Australians at War Film Archive

My name is Tony White. I was born in 1940 in Perth, WA [Western Australia] and lived there a very short time. My father was a lawyer down in Albany. That was shortly after the outbreak of the war and he very soon joined the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] himself. And so we all shipped

back here to Sydney, where he originated while my Dad was away. And then at the end of the war, we all shipped off to Kenya, where my grandfather had settled after World War I and had an uncle living. We went there originally just for a holiday but ended up staying there my entire childhood. I did all my schooling there. Britain was the colonial power, so tertiary education was then on to

England. So I went and did my first year of medicine at Cambridge and then I had to decide whether to become a Pom [English] or to become an Aussie again. And I made the right decision and came back to Sydney and finished off my medical course here. Unfortunately, at that time, my parents’ marriage had broken up and so we were out of money. I was facing the choice of either abandoning my medical studies or…

option two was to sell myself to the armed forces, which I did. I entered a bond with the army – they paid for my second three years of medical training in exchange for four years of service for the army. So, at the end of my intern year I was into the army. It was a very steep learning curve:

I was in the battalion very shortly and away to Vietnam within a few months of completing my intern year, really knowing very little medicine and even less about the army. So, I actually ended up having five years with the army. I had a year in Vietnam and then, after that, eighteen months at the recruit training battalion at Kapooka as the MO [Medical Officer] there and then we were posted to Singapore,

to the British Military Hospital there and that completed my five years with the army. Back in civilian life, I went to Prince Alfred Hospital to train as a physician and then I decided to do dermatology – that’s how I became a dermatologist. I then had a couple of years in the States [United States] of post-graduate stuff

and since then, I’ve been in private practice in Sydney and I’ve continued my link with the army. I was the consultant dermatologist with the army until retirement age, which was then 55. But I’m chugging along in private practice at the age of 64 and I’ve plenty of outside interests and activities. I do certainly keep up with my old colleagues and we’re actually planning our first trip back

to Vietnam next year.

Well, really nothing. He signed up when I was a mere nine months so he was away. I have really no recollection of him doing that. I remember his khaki figure coming back

at the end of it all and then I saw packing up to go to Kenya, that’s about it. I have no recollection of those early days.

I do. I’ve got an older brother and two, younger, post-war sisters. On the service side, I should mention that we had quite a strong military connection: my grandfather, my father’s father had

a very distinguished career in the 6th Light Horse in Gallipoli and Palestine. He was the chap who settled in Kenya. He bought a farm from a guy in a pub in Cairo during the war and settled there after the war. My father’s brother, he was in the air force and he was actually killed, he was executed by the Japanese on Ambon in ’42 in that massacre of POWs [prisoners of war]

and second uncle, my mother’s brother was a signaller on small boats around the islands in the army. You’re conscious of a lot of guys in your close family, as most Australian families at the time did have, that this is an honourable thing to do, very happy to do it. And, of course, in our

childhood games it was much the Aussies versus the Japanese and of course, being the younger brother, I was always cast as the Japanese and on the losing side. My brother was the Aussie.

I was five and we were then living out on a farm. My grandfather, he bred Boran cattle – they were beef cattle – and we were out in the middle of nowhere. There was

no electricity or running water at all. We had plenty of wild game around us. There was no schooling so I was sent off to boarding school at the age of six, as most of the farm kids were, about a hundred miles away. But it was a wonderful life, a great place to grow up in, Kenya, and a great climate. And, talking about smells, the smells of Africa never leave you if you’ve been there.

But it’s a captivating place and was a wonderful time to grow up as well because it was post-war, it was a very spartan existence – nobody had anything at all but optimistic time – and we did a lot of outdoor stuff, sport and travelled down to the beaches, mountains.

Along came the Mau Mau rebellion within the early ’50s. That sort of tied things up. That was a very nerve-racking time for our parents because the security was terrible and people were getting killed. For us schoolboys…schoolboys have no imaginations so for us it was just fun. We had places all sand bagged and barbed wired, the big boys were issued with rifles. And so that didn’t bother us very much.

But, for our parents, it was a very worrying time.

It was a huge step. She was an Eastern Suburbs girl, very precious thing but no, she loved it, she actually loved it. Somehow, she caught the spirit of the time. There was a sort of pioneer feel about it.

Although we were, as I say, not at all well off and with none of the frills that we have in life nowadays. She really loved it. And she ran a clinic for the locals and just worked, enjoying the life of a young mother and two more babies came along. It was a very good life.

Yes, it was a cedar slab hut and it was painted black inside. I think it was to keep out the bugs so it was very dark at night. We had kerosene lamps, an outdoor dunny and I remember my Dad used to escort my Mum out to that at night if she needed to go, with a shotgun and occasionally had to use it.

It was set in a garden by the river – we had a very good garden plantation of oranges and vegetables. We had some Africans used to work in the house as well as on the farm and we just lived a simple – which a lot of kids would understand, even in Australia – a simple life, riding and

scooting around on bikes, exploring the bush. A very good life.

I don’t remember it being tough. It must have been for a six-year-old to go to boarding school. In fact, I remember coming back after…because you called any male, old male was called,

“Sir.” I remember calling my Dad, “Sir” for a couple of days before I realised, in fact, he was Dad and not just another teacher each time. But, I think kids are infinitely adaptable and I wasn’t alone. There were a lot of other little squirts, same age and it was a stern, fairly robust sort of environment but not…by no means, brutal and I have very many happy memories

of childhood. In fact, in one of my report cards I was reading the other day. It said, “If Tony would only stop trying to amuse his classmates and get on with his studies he’d do quite well.” So I don’t have any feeling of resentment or regret about that at all. And my parents didn’t have any choice. I mean, my mother didn’t feel she was up to teaching a couple of young kids and it was the standard thing.

In fact, a lot of Brits [British] used to send their kids to boarding school even when they were living in a city. It really was the time.

Yes, yes. We had ‘houses’. They were named all after heroes of the British Empire: Drake, Cook and Wolfe. The dormitories, again very spartan with a wash-stand down the middle with enamel hand-basins and communal showers

and plenty of playing fields. They even had a riding school in the school. We were very fortunate right throughout with very good teachers, very dedicated types. Again, there was a feeling then of actually building up

the people who were recovering from this terrible war, their getting up and rebuilding lives. So it was actually quite an optimistic time.

Pets were a big deal. Things like chameleons were very popular. There was still a lot of wildlife around. In fact, driving between Nakuru,

which was where the boarding school was and Nairobi, the capital, you often had to stop to let a giraffe cross the road and so on. And there were plenty of zebra around. But, at school though, it was pets, marbles and then very limited toys. When you look at how crammed kids’ bedrooms are now with toys and gadgets. We might have had, say, one little truck or something but it didn’t really matter. We fashioned things, carved wooden propellers out of twigs.

Wherever you’ve got kids and a ball, you’ve got something going.

Yes, very good. With boarding school, you were there for I presume, twelve weeks, so sport on the weekends was a big thing. Soccer, rugger, tennis

all-rounders, us. Big accent on character development, so there was. Everybody participated. We even had a swimming pool. It was full of frogs.

Not really because there weren’t any other schools around. It was very much within the school. I think, maybe there was another school about fifty miles away we used to have maybe a cricket match

once a year, that sort of thing.

Yeah, we did have, very occasionally. I remember some pianist came and gave the piano a good thrashing and all the kids were thrilled when he broke one of the notes. I remember the Imperialists had Empire Day, which then became Commonwealth Day and then, I think,

Arbor Day. The provincial commissioner, he was the head British bureaucrat in that province, came with his wonderful helmet adorned with feathers and he handed out an apple to all the lined up kids. An apple was a big symbol of empire. It’s red and round and this was the basis of his talk about the empire.

So it was very British, there’s no question about that. We didn’t have an awful lot of guests, probably about one or two outsiders blew in in a year to entertain. Otherwise, it was very much a little closed centre. We trotted down to church on Sundays on a crocodile into town.

Well, you know, a crocodile line of kids. It’s called a crocodile. But otherwise, it’s threadbare but not at all bleak or unhappy. I think that’s the way I look at it.

We didn’t have God Save the Queen so much but certainly prayers morning and night, yes.

I think we just had one service. I actually went on to a second primary school where we had two services on Sundays and morning and evening prayers every day. So you got to know the prayer and hymn book very well.

Yes, well they did actually come down a couple of times

during term time, if you had big sporting events. Otherwise we got back and then on a farm, of course, you don’t really need to go anywhere. We were very happy, we loved the cattle, we loved to get around for all the activities on a farm. We did an occasional holiday down to the coast off Kenya, which has wonderful beaches and was always a great treat. We never took, during the time we were there, full

advantage of the game parks, which was a shame because very often when you’re living somewhere, you tend to think, “Well, it’s always going to be there.” And you see them anyway around the paddock. I remember once walking with my father on the farm along the river and there was a lion across the other side about two hundred yards away and so we very quietly did a long detour. So it was a little bit scary, but unremarkable, running into a lion.

You don’t want to do it but it happened.

When he came back from the war, see he was a lawyer by background, he actually went to work for his father on the farm but only for about three of four years because they were both fairly strong characters and they fell out. So he then went back to the law and

ended up living in one of the towns as a lawyer. He enjoyed the Kenyan life as well. It was a bit like living in, say an Australian country town. You could have a very good social life, plenty of activities, plenty of parties and he earned a good living, had a very successful practice and then

along came independence. At that stage, we had to make a decision because we were into tertiary education and the security was not so good. They could see the future was not going to be very good so that’s when we decided to all come back to Australia.

Well,

the Kikuyu tribe were the main drivers of the Mau Mau Rebellion and it was, as with all these things, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and they were called terrorists over there. They were terrorists in a sense that they would indiscriminately massacre African villages, who were deemed to be loyal to the British government. And they killed a lot of white citizens. Not that many, probably in the order of 25 or so, but

they were hacked to death with machetes. So that got a lot of publicity all around the world at the time, the manner of the deaths, not the numbers. And a far greater number of Africans were killed by the Mau Mau. So there were a lot of British troops in the country at the time. My Dad and a lot of the whites did home guard duties at night. He’d go around on patrol in the town. My Mum had a six-shooter [hand gun]

in her handbag. So all the whites were armed and I remember being very proud, playing with my Mum’s six-shooter and so on. She got to be quite a good shot. She used to practise out in the backyard.

He did.

Just put up a board against a tree,

plug it. They never had to use it in anger. By that stage, we were in the town so things were a bit more secure but out on the farm sometimes, the Mau Mau would come. They used to hamstring the cattle, which was pretty brutal. They’d just chop their hamstring tendons and created a bit of mayhem. It was a very

insecure time but it lasted for about six or seven years and then came independence so that was effectively the end of it.

Most kids don’t have a clue really what they want to do, do they? And I certainly was like that. Law had a bit of appeal to me because my Dad was a lawyer and I liked languages.

I liked Latin, I did Latin and Greek at school, and that had an appeal. Farming I thought about but I’m not that practical. You need to be a good mechanic to be a farmer. And I just sort of drifted into it, really. It sounded like a good idea at the time. I suspect a lot of people’s careers start like that. In retrospect, they make out they wanted to do it all the time. But once I got into medicine…of course, the more you know

about anything, the more interesting it becomes.

It was, it was terrific. It was a dream. I was just a colonial hick rolling up in this absolute paradise. Lived very well, didn’t do any work really at all. It was at that time regarded as not quite on to study too hard. I rowed every day and I joined the

University Air Squadron and learned how to fly and it was just a lot of other social activities on and in between lectures and study. So when I came back to Sydney it was a different matter because, at that stage, Australian medical schools had about 600 start in the first year and they had to whittle them down to 300 by fourth year to fit them into the teaching hospitals. So the attrition rate

was enormous. So it was very competitive and people were very keen on study. That was a culture shock, then, coming back to Sydney.

Well, there was formal dinner every night with academic gowns and you had to be in by, I think, ten or eleven at night, which meant you had to get quite good at climbing over

fences and so on. You had to behave yourself out on the town and there you had to wear your academic gown in the evening. They had the equivalent of university police, called bulldogs. They used to patrol the area and, if you were misbehaving, you could be apprehended by them. They spoiled us,

they actually had servants who made your bed, they were called ‘bedders’. You lived in college so there was a very collegiate feeling. But the general sort of mischief that all 18-21 year olds get up to. I can’t recall the specific acts, I was a fairly law-abiding type.

No, there was no “fresher” type of thing, which was actually quite big at Sydney University when I got back. But, having been a graduate of Cambridge, I was exempt from that, which is just as well ‘cause you sit down people out on the road or something without any clothes on and make them find their way home. But no, there’s none of that at all in Cambridge. At that time

the class system was pretty alive and well in Britain so they had knighted gentry and then they had the sort of grammar school kids, who were probably at the bottom of the pit. The colonials weren’t much higher than that so they would regard us as not quite on. But, after three years you get to find your way through that OK.

I think it was very good because don’t forget Cambridge always had top academics there. So we had some of the pioneers in biochemistry and so on lecturing us. I was then 17 or 18 so you really don’t appreciate until in retrospect what’s…you know,

it’s ‘pearls before swine’ to a large extent. The other thing, of course, is that top researchers don’t necessarily make top teachers so I don’t recall any great influence from any of those lecturers, really. I did what was required and really no more and actually scraped through OK for three years.

The sex ratio was ten to one. There were very few females so you had to import yours from London or elsewhere for parties and balls and so on. The highlight of the year was the May Ball which actually, in typical British style, was held in June. So, one time my girlfriend came up for that. The colleges were all unisex. That’s, of course,

very quickly evened out now. So life for the undergraduates is much more democratic in that way. But, at that stage, no, it was a bit lean when it came to girls.

My kids would say I was a real dag because it was a very ‘tweedy’ time. Yes, tweed jackets, everything except the leather patches

on the elbows, the scarves. Don’t forget this was in the late ’50s. Up till 1965 or so changed the world and this was all pre that time so I think ‘tweedy’ is probably the best way to describe it. It was still very much a man’s world, for sure. Music,

Bill Haley had struck in about ’56 or so but it was still jazz that was king. Jazz was probably head of everything then because it was pre-Beatles and The Beatles changed everything.

Ah yes,

anatomy covered the dissection of the whole body. You had one term per part. One term for the head, one term for the chest and so on. So, over a period of eighteen months, you dissected a whole human body. You heard tales of people getting up to really what were pretty horrid acts, pinching body parts and so on but I never encountered that and it would’ve been regarded as totally out of court, really.

You dissected in pairs and you chipped away at your body part over a term and learnt your anatomy.

It didn’t bother me at all. You know, I think some things in life bother you a lot more later that they do at the time. At the time, you just think well that’s the way it is. Actually,

as a school kid, when I got this idea of doing medicine, I got into dissecting animals. So I’d shoot the odd pigeon or a rabbit at our place and dissect them. At school we dissected, I think, dogfish and rats and so on and so it really was not a giant step. I mean it’s pretty revolting when you think about it and so moving onto a human body is not a huge step. If you came from a total

non-anatomy background, it probably would be horrifying. But you wouldn’t want to take your sandwiches in there for example. One thing medical students learn quite early on is how to disassociate so that you don’t think too much about there’s a human being here who you’re chopping up. You’re saying this is an intellectual problem, which you’re trying to understand. That sees you in good stead later on,

for sure.

It is, for sure because you’ve got a live, human, a person and that’s a dead body, that person’s gone. A human, yes, that’s a big jump.

They were pre-clinical years, so ethics didn’t really

come into it. It was made clear to us, say, in the dissecting room, that any sort of misbehaviour could be treated very strictly but that was spelt out. But the ethical side, that didn’t come on-stream until you actually got into the ward and you’re dealing with patients. So this is all anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, just the science that underlies medicine. So we wouldn’t have had any of that really.

Not at all. I was only five when I left. Then, in Kenya, a British colony, you felt more British. I mean, I had albums with pictures of the royal family and so on. The royal family was a big deal in those days. We listened to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

on this little, crackly radio. It was a huge deal so I really felt more British, for sure. Inside, you knew you’ve got to cheer for the Aussies when it came to sport and the test matches in cricket. In Cambridge, I was just a colonial so I had to then. At the end of Cambridge, the next step was hospital training. There wasn’t any at Cambridge

so you had to go to London or Edinburgh or elsewhere so I decided, well the family’s all coming back to Australia, so I’ll see if I can arrange it. It took a lot of arranging, actually, to transfer to Sydney University. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing of letters because it had never happened before. I don’t think they’d had anybody who’d done their basic science elsewhere and then started at Sydney.

No, in fact, I felt at that time there was still a bit of that post-war drag in Europe and Britain and Australia had the young-country image. To me it had a greater appeal so it wasn’t a very hard decision. I felt OK. I realised that if I was going to be a Pom,

I’d be a second class Pom because, at that time, the class system was still intact. And so, it was not a hard decision at all and the family were all coming back here and I wanted to be with them. So I did it, no problem.

Ah, well, I should tell you that I came out as a ten-pound-Pom. I don’t know if you know,

there was this wonderful system there of assisted migration where you paid ten pounds, subsidised by the Australian Government, for the fare back to Australia by ship. And even an Australian who’d been out of the country for two years could apply for that. So I did, in fact, come back as a ten-pound-Pom with a shipload of Liverpudlians [people from Liverpool]. So, what did I think of Australia? Well, I was probably a bit of a prig [pompous]! I came out of

Cambridge to the back of the sticks and, at Sydney University, I thought, “Boy, this is a bit like some sort of ag [agriculture] college.” Because they had this initiation ceremony we talked about earlier.

