em up on the bamboo poles and elect a chief of their own, for Charlie. The next day or a couple of days later, the good guys would go back there and say, ‘Hello, there’s our chief, sort of, hanging about in the,

in the sun.’ And they’d find out who the Viet Cong chief was, they’d lop his head and his wife and his kids, and stick ‘em up on the pole and then they’d nominate somebody else to be the government chief. And pretty soon, both sides were starting to run out of volunteers to be the government, you know, to be chief of the village, particularly with no protection.

In some ways, chaotic, frantic, desperate moves to do something, to achieve something. You know, when you think about it, and you think about it, and you read the, or study the lead up

to the Vietnam War that concerns us and the Americans, we had no right to be there. We had absolutely bugger all right to be there. Vietnam, going back to the Second World War, if I could take you for a lesson in history, Vietnam was a French colony before World War II. Then the Japanese of course attacked

and wiped out the French, and showed the Vietnamese peasants that the white man isn’t God after all, that we Asiatics or Asians can do ‘em, right, if we want to. And at the end of World War II Vietnam was occupied by the British not the French, by the British, right. Who, instead of allowing

Ho Chi Minh to form a free French, ah, free Vietnamese society, handed the colony over back to their colonial buddies, the French, right, so that’s how the Viet Minh war started. When in fact Ho Chi Minh, who couldn’t get any training from the Americans, right, turned to the Russians, and of course as soon as he turned to the

Russians for military help and military aid, he’s a communist, right, instead of being a nationalist, and this is how, you know, how it all turned to shit. The French were kicked out by the Viet Minh in ‘54 after Dien Bien Phu, then it was decided that a nation-wide vote or plebiscite would be taken, as to

whether Vietnam would become sort of communistic or nationalistic or republican, right. That’s what it was gonna be, nation-wide plebiscite. But then the Yanks realised that in fact the campaigning that was being carried out by the nationalists was gonna do ‘em in, do the vote in, so she, Vietnam

was cut in half, that’s how you got the DMZ, you know. So Charlie started attacking or trying to win this, we of course, the Yanks seeing reds under the beds at every given opportunity. And the domino theory, ‘If they take Vietnam, next they’ll take Malaya, then they’ll take Formosa, then they’ll take this, then they’ll take that, they’ll take every bloody thing.’ And the row of dominoes

would fall, before you know it they’ve got Australia and Antarctica. And our boot licking government, under Bob Menzies... the Vietnamese never asked us to help. Australia, in fact, asked the Vietnamese to ask us publicly to help, right. It’s all there, it’s all documented, right. Then dick-heads like me, right... when I say dickheads, professional soldiers, I don’t mind

fighting for, you know, for something that where you don’t snow me, you don’t tell me lies, right. Because apart from the fact that you’re lying to me, I had to pass on those lies to my soldiers. I had to look at, you know, my soldiers in the eyeballs and pass on the horse shit that you’ve been feeding me. And that’s, that hurts. That, you know,

destroys your confidence in your leaders. Then the home coming, oh yeah, ripper, treated like shit by the populace. And the government hiding, hiding us, we’re all hiding. I come home in 1970 and where were we, we weren’t allowed to go out in uniform. We’re,

you know, working on a headquarters somewhere, you had to be in collar and tie, in a suit. Only on pay days could you wear uniform, right, but if it was too dangerous amongst the anti demonstrators, you know, anti war demonstrators, then go in your suit. Now this isn’t a way to run an army. So of course it was quite happy to go back into an army camp somewhere and live amongst your

mates, who are also all pissed off and depressed and what not. And that’s all it’s all about. I think I said to you outside that, you know, this shame will not, as we consider, ‘This shame will not die out until the last Vietnam veteran is dead.’ The scars are there, the hurt is there,

you know. And nobody in my opinion, we’re dealing with me, my opinion, nobody begrudges the kids coming back from war these days, even stupid wars like Iraq where they shouldn’t be. I don’t begrudge the kids anything, the soldiers that are coming back, they’ve done their job, they’ve been sent over there doing their job, getting hurt, although we’re lucky, we haven’t

had any casualties from Iraq yet. Yet. Fine, you know, the kids are doing fine but the government is bull shitting all along. But they’ve learned, they’ve learned with us, Vietnam veterans, don’t spit upon us, that’s from the government point of view, so they’re treating these young kids as heroes. I don't know what the full story of the Rwandas and the Ugandas and the

East Timor, but they’re all certainly getting, you know, the royal treatment upon coming home, and that’s fine, fine. End of lesson.

