Australians at War Film Archive

Right, I was born in Melbourne on the 24th of March in 1943 during the war. My dad was then working

like in the air force at that time at Parafield, sorry, at Essendon, and then we moved from there to South Australia. From South Australia my dad left so we went by ship to Fremantle and when we arrived in Fremantle my father at that time was sort of a sheep station overseer, spent a little bit of time there and from there we lobbed down in Albany. So I spent most of my childhood and schooling in Albany. I went to,

the Albany High School. During that time, my affiliations with the services I was in the naval cadets, the air force cadets and then I joined the CMF [ Citizens Military Force]. My job at the time in Albany, I left school when I was 16, I had various jobs in Albany. The last job I had was at the woollen mills. I was a loom tuner. Now not many people know what a loom tuner is

but it’s actually a fitter or a maintenance mechanic on looms for woollen and worsted machines. While I was in the CMF my interest was directed towards the regular army. So I applied for the regular army, had a few troubles getting into the regular army because I found out I had a, or so the army or the medical people in the army thought I had some sort of heart problem. Anyway I joined the army in

’63, left Perth in ’63, did my basic training at Kapooka and then went from Kapooka to Ingleburn. From Ingleburn I was lucky enough to be selected to go from Ingleburn to Malaysia as a reinforcement to 3 Battalion at Terendak in Malaysia. I was only months in Malaysia.

I came back from Malaysia to Ingleburn actually to do a junior instructor’s course ’cause at that time you might recall that we had Malaysia, Borneo and Vietnam. The war was starting to gear up. So the National Service intake was starting so I ended up an instructor, a corporal, at Ingleburn. I was there for

nearly two years. That was before I got a chance to interview for the SAS [Special Air Services] Regiment. From there I went to the SAS Regiment. While I was in the regiment I moved around quite a bit among the squadrons, but the first squadron I was in was 1 Squadron and then while I was in 1 Squadron I was in New Guinea pre-training for Vietnam. My stepfather was killed

in a place called Mount Barker when a tree fell on him so I had to come out of New Guinea fairly quickly and go home ’cause I was the only child. I’m the only child in the family so I had to go home and look after mum again. Her second husband that got killed, tragic circumstances. Then I joined 2 Squadron which is the squadron I went to Vietnam with. I trained up and went to New Guinea again. I went to

Vietnam during ’68, ’69 and then after ’68, ’69 I came back. I was then in the regiment. I trained up again preparing for Vietnam. I was going back with 2 Squadron but I then, something else came up which I’ll explain and then I went to 3 Squadron in which we trained again to go to Vietnam. By the time we got back from a whole round of New Guinea and pre-

Vietnam training, the war in Vietnam was called off. So then we went into specialised training. So then I stayed in the regiment. I went in as a corporal and kept my rank and was promoted to a sergeant just before I went to Vietnam. We did some specialised training. When I went into specialised training at that stage I was promoted to warrant officer. I did my warrant officer course in ’75. I was at

regimental headquarters in ’75 as the assistant adjutant come family liaison officer. I left the regiment went to RMC, Royal Military College in Canberra for two years. Two years I joined, I then joined the Commonwealth Police Force from RMC and I stayed in the Commonwealth Australian Federal Police Force for 22 years

and then during that time I serviced in the active reserve of the air force as a flight lieutenant police officer for 10 years. That was my other job when I wasn’t doing AFP [Australian Federal Police] work. So then after 22 years I retired here up to Port Stephens with my wife. Now I’m in the Coastal Patrol doing active work as a crew

and radio operator for the base. I’m virtually, that’s it I think.

I was born in Melbourne. I was born in Essendon. Obviously I barrack, I have to barrack for the local VFL [Victorian Football League] Essendon football team. I think, I don’t know how long we stayed there before we moved to South Australia to a place called Parafield. Of course I don’t recall

much of my childhood or movement.

24th of March 1943. I don’t know whether there’s anything significant about that date except I’m an Aries, might answer some of my background.

The significant part of my childhood which I remember mostly is when I was in Western Australia.

When my father moved to South Australia, he left after the war and then he set up a boot maker business. My father had, I know it’s not about my father, but he was a drover originally. He ran away from home when he was 10 because he saw his brother drown in a copper. You know those old washing coppers in the old days. Anyway he was a drover and then he was a boot maker and he went into the air force and was a sheetmetal worker.