Well, I was exempt from it. I had to do some fast talking to get out of that but they call it ‘freshers’. Freshmen, they were effectively servants

and they were at the bid and call of the senior students and they were humiliated and so on. You hear all the bad stories but it was pretty good natured as a whole but I can do without that. You never had that at Cambridge, you were just into the swim. So, it was a big adjustment for sure. I felt quite alien, really, for a year or so but gradually settled in because it was then

hospital training time so I wasn’t actually in college as much time as in the hospital environment. It was new and interesting and I just got on with it.

Well, it’s lovely. This is where the new course is much better,

you have patient contact from day one and it’s integrated with all your basic science. Back then, it was basic science for three years and, “OK, now you’re ready to go down to the wards and see some real humans.” I thought it was terrific, you talk to people and, generally, most people, patients I call them, are well disposed towards medical students. They

actually quite enjoy the attention for one thing but they do feel quite sorry for these little guys who are struggling to learn medicine. No, it was terrific and so I really enjoyed the ward life. I had a Sydney hospital, which was a terrific hospital: small, very good morale and very good teachers. I have very high regard for my mentors

then. They had the honorary system where the doctors had their private practices, mostly they were in Macquarie Street, and then they would come and teach at the hospital. And a lot of them at that stage were ex-World War II doctors. We had one, Ewan Corlette, a very fine fellow. He’d been a prisoner on the Burma Thailand railway, wonderful bloke. Alan McGuinness, he actually won a Military Cross on Kokoda as a doctor and

so I felt that we were in good hands. People knew what they were doing and the whole experience was very positive. Wonderful.

You’d have formal tutorials where you would do a ward round with your honorary doctor and he would

see the patients that were allocated to him. And he used to go around and discuss them around the foot of the bed. I don’t think that happens so much nowadays because I think the balance of power has shifted with patients saying, no, that they don’t want to be discussed. But you can stand around and the resident would present the history and what his findings were and what the tests have

shown and then you’d get quizzed. He’d say, “OK, White, what did you make of that story?” And then you’d scratch your head and try to make some sense of it. The bedside has always been regarded as the place to teach medicine. You can’t learn it from books, you can’t learn it from even computer simulations. It’s real humans, it’s real problems because there’s that infinite variability and I thought it worked well. So we had that formal tutorial thing,

we had seminars, we’d go off and somebody’d present a little story about something in the theatre and then there would be lists of “interesting patients” put up in the resident’s room. So, if somebody had a nice hernia or something, people would dart along and see them individually. That meant chatting up, first of all, the very fierce ward sister who, at that time, ruled the roost very strictly. And then

going and introducing yourself to the patient and ask them if they’d be happy to show you what their interesting feature was. And most of the time you didn’t get knocked back.

My most poignant memory is of a young fellow of 17 dying of kidney failure. He took a good three months

to die and that was terrible. And the huge irony of that was that the first kidney transplant was carried out in Sydney about a matter of six months later, which just shows the irony of the timing, the technology was not there for this bloke. Looking after any chronic, young, dying person, that is terrible.

I think it is. You can read about things, you can be told about things, you can discuss things in groups and counselling and what not, but that one-to-one experience is much more powerful, for sure. I think you do have to encounter it first up.

No, not really. That’s something that’s very recent. It was just a fact of life that people got sick; most of them got better, some died. It would seem to be a matter of stating the obvious that sure, it’s very sad. It was just something you

put under your belt. To actually analyse it would seem redundant but I can understand nowadays, everything gets analysed to a degree, doesn’t it? You have counselling for any adverse event just to try and make some sense of it. Because you get used to it gradually. That’s how people since

Hippocrates time have handled it and digested it, gradually got used to it, not hardened. But I think you do adjust to it and learn how to handle it without disturbing your judgement too much.

Yes, for sure. I’d been effectively away from home from the age of six except for holidays. And then, of course, living in England, I was only 17 or so and I’d seen them occasionally. I was 21 when I came back. Watching my parents separate was no fun but

I could see it coming. It was tougher, I think, on my younger sisters because they were then in their early teens and I think, at that stage, much more vulnerable. Financial difficulties always come in the path of any marital breakdown and so my mother was hard up and having to go out to work. This was one advantage of signing on in he army. I was then drawing a lieutenant’s

salary, which was huge by any med [medical] student’s standard so I was actually able to help with the girls’ schooling, which was a big plus.

Well, I had to do some fast thinking. I’d arrived back in Australia in December of ’61. The academic year started then in about March,

I think, the following year. I had been accepted into the fourth year of medical school so, what do you do? This is the Christmas break, nothing much happens in the world, in Australia at that time and I had to scout around for options and the only option was the armed services. I tried the navy. That sounded sort of more glamorous but nothing doing, they had no jobs. So the next stop was the army and

they were very happy, so I too was happy.

No, not really. I thought the army sounded a better bet.

I don’t know, it was probably just Item 2 on the list. I remember the navy was first for sure but I know I’d rather be in the army than the air force. The air force would be more comfortable for sure, in retrospect

but the army was fine. They took me with both hands and I signed up very quickly and away we went.

You signed up, they would pay your salary as an undergraduate, you had a book allowance that paid your university fees – that was before free university which was a huge plus –

and then they would nab you a year after your junior resident year, which is now called intern year. So, three years as an undergraduate, one year then as your hospital-based training and then into the army and the deal was four years and then away you went. So it was a bond for four years. In fact, I did five.

It’s a very mixed bag because you really do have to take what’s floating past you and what terms get allocated to you. So you do your basic medicine, which is chest infections, gout,

strokes, blood pressure and so on and then a surgical term – hernias, orthopaedics, vascular surgery – casualty, emergency room and an eye term – eye hospital – and a bit of obstetrics at Crown Street. I delivered twenty-three babies. In those days the medical students delivered babies as well.

So, it was fairly broad spectrum but very basic. Then, after that, I had my intern year, which, again, was a rotation around several different departments. At the end of that, you’re very wet behind the ears. As an intern, you’re very much supervised, you’re doing very much sort of, “Go and get this result from the laboratory,”

“get some blood out of this patient,” “admit this guy.” But you could easily, in a teaching hospital, dodge decision making because there’s a hierarchy above you. Getting into the army straight after the intern year really is not a huge preparation. Nowadays with Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], for example, they won’t accept anybody into that job, which is really

akin to being an army doctor, until about five years out in the real world and had a few of the rough edges knocked off them. So, it was not a great preparation. It’s too early to get in with that responsibility.

Under supervision. You’d have the midwife sitting at your elbow and the

obstetrician, you were in the slips, catching the babe. You had to notch up a certain number to get your certificate.

At the bottom of the pack. The nurses are very good. I think the relationships between doctors and nurses were a lot better then than they are now to be quite honest. I know it’s politically incorrect to admit that but the nurses did the nursing, the doctors did the doctoring and each respected the other’s skills. There are also things that nurses did considerably

better than doctors. I learnt most of my practical stuff, the sort of nuts and bolts of doing dressings and taking blood and what not from nurses. And I’m very grateful for that because you do a lot of intellectual learning as a young med student but not a lot of practical stuff. So you’re pretty naïve but the nurses are right up close and personal from the start

and, provided you respected the hierarchy. The ward sister was a very powerful person, ran a tight ship, supervised things, had a whole stream of trainee nurses under them. And, if you respected that, you got on well. I think, if you tried to throw your weight around and be King Doctor, obviously you’d stub your toe there for sure. But I always found them very helpful.

They did. Things here have improved a lot, med students are much more involved in patient management now, then they were very much more spectators. You’d go and say, “Look at this interesting patient.” But now they’re actually part of a team. They might be down at the bottom but part of a team. At the start of the intern year

you go from med student one day to training to be a doctor on the next day and you need a lot of help. And I did, I got a lot of help for sure. I was very grateful for it.

Not particular examples but, at every turn, you’d have some queries,

“How do I go about that? Where do I find that?” For the patient, you’re actually the doctor all of a sudden and they’re putting big demands on your performance and knowledge and so on. So you have to run to this resource at your elbow all the time for help and things. I can’t think of specific instances which would clarify that but

I did learn an awful lot from the nursing staff for sure.

I think the difference is that nurses are more practical, they’re hands on. The way I look upon it, the doctor would formulate the diagnosis, what’s exactly going on, and then formulate a plan to treat it and then the nurse would implement it. Now, that whole things got quite

blurred and so, as a result, there’s a lot of conflict now because a lot of the nurses don’t like the idea of just carrying out the orders of some doctor who’s decided they want to be in on decision making. But that time, that division was a lot more clear cut. They appeared much more comfortable in their role so the nurses weren’t particularly fussed about what they had to do. They just wanted to know what you have in mind for this and, if you as the intern didn’t know, you’ve got your senior resident

to go and discuss it with or the registrar and the honorary as the last court of appeal. And the messages would pass up and down that chain all the time and, as the year went by, you just gradually got more confident in what you’re deciding.

I’ve always been

more interested in internal medicine. The surgeons are the show ponies, the physicians like to feel they’re more intellectual, obstetrics is, obviously, a very joyful type of thing but the idea of doing a lot of work at 3 o’clock in the morning loses its appeal fairly quickly.

Internal medicine has its intellectual challenges: you have to work out from a huge array of data and evidence, what the heck’s going on with this sick person. I’ve always found that a wonderful challenge and still do.

Well, it was

constant ward rounds, so you had this stream of sick people coming through the ward and they did get better, most of them, and some didn’t. It was a process of a slow accretion of knowledge and so you’d do your ward work and then you’d go back to the library or back to the books and they’d complement each other. And you’d make mistakes and learn from other people’s mistakes preferably

and that’s how it’s always been and I’m sure how it always will be.

Don’t forget, those were different times. As an intern, you were effectively a prisoner. You didn’t really finish the ward until about 6 or 7 at night and then you’d have to do a late night ward round on your own patients

before midnight and then upstairs and on call for your patients. You’d be sleeping four to a room upstairs in Macquarie Street at Sydney Hospital, and no phones. The night porter would come up and find out which bed you were in and say you’re wanted in the ward and you trot down. There was

pretty limited time off. You worked very hard and were up early in the morning to do your early morning blood round at about eight and, before the rest of the action, finish up at about six or seven. You could nip out then and then back at eleven for ward round. And then the assistant superintendent would do a ward round after the interns had done their’s and he’d just check out your

paperwork and so on. I remember being dragged out of bed at about 1am because I hadn’t done a urine test on a patient I’d admitted earlier that day. Things that test your sense of humour. It was a tough life and you were on duty every second weekend and that’s a 48 hour weekend. You really were working pretty well around the clock. Subsequent years in the hospital system got lighter but intern year you

were a prisoner, for sure.

Yes, that’s right, but we still had a good time. We had things like the hospital revue, which was the usual vulgar medical nonsense. That was on at the Footlight Theatre on Parramatta Road and I participated in that

in “The Dance of the Flowers” as a ballerina. These are the sorts of ridiculous things. We had lots of parties in the residents’ quarters, drank too much and so on. It was a full on life. You were working very hard but playing very hard at the same time.

No, I’m destined to be lifelong “tweed”! I don’t think the blokes really were into fashion at all. I can’t remember being regarded as a fashion plate at that time. We were all just basic Aussie dags.

Yes.

This would have been ’65, the Rolling Stones for sure, that was coming on stream, early Beatles for sure.

Oh, terrific. That hit like a tsunami because, before the Beatles and the Stones, it was very much ballad type of stuff. I

never made The Beatles gig, their visit to Australia I never got to their gig, which was a shame.

It was, it was transformative.

Early on, it was Bing Crosby, then Perry Como, Mario Lanza. That’s what I was brought up with and then Bill Haley! That was quite an explosion but I think that was swept aside altogether by The Beatles. People really got excited about it and they actually…I don’t think there’s been anything like that since. I don’t know, I may be out of touch.

Is that right?

I think I escaped rebellion. It’s a terrible thing to confess but I was actually always an obedient sort of a chap and then I just happened to end up there in this disciplined intern

prison followed by the army prison so I was actually shielded from this revolution. So it all went on from there to Kapooka and Singapore, which was about as remote from the revolution as you could get. I was never conscious of wanting to grow long hair and a beard and smoke dope and so on. That whole thing eluded me. I’m deprived.

My wife worries that I might start rebelling late to make up for it.

No signs yet, no.

Well, just

the family folklore. We were supposed to attend the Sydney University Regiment parades once a week. There was one other guy who was at Sydney Uni [University] with me, a chap called Bernie Walker and we were supposed to attend, as lieutenants, the parades at the Sydney University Regiment. We went once or twice and it really seemed like a total waste of time so we never went again. In fact,

the whole idea of that, which you can understand, was so you get introduced to the military thing, know the rank structure and learn a bit about the army as a whole but I never did it, which was a shame really. It was just one night a week I could do without, really.

I remember, I went to a lecture on the placement of mortars in jungle warfare and I thought, “I’m too busy doing other things, thanks.” In a way, I didn’t fulfil my engagement by not doing it so, of course, when I did get into the army, then I had to learn very fast.

Straight after the intern year a bunch of new doctors from all states had to go to the School of Army Health at Healesville in Victoria. It was a six week indoctrination course. This was to teach you how to be an army doctor, you see, and all that basic stuff about uniform, parade ground, the rank

structure, army health and so on, which is just what you need, after all – that transition from civilian life into the army. But I got snatched six days into that to join the battalion then, so I really didn’t have any of that. It was a six week course. I had six days. So I rolled up to the battalion then, which was being assembled in a huge hurry

to go to Vietnam in the May. So, in about January or February, I had this non-existent course and then we were away in May. The battalion had only been formed in March of the previous year so it was, in itself, a pretty new entity. And then I was dropped into this feverish activity, getting everything ready and I was just chucked in the deep

end.

Well, I don’t have a great memory. There were just good old army-style huts there and we had an officers’ mess and we had a few lectures. One day, Colonel Bill Rodgers came down

and I was taken out of the classroom and he said, “How would you like to go to Vietnam?” And I said, “That will do, yep.” So it really was as quick as that. He said, “All right, we’ve got to get you into the battalion now because you’ll be getting a new radio and you’ll be going away in three or four months.”

Nothing, and Australians didn’t know anything about it.

We had some training team people, we had a battalion there for a year but it was a very hazy area. Nowadays, of course, it’s very well known but then, people had a hazy idea about the French, in Indochina getting booted out. And then the second war was getting under way and we were going to go up there and stop the communists there. And there was the idea of the domino theory but I really knew nothing at all. I had to get an atlas

out to find out where it was and didn’t really know anything about it.

Well, my Grandpa, he’d been at Gallipoli and Palestine. Kids don’t really take an interest in that. You only get interested in your old folks when you get to about 40, so you miss the opportunity.

By that time, of course, he’s dead and gone. He didn’t leave anything at all, any record of his experiences. The same with my Dad – it was only in much later life that I got into it so I knew nothing about it, really. It was crazy.

Well, doctors are in a special category, we’re given a lot of license. You can put your uniform on back to front and so on and they’ll laugh at it. That is the way doctors are, you see. You still had to work within the system – you are an officer after all. You’ve got a commanding officer, you’ve got superior officers who you report to and then you’ve got a hierarchy below you.

It is quite a privileged position. It’s a bit like being the battalion padre, you’re within it but you’re outside it. I found the officers in the battalion when I joined very helpful because they knew that I was going to need a lot of help and they did actually pitch in. And they’d give me little one-to-one tutorials on army life and the very basic stuff.

You’re in this totally alien culture, do you salute a Corporal or does he salute you, all that sort of stuff. How should you deal with other colleagues who might be difficult or obstructive, how to get things done, how to work the system, in other words.

To get rid of one very obstructive

sergeant I had in my medical side. He was tricky and really obstructing the whole preparation. It was a real frenzy of activity, getting gear – it sounds simple, you’ve just got to get your medical gear together – but you’re taking gear for three months, for

850 troops out there and you can’t depend on resupply in that time. There was a lot of hitches along that line and I had a very unhelpful chap. So he got the boot very early on. After that, it was pretty well all plain sailing, well, not plain sailing but it was doable. A battalion is

like a giant family and this is the guts of esprit de corps, that you get to know a lot of people and there’s a lot of people to get to know in a short time.

I met the adjutant – he was like the chief administrative officer, a Brit, actually, a fellow by the called Peter Isaacs. He introduced me around and the next step was, we just went straight off on a big exercise up in a training area called Gospers, which is between Lithgow and Singleton and very rough country. And I, of course, only had about a quarter of my gear so I was cold and wet

and unsheltered. I didn’t have all the right gear and so, here again, there’s a lot of shuffling and so on to get bodgie gear together. We were just camping out on the ground. I was issued with a batman, a batman is an officer’s servant. He, in turn, was a nasho [national service soldiers] so he didn’t know much about the army. We gradually, over that period of the pre-Vietnam thing,

we got a working system going. But it was a shambles for sure, a big rush.

Well, just the doctor. You’re there, somebody gets injured…day one, we had a guy who dislocated his knee cap; you’ve got bronchitis and so on…you’re just a GP [General (medical) Practitioner]

for 800 blokes strung out in the bush and they’re organised in their companies of 100. So we have one bunch a kilometre over there and another bunch over that way. In each one, you’d have your own medical corporal and he’d be your first port of call. Then he’d contact you if he had something a bit more serious. It could be a

scorpion bite or somebody’s fallen over and hurt themselves.

In the field, your RAP is just what you carry on your back, you have a basic medical kit.