After the war,

basically, yeah. Upon reflection, upon discussing it with others, upon reading about it. About seeing all the disclosures on various TV programs. One program that I will give a, you know, a blurb for is Foxtel or Austar, whatever it

is, channel twelve, which is their history channel, good stuff, bloody good stuff. A lot of this garbage is coming out now, historical value. Yeah, I suppose I’m punishing myself too, by watching it, you know, and bringing back memories, suppose I gotta do something for my sins, I don't know.

Yes, yes, as I told you, that B-52 strike would’ve wiped out virtually all my problems down there in the Delta, but no, because

it was not politically acceptable. We’d told the world that the delta’s been pacified, you go out there with your, you know, bayonet and you know, pitch fork and do the job in your own... that sort of thing.

Oh no. Expendables. No, oh, hope not. No. That’ll be another bloody insult. No, in fact when I first arrived in Da Nang, the CO, you know, and he was a nasty

man too, I settled with him afterwards, after Vietnam. Nasty, nasty man. Still alive somewhere, bugger him.

He was just a nasty man that’s all.

He, you know, the briefing he gave me, he said, “No heroics. No more heroics,” he says, “I’ve had enough,” he says, “I’ve lost too many of the team with the heroics. Start pulling heroics and I’ll send you home.” So that was probably another reason why he didn’t

sort of write anything in my monthly reports. Nasty bastard.

Yes, yes, yes. On operations it wasn’t so bad because one,

one of the two of us would have to stay awake on the radio anyway, so it was a few hours on, few hours off, between the two of us, when there were four of us together. At least we shared the picket. The radio had to be manned constantly, it wasn’t just for our own safety but there were others around, there were things happening, the other battalions of the regiment and all that sort of thing. And so had to be, you know,

and there were only two or four of us. Back at base, the battalion base, sure, they had their mine fields around the base and within the compound I had my own mine field around my hut, to keep the nasties, internal nasties out.

Oh that one, yeah but that was in the Mekong Delta, that was with a popular force platoon, which we were training at that point. Yeah that was a, you know, sort of a hammock sort of laid out on ammunition boxes and that was, you know, that was my own, hoping like hell that nothing would come in through the tin roof. It worked.

Yes sir.

Well it was either that or sleep on the wet ground, in amongst the ammunition boxes. I might as well sleep on top of the bloody things that are dry.

No. No.

Probably about the whole time, yes.

Probably about, yeah.

Well God I’d have to think about this one. There’d be a few giggles around the place. Nothing springs to mind at the moment I’m sorry Kiernan.

No,

I told you, give me a bit of warning about that sort of question, I could’ve thought of something.

Yeah. Surely to Christ, he says to himself, there’d have to be, you know, has to be something funny amongst all that shit, something had to be funny.

Nothing that polite people should know about. And my children and grandchildren might sort of view this one day or see the text of it.

We, in the club, the advisers club, Australia House, the game would be played. You know, we’d all be

cheerfully sort of jovial, and then someone would scream out, ‘Dead ants!’ And the last man flat on his back with his arms and legs up in the air, lost, and he would have to shout the next round. So of course you know, every so often, when you were doing something, some bastard would scream out, ‘Dead ants!’ Well you had to flop on your back rather quickly. And there was,

there was annoying American colonel, full colonel, chicken colonel, burnt colonel who worked in the headquarters round there and he’d befriended some of the local, and he kept hanging around, you know, hanging around Australia House. And there was one party where the minister for defence, named Anthony... Andrews, Anthony,

whatever it was, was up there and the place is full of American generals and of correspondents and the hierarchy, and the minister for defence with his entourage. You know, and those of us that were out of the field actually managed to get a clean uniform from somewhere to look presentable for our sir. And this American colonel was there too,

and some lout, some lout yelled out, ‘Dead ants!’ Course nobody, you know, all of us stood still, and the American colonel, you know, flopped on his back, right, with his arms and legs up in the air. The generals and the minister for the army, ‘Oh yes, maybe it’s time that colonel went home to America.’ I’m sure that would’ve been the end of his military

career, no sense of humour some of those bloody Americans.