Anyway he set up a boot making business in Port Pirie. While he was there, I remember as a kid he used to take me on the ships to get the boots for the sailors, and of course one of the things after the war, I do recall dad having these large boxes of different things and apparently they were cigarettes and stockings. If you might remember stockings were popular with the ladies at that time so dad was doing a bit of a trade.

What you might call smuggling nowadays.

Mmm. Anyway he told me that later on the local customs man said, they were very friendly. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘You’ve been noted what you’ve been up to,’ and he said, ‘If you don’t leave town in the next month or so I’m going to have to arrest you.’ So Dad got the word, packed all his gear, all our bongos and we jumped on the ship in Adelaide on the

Strathnova it was. I remember the first time we went across the Bight and landed in Fremantle that’s where I started off my life. He got a job on a sheep station up near Northampton north of Geraldton and we loaded all our gear on this truck, and the guy who was the overseer was there with the truck and while we were in Perth we loaded up all the gear and he got

a whole load of fowls, WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, on the back of the truck. So I spent on the back of the truck for two days with the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s while Mum, Dad and this guy sat up in the cab. So they went up there on a sheep station. We were up there for probably a couple of years and then we moved down to Albany. That’s where I recall most of my childhood growing up on the coast in Albany which was great.

Albany is unique in itself that it’s surrounded by a very scenic and very large, well not large, but hills and a very rugged coastline. It’s unique in itself and it’s got a beautiful harbour they call Princess Royal Harbour and King George Sound I think they call them, but it’s

significant. As a kid I remember because it had a lot of old wartime forts along the coast. It was very important during the war because it was an alternative base for submarines and other naval ships when the northern coast felt threatened, but it was also a place that was impressed on my mind. It was where most of the convoys left for the First World War. They assembled in Albany in King George Sound and I remember as a kid finding

in this house where we rented, this lady had a lovely album of all these photos of these ships assembled in the harbour. Of course when I was a kid going to school there we at that time I think we were called the baby boomers, but I was a little bit earlier than the baby boomers. There weren’t enough school rooms to put everyone in so we ended up going to school up at the forts which were the original forts and the old guns were still up there.

We used the army barracks actually. Of course the teachers had a hell of a time trying to control us wandering off and playing on these great big four inch guns. You know we’d just disappear, they’d come looking for us. After a while they just banned us from that particular area. It was wonderful because the guns were still operating and all this sort of thing. We used to get in there and jig the machinery and you know, the things would move around and you could imagine move them up and down, but all the old forts, all the underground bunkers and systems were

still there. It was quite great, great fun for boys, for kids that age.

Oh yes, yeah, yeah.

At that stage I was, I was always in awe. I didn’t know much about it as a kid because we weren’t told all that much. It was only what we sort of picked up because in the ’50s I think at that stage people didn’t really want to dwell on the war. It was just too close to when it was, when the war had finished but there were still plenty of signs of

like around Albany that the war had some impact, but people never spoke about it. People, they sort of lost, there was always the kids, I used to go to houses, I used to see photographs on the mantle piece of people in uniform, I think that was significant, that had been to war or they’d lost people during the war.

Well, as

a kid I was in the Cubs originally. I joined Cubs. I suppose that was my first uniform and as cubs we used to always go to the Anzac Day services but we were always in awe of the guys and, I suppose they were still old guys to us then, younger than me, what I am now, but they were on parade with their medals and so on. That certainly impressed me yes, but we actually never, Albany was a bit isolated I suppose. We never saw

much military or yeah, much military hardware or planes or ships, except navy ships used to come in regularly.

About 10,000. Albany was 254 miles south of Perth. If you went to Perth it was day trip or you went by train, plane.

We had an airport. As a matter of fact it was a war time aerodrome but it was always normally by car or by train, and Perth was up there, you know, was up north. So Albany was quite isolated. A lot of people retired in Albany. It was a retirement town from the, say the farmers and the wheat belt because it was much cooler and it had a pretty staid population. It was

very old, old style of town, old town hall, a big street that used to run right down to the ocean on a steep hill and in between, nestled in between two mountains, Mount Clarence and gee, what was the other? I’ll think of it in a minute.