It would contain painkillers, some basic antibiotics, field dressings,

heavy duty shears for cutting a uniform if somebody had a wound. I had a lovely silver tracheotomy set, which, fortunately, I never had to use. That’s for drilling a hole in the trachea in somebody who had their face blown away, and that was about it. In Vietnam, I carried a little bit more extensive stuff but

that’s really all you need. You just need your brain, some dressings, some pain killers, some antibiotics.

This is where a few years in general practice would’ve been a huge help because you do get very good at quickly sizing up a situation. Is this patient fair dinkum or are they swinging the lead? The diggers are human beings and a lot of them might feign illness

and, with time, you get a much better judge of character, “Is this person really sick?” And you get through to the heart of the matter quicker. In that sense, it was hard because you’re in a strange cultural setting and a brand new experience, like a new grad [graduate] going out to work in a general practice for the first time. He’d rely on his colleagues a lot

to float things past and, of course, all his colleagues say, “Don’t worry about that, it’s nothing.” I had to do it all by myself, which is good and bad.

Yeah, well, I thought this was the way it is, I don’t know much but I’ll just do the best I can and learn as fast as I can and make plenty of mistakes and, hopefully, more non-mistakes than mistakes. I wasn’t particularly cranky or miffed about it. I just thought I don’t know much but I’ll do the best I can.

Yep, all officers carried a nine millimetre pistol but I never used it in anger. I used to test fire it into a weapons pit before going out on operations. Out on the beach in Vietnam, you’d shoot up a few beer cans but that’s the only time I ever fired it.

No, I think in Healesville they would’ve had weapons training for sure. They would’ve done some bush craft and weapons stuff then.

I just remember some classroom stuff and, maybe, a bit of square bashing one week.

Well, my commanding officer was a fellow called John Warr and he was wonderful. I have a very deep affection and regard for him. He was very supportive from the start. That’s an interesting situation because he was actually a Christian Scientist.

The core of their belief is that it’s your own spiritual beliefs which heal physical illnesses and you’d think that could cause a little bit of trouble with a doctor but not at all. He always went out of his way to facilitate anything I needed. If I wanted transport to go up to one of the companies, for example, he would always ensure it. He was very helpful.

I had terrific support all along the line, really. People were interested in the doctor actually doing his job because they may need his services the next week, so they’re happy to have me on side.

The soldiers had a folder – I don’t know what the system is now – with their medical record and that travelled with the soldier in the RAP, in the medical centre, which is what an RAP is.

The staff sergeant who ran the RAP looked after the records. If you were, say, out in the bush, you wouldn’t have that but, back at the base, you’d have access to it. Out in the bush, you’d just jot a note in your note book and then transcribe it later.

Yeah, because you’re dealing with a fit group… they’re all screened and they’re all supposed to be fit for service overseas, which is the top level. They had a grading system where, if you were an old wreck, you’d be sitting in a base somewhere, behind a desk. At the other end of the spectrum, you’d be fit for service overseas and that’s at the top. So you assume they hadn’t any medical problems in effect.

Oh, yes, that happens before they’re posted to, say, a battalion. They can’t be posted to a battalion unless they are in that grade so you’re not going to have, say, an asthmatic or a diabetic or something like that to contend with.

Oh, yes, there is a schedule,

an annual schedule for all troops and, depending on if they’re going to be posted overseas, then that would be boosted by what ever was required in that particular theatre. So, if, for example, you were going to Vietnam, you’d be up to speed with smallpox and a plague vaccine, tetanus, cholera and what not. It was a duty of the RAP staff sergeant to keep that schedule up to date and,

if a soldier had fallen behind, he’d be nabbed out from his company and brought in for his shots.

To have my own shots?

Well, that was pretty well a milk run because it was all set down. There’s a protocol for that, there’s a record of whether they’ve had it or not and it was the RAP staff sergeant’s job to inspect the records

to see that everybody’s up to date. So that was not a problem, really.

Local reactions are quite common but nothing life-threatening at all. It was pretty straightforward.

No, I’ve got to tell you it’s the other way round. I had one bloke in tears because he had a knee problem, which was going to downgrade him and he wouldn’t go. Back then, people were falling over each other to get into a unit that was going to go away. Even a lot of national servicemen were very keen to go.

Their other option would be sitting out somewhere for the duration of their national service whereas here, young men, adventure, travel, the pay was better, tax free. I can’t recall anybody trying to swing his way out of a battalion. If anything, it was the other way round, for sure. And, certainly, when I was posted to

Kapooka, I had, again troops who were very disappointed that they were not fit enough to get into a battalion. In other words, they would be condemned to life on a base.

This word, counselling,

has been invented since I was a boy and I did my share of counselling, for sure. You had an army padre, two padres in fact, Anglican and Roman Catholic. I had my share of people with concerns. I remember counselling one grizzly old sergeant who was worried about his marriage problems back home. For a callow 25

year old, that’s a really tough call. That’s a part of every doctor’s job, a lot of the patients you see, the physical symptom may be just an excuse to get in for a chat. There was a fair amount of that.

Usual general practice, you know, coughs, colds, sprained ankles,

headaches, diarrhoea, the sort of thing any general practitioner sees every day. Obviously, no women’s business. It was very much bread and butter medicine, certainly, a big accent on skin, especially in Vietnam. And orthopaedics, a lot of crook backs, strains and so on

but that’s it in a nutshell. There were no great surprises because you were dealing with healthy young men. I mean, (a) they’ve been screened and (b) they’re in physical fitness and they’re well fed so you’re not dealing with the sort of things, the chronic asthma / diabetes type of things at all.

The RAP is the battalion medical centre.

There’s the doctor, you have a staff sergeant and a corporal so that’s a threesome and then, out in the battalion as a whole, each company, which has 100 troops, would have a corporal medical assistant, who is medical corps. And then we had, at that time, the army band, also basic medics so they were scattered around, one per platoon. They were the first port of call

and they really had very elementary first-aid type of training but they were the local medic. And then, if they had a problem, they’d take him up to the corporal of the company and if he had a problem, he’d bring them into the RAP. But, I always tried hard to get around to the companies as much as possible.

It’s very hard to get them all together because they’re out on duty but we used to have powwows as much as possible.

They were so scattered. I got to know all the officers pretty well because they’re your first point of contact with every unit, and the sergeants.

The digs [‘diggers’ – Australian soldier], you gradually got to know them over the year but it’s quite a big number of scattered people. Some of them you got to know very well, you’d see plenty of them. At the end of the year, that’s quite close contact. Pre-deployment, it was quite hard to put a name to a face all the time.

No.

My casualty training in Sydney Hospital was stitching up the odd drunk who came in from the Domain and I’d assisted at surgery at operations.

It’s a very controlled situation there, the patient was anaesthetised and you had somebody at your elbow who knew what he was doing. No, I’m absolutely innocent of any training in trauma, for sure. I mean, I was just a first-aid bloke from that point of view. And, in that sense, we were extraordinarily lucky that we had such an effective helicopter evacuation system. So it

really didn’t make an awful lot of difference in the long run.

Oh yes, for sure, but young men are very cocky and you think you can do anything, don’t you? You think you’re immortal for a start and then you think you can handle anything. After I’d been over there for a while

that’s a separate matter because you realise that’s a big swift reality check. But, at the time, I felt quite confident. It wasn’t a very well founded confidence.

They wouldn’t have drugs

except morphine, they all carried morphine for wounded patients. Their first-aid kit was some antiseptic, field dressings, shell dressings, big pads with ties attached and some basic aspirin type of things and that’s about it, really, which is really all you needed. So, cuts and scratches, just clean them up with some antiseptic.

That’s a very common sort of problem, somebody’s got a headache – some aspirin. For wounds, you just need a decent sized pad, which you can tie on with pressure. Whereas I carried, say, antihistamines and antibiotics and cough suppressants, very limited because we had quite a good resupply system.

So, if I wanted something specific it would be delivered out in the bush within a day or so from the RAP.

My tracheotomy set, which, as I mentioned, I’m very pleased not to have to use, which is a set for cutting down into an airway, into the trachea. And, apart from that,

some artery forceps and just some basic dressings, forceps for extracting splinters, a scalpel and that’s about it, really, nothing very extravagant. Everything you had with you, you carry on your back and that included your hootchie [tent] and your sleeping gear and your food and your medical kit. So

there’s a limit on what you could really take. In Vietnam, I took some of these concentrated albumen cans but, there again, you couldn’t take an awful lot.

It was for intravenous administration for somebody who’d been wounded. It’s a substitute for blood, concentrated albumen, with a drip set so you could whack that up while you were waiting for a helicopter. They were quite hard to come by so,

in effect, I didn’t use that much.

There’s a standard syrette, which is pre-loaded. Some of them are in a tube like a mini toothpaste tube with an attached needle and you just whack it in and squeeze. It’s

just 15 milligrams so you weren’t going to get into any trouble with that and it’s then marked on the patient or on a card attached to the patient that they’ve been given the morphine. So, when they got to the hospital they knew they had that on board so you didn’t give them too much more.

No, no, you whack it into the arm or leg, any bit of skin.

I don’t know if they really were terribly impressed either way. They weren’t terribly keen about me going into the army. For one thing; they thought it was a bit of a bad career move. But there really wasn’t any choice. I’d have to go out and drive a cab or something to pay and this, at least,

was, I felt, being brand new in the country effectively, that this was the most sensible thing. But, I think that they didn’t approve terribly much. As for going to Vietnam, I’m sure they weren’t terribly keen. I know my mother didn’t like the idea, for sure.

Well, he was over in Perth at that stage so we weren’t having an awful lot to do with him. Unfortunately,

the family split up and he was the bad guy and I was down in Sydney with my mother and sisters so there wasn’t an awful lot of communication. I think that that generation felt that army service was almost like a rite of passage, you were supposed to do it and this was my turn and his Dad had done it.

No, I took a diary, which, unfortunately, fizzled out after about six months or so but no, effectively, nothing. While I was there, I accumulated a bit of junk but I didn’t take much. Books, I got a good resupply system of books going but that’s about all.

Nobody special.

I did correspond with several girls while I was away but no, I wasn’t perched on the precipice of marriage or anything like that at that stage - a free man.

It’s all such a rush, you see, that’s the problem. We did have a bit of a shindig out at Holsworthy

one night. The battalion went away in dribs and drabs, one company went on HMAS Sydney, by sea and the others were flown up then by Qantas 707s [Qantas Airways] over a period of about ten days, something like that.

I went with a bunch of digs from one of the companies on a

Boeing 707 up through Townsville and Manila and into Saigon. Then, from there, we transhipped onto an American aircraft, could’ve been a Herc [Hercules transport aircraft] and dropped in Vung Tau, which was the logistics base. And there we were driven up the beach where the battalions were setting up these tents on the sand dunes and there we stayed for about ten days before we went into

our first operation. It was all quite a smooth operation. There was an advance party who prepared things pretty well, had all the dunnies [toilets] set up. We were on the beach so we could surf and the tents were all erected so it was just a walk in really, no problem.

First time in Asia and the heat, the hot smell of decay, landing at Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon – it was then, the busiest airport in the world, they called it, because it’s the main fighter base and so on. Huge smell of kerosene

and noise, smell, kero and, of course, in Vung Tau, hygiene is not terribly strong there and so that very distinctive combination of heat, humidity and decaying vegetation, that’s the first recollection. But, having lived in Africa, I was softened up for this. I wasn’t at all put off by this.

The airport is big, it’s huge. There’s all these US [United States] aircraft, fighter-bombers bulging with weapons, that was very spectacular. But then, as soon as we got into our Aussie world, we were just back in our Aussie world, really. We had an Aussie war, really. We didn’t have an awful lot to do with the Americans.

It was familiar people in an unfamiliar setting.

It was just a tent on the beach. In fact, I don’t think we had any medical records at that time. It was really just a tent and we had a sign outside: ‘Here’s the RAP’. We were only there for ten days while we were

shaking down ready for the first operation, which was the beginning of the Aussie adventure in Nui Dat, so we were the first ones in there.

We knew that we were just going to be dropped up into this rubber plantation,

which would end up, eventually, as the Nui Dat base. We would be bivouacking [camping] hootchies for a number of weeks so all you’d be taking was what you were carrying on your back. The Americans had done a sweep through that area and they’d had quite a few casualties but we knew the area was reasonably secure by then.

We’d had one little test movement of a battalion on a fleet of 20 or 30 choppers [helicopters], moving the whole battalion in waves up from the beach area to drop them in. So we practised that, we learned to climb in and out of a helicopter. It’d come and touch down for just seven seconds and you get your troop load of seven or eight digs on board in that time and take off straight away. So

we were competent with the helicopter routine. It was just another battalion exercise except this is a fair dinkum one. We did have a big shindig with the US aviation company who ran the helicopters. So we had a big dinner for them in one of the hotels in Vung Tau and

we outshone them there because the officers all had their white mess dress gear, bow ties and so on and the yanks were just in their greens. We had our band playing and they thought it was a bit over the top. We all got very drunk and experienced the terrors of the tropical hangover after that and then, a few days later, we were off. So it was brief, it was pretty uneventful.

Most people were very eager to get on with it. That was the thing, nobody was really unduly apprehensive. That’s what we’re here for, after all the whole things assembled, let’s do it.

Hardihood. I don’t know where the names of them came from – they were dreamt up – we had Hardihood and Canberra and Sydney and Queanbeyan and Renmark and so on.

I think pretty well in the middle of the stream. They moved the whole battalion up over a space of about two hours, which is not bad for 800 people. And we were choppered up about 20 kilometres up into a clearing in the rubber plantation

in Nui Dat. When we got there, the troops were all around in the rubber plantation. We had our artillery already here, firing away at targets. There was my batman and myself and we were off to war. As always happens, there’s comedy in these things.

As we jumped out of the chopper we ran under the trees and we heard what we thought was machine gun fire and so we both hit the ground. In fact it was the rotor of the helicopter hitting the top of the trees so we rolled around, we realised how stupid it was and started giggling like a couple of school girls. It was a big adventure and

it was just another army exercise.

Yes, so it is the insertion of the battalion into the base, into what was to be the base. But it’s really just a bit of spare real estate. It was decided that was a good spot, the rubber plantation was good because it gave you shade. There’s a hill at Nui Dat, which one of the companies perched on and this was going to be our area

so we started settling down and patrolling to establish our presence.

This is where the battalion headquarters are going to be, this patch here, A Company’s there, D Company’s on the hill, C and B.

You can put your hootchie up here and we just got on with it. Those early days, we really just perched right there while the companies did their patrols all around. It was the start of the rainy season, so we got this afternoon deluge every day - a couple of inches of rain would drop so it was very wet, very muddy.

We dug primitive weapons pits for protection and hootchie up and got on with it.

There was no physical aid post, there was just me, my back pack and

a hootchie, which is just your bivouac. So, if a dig was hurt or sick or something, then they’d either report to me or I’d be called over and set to. If they were bad enough, they’d be evacuated by helicopter. We were very lucky with that Vietnam War that we had control of the air and

a twenty minute chopper ride to hospital, which is better than you’d get on a car accident out on the Pacific Highway. There were a awful lot of things that you could sort out - here’s a guy who’s sprained his ankle, what are you going to do about it? Is he bad enough to be shipped out or can he just rest up for a few days?

In those early weeks, we didn’t have a physical aid post as such, it was just the back pack.

Yes, they were on paludrine [anti-malarial drug]. The old sergeants had served in Malaya, they knew about malaria, so there was a rule,

sleeves down after sundown, mosquito repellent and we had mosquito nets. In your bivouac, you had a rectangular mosquito net, which you could tie up four corners and tuck under your blowups. Avoiding being bitten was top of the list, then your daily paludrine. That was supervised by the platoon sergeant. He would actually make sure the guy dropped it in his mouth. As a result,

our malaria rates were not too bad at all. We had about twenty malarias in the year. One of the things, which helped in that, really, was the digs had heard of malaria-borne encephalitis and that put the wind up them and reinforced their mosquito repellent behaviour a lot.

It’s a viral infection of the brain, which cannot be treated. Japanese B encephalitis was around.

So it wasn’t just malaria, they had these other things to contend with, dengue fever, different mosquito but again, mosquito borne.

Yes, you’re certainly conscious of, well, malaria – it’s a bad disease. You practise what you preach for sure. Malaria is regarded as an administrative thing rather than a medical thing, so, in other words, the digs themselves were supervised by the

sergeants to take the precautions: sleeves down, nets up, take the pill. So it wasn’t a matter of the doctor saying, “Look, this is a good idea.” It was actually supervised.

Unfortunately, we had our first casualty that first night

of that first operation and, to make it even worse, it was a national serviceman. That really was a huge reality check. A digger killed the first night happens to be a national serviceman and that had a big political backwash in Australia. That happened about a kilometre away. It was night time and I was unable

to get there. But we had the corporal medical assistant there who treated him and he was evacuated fairly quickly but he died. The next day, we had a guy who had a tree fall on him and he had an abdominal wound from that and I had to look after him overnight. I had his hootchie put up next to mine and I gave him painkillers. He was obviously in a bad way.

I was worried he had a ruptured spleen. He was then shipped out the following morning by helicopter.

I think they were clearing an area for a chopper pad. It was not very good. We had a guy who had terrible hives,

which you can get from insect bites. Again, really, you see the same sort of things; you see a large amount of people. The odd one is bound to get the odd dose of bronchitis or just feel crook. Fevers, we had a lot of fevers, not all of which were anything terrible but they’d be crook for a couple of days, obviously some virus encountered and you just treat them

symptomatically. If it went on long enough or they were sick enough, you’d evacuate them.

I would.

They didn’t have any choice.

We were lucky.