Well we were under mortar attack by the nasties and I was lucky enough to, although the mortar, the eighty-one mill. Or eighty-two mill. As they

used, was close enough, or very close, I was lucky there was an American sergeant between me and it. He got most of the blast, I got tiny bits in the face, head, shoulders, that sort of got blown away, by the force of it. About an hour or two later, after the attack had finished, of course the face was all swollen up and there was blood

congealed all over the place, the Americans, the medic there decided that I could have a bit of shrapnel in the eye, So I was casa-vac’d to an American hospital, x-rayed, examined, shot back out in the field a couple of days later. The shrapnel kept coming out of my head for about the next ten years in fact, you know, very difficult to comb one’s hair

right, and bits of metal are coming out, right. Bigger than your filings, certainly some as big as a coin, almost a small coin.

Yeah, you’re combing your hair and the comb gets stuck, and it’s not on your matted hair cause one didn’t, one hasn’t had matted hair since he was a boy,

sort of thing, right, cause besides I always had a bloody crew cut. And then, you know, pull on it and, ‘Oh bit of shrapnel, eh.’ And of course, you know, then you run your hand over your skull and nothing there, yeah, fine, okay, well. Then a week or two, or a month later, another piece would pop out of the skull, you know.

Yeah, I think that was the general idea.

Yes it did actually, it made me realise that I’m not Superman and I’m not bullet proof. And yes, it hurts, and I bleed like the next man and maybe I,

maybe I won’t survive, cause at that stage, I’d survived nine months, all sorts of, you know, all sorts of things. Yes, well, and that’s it, keep working.

Well they x-rayed me, they patched me up, put sticky tape on this, a bandage on that, gave me a Purple Heart,

right, cause I was under American command when wounded.

They patched me up and because I was under American command at the time, wounded in an attack on Americans basically, casa-vac’d in American helicopter to an American hospital, they gave me

the, you know, the Purple Heart. So there you go.

Well yes, no, it was... well firstly was thankful that the eye was okay, you know, okay survived that one, let’s hope we survive the next one.

No, no, it couldn’t, it couldn’t for me cause, you know, how can I explain it. I was the, you know, I was an Australian commander there, excuse me, I had to maintain some sort of face, if you want, in front of my ten warrant officers, right,

that was it. I couldn’t go hiding in the... oh I could hide in the compound, I could hide in my little headquarters , but they’d soon be on to me, these hoary old bloody warrant officers that I had under command. And the only way I could get any, you know, respect or obedience out of ‘em was to be at the sharp end with them or in

front of ‘em, it’s as simple as that. So, you know, for me personally, it was a lonely war. As I said, you talk to other advisers who were, talk to some of my warrant officers for instance, and they, you know, they were a little buddy group, of course they were, all hated my guts, thought I was too harsh on ‘em, you know.

Oh cause I made ‘em work and take risks. Well, I’m being facetious. Yeah, okay, I told ‘em like it is and that was it. Yes, fine, I was under stress, they were under stress, yes, it’s not your Sunday afternoon football

game, you know, it has to be done so let’s go. And they were all pros, okay let’s go, do, yap, yap, yap.

Wet. The water table is very high, so in fact

you could hardly sort of dig a bunker, it was all above ground, very muddy in places. Sure there were one or two main roads, bitumen roads, but everything else was basically paddy fields, a bit of jungle, not much, tree lines along the creeks,

you know, a cultivated area. Where we were operating further south it was even worse, the river system really, you know, took over and there was more boat work, and this is where the American... cause we, we started off with one regional headquarters and then moved the whole operation

to the Dong Tam navy base, which I think I said to you is where the American brown navy worked from, the river boats. That was a huge complex, where they had the American infantry division and the Vietnamese infantry division amongst, you know, navy support and navy and helicopters and... big

base. And we were sort of towards the middle of it, where we set up our Australia House and do our thing, go out and do the night shift and then come back in the morning. The Americans could never understand us cause, you know, cause here we’d be, sort of after dawn, from working the night. We’d clean up and re-

arm...

Where are we?

Yes.

Well,

as I said, one of the operations was by canal, there were water ways, there was mud, there was laying in paddy fields and ambushing the path ways, the bunks in between paddy fields. And yes, it was, anyway, you know, I think I started telling you, so by eight o'clock in the morning of course, having just finished a night shift, we’d be sitting

on the steps of our Australia House, as we call it, with the Australian flag up, drinking beer, right, whilst the Americans are going to breakfast, see, and in a local mess hall. And they must’ve considered the Australians to be real drunken bums, you know, cause there it is eight o'clock in the morning, we’re having a beer. But what of course they didn’t realise is that, sure we’d have a couple of beers, at about nine, half past

nine, we’d all hit the sack, wake up about three, be briefed by the warrant officer intelligence on what he found out that day, prepare our plan and go off to work out there, you know, while the Americans were retiring to their clubs. But at eight o'clock in the morning they’d see the Australians,

wouldn’t say anything, you know.