Well it was. I didn’t appreciate it then. We used to live up on this side of a hill. We rented this old house, corrugated iron house that overlooked the harbour for

a view nowadays that you’d pay millions for. Here was this house and I had the bedroom right at the front of the verandah and I never sort of paid any attention to it, but it was a fantastic position, a big yard at the back with a big fig tree and of course the toilet was right up the back of the yard, you know, one of the old thunder box type things. I used to have to take mum up there with a torch at night if we had to go, sit under the fig tree, you know, but I used to play in that fig tree ’cause it was a huge fig tree and eat the figs and

have a shanghai and try and shoot the green eyes that used to eat the figs, these little birds, but if you want to know what I did there I went to high school there. I went to a lovely high school, Albany High School surrounded by all this lovely lawns and layout and the topiary. We used to have this guy, I remember his name was John Colgate and he used to cut all these teatree bushes into all sorts of shapes and

beautiful high school, it was something, a double storey high school but it was a five year high school. It was the only five year high school in the whole Great Southern so we had kids coming from as far north as Katanning and Narrogin and they used to stay at boarding houses, but it was a public high school but the teachers used to wear grey suits and brown shoes, very conservative, but

I wasn’t a real good kid at school.

My favourite subject was actually physiological hygiene. I liked things about the body and biology and I liked things, hands on, of course all the metalwork, woodwork, technical drawing and anything outside because I was always looking out the window. When we got onto Shakespeare and you know, the real hard subjects and

English literature I used to wander. I wasn’t ever very, maths used to put me off terribly, or trigonometry or geometry ’cause that was too much concentration needed for that.

If I can express myself that was all right, that was fine, but you sat there being taught at. You know what I mean? You didn’t get involved in subjects like the kids do nowadays or

like the way adult teaching is nowadays. It was all being taught down to, you know. I think that sort of bored me, I couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t participate or make my contribution if you like.

Well I think it was a very low

level involvement. He tried to get into the air force but he got put back to like an air force level where he was in charge of repairing aircraft that used to come down from up north. So what he had, he used to tell me that he was in charge of six to ten women and he was the foreman and used to repair the bombers and so on at Essendon and Parafield. He used to tell me about stories

you know, these planes used to come in quite badly damaged. He used to wonder how they used to fly down there, but of course mostly Americans that was, Americans used to come on leave from Darwin and up north and of course they’d get their planes repaired and they used to load the planes up with all sorts of goodies and try and take off, and sometimes they used to crash tragically and he used to tell me about they used to,

they were that heavy with goods they never made it off the end of the runway. They used to clip the power lines. “Typical Americans at that time,” he said. Oh well, it wasn’t about why did the plane, they just put all the power lines underground, you know, where the Australians couldn’t do that sort of thing. They had it done within weeks.

Well,

my father, I’m a sort of generation out of the, my father married my mum when he was 40 and my mum would’ve been, he was 40 something and my mum would’ve been 20. It’s a tragic story actually. My father used to tell me what he’d done but I never really found out where he’d been and now up to 40 I suppose it was a bit strange those days

that he’d been around the countryside. I wouldn’t know where he’d been or what he got up to and I’ll tell you why in a minute because he got drowned when I was 18, but he met my mum in Tasmania and they were ballroom dancing around the countryside and they won many trophies as I showed you that photograph, Mum was quite attractive. Dad was very typical I suppose. He

was very strict in his way. Mum was, you know, I was closer to Mum than Dad. I think Dad told me stories. He’d seen a lot and grown up with a lot, so he was rather, I don’t, he was a rather stern man I suppose. I suppose I took on some of those traits later too, but when he was in Albany when we grew up, he used to love fishing and I used to go with him, sit on the cross bar of the bike

and away we’d go. He’d pedal this bike all over Albany, all over the hills and that was great, but as I grew away from my father he used to try and still interest me in fishing but I wasn’t so interested in it. When he was in Albany his job was he was a panel beater, spray painter there, then he became a house painter and I used to help him on my holidays paint houses. I used to get the job of doing the corrugated iron rooves, you know,

up on the top of the roof or paint the picket fences which is intricate and messy and he’d do the more straight forward job.

Oh yes. I couldn’t give cheek to my father or answer back. I did a couple of times and even when I was a teenager I

basically shaped up to him and he belted me, but I always remember a wonderful incident, I had a black labrador then. I’ve always been very close to animals, probably closer to animals than people. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but anyway the dog was very close and he used to jump in through the window and sleep on my bed and Mum and Dad, I think they knew but they, but my Dad raised, I raised my fist to my Dad and he was starting to belt me and the dog jumped up and bit him.