If somebody was really crook, then actually, he’d be a liability in the lines because somebody would have to go and feed him and so on. You had a little bit of resting up in the lines, but really no more than about 48 hours. If somebody wasn’t coming good in that time, then I’d ship them out. That took the burden off the rest of the digs

so, if he were brewing up malaria, you’d get that sorted out fairly quickly. Nobody actually went on patrol really crook or badly injured, for that matter. We had the ability to get people out quickly. It this guy got a dose of bronchitis,

he can continue taking his antibiotics and go out or, is he going to be a nuisance. If you’re in an ambush position, you can’t have some digger coughing for example because they’re no good.

There was a policy for the force. If someone had a slim chance of getting back into action within a month, they’d come home because it’s pointless. You don’t want people convalescing for a couple of months when the whole tour is only 12 months. So, if there’s a good prospect of fixing them within a month, they’d look after them down on the beach at the hospital. There’s this lovely term, ‘the homer’. Have you heard of ‘the homer’? This is an

illness or a wound good enough to get you home. So people used to talk wistfully about that a bit. You wanted to get an injury, which was not enough to disable you for life but to get you home, that was nice. We used to joke about it.

If you broke a leg, any fracture, you’re not going to be back, back in the front line, you’re right. Or say, a

gunshot wound needing a lot of rehab [rehabilitation], then they’d go back.

I think, for his company, it was that moment for sure, “This is fair dinkum!”

War is an adventure for young men, for centuries they go off to war and then there’s a big reality check – you just have to see one of your mates… in a platoon, 30 guys, in a section, 10 guys, it is a very intimate relationship. They know each other very well and so when that happened that was a huge blow and that’s serious.

Oh yes, I’d always try to get around, to get out to the sharp end as much as possible. I think it’s a good morale thing to see the doctor out there and a lot of people like to have a chat. You could sense that some people were getting quite wobbly after an experience like that and

often you could help them along just with a bit of a chat. Once or twice, I would get some guy out of that front-line setting if they were getting very wobbly. But most of them, their sense of loyalty to their mates overcame that. OK, they felt terrible but their mates probably felt terrible as well

and to walk out on them just because you were feeling terrible was bad form.

My first check was going to attend a group of digs who’d been mortared and there were a couple killed and a couple wounded and it was terrible, frightful. The whole thing’s a lot dirtier and messier than all the first-aid…you can

see all the first-aid programmes in the world but, when you see wounded soldiers in pain, dead soldiers, it’s terrible. Somehow you manage to disassociate from that and just get on and do it but afterwards, you get hit very hard afterwards. Those early

experiences took a lot of digesting.

Within a week – very early. In a lot of cases in the battalions, the doctor himself didn’t see an awful lot of the wounded because of helicopter evacuations. If you had a company, say two kilometres away, the chopper would beat

you to it and you may not see them. I, in fact, just through good luck or bad luck, depending on how you look at it, saw two-thirds of our casualties before they were evacuated.

Different incidents get a bit blurred in your mind but you impression of how

dirty everything is. Explosions create a huge amount of dust and smoke and these are mortar bombs, so the digs are dusty and blackened. In amongst that, it’s a question of finding the wound, which was often not hard actually, but large, messy wounds

set in a background of black, dusty skin, torn uniforms in the middle of the scrub. What my job really was was to sort out who needed what and when. So, two dead ceased to be a problem. A couple

slightly wounded and then a couple of badly wounded, you go straight to the badly wounded because they’re the ones that need the attention. It’s then a matter of stopping bleeding, that’s top of the priority and because there’s no problem with breathing, but bleeding and applying shell dressings which are these heavy pads of gauze, which you can tie onto a limb, for example, or around a

torso and administering some pain relief. Mercifully, the helicopter evacuation would be there within, certainly, half an hour. Each incident was, mercifully, brief.

To the minor wounds, I just took them back to where my RAP was and did some stitching. The dead and badly wounded were helicoptered out within half-an-hour, that sort of thing. And then, of course, you’ve got the collateral damage, as they say nowadays, of the mates of the wounded and, in a way, they were as much a problem as the wounded themselves

but they had their own ways of dealing with that. This is where, in a unit like that, they do give each other huge support. It’s seldom necessary to actually intervene as a doctor in that setting. You just really show comfort, put an arm around somebody, and they get on with it themselves.

Except for one big mine incident, that was the usual pattern: who’s dead; he will; he won’t; he may. That’s the sort of classification you have to do to work out what needs to be done when.

Sometimes it’s not possible. I had one patient who was shot through the neck and

it severed the great vessels in the base of the neck. Even if he were sitting in the emergency room in a hospital, there’s no way he could’ve been saved and he died over about 20 minutes. It was inaccessible and it was terrible. You just do what you can. You’re just a bloke out in a

paddock where somebody’s been horribly wounded. Fortunately, he’ll be on an operating table within half-an-hour and that’s why, say, in the Vietnam War, in the hospitals, they saw people who formerly never survived, never got that far simply because the evacuation was too slow. It really was just a patch-up job. I don’t think I ever actually saved a life. It was really just patch-up, prioritise and

out. That was about it. Painkillers…

I think they like to believe you did save them but, in my own mind, I think maybe I saved one guy. This chap I had to escort on a helicopter to Saigon. He was the pilot in a helicopter crash. He was actually just coming to

pick me up and he crashed a few hundred metres up the road so he had a head injury. But otherwise, most of the injuries are just work out if there is a spurting blood vessel or something like that. Really, it could’ve been done by anybody with basic first aid and I think the presence of a doctor there was

good for morale, the digs liked to see a doctor for sure. It does make them feel better but it didn’t actually come to very much.

A lot of the digs mentioned on other events that they experienced a huge sense of relief when they saw me on the scene

because, somehow, you get imbued with this magical power, which you don’t have and it’s more powerful than, say their own medic who would have done just as well.

The battalion headquarters would travel around – the battalion headquarters was the commanding officer and the adjutant and the intelligence officer, about 50 odd

bods [bodies] – and you would travel along with them, just marching in single file. And marching there meant an ultra slow bush walk so you’d cover maybe a kilometre in an hour. So very slow because that’s the way patrols move, very slowly. You’d have the companies patrolling around you, either close or at a distance and then

you’d often find yourself standing there with your back pack on for ten minutes and then you’d move on again. And then you’d be at your destination wherever that might be, it could be a rubber plantation or surrounded by banana trees or something like that and this would be your spot for the night. And the battalion headquarters would form a circle about fifty metres

wide and you’d have the digs around the edge. And you put up your hootchie where you’re told to put your hootchie by the RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] and there you were for the night. So that was the pattern, battalion headquarters, we’d move a bit, the companies would move much more – they’d be patrolling a much wider area around. And the battalion headquarters would be controlling the whole operation and moving more or less

in amongst them. Some of the digs used to joke it was a nature ramble, one day you’d be sitting in amongst the banana plantation, the next time, it’d be in some forest, so it had its aesthetic aspect. We’ve always enjoyed camping and this was camping with a difference. You put up the hootchie and you have the long, tropical nights,

twelve hours and you had nothing to do, no lights. So you just put up your hootchie and go to bed. You couldn’t read, you couldn’t talk to anybody. This was in the early stage when we were out in the bush all the time. Very long nights… We had this system of stand-to, where the whole battalion would stand-to for that

half-hour before and the half-hour after both sunset and sunrise. So you’d just be sitting there on the ground, your eyes adjusting to the changing light. It’s actually a lot of time for thinking and it’s quite meditative. I quite enjoyed it. Then, during the daytime, if there’s nothing doing, you might be just perched in a spot there while the companies are patrolling out at a distance,

nothing much happening - read and write.

The day the doctor gets shot at, you know you’re in trouble but that didn’t happen to us. With battalion headquarters, you’re not really, strictly speaking, at the sharp end. In Vietnam, there’s no real front line. When we first settled down in that first

couple of weeks, on that first operation, there were a few nights where we were under threat of imminent attack by this Viet Cong regiment, which was about eight kilometres up the road and that was quite scary. But the digs, in their usual way, were spoiling for a fight, they wanted to have a big-time fight.

There were big numbers of enemy up there and we were there and we were just perched in this rubber plantation so that was quite scary. One of the US spotter aircraft had been shot down just up the road and they all went off there to ambush that because they thought we would go out and investigate that. But we

didn’t know where it was and the battalion didn’t go out after that so their ambush was for no good at all. So those early days were quite scary but also exciting. This is one of the paradoxes of war, you can’t have the adventure without the scary but of course, as time goes by,

the scary totally outweighed the adventure and about three months of that was fine. I would’ve been quite happy to come home then.

Yes we did. We had this medical, civil aid programme. Underlying it was the idea of winning people’s hearts and minds, which people now are very cynical about.

But the idea was, here you’ve got a doctor available, so we used to trot down to the villages and set up a little aid post there and treat the locals for an afternoon or morning. It was a bit token because their problems are much bigger. They had malaria and hookworm and TB [Tuberculosis] and so on, the things that no doctor can treat out of his back pack.

Things like skin infections you could fix, you’d incise a whacking great abscess on a baby so the locals liked it, for sure. Some days we’d see a hundred patients in a couple of hours, it was a bit of a bun rush.

We did a lot of that. We did some of these cordon and searches where a village would be cordoned off by the battalion and the company would search the whole place and fish out the bad guys with the weapons and so on. And we’d set up shop at the same time and treat whoever came by.

Impossible to tell.

I saw a kid who’d been wounded in a US [United States] air strike but nothing identifiable. You couldn’t really tell who the good guys and the bad guys were at all – totally inscrutable.

Well it doesn’t really matter if you’re a doctor, does it? You just treat whoever rolls up. So you get some old granny with a bad cough and she’s probably got TB and I might give her some cough mixture or something. But, as I said, a lot of it was just token stuff and this is a public health problem – they have no way of controlling their TB and malaria

and so on. We probably did more good than harm, I imagine but it was very popular. At some of the cordon and searches, the band would set up and play some music and they eventually learnt some Vietnamese music. We had handouts of rice and they had little engineering projects that got underway eventually to put down

water stands and so on.

The usual pop stuff that was current at that time. It wasn’t military music, just pop stuff.

Brass

and drums and they were all terrific. One of the guys used to play in the Mittagong Town Band. He was a nasho and he played the tenor horn. They’d cordon off the village and then they’d truck out their instruments from the base and away they’d go

and the locals loved it. They had pretty bleak lives out in the middle of nowhere. On the whole, it was impossible to tell where their sympathies lay. They probably thought we were a bit of a joke but they looked like they appreciated the

medical stuff.

The villages would vary a lot in their standard. A couple of villages were made up entirely of refugees from North Vietnam who came down as an intact village, complete with village priest. They’d set up with very good hygiene and a well-run show. At the other end of the spectrum, some

were just dirt poor, really flimsy palm huts with terrible hygiene so there was quite a variety in that way. The cordon and search, the idea was to creep up on a village and have a cordon in place before first light with troops all around

so nobody could enter or leave and, ideally, do it without the locals knowing about it, which is quite hilarious. With that cordon intact, one company would then move through the village and just house-to-house search. The first of these was almost high comedy because we had to have deception plans, sending off APCs

in this direction – Armoured Personnel Carriers – and we went off in another direction and hid in the rubber plantation and set off then at about 1am, pitch black. And we put a little blob of phosphorescent material, decaying vegetation, on the back of the shirt of the guy in front of you so you could see where he was. And we were all actually roped together with toggle ropes, which was, as you can imagine, doing this to a

couple of hundred guys, asking a lot. But it actually worked! We surprised this village and, at five o’clock in the morning, we had this cordon around the village without anybody being aware of it. It was very successful so we repeated this same drill several times on different villages.

In a village of a few hundred people, they’d fish out a couple of dozen suspects who’d then be handed over to the Vietnamese army. Our job was really just to do the search with interpreters and South Vietnamese army types and the suspects would be handed over to the South Vietnamese army at the province headquarters

and then we’d move on, we’d done our stuff there. That was low-key. The Americans liked big time war; they wanted to kick arse all the time and have set-piece battles. Australia, having had its Malaya experience, was used to the guerrilla thing where you concentrate on low-key patrolling and this cordon and cordon and search type of operation.

In that setting, it was successful. But it’s quite an adventure, wandering along in pitch black. On this first occasion, the lead guy fell down a well! Fortunately, there was a beam across the bottom, which he narrowly missed and it was full of water so he was fished out. They had to tie a whole lot of toggle ropes together to fish him out.

There’s no blackness like the blackness of a tropical night under that canopy of the rubber plantation because it’s quite dense and it’s quite hilarious – we enjoyed it.

No, the engineers were the ones and you’ve got to take your

hat off to them. The sappers, they got down with a torch and a pistol. I saw one of the tunnel systems after it’d all been sorted out, it was extraordinary. But no, I had no direct experience of that.

I was very keen to get to know the diggers…you’re much more effective

if you mean something to them and they mean something to you. So I worked very hard at that and then trying to sort out the stream of problems on the sick parade, who’s really crook. And this is what every young doctor has to struggle with at first. Is this guy really crook? If he’s got something fairly mild, is he going to get over it by himself? Does he need treatment?

Does he need to be evacuated? For example, I had one old warrant officer – by old, I mean about 35 – who had chest pain. Now, was this a coronary or just indigestion? That sort of stuff, which an experienced GP would work out reasonably well and, in fact, with that guy, I played it safe and evacuated him and it turned out it was nothing. So I did make mistakes

like that for sure. It’s actually a huge responsibility, young lives. It’s a judgement and judgement you only acquire from experience and experience you only acquire with time and I had none of that behind me, really. So it was a lot of seat of the pants stuff and I’m sure a lot of crook judgements were made.

You just did the best you can and I’m sure it got better as time went by. After a while, you just could tell, especially as you got to know the digs. You could say, well this guy is cracking hardy [being brave], he’s really sicker than he’s making out to be. There was a lot of that, a lot of the digs didn’t want to let their mates down. They’d be sick as a dog and actually want to go out on patrol with their mates so as not to let them down and, sometimes, you just had to put your

foot down there. And very occasionally the other way around, some people were not as crook as they thought. So that was a constant test.

Oh, yes, if fact, I’ve got two opposite ends of the spectrum there. One was a bloke who was very frightened – he’d had a terrible time and he was very frightened

and the unwritten text of our conversation was, “Get me out of here. Get me out of here. I need a break.” So I gave him the standard spiel about you can’t let your mates down, not long to go and all that sort of stuff. He wanted to get out and go back to the base and, in fact, he got shot that night. He wasn’t killed, it was a chest wound,

a minor chest wound. A couple of days later, I went down to the hospital with fear and trepidation as I thought he’d give me a real blast. I went to see him and he was sitting up there in bed, big bright smile, thrilled to see me, a nice honourable wound and he thanked me for encouraging him to stay and he saved his self esteem; that was a real plus.

The other end of the spectrum though was one guy who was actually one of the stretcher-bearers and he’d had some bad wounds to deal with and things and he was effectively refusing to go back out. So we had quite a long what is now called counselling. I’m not sure what it was called in those days – chat? – and

with great ill-grace he went back. He actually tackled me about that very episode when I ran into him out in central Australia about thirty years later. He thought I was a real bastard for doing that. What do you say? That’s the way it is, you’ve got to do your duty. Sometimes you don’t want to do your duty, you have to make some judgement. Is this guy an absolutely

unsalvageable wreck, a nervous wreck or should he just be encouraged and jollied along and feel better about it later.

One who obviously went over the edge was a guy who had an antique gun illegally in the lines and he accidentally shot his best mate dead with it. Now, he was absolutely wrecked and he was taken out of that shoot-out for a couple of weeks. There was no question about it, he was just

a gibbering wreck. But most of the people you could sense that really they just wanted to let off steam and give them a bit of perspective. You say, “OK, we’re all in this together. Nobody’s enjoying this, not long to go, you owe it to your mates.” So there is a bit of moral blackmail, I suppose. For most of the diggers, they had a sense of loyalty for their mates.

You hear a lot about mateship and so on but it is a real thing and to actually walk out… you’re one bloke in a section of ten, you’re ten percent of the action there. You can’t just shoot through unless you’re right at the end of your tether. Most people, you could, just with a bit of humane dealing, get them around to stick it out. But I think by the end of the year, most of the people

really were at the end of their tether, for sure.

Well, just a non-specific malaise, body language, sagging, haggard of eye, hypochondriacal, full of symptoms of this and that. There’s nothing you can really put your finger on, just

what you expect from low morale. They’re just hammered - they want our - anything except here, please. Don’t forget there were other people there, they could talk to their NCO [Non Commissioned Officer], their sergeant, their platoon commander. It’s not just the doctor but the ones that I saw, you could generally

just say, “Look, I agree, it’s really crook right now. You’re going through a bad patch. It’s not going to last forever,” and so on. That was very testing, probably just as testing as physical illness. But it must happen in all wars at all times.

They spook themselves. I never encountered that, that they knew it was going to happen. Statistics will show it’s bound to happen occasionally.

I always found that tough because the first duty of the medical corps is to conserve manpower and that means to make sure the guys on the front line are as fit as possible.

It is. You might be putting somebody in harms way, which is what you’re trained not to do.

Well, you say you have a duty to the army, you have a duty to the individual and most of the time I think it worked out OK. Maybe that one stretcher-bearer, I don’t know if he would ever get over that. He served out his term but he was obviously deeply resentful of it.

No. I’m sure I felt every bit as timid and

worried as he was. Everybody had their times when they feared for their life. The question is what do you do about it?