No, no, no, they’d have their drinks after they finished work, you know, this is the base camp, yeah, course they do. Those that weren’t on duty, yes they had their clubs, similar, very similar. No bastard wanted to go out and patrol at night, the Americans and the Vietnamese, civilised chaps, nice way to run a war.

Yeah.

Yes.

Well some were, some weren’t, yeah.

Well there’s no, there’s nothing you can do about it, except live with it, right, and that was one of the quirks of the Vietnam war. And I’m sure that you’ll find this from Iraqi veterans, Iraq veterans, that not everything that’s in a nice uniform is kosher, right.

That there are still, you know, this is where half the problems that they’re having, you know. And we had the problem, yeah, right, it was difficult, course it was and this is where it was different to your other wars. At least the enemy was decent enough to wear a, you know, a different type of uniform, except for the partisans, right, who when caught by both sides were executed

on the spot or, you know, tried and executed shortly thereafter. But at least, you know, it was more of a gentleman’s agreement as to, you know, wear uniform, be a nice chap so we know that you’re a bad guy. It didn’t work. Yes there were infiltrators, yes there were traitors, yes. Yes and some were caught, some were, gun, yes.

Yeah.

No, well firstly, I said had you asked me the question, ‘Was I aware of torture?’ I would’ve said, ‘Yes,’ and we’d leave it at that, right.

Secondly the incident that you’re talking about, wasn’t an enemy within, he was a Viet Cong soldier with a rifle, who had been shooting at the Vietnamese. You know, an interesting point on torture to get battlefield information, everybody’s on about torture, right. You name

me one, and in fact think about it, World War II, there was German, Japanese, Italian war criminals, right, who were prosecuted, imprisoned or executed. Name me one Australian, one Brit [British], one Canadian, one American or one Russian, right,

you gonna tell me that they were all good Christians, right. Mmm? What, nobody on the good side committed nasty things? There’s your winner, it’s a winners are grinners. Of course torture goes on and particularly when you’re trying to get battlefield information that is of immediate

relevance right now. Yes brutality, yes brutality, war’s brutal, what do you think it is, you know, tea and sandwiches or some bloody thing. Course it’s not. Yes it’s brutal, yes it goes on and yes, yes, yes, yes. I will say one thing,

I don’t know of any Australians, including myself, who committed any torture, but the fact that one was aware of it cannot be denied.

The survival instinct more than anything else I suppose, you know. This is why, in fact, people joke about it but very shortly after arriving in country, there wouldn’t have been too many soldiers that didn’t have a Julian calendar,

you know, one that runs backwards, right. ‘I’ve only got three hundred and sixty-four days,’ having been there one day already. ‘Look ma, there’s only three hundred and sixty-three,’ and, you know, and then the last one, type. Oh yeah, it wasn’t just me, talk to any front line soldier, it was survival in the end. Yes,

maybe in the formed units, maybe they were fed more bullshit about what... but they were doing a good job, don’t get me wrong, they were good, you know, in fact I’m proud of all the Australian veterans that served. But the reason for being there and the reason why we were getting our arms and legs and other bits of body blown off,

were they justified, really, right. You know, you wanna hire mercenaries, well then tell me I’m a mercenary. You want me to fight as a soldier, you know, of God, Queen and country, then okay, then you know, gimme a war that’s justified. In fact when you think about it, when you think about it, Australians are bloody the greatest war-mongers there is. Name me one war with the

exception of World War II, where we were justified in going to war. What were we doing in the Boer War? Helping the bloody Pommes [British], right. What were we doing in World War I? Was anybody invading Australia, threatening Australia? No, we sent hundreds and thousands off there to get killed. Korean War, again. Vietnam War, Iraqi War. Okay, World War II those nasty Japanese were coming

down here to do nasty things to our women and children, well our women, you know, in particular, which we sort of didn’t appreciate. Okay, World War II you can understand, we were defending the country. Name me another time when Australia was being defended. Okay, so we’re war-mongers, at least tell me why I went, why I’m being sent. Don’t bullshit me, don’t tell me lies, tell me the truth.