I think it’s such an internal thing. I think some people were scared witless

without any physical manifestation. You’d often see people shaking badly and crying and so on after some bad event, which is human. But this is big on the macho and the stiff upper lip and get over it, get back to

base and have a few beers and talk it over. I think it is an episodic thing. I don’t think too many people had a lasting dread. They wouldn’t have been in a battalion, they would more likely have been down in one of the support units on the beach or something like that. So, in a way, getting into a battalion is fairly self-selecting people; people who were fairly gung-ho and eager.

They might find they’ve bitten off a bit more than they can chew but they would do it.

That was huge, yes. Morale is as important as any weapons or technology.

Oh, for sure. No question about it. If they thought the doctor and the padre and the officers were living it up back in the base area while they were out there. Well, of course, it’s human nature, you’d think what a bunch of wankers! But actually getting out there, and I’d be as filthy as them and wet through and smelly and so on,

and you’re sharing this. You may not be out there on sentry duty at night but at least you’re living on the ground just like them and eating the same tucker [food]. Often you’d share a meal and I had a hip flask and used to give them a swig of my whiskey occasionally. When you did see the men in trouble, they’d often be a lot more level with you – if they were sick, for example.

You’re not a stranger.

Yes, I think it’s true. Sometimes you’d go out where there were troops and, if you knew the digger, you knew how they were reacting, whether they were over-reacting or under-reacting, that was quite a help then, in assessing what was going on. You weren’t amongst strangers.

I don’t remember ever giving anybody any sort of knockout drops, no.

There wasn’t very much available, that was pre-valium era. There would’ve been barbiturates – they make you dopey. I don’t think I ever used any medication for that. That one chap who shot his mate, I could’ve given him a shot, I can’t recall. People weren’t sedated to protect

them from fear.

Yes, a lot. It’s a very sensitive area and it’s probably a no-go area for the doctor to talk about because I wouldn’t know the exact detail but

it happened a lot. In fact, the first casualty was that of friendly fire, which, of course, makes the whole thing a lot worse.

I think, in retrospect, when they reconstruct it, mortar dropping in, where is that coming from and that takes some time to work out. That gunshot wound, that was two companies;

they were at their patrol boundary; had a party go down to the creek to get water at dusk, first night. So I think that was pretty obvious. We had another accident, just a minor gunshot wound, but this was one patrol marching into a

fixed base. Everybody’s so jumpy, at least in the early days, and I think there was a lot of ‘friendly fire’ stuff earlier on and less later. Relatives of people who have been killed or wounded hate to hear about it and I really don’t know the detail of the incidents enough to comment on. I’m happy to flick-pass that one on to the real soldiers

and the military historians.

We were called, one morning… somehow a couple of grenades got chucked into a pit. There was a fire and they got sprayed with that. That was the only accident and then, of course, that gunshot wound with

that young fellow shooting his mate, accidentally but, otherwise, no, we had no burns, which is surprising, considering there’s plenty of flammable material around. The showers, for example, were heated with petrol running through a 44 gallon drum; a bit primitive but no, none of that really. A lot of people fall, walking around in the dark.

When we were first there, it was pitch black and people had dug weapons pits and you got a lot of knee injuries from people falling into those but, otherwise, not really.

Yes, as important as the stomach, that’s right. By the time that they got there, they’d broken in their boot pretty well. The boots are very good, they’re leather, calf-length boots and they had a steel plate in them for punji stakes, the spiked, bamboo stakes, which were used, which, if you had leather soles would go straight through.

People who were out on patrol for a few days would get very soggy but that was fixed just by drying out for a couple of days.

Yes, tinea powders. Everything grows beautifully in the tropics including fungus, so skin was by far the commonest problem I’d see all the time, which probably triggered me off in the direction of dermatology. And, of course, I knew nothing about that either, at the time.

But infection… in the early days, prickly heat [heat rash] was a huge problem and there’s nothing you can do about that except get air-conditioning, which didn’t exist. Skin on the feet that was usually a problem of early days of training where they were getting used to their boots but, by that time, it wasn’t really a big deal. Tinea is easily fixed.

No, it was a huge puzzle. Most doctors haven’t a clue about dermatology and I was amongst that number. For me, it was a huge frustration and huge problem. Even my commanding officer was tormented by a terrible rash, which I totally

mistreated until I sent him down to the beach. He got better very quickly when he was correctly diagnosed. So I learnt my dermatology – I learnt to become competent at what the problems were there, which was essentially infection, bacterial and fungal – and I learnt the proper stuff later. But I could have done with a good working knowledge before I went there because it’s such a huge

problem. In fact, quite a number of our diggers who actually came home on medical grounds were skin patients. Acne, for example, they had a thing called tropical acne, which is like very solid boils on the trunk, which make it impossible to carry a backpack. It’s readily treatable now but, at that stage, there really was no decent treatment and they were as good as useless

when they had a dose of that.

We were supposed to take a three month supply with us on the way up. That was the job for the RAP staff sergeant, to keep an eye on supplies. There were certain agreed usage rates for different things and the theory was you were supposed to stay within those.

You got a bit of a ticking off if you used too much of a certain thing because they had to work on some sort of scale to make it manageable. When things were running low, he’d just reorder so there was a resupply from Vung Tau from the back beach there, a logistics support group. He’d put in for it and they’d send it up. And then, out in the bush, when you’re out on operations, if I wanted something, say, I needed some penicillin or something,

that would often come out on a chopper. Sometimes even the same day or within a couple of days, anyway. So we were actually pretty well off in that way, we weren’t too short on medication.

Yes, well, that’s right. There, they have scales of usage, which have been invented somewhere, probably for

a different war, so you get a bit out of whack. We had a lot of inflammatory skin disease, for example, for which we used a lot of hydrocortisone and there was a usage rate for that, which I exceeded. And I got ticked off for that but that was about it. Once a pattern was established… respiratory disease is very common in the tropics (bronchitis) and you get through a lot of tetracyclines

but I don’t think we ever exceeded any official scale for that. Things were always just a little bit tight; the army has always worked a very tight budget so it’s a chain stretching back, actually, to the next door here, the so-called “dead and mental store” (medical and dental store) and they would forward things up…

…either freight them up by air or on the HMAS Sydney.

That was a shell dressing and it’s date stamped April 1915, which was a key date in Australian military history and I’ve got a great sentimental attachment to that. That was our issue of shell dressings and field dressings.

These are, essentially, a big wad of gauze with ties stitched onto them and a little vial of iodine. The digs each carried a small field dressing, which is about half that size for a smaller wound. I’d also carry a dozen or so of those big ones in my pack. You’d whack that on a wound and they really were as good as new. They were then fifty years old

but they were fine. The rest of the kit: we had some ancient Thomas splints for fractured femurs – we had them back at the RAP. We didn’t take them out bush but they’re also just a big splint for the whole leg, for a fracture; my tracheotomy set, that was probably World War II but

it didn’t matter. I don’t think anybody actually suffered as a result of ancient of insufficient equipment. I can’t recall a single incident. A dressing is a dressing, it’s just a decent wad as long as it’s sterile, they could still be used.

Well, they’re already grossly contaminated from the blast; they’re full of dirt and twigs and rubbish, so a human hand is not going to

compromise that and, when they get to the hospital, the whole area would be thoroughly cleaned out, they’d be on antibiotics. The first thought is to save a life, that means stopping bleeding, which means pressure. Pressure means with whatever you’ve got and, if that happens to be even a folded up shirt compressed against whatever,

there’s no avoiding that. Everybody’s filthy out there, nobody’s had a shower for a week or so, so you assume that everything is contaminated.

We didn’t have any snakebites, there was a scorpion, yes. No, we didn’t have any snake bites, which was surprising, really. I had quite a snake collection, the digs would bring them in and

I had no way of identifying them so I just collected them and waited for some book to identify them. It never happened and, fortunately, we never had any snakebites, which is surprising with people lying down in leaf strewn things overnight.

No.

In those days, it was just a tourniquet and hope for the best.

Nowadays, it’s compression. You still have to identify the snake, the first rule in the army book on snakebite was catch and identify the snake. They caught and identified a lot of snakes but, fortunately, nobody ever got bitten. I was amazed, I was waiting for it. I would have had a collection of a dozen different snakes by the end of the year.

Yes.

Yes, I tried to get a book on local snakes but it was impossible to come by.

Operation Sydney was

nothing spectacular. We were just parked in an orchard in battalion headquarters while the companies were patrolling around so there was nothing exceptional about that. We just got out around the companies and it was business as usual. That was quite unexceptional really.

Again, just the standard stuff, there was nothing apart from the usual GP stuff. That was a pretty uneventful operation from my recollection. I don’t remember the details, I just remember the nice orchard with all the fruit trees, good spot to stay, nothing much to do. And the companies patrolling around that particular real estate.

That was one of our cordons, that was part of that, that’s right. So it was a village cordon and this guy, he was just a teenager, he took off down a tunnel and somebody chucked some CS [tear gas] gas to get him out – tear gas – but he came out and he was perfectly OK.

He was actually very imperturbable. I asked him how he was feeling and he said he was feeling tired but he got up on his feet again and he got marched off. He didn’t actually need resuscitation. He looked a bit seedy when he was fished out because of the tear gas, which we then got all over ourselves as well, so we just all joined the throng. He didn’t actually need resuscitation; he was just down a tunnel, got

gassed, fished out and marched off.

Remind me a bit of that now.

Ah yes, that was one of our Medcap [Medical Civil Aid Programme] things and that is heroic. We had several days of these clinics and huge crowds. There was another doctor

with me and med assistants. I think we saw about 700 in a day, it was just a stampede.

It’s ridiculous and, in a way, it is evidently a gimmick. There’s no way you can give attention to…particularly the deep problems, the public health problems. Nutrition was crook, they were all anaemic, they were full

of hookworm and malaria. And I think about ten percent of the population had TB and they all fronted up. Some of the minor things like obvious skin infections and so on, you could treat. It makes good film footage but, in the big picture it’s a public relations stunt and I felt that about a lot of those,

they were of very little medical value. Everybody ended up with a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling but without really achieving anything.

We had an interpreter. We asked what was wrong with them, cough or headache or

just sick? Often we’d just give them some vitamins or some cough mixture and let them pass, that’s all you could do. In theory, what you do if you get somebody who is, say, middle-aged and hugely anaemic, you get a blood test done, find out what type of anaemia, check them out for worms, X-ray the chest and so on but none of that was available. It really

was just a show-and-tell thing. But the odd person you could do something for, if it was something I would see amongst the diggers, for example, say skin infections, I could treat that. But it’s such a novelty that we had such a huge roll-up and they came along and got seen and everybody felt better and went on their way.

We had one meeting of the Nui Dat Medical Association, which was four of us doctors. We managed to get one reliever up from the beach and we all got terribly drunk and we lost the minutes of the meeting. I was sent down to the beach for a month because I had bronchitis myself, I was quite crook, and I worked there for the hospital for the month. That was quite good because I could see

their end of the spectrum. There’s always a bit of paranoia between the people at the sharp end and the people back behind the front. So I allayed a lot of that and I could see how our casualties were being treated and handled. I had a bit to do with a French doctor who was the company doctor for the rubber plantation just up north of the Nui Dat area, so we did the

odd joint clinic together. That was quite handy because he had a good working knowledge of the local disease pattern and they actually had a hospital about ten miles away so some of the people working on the plantation, they got quite good treatment there. But otherwise you’re on you own. There’s no mentor, no wise old chap looking over your shoulder.

You were on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week so you couldn’t get drunk, you had to be there, you had to be accessible. Yes, it was lonely making

decisions. On the other hand, in the month I had down on the beach at the hospital, I couldn’t wait to get back, my loyalties lay there. You do get quite possessive about your job. “This is my battalion! What’s this guy doing in my battalion?” So you’re caught between that. It is tough

but it’s one of the greatest jobs a young doctor can do, there is nothing to compare with it. It’s in the deep end but with huge potential. You know that a lot of people depend on you and you probably do a lot more good than harm, I loved it. I wouldn’t do it again, once is plenty.

No, it was a fairly quiet time so not an awful lot happened. It was just back into it again. It wasn’t calm for very long though, we ended up badly with our last operation.

I was pleased to get back, like having a home. On the beach, I felt that a lot of the psychiatric problems from Vietnam, I think they were much more prevalent in the people who were not at the sharp end. So people in the base area, they drank too much, they got too bored, they had a lot of time on their hands. They didn’t have that esprit de corps because, if you’re working for some resupply depot, it’s totally

different ambience to working in a battalion where you’re all in it together. So, in a way, I think their job is tougher, not as dangerous, but they were just bored rigid.

Oh yes,

you’ve got back-up. If I had somebody who was really crook, you just get him on a helicopter and he’s out. In that sense, with 800 people, one GP can service 2,000 ordinary people or so, so that’s OK. Some of the situations I got into, I was utterly overwhelmed but you’re not going to have several doctors sitting around waiting for that to happen.

Ah yes, this was a pilot you’re talking about, now?

There was a chap who was a forward

scout who was shot, he was mortally wounded. I took him back down to the hospital in Vung Tau. This is ridiculous but I gave him mouth-to-mouth all the way but he was very dead on arrival. Here again the horror of war, there’s always funny things happen. When I got off the helicopter, the chopper pad of the US hospital, this big, black

US sergeant picked me up because he thought I was the casualty. I was covered with blood so I had to protest vigorously and say, “Put me down, I’m OK!” You get constantly this juxtaposition of something absolutely horrible with something utterly ridiculous and these sorts of things happen time and time again.

Immediately somebody is wounded, the platoon commander or the company commander call a dustoff chopper so that’s about a twenty-minute call time. If I was within cooee [close by], as I quite often was – with this guy, I think I was only about a kilometre or so away –

I hopped up there on a jeep. This guy, with a gunshot wound to the chest, he’d had it, really. He was still alive and the chopper would’ve been there within a quarter of an hour so I just piled on board with him and away we went. We were down on the landing pad within twenty minutes.

Yes. He was alive

when I got him on board and he would’ve died on the flight. On a helicopter, you can’t make sense of what’s going on with a patient, you can’t even tell if they’re breathing because of the vibration, it’s noisy and your stethoscope wouldn’t do anything. It is really again just a desperate, zero type of action but you wouldn’t do it any other way,

would you?

Should the doctor be there, do you mean? In danger?

No, no, doctors don’t shoot.

The patient… there are plenty of other people around to have a shooting war. I focus entirely on the patient. I can’t imagine any situation where a doctor has actually picked up a weapon in Vietnam and had a crack at anything, that would be truly desperate.

Operation Queanbeyan, that was a very tough one. We were on, what the boys call, the Warburton Mountain. We were moving up the side of this steep hill. It is very heavily timbered, big forest timber and these huge rocks the size

of transport containers. One of the officers got shot, he was very lucky, actually, the bullet hit the stock of his machine gun and so he only had a surface wound. I went up there to dress the wound and we were huddled behind a rock. That was a shooting war there, so one of the guys decided to put his head up

to see what was going on and he got his hat shot off. That was about as close as I got to getting shot but I was not in any immediate danger. At that same incident, we had this other guy who was shot through the neck, I mentioned him earlier. He was shot through the main blood vessels up there and he died fairly quickly. That was just an impossible situation

where the defenders were in the box seat. They had these prepared positions and this beautifully rock slope. We were going up this slope. They had the rocks and they knew where they were so that was quite frightening. That chap who was wounded was lifted out by a helicopter pilot who did a beautiful job of reversing his helicopter onto a flat rock in the middle of all this, you had to take your hat off to him.

He was an Aussie army chopper pilot. They did some wonderful things. That was my only experience of being conscious of being shot at.

It is unreal for sure. You can’t quite

believe it, that it’s happening, and yet, the evidence is right there in front of you, so you’ve got to believe. And, fortunately, unlike, say, older wars, these actions are all very brief. That shoot-’em-up episode would have lasted for half-an-hour or so and then we moved up the hill and that was it

whereas, in past wars, they’ve been slugging away sometimes for days. This is all quick, over.

Well, not if you’re sitting behind a rock, which is where I was. I could hear the platoon all around me shouting their combat instructions. They’re the guys you take your hat off to because they’re out there,

looking for the bad guys and the bad guys are looking for them. I was redundant at that stage, you just wait until it all moves on and then move on.

The stretcher-bearers are a bit of a misnomer, they’re really the medics. Stretcher-bearer is an old term from World War I where that was their job.

There’s the wounded, the stretcher-bearers, they run up there and cart them back to the doctor. The stretcher-bearers in the battalion now, they are medics. There are no stretchers, anyway, and there’s one per platoon and they will go, if a guy’s wounded, on to him and attend to him straight away, maybe fish him out of the fire-zone if possible or just wait until things quieten down and get him out.

The guy who was choppered out was on an improvised stretcher, just our of ponchos and so on.

I think you’re protected by a big dose of “she’ll be right”, in other words, that immortality of young people. I certainly lost that by the end of the year but, at that time, I still felt, “Heck, I’m a doctor, it’s the patients that get wounded, not the doctor!” The whole fire-fight just died down at that time.

We just moved on up the hill and it was business as usual. We reached where we were getting to after nightfall and put up the hutchies. Everybody was wrecked, we were all tired, but I wasn’t conscious of any more fear after that. I thought OK, it was a tough day today but that’s the end of that.

It’s quite a good liaison, the battalion had a little network down on the beach who would then send a signal up saying, “Private X is doing fine. He had his wounds dressed and is doing OK.” You’d usually get some sort of feedback within a day or two but you had a pretty good idea who was going to survive, anyway.

In the Vietnam War, they had to cope in the hospital with patients who normally would never have made it there. They had some horrendous injuries who survived who, formerly, would have just died in the field, simply because from wounding to getting resuscitation fluids on in every vein

and so on. They talk about the “golden hour” from when you’re wounded, that’s when you’ve got the best chance of saving the situation. And they were all in resuscitation within that time, which is very lucky from the medical point of view, which means a lot of horrendously badly wounded people survived.

Yes, I was. I went to Hong Kong in November of that year. It was bliss, five days of bliss and I stayed in a flash pub. What I enjoyed there was simply silence and enjoying those

comforts like having carpet under your feet and turning a tap on and hot water comes out. I had kippers for breakfast every morning and just goofed off, very good.

Yes, I remember it was a Pan Am [Pan American World Airways] charter and they made a big effort to pay attention to everybody. It was a huge relief, in fact, just taking off from Saigon.

Very good.

It was utterly bizarre. In Hong Kong you very quickly adjust to the fact that you’re in paradise for five days. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the military. I didn’t go with anybody else. I didn’t drink at the bars with any of the old diggers. I just went and

goofed off and had a quiet time. You spend so much time in the army…you don’t have an awful lot of time to yourself. There’s people around you all the time and just to have the luxury of silence was beautiful.

I think it was just existing.

I didn’t tear up the town at all. I didn’t get drunk or go with loose women. I just had a total relax with my brain in neutral.

Very, very good, yes. I’ve heard of diggers who couldn’t sleep in a bed, they had to lie on the floor but that didn’t happen to me at all. I was very happy. I hadn’t been in the army long enough.

The shower

was good. I was supposed to have a second R&R in February or March but that got cancelled because they had an operation on then.

Yes, you could put down for wherever you wanted to go. A lot of the married guys elected to come to Sydney. There was Taiwan, Hong Kong, Bangkok, they were the main centres, Singapore

and I just wanted Hong Kong.

Yep, it was too fast. I was marching back to the aircraft before I’d known it. It was a glorious time.

I could sense a little drag there, the “here we go again” sort of thing.

I wasn’t reluctant to come back but I wasn’t rushing to come back. It’s not like rushing to get to Vietnam at the start, there was a little less enthusiasm.

Seven months to go. It was May to May and this was November.

It turned out he wasn’t hit by a sniper.

We were on a highway holding operation and he just dropped me off at this one company position. I had a look at some of the diggers and then he scooted off up the road to another spot and he was going to come back and pick me up and take me on again. It was one of those little two-man reconnaissance helicopters. He came

whipping down the road at just above the tarmac level and the next thing you see is this thing spearing into the road and hearing the helicopter somersaulting down the road at high speed. It came to a halt about a couple of hundred yards from us so we all rushed up there. We were all worried about the thing bursting into flames but we got the pilot and his passenger out. The passenger

had a broken leg but the pilot was unconscious. The first thought was a gunshot wound but he certainly had a head wound. It turned out subsequently that his rotor blade had clipped a pole along the side of the road, that’s not good for a helicopter. There’s a neurosurgery facility in Saigon, which I decided to take him to

in another chopper, he survived. He was back in the air after about 12 months, which was a week after his 21st birthday, so he was a very lucky fellow. He again is another of these chaps who wrote to me to say thank you for saving his life but I didn’t save his life at all. I just nursed him, an unconscious patient, for a

half-hour flight to Saigon and I’m very glad he survived.

I recognise that saving a life means you intervene in some way, like, for example, if somebody’s airway is blocked, you fish that out or if they’re bleeding to death, you stop the bleeding and organise a transfusion. It was nothing like that. Here’s a guy

with a head wound, unconscious. OK, he should go to Saigon rather than going to the normal evacuation route, which was down to Vung Tau. So I just dropped him off there and left him in competent hands and then it was back to the battalion. All that drama in the space of a couple of hours.

A very weird war, so doctors from olden day wars would’ve been amazed by this, it’s so easy in a way.

Yes, to have a particularly unusual thing back to a first class facility, which is what they did have in Saigon, then myself back to Vung Tau where I was able to have a shower and a change of clothing and the back to the battalion by sunset.

All in one afternoon.

One of the best things I ever did joining the army was to read Catch 22, which is the most wonderful war book I’ve read, which perfectly captures what a weird world it is. Side by side, great

human drama, great tragedy and black humour, all squashed together and sometimes all at one time. It was a huge stroke of luck to have read that book before I went to Vietnam because it just put me in the right frame of mind. Otherwise, you could easily be shattered by some of the things that happened. When you realise that this is part of the absurd

human story that we’re all involved in, then you can much better take it in your stride. I didn’t like it but you knew that people have been through worse things than this and this just happened to be today’s ration, today’s weird event. I could’ve been on that helicopter as well and, five minutes later, we would’ve done the same.

I just read some of the poems from World War I, that was just horrendous beyond belief. They had none of the creature comforts we had, they went on forever, the slaughter was unimaginable.

We had a lot of things to make life comfortable. Sometimes, out on some of those operations, for example, a chopper would come in and offload a whole lot of cartons of cold milk and sandwiches and fruit and so on. This would be unthinkable in older wars and just having the luxury of casualty management. That was a huge morale booster for the

troops. To see a dustoff chopper rolling in, that immediately put minds at rest. And luxuries they never had before, in the old days you’d be carted off by stretcher bearers, you’d be on the road for maybe six hours until you got to a facility, bumping along – terrible! If you’re going to have a war, that was not a bad war. I mean, it was a very tense time

because it was always non-stop; there’s no time where there was not a possibility of something happening. There was no front line so therefore no real line.

That was the biggest single incident.

That was undoubtedly the most terrible day of my life. It was towards the end of the tour, February, and we had a little battalion operation to head up towards what was called the

Long Hai Hills. This was a Viet Cong stronghold from way back, from French times, it had given them trouble. We were mounted up on armoured personnel carriers. The B Company went on ahead, we were to follow up just behind them.

We were just packing up ourselves to follow them and we heard this huge explosion. Looking up, we could see this big mushroom cloud rising and we thought, “What the hell’s going on?” And then about four minutes later, there was another explosion and another mushroom. Then there was a garbled report of casualties. There was a

chopper, one of those little reconnaissance choppers, right with us at the time, so I dropped into that and there was this scene of absolute, unimaginable horror. It was terrible! The bottom line was we had 26 wounded and six killed and

a couple died subsequently from their wounds. All the medics had been wounded, the whole lot, the corporal medical corps, all of the stretcher-bearers – one of the stretcher-bearers had been killed – so the wounded medics were trying to do their best but they were obviously totally stunned by this. One of the medics is still haunted by the fact that he was told not to move because we were obviously stalled

in a mine field. And what had happened is that the lead APC had been blown up by a big mine, which turned out to be a recycled US Naval, five-inch shell. And the area had been seeded with jumping jack anti-personnel mines and they’re particularly mean beasts. They’re ones which, when you tread on them, the charge detonates them, they spring up to about

head height and then they explode with great force. When the first mine went up, the commanding officer and his off-siders went forward to see what the hell was going on and help and one of that party detonated the jumping jack and that actually caused the majority of the casualties. So, when I arrived at the scene, the commanding officer, Major Bruce McQualter

was sitting up, semi-conscious, unable to get up, with a head wound and right beside him was the platoon commander, Jack Carruthers, also with a head wound. He was stretched out on the ground and then these 26 other wounded. They were obviously sitting in a minefield so that didn’t make you feel any more comfortable. This was

the one time in my life when I felt absolutely overwhelmed, impotent. How do you proceed? How do you get around this pile of badly injured people and help them and organise them to get out. Anyway, in the meantime, the dustoffs called so I just pottered around

dressing wounds. I was conscious of a great fear that I’d set off another mine, myself, and join the rest of them there, so that was frightful. In fact, one of the diggers there is convinced that he told me that, if I moved, he’d shoot me. I have no recollection of that but he’s quite convinced.

So, I just did my best with what I had in the way of dressings and so on to stop bleeding, making people comfortable while waiting for, first of all, the sappers [military engineer] to move in with their mine detectors and they were in within half-an-hour. So they moved through this area and laid white tape where it was safe to walk.

Shortly after that, the first helicopters arrived and we were able to start shipping people out. This is probably where a doctor does earn his living, just prioritising the injured, whose needs are most urgent? I had that, more or less, worked out by the time the choppers arrived so out go the badly wounded, then the lesser wounded and, finally, the dead.

There were just some terrible scenes there. This B Company got terribly mauled, not only then but subsequently as well. So just coping with one or two casualties is bad enough but, with such a huge number, you do feel

hopelessly inadequate.

The force of those mines is just unbelievable. One guy was just cut in half so there was a pair of legs and the torso was sitting

ten yards away. Up in the branch of a tree was an Australian army boot and that’s OK but, within that boot, there’s still an Australian army leg and that sort of image will haunt some of these guys forever. The lead APC had been thrown up into the air and was over onto its side and, underneath it, you could see the arm of one of the guys protruding and still holding his rifle.

The maiming capacity was just spectacular. Some of those wounded had fairly mild wounds but the bad ones were just beyond belief. Everybody was, of course, mentally shocked. The percussion alone was enough to blow the back door off

an armoured personnel carrier and the diggers sitting inside it were blown out. Miraculously, only one of them was killed. The driver and the commander of the personnel carrier were killed instantly. Of the wounded, both Major Bruce McQualter and Lieutenant Jack Carruthers died over the next

week or two in hospital of their head wounds. I could not handle that event. It really took me a couple of years to settle down from that and I’m sure that some of the diggers have not got over that at all.

Yes, it was very distressing, terribly distressing. I remember going up to the back of the APC that had been blown over. At first, I thought it was just this pile of discarded equipment but, in fact, they were the diggers and the dead amongst the alive just all piled together and

all blackened by the explosion. It was very hard to work out where the hell to start, who need first up. But here, mercifully, the whole thing was over really from go to whoa [start to finish] in a couple of hours so you knew this terrible thing was going to come to an end and to just

do the best job you can. By that stage, it was late in the tour, it was getting towards the end of the tour. I’d seen enough to know that there are limits to what you can achieve. Even if you had the world’s top neurosurgeon or vascular surgeon there, sitting beside you out in the field, they weren’t going to achieve any more than you could with a backpack full of shell dressings. So

I don’t feel I really saved any lives but I don’t think I stuffed up either. I think I just did the best with what I had in the situation. I’m giving a talk about this, actually, to the army medics in a few weeks time and I’ll just point that very thing out. There’s some situations where you’re not going to do that much except you do the best you can and what you can with what you’ve got.

That’s now 37 years on and I still do get quite emotional about it because it just stays with you for keeps.

You’d have to be weird not to and that’s why I don’t feel harsh about diggers who

are psychological wrecks as a result of that because you know that it’s like your soul is ploughed and it leaves a furrow and that may be enough to cripple you. On the other hand, in my case, I think it’s actually made me stronger because you feel you’ve seen the worst that the world’s got to offer. That’s probably exaggerating but you’ve seen something terrible and you’ve survived it and you

get back on the horse again and away you go. That’s all you can do in life, do the best job you can at the time with what you’ve got.

The officers you get to know very well because you meet them in the mess and so on but most of those diggers and the stretcher-bearer who was killed, a young fellow called, Mick Poole, it was only two weeks after his 21st birthday. He was always a favourite with the kids in the village and so on.

It was just horrifying seeing them there, dead. The corporal medic, Ron Nichols, he was a very fine fellow. He had lots of rough encounters his whole year with bad wounds and you just feel that he’d had enough. In fact, I think everybody had had enough by then everybody was well and truly ready to go home. And the terrible thing

about that particular platoon, they got a new platoon commander and, a month later, he was killed himself on a mine, right in front of the diggers who had just survived this last thing. The mine story, I think, is one of the most horrendous things in that Vietnam War and the fact that a lot of them are our own mines just getting recycled would

make the whole thing less meritable. Very tense walking around in a mine field because you’re torn; your instincts are saying, “Look, sit down and wait for the mine clearance to happen.” But you can’t do that when you’ve got, in an area about the size of a couple of tennis courts,

26 people who are wounded and who need help and to call in for it. I must admit they were very good, there was no hysteria, no great fuss but you knew it was very bad.

We lost the stretcher-bearer but

the one company medic, the medical corps, he was wounded and all the four stretcher-bearers were wounded – one killed. So the diggers at that time were without any medical care. Not good.

This is what we were all worried about. We were stuck there where we could get mortared, we were a beautiful target but, no, it didn’t happen. That night, they certainly saw lights moving down the hill and they had air strikes on it and what not

but, no. So, everybody just packed up the following day and went back home and they called off the operation. And it wasn’t called off because of that mine incident, it was called off because there was threat of an attack on the Nui Dat base. So it was all hands on deck back at the base at that stage. But I think everybody was glad to say goodbye to the Long Hai Hills. In subsequent years, there were more mine incidents galore in that area.

A lot of the mines were actually retrieved from mines laid by Australians.

Yes, the Vietnamese were very smart and they lifted the mines and put them down where they wanted them.

Yes, the Claymore [M18 mine], that’s right.

Well, they were a very astute adversary.

You’re tempted to put them out of their misery, you mean?

I’ve never contemplated it myself. I think it happened,

and here I’m only relying on anecdote, with some Vietnamese wounded, but they were wounded very badly. This is obviously highly controversial and it’s only hearsay but I would not be surprised. I instructed our medics to treat the enemy wounded exactly like ours. In fact, they got evacuated in helicopters, they shared the same ward in the Australian hospital

with digs. It was actually quite touching seeing them learning all the bad language from the diggers while they were convalescing. I would never countenance that, people can be salvageable. Quadriplegics live to be grateful that they’re still alive, some might curse their sate and not want to be alive but at least they’ve got a choice, haven’t they? But you’d never dream of having to make that decision out in the field.

I can imagine somebody being too horrified with what lays before them; is this person really alive or not?

Some of the wounds were just frightful. You’ve probably seen photographs of them, people losing both limbs – that ain’t no life.

I tell you what, the Australian

hospital had a reputation of being conservative with limbs. The American hospital had a reputation for being a bit gung-ho [over the top] and removing them. Now, whether there’s any basis to that or not, I don’t know, but I know one dig who managed to persuade the pilot to take him to the Australian chopper-pad instead of the American. That’s what he reckoned, anyway, because he thought he was going to lose a leg under the American care.

Soldiers love yarns, don’t they, and a lot of these rumours start and, whether there’s any truth in them or not, I don’t know. But that was the reputation of the Americans, they were a bit gung-ho, whereas the Australians would fight harder to conserve the limb.

Yes, and, if you’re faced with multiple casualties queuing up outside the operating theatre, some are going to die. That would put pressure on you to take a short-cut and that may mean a short-cut of somebody’s leg but that’s a choice I never had to make. It may well have happened. It certainly happened in other theatres when there’s more wholesale carnage. People

would remove a limb to save a life, which is perfectly legitimate and you’d be more likely to do so if you knew there were three other guys queuing up for a life-saving procedure.

Well, there’s a lovely story of people who were lined up for a photograph before they went out on an operation – let’s get a shot of you while you’ve still got both your legs!

There’s plenty of that. I can’t think of any other good examples. Talking about you won’t be dancing when you get home, mate, you won’t have any legs, that sort of stuff. That went on a lot.

Yep, yep. So, in other words, it was used [UNCLEAR], a bit of the, “She’ll be right!”

Probably that chopper pilot – maybe. It was quite a long flight, a half-hour flight, unconscious patient, just attention to airway and good posture and so on. But that’s something that any first-aid certificate can do

so it wasn’t any big doctor skills there.

Oh yes, but I wasn’t flashing any great skills, I was just looking after him in a way anyone trained in first-aid would do, get a good airway, breathing, because he was unconscious the whole time. It’s actually very hard to nurse somebody on a helicopter. They are

so noisy and vibrating and you’ve got absolutely no idea what they’re doing with pulse rates and so on.

You just get them over on their side, head back, tongue forward.

Yes, on the floor. It was just an ordinary chopper, it wasn’t a dustoff chopper. A lot of our casualties were evacuated in an ordinary helicopter if there was one available.

Just another taxi to get the person off the battlefield into the hospital. The dustoff choppers are good because they had medics on board, they had intravenous gear all ready to go so you could actually whack you a drip if you had somebody who was in shock from loss of blood. Those medics were quite skilled. They spent

time fishing people out of the battlefield and getting them in as good a condition as possible to hospital in the shortest time.

They probably worshipped them. Because they were

fair game, targets, the Viet Cong shot at them. They had a nice big fat red cross on each door and the nose and on its belly, which was supposed to protect them but they were targets. Some of them got shot down. The Yanks [Americans] were very good, actually. The air force choppers, they came in for a fair bit of criticism at the start of our involvement there because they’d been told to be very careful with their equipment and so they would tend to stick to the rules a lot.

whereas the Americans would crash into any old landing site and do the needful. Later on they became very good, the Aussies were good. That was an American division entirely, they were terrific, they would have a shot at anything and it gladdened my heart to see them roll in and say, “Over to you, mate.” You know they’re going to be in good care and

on operating tables, shortly - a huge relief.

No doubt about it. There was a lot of ill feeling at first and that rose up through the ranks and had to be sorted out at top level, “Look, come on guys, throw your standing orders

overboard. This is a war, after all, and you’re not working under peacetime rules about where you can and cannot fly where it’s safe or you might risk your chopper. They’re an expensive item but you might just save a life.”

You see them hunting around to see if there’s a log there, worried they might get down on the wrong spot and wreck the plane. They only wrecked one chopper on operation as far as I know but, eventually, they would just drop it anywhere pretty well, which is wonderful. They needed to have a bit of a

run out – a lot of those areas have a lot of trees and scrub and so on. You get your chopper blades caught in those and you’re down as well.