What else can I say?

Yeah, okay, that’s your personal view and mine.

You keep saying that.

Well okay.

We were all issued, this is back in Da Nang again, with the regular army of the Vietnamese. We advisers were all issued with a surgical kit, I’ve still got mine at home somewhere, it’s got all sorts of beaut things in it. And there was a pocket in there for tubes of morphine, they were like little toothpaste tubes with a needle protected on it.

And apparently was worked out that, you know, you received a nasty wound, leg blown off or whatever, a tube of that into your system would sort of relieve the pain or kill the pain until, you know, you could be casevac’d [casuality evacuation] , you know. And unfortunately the captain, American captain, senior adviser of 4 Battalion. I was with 1 Battalion,

2, 3.... well 4 Battalion, I’ve got a radio message that he’d stepped on a mine and blown his legs off or some bloody thing. There was no American within the, within his vicinity, hopped in a helicopter to go and have a look at him and he was already dead, because the Vietnamese had already got to his surgical kit and pumped a whole ten or twelve tubes of morphine into him, obviously to relieve

the pain. But they obviously thought that, you know, the more tubes they pumped into him, the more the pain would go away. Went away alright.

The, as I said, the Vietnamese, I don't know whether I mentioned this before, if one of us advisers was hit, we guaranteed to be on an

operating table, in a MASH type environment, within twenty minutes, with a top surgical team. Vietnamese, tough luck.

Yeah, well, you know, yes. Yeah, leave it at that.

Well the wind up to go home, I just wanted to get home. In fact Bernie McGurgan who’d taken over from me in the, in Da Nang, was also taking over from me sort of five months later, down in the Delta. Years later kept saying about him that McGurgan followed me around Vietnam. He didn’t appreciate it until the book, The Team, was written and there it said, ‘Why the officer,

McGurgan followed Sheppard around Vietnam,’ you know. Tough luck Bernie. I’d been there, Bernie had been there about a week at this stage, right. I’d shown him everything, taught him everything, introduced him to all the right people. I was hanging around like, you know, the spare appendage at a, at a wedding, you know,

of no particular use. And of course which was confusing to warrant officers because they didn’t know whether to obey me or to obey the new captain. So I rang headquarters in Saigon to and spoke to the colonel and I said, “Well look,” you know, “I’ve finished, I’ve got three days to go, can I go and visit the Australians at Nui Dat?” Cause I’ve

never seen ‘em up there, I’ve never been to Nui Dat. “Yeah, righto,” he says, “you make your own transport arrangements, as long as McGurgan’s happy,” yap, yap, yap. So I packed me bags and a couple of cartons of beer and down to the helicopter pad. First American pilot that I could find, seduced him with a carton of VB [Victoria Bitter], at three dollars a carton. He had to drop off some mail in,

in Saigon, but he was prepared for the carton, he was... “Where is this Nui Dat?” I said, “I don't know, it’s sort of north east there or somewhere of Saigon.” Said, “Tell you what we’ll do, we’ll fly up in that direction, just follow the highway, it must be near a highway somewhere, and look for Australian flags.” “What’s an Australian flag like?” he says. “Well it’s different to the American flag, so when you see a different flag just let me know,” right. “And funny

vehicles, not jeeps, but Land Rovers,” see. So right, off we go. He dropped his mail into, in Saigon and away we flew. Eventually he found what looked like an Australian base. Australian flags, Land Rovers, what not, there’s an LZ [Landing Zone]. So I said to him, “Down there,” right, “and drop me off there, from there I’ll work out how to find an Australian infantry unit once I’m inside the compound.”

Well I land, and they’re running round like cut cats, brandishing weapons and threatening to kill me. You know, taking down the helicopter’s number to report him to Westmoreland or whoever they were, and report him too. Didn’t realise I’d landed on SAS Hill, the most secret bloody landing spot in the whole of Vietnam, as

far as the fuckin’ Australians were concerned, right. And I’m surrounded by all these super killers, who are gonna throttle me and gouge my eyes out. And, “Na-ah, Australian see, Australian flag,” this, that and the other. Eventually they kicked me off the hill and gave me a Land Rover and buggered me off towards one of the battalions,

to spend the night... where? I bumps into the 2IC [2nd in Command] of the battalion, Major Smethers, you know, and later became a Major General. “G’day Wal, haven’t seen you since Borneo days,” he was a company commander in Borneo. Yap, yap, (UNCLEAR) “How about a beer?” “No problems Wal, we’ll have a beer in the officers mess.” “That was very nice.” “Another beer, have another

beer.” “That was beaut.” “No more,” he says, “two beers, per man, per day, per-haps is our motto.” I said, “Yeah, that’s alright for you blokes, you’ve still got a war to fight, you know, my war’s finished. I only dropped in to see you, you know, I could’ve spent the three days in the sin bins of Saigon. I’m finished.” “No, no, while you’re here, two...” Must’ve been the driest bloody night of that week.