No, I think they would

grant us as fair game but I never had any first-hand experience of one being shot at or shot down. The red cross didn’t make them immune. They were unarmed, they didn’t carry machine guns at all and the medics didn’t wear a red cross. You notice now in Iraq that the troops are wearing a red cross on their armband. They didn’t do that in Vietnam because

it would probably make a good target.

No, I was just in my jungle greens.

Yep, officer as well, you could see the pips on the shoulder. They weren’t shiny pips, they were cloth so they weren’t that easy to see. A red

cross would stand out a mile and it certainly wouldn’t give you immunity.

No, you’d be fair game, that’s right but, on balance of thought, it would be unwise. I don’t think anyone put their hands up and asked for

their red cross. No, but if they’re shooting down choppers with a red cross on, that’s usually a pretty good hint. Don’t go that way.

Yes, on the jungle green, it’s quite eye-catching.

I think it’s just a gradual attrition. I believe that you have a finite amount of courage issued to you and even the most courageous bloke, if you hammer him enough, he’ll run out of puff. I could certainly feel myself running out of puff. I was more inclined to ride inside an APC instead of on top of it towards

the end. Early on you get on top so you can get some fresh air and see what’s going on. Later on I’d be very happy just to huddle down inside when you travel anywhere and, when I was going on some of those village clinics. Towards the end, I was wearing a flak-jacket and a helmet on the road trip, up the back, whereas before – just another jaunt around the countryside. I think very gradually you realise, “Come on,

you’re no immortal, after all. Damn it!” But I didn’t feel bad about it, it does actually make sense. In a way, it’s false heroism to expose yourself needlessly.

Well, the hospital at that stage was pretty well set up in these Kingstrand huts, these aluminium huts with glass louvre windows, open and airy. Some parts were air-conditioned,

I think the intensive care unit and maybe a fever ward, something like that. I was actually a quasi-patient myself because I was quite sick but I was helping out with the medical ward, just the general malarias and fevers and chest infections, that sort of stuff. It was nice and slack and

got down to the beach a lot and had a few good meals in town. There were some relics of French cuisine in those days from the old colonial era. It really was a holiday, actually. It was very non stressed but my heart

really wasn’t there. I felt, as I mentioned earlier, that I belonged back at the battalion because I had a great sense of belonging and I couldn’t wait to get back. I felt the doctors there were very competent and so on but I was just not happy there. I wanted to be back in the bush.

I’d be very hazy on that. I think there were about a hundred beds. At that stage, I think the nursing staff were just… there were nurses there. I’d be totally inventing the structure of the hospital.

There were a couple of surgeons. I can’t really go into that.

I think I was just doing 9 to 5 in the medical ward, which was just general medicine sick figures.

Not that I remember, no, I don’t think so. Not much help

there am I? I’ve got a very hazy recollection of that chapter. Maybe I just blocked it out. I just felt it was a bit of a waste of time, in other words, I didn’t get my teeth into it. In retrospect, what I should have done was say, “Whoopee, this is a great opportunity to look at military medicine from a hospital perspective,” but I think I was just mentally tired and goofed off.

No, it was

like a second R&R but not as comfortable. The accommodation is just in tents on the sand, you didn’t have floorboards or anything.

I think it was shared.

Not bad, the surf was a bit flat, a few stingers.

It was very hot though. It’s much hotter there. Surfers Paradise in summer’s bad enough, this is worse. In fact, the diggers called it ‘Sufferers Paradise’ in the diggers’ way, they always dream up a name for things. So early in the morning, fine, but you wouldn’t want to go out in the middle of the day.

Yes, I think so. It was facing the South China Sea so it was well away from the town but it was OK.

Yep.

No, that hadn’t started, that came about a year later I think.

No, there was the Pacific Hotel, that was probably the main. I remember going to watch a striptease performed by two Philippino ladies. The only music they had was Jingle Bells…

… absolute absurdity. There were a couple of quite good restaurants there. You felt reasonably safe in Vung Tau, it was pretty secure.

Yep,

I think, generally, the feeling was hostile. They were very pally for commercial transactions, the barbershops and bars and so on but I really don’t think they liked having Aussies there. I’m sure great individual friendships

sprung up with some of the civil aid staff, that went down well. But you got the feeling, certainly in the villages out in the countryside, that they were not happy about the whole thing. They couldn’t wait for us to shoot through.

We were there early on when it was still very positive and the Australian population as a whole was very positive. We were there doing a great job, we were saving them from communism and, in turn, protecting the rest of Southeast Asia and, in the long term, ourselves. People really did believe in the domino theory – you stop them all up there. There were certainly plenty of refugees from the north

and a couple of those catholic villages I mentioned. They were very grateful to us. We had a great rapport with them.

Yes, we were winning. The map before we went was a Viet Cong province and had been for 17 years or something since the French had left. At the end of our year

the whole province was pretty well under some sort of control. It wasn’t secure, but there was some semblance of local government returning so we felt we left it in a better condition than when we arrived.

Yes. Mind you, subsequently, it all turned out to be a total failure. We’d lost already

and the bottom line from my point of view was that it was a total waste of time – terrible! Other people argue that we halted communism for a while and gave the other countries a chance to get ahead but think of all those lives: 500 Aussie lives, for what?

No, I was keen. That’s the price you pay.

Yep, most of the diggers thought this was a great thing. I can’t remember any of the digs saying that this is atrocious, us being in the country. We got an occasional feeling… occasionally you’d see on some of these roadholding operations, they’d open a highway to let civilian traffic move through for a while and you’d see, sometimes, these Mercedes full of

obviously well-off Vietnamese sail through and you’d think, “Hell, are we really on the right side here?” But, overall, I think most people thought we were doing the right thing, in our year. Two years later, it was a different thing altogether, we were clearly losing. And we got a lot of support from home. We had heroic marches through town

before embarkation – the battalion marched through, great reception and everything – and, when we came home, ditto. Fantastic! The protest movement was just getting going but it was not prominent.

Yep.

The army has this wonderful institution whereby the officers serve Christmas dinner to the digs

and so we served them Christmas dinner. In fact, we did a round early in the morning – we were back in the base at the time – we did a rum round in the morning around the tents, dispensing rum to the diggers. And then at lunchtime we had this big slap-up lunch for them – I’ll show you the menu if you like – and served by the officers, which is a nice tradition really. And they ribbed us like fury and demanded better service and drinks. In fact, there was a truce, there was

a Christmas truce declared, which was honoured.

Yes.

I’ve got it in my scrapbook if you want me to get it.

I don’t remember. It was good army tucker with some fancy labels put on the menu. I think that’s what it was. And many courses and a pretty liberal

supply of beer, a sit-down lunch.

Yes, the mail was very good really. It’s something like four or five days from Australia to Vietnam out in the bush there. I got all my medical journals forwarded up there.

Fruit cakes were the big thing, you ended up with a 16 x 6 tent full of fruit cakes with nobody to eat them, the Vietnamese refused to eat them. We eventually had things like smoked oysters and anchovies sent up, we were very well looked after from home. And digs who didn’t have any particular

attachment were very generous, they shared things around all the time. I used to take some of my smoked oysters out to the bush and tell the digs this is what the new officers were rationed, just to pull their legs. Towards the end of the trip, we were living quite comfortable, we had tents with floorboards down and beds, we had electricity

through the medical centre. And I bought a whacking great tape recorder (you could borrow tapes from the US library in Vung Tau) and have little musical soirees back at the base. We even had a movie theatre going with an outdoor screen.

No, and then the odd entertainers came up and performed

down in a concert bowl in the middle of the task force base. There again, I can’t remember who came.

It’s happened in every war. Bob Hope used to go up to Korea and World War II for that matter, out to the front line and entertain the troops. I think that’s an old tradition from way back

and the digs loved it, of course.

No, diggers work very hard, this is why I have full admiration for the average private soldier. They’d be out on an operation, come back, filthy, ragged clothing, mouldy, buggered and then, that night, they’d be out on sentry duty,

out on the wire of the base for four hours. So for them it was 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as well. They had one or two periods of R&R and they also had a thing called R&C, rest and convalescence down on the beach for the diggers. They went down for a 48 hour break.

Most of them got at least one or two of those during the year. So it’s really very relentless work. I’m sure down in Vung Tau, the base units would’ve got some entertainment going for themselves.

Jumpy,

people were very jumpy. The week before that big mine incident, which I mentioned earlier, which was on the 21st of February, there was another mine incident on the 14th of February where three other officers were killed and, for one of them, it was his last operation. He was due to go home on the advance guard and, for the company commander who was killed, it was his first day of his

first operation. So people did get very spooked about counting down the days and they were over cautious. I think everyone was just knackered at that stage and bored and fed up. It’s amazing how well things continued on and grumbled on but without that bounce. At the

start, there’s plenty of bounce and enthusiasm. At the end, just a bunch of half washed-up old digs.

Yep. Well, you had to. The next battalion, the 7th Battalion moved in to take over our position. We had their advance guard there but I’m not exactly sure when the main body arrived but it was right up to the end and onto the Chinook helicopters and off to

HMAS Sydney and back to Oz [Australia].

Well, not compared to what the World War II guys went through but for Vietnam, yes, I think it probably was because it was so relentless. I think if you’d had a front line and went up to the front line for

two weeks and then you went back behind the lines to the real world as it happened in the European theatre, you could argue that that was doable. But there, you were never off duty. The diggers would come back from an operation and, if they weren’t on sentry duty that night, they’d all get uproariously drunk for that night. But then they were back on deck again straight away

and never really out of harms way. So that was probably the difference and 12 months is a long time for that.

I think professional soldiers. Don’t forget, half our battalion were nashos, so they were clerks, real estate blokes, all sorts of types.

For them, that is it, thank you very much. A few of them actually became career soldiers but for the other half of regular soldiers what is soldiering about? Soldiering is about going to war. Where’s the current war? Vietnam. So they go back for another go. You’re right, some of them had three goes. Crazy.

A lot of them had different jobs the second time around, say,

they’ve gone up a couple of ranks and be back behind the sharp end a bit more. But, no, I couldn’t understand it. It’s such a strain, I can’t see why anybody would want to put themselves through it again.

No, I was at the end of my tether and, to be quite honest, I think everybody was. If somebody had announced, “OK chaps, we’ve decided to put off your return for another three months, is that alright with you?” There would have been a mutiny. People behaved very well but I think people were just absolutely wrecked and I don’t think anybody left with any regret. Some guys had the odd Vietnamese sweetheart.

I think there might have been a bit of that but, for the vast majority, no, get me out of here fast!

No, I just felt like a watch winding down. That’ll do, thanks, I’m off, pack up. And of course, the people who were taking over from us couldn’t wait to get rid of us either. The 7th Battalion, we had their advance guard for a month and they were just amazed at what a rabble we were, not in a disciplinary

sense but just that they felt we should be out of this place because we were pretty ineffective. They were probably right, actually, we were probably getting a bit ineffective by then.

Yes, I had a chap called Tony Williams who subsequently became a psychiatrist and we swapped notes like fury, which I’m sure is helpful to him because, by that time, it’s an

established camp and an established medical… a nice gleaming hut and so on. We knew the disease pattern, what sort of drugs you need to take out bush, all that sort of stuff, so that was good.

Twelve days and that was lovely.

It’d be terrible cold turkey to fly out of Saigon into Sydney because May, cold, and just your brain and this way was much more civilised. It was still quite hard work on the way back because , as a doctor, you still had a few medical problems with a boatload of diggers. So I still had quite good sick parades.

No, they weren’t having anything to do with the army.

Yes, there were a few anxious blokes with their socially acquired diseases, so there was a bit of that. But it was just wonderful to be out at sea, sun, out in the open sea. Glorious. Very relaxing.

Yes. It was a very emotional thing. We sailed in at dawn, a beautiful autumn morning and all the diggers were lined up on the side into Garden Island, their families all waiting there. It was fantastic. Down the gangplank and it was all on for young and old. Then we formed up

and marched through Sydney, lunchtime crowd and a huge reception. I got a special cheer whistling past Sydney hospital, we marched straight past there and it was wonderful and then back home. We all broke up and cheerio. So that was a very emotional thing, just that.

In an article I saw, they quoted 100,000 people but I don’t know how they judge these things. But there was ticker tape and it was very, very enthusiastic. As we swung out past the Woolloomooloo pub, this guy was just standing out there with this whole tray of schooners, just handing them out to the diggers as they marched past and they’d swig them down and put the glass down a hundred yards further on. I think we were a

very lucky battalion to go at that time. If you’re going to go to a war, go when it’s a popular war and you’re vaguely winning. The ones I feel sorry for are the latter ones where it was deeply unpopular and, obviously, the whole carnival is being shut down and it was winding down and what are you there for? We, at least, had some sense of purpose, that we were actually helping these poor buggers,

defending them against communism, liberating them. I think people really believed it and that made it an awful lot easier.

Yes. I think if they’d

been something like nine months, some long period, then they’d come back with the battalion. They had a thing called the Australian Reinforcement Unit so diggers would be sent up. And they’d be held in that unit at Nui Dat until there’s a slot from the new battalion to replace somebody who is going home. That would’ve been hard for them. I always felt sorry for them because it’s like the

new Joe on the block. The other guys would size him up and he’d have to work hard to fit in with them and there must’ve been some difficult cases there. I think we had 200 out of 800 come home early and were replaced. That’s quite a number, a quarter.

We had

a total of 100 casualties and 25 of those were killed including 5 officers. Low figures by classical trench warfare style where they wipe out whole battalions. It was a terribly frustrating war because, with something like a minefield,

you’re passive, with absolutely nothing to do except suffer and get on with it. There’s no enemy to charge, no over the top and at ’em stuff, snipers, ambushes, just tense, brief, often inconclusive, very hard. So, I think mentally it was a very hard war for the digs and, if it happened to be one of the later battalions

where it was also unpopular, you get kicked at both ends.

It was clean – the public hygiene at Vung Tau was not a strong point, it still isn’t. It was utterly safe.

I remember just floating down on that first day after we got back, it was like being two feet above the ground, positively, absolutely euphoric. It was a glorious feeling. It is like recovering from some mental illness. There’s a huge gap between what’s in your head and what’s in the head of those around you and that was really

unbridgeable. I know with my own family, with my mother and sisters, they said I was like a bear with a sore head. I was doing my best to be the right guy but I was not the same guy. Twelve months on, probably about ten years older and it was very hard. People would ask you, “What was it like over there?” You can go either of two ways.

You can say, “Well, it was great. We got into the rape, loot and pillage,” – a totally flippant answer – or you can dive into, “OK, do you really want to hear this bad story?” It’s very hard to pitch, transmit your experience to other people. I found the best way, just more recently, is to write it, write it down. That’s therapeutic as well.

Yes, the marrieds were the ones that I felt sorry for. For a bachelor, you’re a free spirit. But for married – huge. And I know a lot of marriages bust up after that. You felt so sorry for the dads missing out on their kids, a year of their young lives

and I felt even more sorry… actually, in a way, I think it’s even tougher on the wives. They’re holding the fort back home, getting none of the glory and all of the work and that was very hard for those, hard for the married ones.

Well, my little

batman, he was a carpet layer from Melbourne. He got married only two weeks before he left, in fact. He came back home. He couldn’t wait to get back to Australia, back to his mates and so on. I got this plaintive letter from him about a year later and he’s missing it and another year went on and he actually rejoined the army. He rose up to be a captain in the medical corps

on the administrative side and he’s a different bloke. His marriage survived and he’s back into it.

No, there was no career at that stage. I think the career opportunities are probably better now. In the British army, you could specialise but here you’d just be general dogsbody forever. So looking ahead, you jump early or not at all, so I was not at all tempted.

I kept up my links with the army as a consultant dermatologist for many years but it is a young man’s game anyway. It’s only a chapter of your life, you’ve had it by the time you’re fifty.

Fifty-seven days. That was bliss! I just charged off around the countryside,

went visiting friends and relatives around the country in Victoria and Tasmania and just had a good bludge. Vietnam totally occupied my mind for twelve months, everything else was peripheral. It is

extraordinary! I could not get this stuff out of my mind, it was totally dominating every moment of every day for a year and then, it just slowly faded out and got taken over by the real, present world.

Yes, I think finding a wonderful woman and getting married, that’s probably as therapeutic

as anything. I think getting out into a country post, Wagga [Wagga Wagga] – country towns are quite therapeutic – down on the banks of the Murrumbidgee there, just a bit of standard, non-hectic… I think if I’d dived into a hospital existence in a metropolitan hospital, I probably would have sunk, whereas this

was nice and low key. So, just gradually, that healing balm got going and I settled back to normal.

Well, it’s the old, corny doctor/nurse story. She was a trainee nurse at Wagga Base Hospital and I used to do the odd night and weekend, moonlighting there as a doctor and we met there.

Kapooka camp is only about seven miles out of town and so that was easy. Then we married about 18 months after I got back and then we went off to live in Singapore for two years, again, still with the army attached to the British military hospital and we lived happily ever after.

No, I hated it. I just didn’t have my heart in that at all, actually. My brain was just too befuddled, I think. I went through the actions and so on. I used to look at these recruits coming in and I’d say, “What are you guys in for?” They were all so eager-eyed and keen and I know they were desperate to get to a unit to go to Vietnam.

That gave me a bit of heartache but then getting off to Singapore subsequently, that was totally different. That was quasi army. Singapore life was very good and not that demanding and I learnt a lot of tropical medicine there, which I needed before I went to Vietnam.

I’d probably completed my post-Vietnam cure by the end of Singapore.

Are you talking about the psychological aspect?

To sabotage the war effort?

Well, this is life, isn’t it, hey? The old flow goes on. People rush off to wars and do stupid things and base jumping and what not. There will always be people who want to do that. I really greatly admire these twenty year olds,

these nashos. The average age of the battalion was 20 or 21. In fact, there was a 21st birthday just about every day, there, about 400 twenty year olds. They put up with such a lot in that good, easy-going, Aussie style and I’m just full of admiration for what they put up with. It is hard, it is long, it is tough.

When you see all those bad stories from Vietnam, they’re American bad stories. You don’t see Aussie [Australian] bad stories like that.

I would’ve been in Singapore. I was well away from it by then. That was ’68, ’70, that sort of stage. So, the Aussies were out by ‘72

and so it was peripheral by then. In Singapore, I was away from all the Australian public opinion. I was aware that it was getting increasingly sour.

Peripherally. I could sense that

it was just going bad and I think, if you’re on a losing side, that dampens your interest. I thought, “Hell, this is obviously all going to end in tears.” We’re not going to win, in other words so I had no interest in it.

No, not angry, but I do regret it. There was a reason for us going there. We really believed we were doing good and the vast majority of people believed we were doing good. In World War II, appeasement was a dirty word and we didn’t go in when we should’ve gone in there and so people still had that feeling that

you should go in where duty calls even though it may be at a cost, in other words, lives. And this appeared to be our duty. I know everyone’s wise after the event. You say, “Well, that was ridiculous. Let the Vietnamese sort out their own messy civil war and slaughter each other. What are we doing there?” You could say the same about Iraq.

I don’t feel angry about it, I do regret it though.

Shooting somebody I could not do. I’d be a hopeless soldier on the shooting end, anyway, but, from my point of view

this is just part of the panorama of human suffering. And we just happen to be in this little wedge right then and there. It’s stupid, pointless but it’s got to be done. I don’t feel in any way negative about it except to say it was a waste of time.

If I help anybody either mentally or physically I’m very happy about that. The business of saving lives, I’ve really got no time for that for reasons I’ve explained. It’s one of those things, it’s a chunk of life experience

I would never have wanted to miss but never want to do again. That’s really it in a nutshell.

Well, I was given a choice. They said, “OK pal, you’ve got one year to go. Would you like to go to some dump or would you like to go to Singapore?”

I thought, “Well, I think I’ll go to Singapore.” The work was very good. They had, at that time, a rotation of two Aussie army doctors in the British military hospital, which was a big general hospital – 500 beds. They looked after the families as well as the diggers, the Brits mainly but also Aussies, New Zealanders, Gurkhas, Nepalese and so on. It was terrific. I was in the medical division, which was

the physician side, all the malarias and the gastric ulcers and the things that physicians look after, which was good because I needed to beef up my knowledge of medicine. In a regimental job, you’re not big on continuing medical

education there, you’re not attending conferences and what not but here you are. You’ve got weekly audit things so it was very good, professionally.

Just ward rounds, seeing people in the outpatients with medical problems. It had a night and weekend roster. It was just like being a resident in an ordinary hospital, a big hospital, a good chance

to really learn medicine.

The Brits had a lot of troops in Malaya still, then Malaysia and it was a major tertiary hospital so they did big time surgery. I can’t remember how many troops they

had in Singapore still and air force personnel, naval… we would’ve had, I’m presuming, about 50,000 troops and their families we were servicing, so a big show.

Dermatology is a fascinating field – everybody gets enthusiastic about their own field, don’t they, even colorectal surgeons? Dermatology involves the patient’s whole life style. A lot of diseases are occupational based: what sort of jobs were they exposed to, lifestyle things. There’s a lot of internal medicine involved so they have an expression on the skin.

There’s a lot of psychiatry in dermatology, a lot of skin diseases are affected by your general makeup, when you come to the stage where you’re saying, “Well, OK, now what?” It had an appeal so, when I got out of the army environment and back into a civilian hospital, I did

initially just the general physician’s training and then decided on dermatology. And I got in and away we went.

Credit? None, nil,

which is fair enough. I was starting at ground zero as a trainee physician initially and then ground zero as a trainee dermatologist. Fortunately, in those days, they were only two years apiece. Now, dermatology has gone to five years training and I think a general physician is about the same. I don’t regret that at all. I was then early 30s

just back on the bottom of the pyramid again and away we went.

It probably means

I was not giving full attention to the here and now. I was so overshadowed by this experience. I wasn’t in grief or anything you could call post-traumatic stress disorder or anything like that, I was just… my mind had been fully occupied for twelve months in this one particular sub-culture and it was still dominating my mind. It’s just like

a grey filter across the world. I was doing all the right things – I’m sure I was a reasonably effective doctor at Kapooka and so on – but this thing was in the way. It was like a cloud moving off the landscape and it slowly just shifted off. I still get a whiff of it – things like Anzac Day. I could very easily

get deep into that sort of stuff but I tend to recognise that as a hazard so I keep it at arms’ length.

I do. I march about every five years, go to the dawn service over at Randwick. I’ve been to dawn services all over – Amman, Jordan,

Fiji, Singapore depending on where I am at the time. I think that’s a very important commemoration.

Yes, but I don’t immerse myself big time in the Vietnam veteran world because I see it in a way as a real hazard.

Well, I think you can just get your mind filled up again with all that stuff

to come between yourself and your current, real world. I’m very happy to revisit it but I don’t want to dwell there and I think this is one of the real risks of getting fully involved in veteran’s associations. It can become a full-time job and I think, for some people, it still utterly dominates their lives in the same way it did mine for about a year

afterwards and I don’t want to do that. I have maintained email links with all sorts of odd Vietnam veterans and it’s terrific but not to settle down over half-a-dozen schooners and go over it all time and again.

Well, on one level, I was cranky because I felt a lot of those people protesting were on an ego trip

but, to be fair, most of them were doing it with integrity. They really believed it was immoral and who would argue with them? I wouldn’t call it immoral. I would call it wrong, it was a mistake. I think it was abominable that they took it out on individuals. You hear these stories of some poor soldier in uniform at an airport getting harangued by somebody because he’s been to Vietnam.

That is just sheer cowardice, abominable. I respect the anti-war opinion, the same as I respect the anti-Iraq opinion. I think it’s very well founded. In fact, it’s a citizen’s duty to stand up and speak his mind and, if he disagrees with something the government has propelled his son into, you should say your piece. There’s a bad

way, like that protestor who tipped a bucket of red paint over one of the soldiers on one of the marches through Sydney. I’ve got no time for that sort of thing.

It had a huge influence. You are much more acutely aware of the human being behind the medical problem and that’s a thing that takes a lot of young doctors a lot of time to learn. They’re so engrossed in the intellectual problem, what’s

gone wrong with this bit of machinery, they neglect that there’s a human being there. That’s the most profound thing, how humans respond to tough conditions, that’s very educational. You see some very admirable ways some of them behave in terrible conditions.

From my point of view, it made me not worry about an awful lot of things. I don’t worry about death. You know you’re going to get ill and fall apart and die or you might get run over or something but that doesn’t worry me at all.

An awful lot of people go through their lives worrying about what might happen. When you’ve seen all the horrible things that happen you say, “Well, it didn’t happen.” That’s a form of escapism in a way but it suits me. The downside of that means that some things I just can’t be bothered with that you should be bothered with. For example, committee work, I’ve never been a committee man.

I just can’t take it seriously. I know a lot of people are very effective in committees and do very good work but, in a way, I’ve lost that sense of caring about a lot of things that a lot of people fuss a lot about. I care a lot about human beings. I care a lot about my family and friends and suffering. I care a lot about my patients. But I don’t care a lot about whether we

get a Labor government or a Liberal government. I’m happy to let all that scoot past. I don’t care about money, that’s neither here nor there. That is both good and bad, isn’t it? It makes me carefree, careless but, probably not be nearly as effective. I’ve served on a lot of committees – you get frog-marched into committees – but I also recognise that,

having had that frequent brush with death, you feel that these matters are just not worthy of serious attention. That’s a defect as well as an asset. That’s the way I regard it and I think, if I hadn’t had that Vietnam

experience, I’d be a lot more serious about these public affairs matters and college matters and so on but I can’t be bothered. This is true confessions, hey? I have a theory that we all should have a little brush with death when we’re young, just to shake us up and make us realise just how extraordinarily lucky we are.

Here we are living in a country like Australia, phenomenally lucky when you see the way the mass of people live and some of the things they’ve had to endure. So who’s complaining?

Big plus!

I tried to get a guernsey in East Timor when that task force went in there. Skin disease is a big part of tropical medicine. In fact, I saw a couple of patients who came back from East Timor with skin problems. But that whole operation was cobbled together in such a hurry that they couldn’t scratch themselves, let alone get a dermatologist on board there but it could’ve been helpful.

No, but that’s OK. They’re so close to Darwin. The couple I saw there were just evacuated to Darwin and down here. That would’ve been fun, though. I would’ve liked to have gone. I think, once you have a taste for it… going as a dermatologist is quite different. I do AusAID [Australian government’s overseas aid program] work in the Pacific Islands but I would’ve loved to have gone to Rwanda for example, with the army team – any of

these jaunts. I’ve done one to New Guinea, for example, post-Vietnam, on a malaria survey. I just love getting out in the bush with the digs on some sort of enterprise like that, preferably with nobody shooting at you. Now, the world of dermatology is well behind the firing-line, the day they shoot the dermatologist you know you’re in deep trouble.

Not necessarily so. It’s just the bush. I like the bush. Back in Africa…we had that in Africa, it was a big plus. We did a lot of camping, climbing Kilimanjaro and that sort of thing. I think you get a real taste for it and, doing it under the auspices of the army

where you’re doing it in some style, you don’t have to worry about all the resupply and so on. And you might even get paid for it.

AusAID has a thing called the Pacific Islands Project where they send specialists to the Pacific Islands to do a couple of weeks a year to do clinics and teach. We’ve one that in places like Vanuatu and Samoa and Fiji

to try and beef up their tertiary medicine. The emphasis used to be on doing clinics but the are really a waste of time because you go and do your stuff and you’re in out of it and don’t leave any behind whereas, if you teach, then you’re passing something on and the people you teach can presumably do a better job at what they were doing.

I enjoy that, that’s the sort of thing that floats in and out depending on government budgets and so on.

Once a year and it just goes for two weeks. And I do a clinic out of the flying doctor out at Broken Hill once a year, again a dermatology clinic. You’re based in Broken Hill and you fly out to Tibooburra one day, Menindee and so on.

It’s just the same as doing a clinic here except it’s a change of scenery. It’s good fun.

That’s right, there’s a bit of that. They think I’m lying on a beach somewhere.

It’s a defined disorder now. It’s actually been classified as a mental illness. It always has existed in people who have had any sort of shocking experience

and it means people whose mental lives are being disturbed by past horrible experiences, that’s it in a nutshell. I have no doubt that this has happened to a lot of veterans of all types but I think what’s happened is the whole thing has slipped out of control. It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know this is a very tricky area because a lot of the

veterans would be frothing at the mouth at the very suggestion. It can be a contagious disease, in other words, if you huddle down with a lot of people and rehash interminably horrible past events, it can actually be depressing and it can end up dominating your consciousness.

It can become the main theme of your life and I really believe that this has happened. I’m not taking anything away at all from the fair-dinkum ones whose mental lives have been wrecked or greatly impaired but I think it has become a bit too popular a diagnosis.

I think you can actually avoid it by not immersing yourself too long or too frequently in past misfortune. Everybody has past misfortune, women lose babies, terrible car smashes happen. And I know that term ‘move on’ is a bit flippant but I think, somehow, you have to package bad experiences up and

wall them up to some extent so that you can concentrate on the here and now and just enjoying your family, your friends, your food and the wonders of being alive. Some people are denying that themselves simply by dwelling too much on the past. I’d probably be howled down by some Vietnam veterans for suggesting that but I think that, as time goes by, people

will realise that you can have some terrible experiences and wall them up and still access them, as we are now, without poisoning your life.

Yes, tell me about that one.

It may be good for them. My theory is… I’m documenting myself

so I’ve written down my story because I deeply regret that I haven’t had access to my grandfather’s stuff. He left not a line… Here was a guy, he’s got a DSO [Distinguished Service Order], he was mentioned in dispatches twice, was in Gallipoli and Palestine, he was second-in-command of the 6th Light Horse and not a jot. And I feel cheated. And I think for, say, my grandchildren and so on, one of them are bound to get an idle curiosity in times to come

and I’d just love them to at least have access to it. We’re going over on a jaunt to Vietnam next year with some old vets, first time in it’ll be pushing 40 years and we’re not going to mope. We want to pay our respects and revisit and acknowledge it and meet the opposition as well. We’ve got contacts with the

Viet Cong and I think that will be phenomenal. And to wall that off forever, delete it from your CV [curriculum vitae], I think, is terrible. That’s as bad as wallowing in it too much. Sometimes, when I’ve been talking about it with some of the others, I can feel that I’m sinking, that I’m going down a downward spiral and getting very gloomy and

depressed about it so I just call it quits then. But it’s good to be able to visit. I think it’s terrific.

Yes, and we only live once so it’s terrible to chuck out this huge component of you life’s experience. I think it’s bad.

Yes.

Just to try and make some sense of it. In ’97, we had a big reunion of the stretcher-bearers down in Victoria. It was a commemoration for that stretcher-bearer who was killed. We all went to his gravesite and had a service and a lunch and I was asked to talk at that. And, just to assemble my thoughts, I wrote and article, which was then published in the Canberra Times on that big, minefield incident. And I toiled over

that for about a year. It’s such a phenomenally massive event to try and get it into some sort of order. The only way you get it into order is to write it down, draft after draft, until you feel it bears some resemblance to what you’ve been through. I found it very therapeutic – Good, that’s good, out of the way.

I probably had a shot at it every couple of months for about a year. But, one of the interesting things is that everybody has a different slant. People who are present at any event will have many different versions of it and so other diggers would come and say, “Oh, it wasn’t at all like that. This is how it was…” And there was this guy who was telling me that he’d shoot me if I took another step

and I have no recollection of that. That’s all you can do, see the world from your own little perspective. Instead of it being a free-floating, black cloud, it’s now just nailed down. That is my account, that will do. Put it down.

Some of the diggers who’d been in that wrote and said they were very grateful for somebody actually writing an account of it. I’ve contacted some even in this last year who’ve never committed to paper their recollections of that and I think it’s amazing really so I’ve told them to do it. Do it for their kids if not for themselves.

Yeah, why not?

Instead of it being a free-floating horribleness, it’s now a definable chapter you can file away.

Most of them just got on with their lives. There’s one or two who are utterly immersed in it and I feel sorry

for them, I really do, because I think they’re wasting their lives. Life is for the living and for them to just bang on and on about it. I can understand why they do it but I say, “Look, come on…”, whatever you used to say before you say, “…get a life…” “It was terrible, but it was then.

In twenty years time you can’t still be banging on about it.” But I haven’t got the courage to say that. We talk about their post traumatic stress disorder symptoms and how they’re getting on. I’m not sure what you can do about it really. You could be rude and say, “Just pull yourself together!” Which they did in past wars, didn’t they?

Yes, my son in

particular because he’s very keen on this whole project. He was very excited when he knew I was going to do the archives. He’s 32 and he’s a great thinker and diary-keeper and so on and he’s scribbled notes on it to get me to clarify things and so on. So he’s very keen. My daughter

is up to her ears in babies so she’s not into it. But, you see, you’ve got to look ahead another couple of generations.

When we were down on the beach before we took off for the bush, we had this outdoor shower, just one shower, and all showering is supposed to be done before 6 pm. It was out in the total open.

There was no covering, no hessian, it was just a shower. At 6 pm, the bugle would sound the last post and, at that stage, all showering is supposed to be done and people getting on with what they’re supposed to be doing. Anyway, this guy was still showering at 6 pm. When the bugle sounded, he snapped to attention with the water streaming down over him

until the last bugle note had faded. That’s good Catch 22 stuff. There were lots of pleasant moments like listening to the Melbourne Cup on a crackly radio up on Nui Dat hill and a lot of very good parties around the company boozers [bar]. It was very democratic being a doctor, you’re an officer but

you’re a special type of officer so the digs used to get quite informal about that. They’re not a great barrel of laughs. From what we’ve been through today, it sounds very gloomy. We had formal mess dinners with the same sort of menus and army food labelled to

sound pretty good, sitting out there in our disgusting greens and sand floor. The symbol for the 5th Battalion, my battalion, was a tiger. The symbol for the incoming battalion was a pig so, at the change over, we presented them with a pig painted with tiger stripes, which went

down very well. And they let it loose in the officers’ mess and that caused a lot of fun. I haven’t got a vast store of wonderful anecdotes. I’d have to dredge through my letters to find any good ones. There were lots of light hearted moments but I can’t put my finger on any good

stuff.

Any career has got its

heap of plusses and minuses, hasn’t it? You could end up as a clerk in the GIO [insurance company] boring yourself to death. The military life, provided you don’t get too killed or mutilated, it’s a wonderful chapter for a young person’s life. It can be a great career as well but it can kill some people and

ruin some others and, in the context of the big life picture, it is a reasonable option. I wouldn’t stand in the way of it. It can bring out the best in people. When you see what miserable lives some people who never take any risks live, you say, “Well, the army life’s not bad.” I’m sure some of these guys in Iraq

right now, they’re probably learning a lot about themselves. It’s for a limited time. Yes, there is a risk but most people got home.

Yes, they’ve had an extraordinary run of luck.