So in the morning I found a convoy that was going to Saigon, hopped aboard that and said, “You can stick your Nui Dat, all you bloody Australian jungle killers.” I had two nights sleep, and then we come home. And of course the home coming, that really killed me, that really killed me. We snuck home in the middle of the night, landing at Mascot about midnight, on midnight,

nobody really interested in us. Sure there were a few mums and dads to pick up their sons, a few buses to pick up, you know, certain people from city based units. You know, all of a sudden the place is closing down and I’ll still waiting for some, somebody to come pick me up. I was the only one from the training team and I was the only one sort of with a, allegedly to get a rail ticket

to go home to Melbourne on leave. You know, managed to get you to an officers mess in the eastern command personnel depot, where I was abused for waking up the civilian matre de or whatever you wanna call it, as if it’s my fault cause nobody had picked me up.

In the morning, sparrow fart, end of the railway station, sit on your duffel bag wait for the bloody nine ‘til five people to turn up to, you know, to give you a rail ticket, put you on the train. Get on there. Some old grand mother started bitching about her son, Nasho [National Serviceman] son had been killed in Vietnam and, you know, because I was in uniform it must’ve been my fault her son was, you know,

killed. And very disappointing. And then course, arrive home, go down to the pub, nobody wants to know you, you’re a baby killer, you’re this, that and the other. In fact it was very, you know, painful, very painful. And very glad to, when a month’s leave was finished

and you know, telegram arrived saying, ‘Get your arse to Puckapunyal, this is your next posting.’ So that way gave me a chance to, you know, it gave me and all veterans a chance to just get away from the public, get away from the distaste. You know, that was okay for us regulars see, not as painful for us regulars, but not as painful as for the

Nashos. You’ve gotta understand that they, you know, it dragged out, dragged away from home and hurt, whatever they were doing, shoved into uniform, sent to Vietnam. Okay, trained for a year back in Australia, shoved to Vietnam for a year and then discharged and told to bugger off, ‘That’s it, we’re finished with you,’ right, ‘You’re finished, ta-ta.’

And he’s trying to get back into his civilian life, with very little hope of being understood, of being accepted. So quite a few Nashos in fact finished up, after a month or two, saying, ‘I can’t stand this no more,’ and joined the regular army.

Oh mate, to put it quite frankly, like

cast aside like a used condom, right. And that, and that feeling hasn’t gone and will not go away until I die. They’re compensating us now, yes, with money and medication, okay, but they better not stop, they better not screw us around any more. I can name you dozens of veterans

who are quite prepared to strap on a suicide belt and go and hug the prime minister, any prime minister. They’re still hiding out there, we have a few around the place, still hiding out there feral, who don’t wanna talk to nobody, don’t wanna know anybody. Start screwing around some more, with the pensions as they are, oh yeah.

Yes. I’ve been declared, you know, crazy, PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder], whatever it is, apart from physical problems, yes, yeah.

Well what, you know, well what’s there to say?

My internal, my guts are all screwed up from all the shit food that I was eating while living with the Vietnamese. You know, I don't know whether you, when you barbecue your puppy dog maybe you keep it refrigerated, they didn’t, couldn’t, because there was no refrigeration. So, you know,

nuoc mam, the fish sauce that is used virtually in everything, smells rotten, tastes rotten, but is useful in killing the taste of things that are starting to crawl, right, when you’re eating ‘em, right. Yeah try that for twelve months and see how you go. As advisers, we were paid five dollars a day to look after ourselves, that’s

it. Sure the normal wages were going into the bank, but five dollars a day, total, you know, self support. Yes, one survived.

Well, one’s still paying for it, the system’s been,

yes, okay.

Nightmares, horrors, no let’s not go into that. Let’s not go into it.

Let’s not go into it. Suffice to say that

you know, the last sort of ten years of my married life, we slept in separate rooms, cause I’d wake up throttling her or something. You know, let’s leave it alone.

Not surprised, I knew it was gonna happen, and the panic that ensued. Yeah, not surprised at all, not surprised at all, yeah.

Oh not really, as I said, you know, it wasn’t surprising, it didn’t come as a shock, right. You know, the shock of seeing the

twin towers come down was more impressive when you didn’t expect that. Okay, Saigon was gonna fall, yeah, had to fall. The Vietnamese were left on their own, when half a million Americans couldn’t hold, couldn’t help win the war, so how the hell could half a million less very powerful allies, you know, help.

Yes.

Oh it went, in ups and downs. Not realising that I was a basket case, I did make enemies,

particularly amongst my so-called superiors. I would, you know, point to the facts and not accept shit no more so in some cases it was, you know, unaccepted. I’d call a spade a spade, whereas the polite term would’ve been, you

know, you tend to look for moving earth about, or some bloody thing. You know, yeah, yeah.

No. They had the problem, not me, I got a chest full of medals, they didn’t. They were the ones with the conflicts. No.

Well of course there would have, of course there would, you know, have some influence, right. You wouldn’t necessarily say it to his face but you’d certainly look at him and say, you know, ‘That bare-chested poofta,’ sort of thing, you know, or whatever, right. ‘Aren’t you warrior,’ or whatever, whatever his circumstances were

for not being there. Particularly if he was about the same rank, same vintage, you know, what, you know, what’s the reason for him being bare chested, type thing. You know, like, well, that’s only human nature to either ask your mates, or ask yourself, back of the mind. But no, no real conflict unless they wanted to start something, and then she’d be on.

Well, you know, was it the Swedish Army or was it the Swiss Army, never had a, quote, ‘a modern army,’ had a good one I’m told for the last two hundred years that has been nowhere, right. Wouldn’t it be lovely?

All that training, right. Yeah, well, think about it. All the lurks and perks of being a soldier and not being fired upon. Hey, that’s, I think the modern terminology of that’s, ‘cool,’ right.

Is that even better is it?

Yeah, well.

Nah, we, how much tape have you got left there?

No, no, no. Must tell you about one young fella who had graduated from Portsea just as the war finished for Australians, right. Just as Whitlam pulled, what did he pull us out the Vietnam war in November,

and this young fella graduated as an infantry platoon commander in December, right. And posted to one of the battalions as a platoon commander where everybody down to the lowest private had just come back from Vietnam. Everyone’s got medals, see, except our poor second lieutenant. And boy did he have a hard yard, right, to hoe,

trying to establish his authority on these thirty-odd soldiers who were all war heroes, well in their own eyes, and probably were, some of them. And there’s this bare chested second lieutenant trying to tell us how to be. No, he had a hard road, yep. He was telling me that when he was a major. The poor bastard.

Basically infantry, okay, you know, when you say infantry, you don’t continue running around with a bayonet in your teeth, as you get on in years, you do staff jobs, desk jobs, training jobs. Yeah. In fact I served, the last time I served, the battalion I served with was

6RAR as a company commander, that was in ‘74. And ‘75, ‘76 I served in Kapooka as a company commander of a recruit training company. From there they sent me down to Balcombe, the army apprentices school for a couple of years. Then

might be couple of, sort of slipped a couple of years somewhere. But that was the trail, to Balcombe for a couple of years, then logistic command in Melbourne, and that was a bastard of a job, dealing with all those bureaucrats, like the ones they (kill...UNCLEAR) the road, for two years. And my last real army posting was up here to Townsville as officer commanding the district support unit, basically in charge

of the buildings, all the married quarters, and all that sort of stuff for four years.

Well then, of course I retired from the regular army. Next day I got a phone call from Brigadier George Mansford, an old war hero friend of mine, training team and all, saying,

“You’re AWOL [Absent Without Official Leave], you’re supposed to be here in the reserve.” I said, “I don’t want bloody reserve.” “Yes you will.” So that was ‘84, he grabbed me there and I stayed with him ‘til, for another fourteen years in the reserve. Again, training, training, training. Expertise was there, about triangulations and things.

Let me put it to you this way. Are we about finished?

About finished.

For the day.

Good. Let me finish this interview with a comment, that towards the end of my military career, that’s both regular and

reserve, homosexuality was tolerated, right, so I thought I better get out before it becomes compulsory. That’s how much the army has changed. What more can I say?

Well don’t you?