Now that’s something for a labrador. So he never, when the dog was around Dad never spoke to me or growled at me or raised a hand to me while the dog was there. So I always tried to have the dog around when I was sort of, if I was backchatting dad. So he was very wary after that. I suppose when you look back, it’s a bit sad that I never got to know my Dad more deeply

and what he did and what influenced his life because on my 18th birthday him and the next door neighbour went out fishing and were drowned and at that time I was sort of, I was down town in a small country town at the local milk bar. I was sitting there and of course I was known to the police but not as a criminal, in a small town everyone knew each other. He came along and he said, “Alan,”

he said, “Your dad hasn’t turned up, your mum’s reported,” and he said, “I think you better come down the station. I think we might’ve found them.” So I jumped in the police car and off we went, but they’d found Dad and I had to go down the morgue and identify him not much later.

I think that was the first time I’d ever seen a body.

It was my father laying there on the slab, which it was a slab. He still had his, as a matter of fact he still had all his clothes on, like he had his waders on. I suppose that’s one of the things that might’ve taken him down, like the main cause that he drowned, but they were fishing in an old flat bottomed boat in a very sort of calm estuary. It may have been that they’d got up to do those things that men do when they’re in boats

after a while, go to the toilet and the thing capsized. I only remember there was blood coming out of his nose so I immediately assumed much later that I suppose he may have been hit on the head with the boat or something like that knocked him out. I think he was a fairly reasonable swimmer but they did find them tangled in their fishing lines so I suppose they’re lucky that they didn’t drift away like people do

when they drown.

I suppose, well Mum was very, what do you say, very upset. Yeah, I think at that time it was such a great shock, especially the chap next door as well. He was single and a friend. They used to go out fishing

quite often. Mum was very upset but I, and I think Mum looked, not only that but later was the breadwinner at that stage. I’d only just started working. So I then was the breadwinner for mum. Being the only child, which I think wasn’t intentional; Mum did tell me they tried to have twins. I know I’m regressing a bit, when I was a kid

in South Australia one thing I did remember, when we were going on holiday Dad was going to Port Lincoln and on the way there we got washed away in a flood and we had one of those old Chrysler jalopies, you know, with a canvas hood. Anyway it got washed down the creek. I had a dog then too, a little dog. The dog went down the creek with the car. Anyway we managed to get up to a church on a hill and it was open and in the church, it was Christmas time and there was one of those Christmas trees in there and

being the German influence which I reflect now, the tree had biscuits on it as decorations. I don’t know whether you’ve got a German background but they used to decorate the trees with coloured biscuits. Anyway we had something to eat. Anyway the farmer found us next day and found our car been washed away. We were there a couple of days and then we moved on to, got the car ready and we stayed on the chap’s farm and went onto Port Lincoln, but when mum, I didn’t realise mum was pregnant then

but while she was in the hospital there a bush fire sprung up and the maternity wing burnt down, but she lost twins. So I would’ve had, not sure if they were twin brothers or sisters at that time. So that was, yeah, she lost the two babies. So going back to Albany being the old child, so I had to look after Mum when Dad was drowned. At that time

I’d been in the naval cadets for a year so I was interested in the services and then I was in the air force cadets which at that time of course every kid wanted to be a pilot, you know, fly a jet or a fighter. I went down and applied at recruiting. I said, “I want to be”, this is me at 15, 16. “Of course,

righto son, sit down we’ll give you the normal intelligence test.” I said, “Well I don’t think you can be”, they came back and said, “I don’t think you can be a pilot. We’d really like some people to look after the planes that the pilots fly. You’d make a perfect person to repair aeroplanes.” You know, they talk to you like that. I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “Like an air frame fitter”. Of course I didn’t know what that was. I thought, “Oh no, no, that’s not going to suit me”. So I canned

that. I never thought about it again until much later when I joined the CMF which was during, it was about the time when Dad died when I joined the CMF, so I was still in the Citizens’ Military Forces in Albany at the time. So I looked after Mum. When I say looked after that was the only income ’cause there weren’t, Mum didn’t, there weren’t any social service like widows’ pension or things like that. It was just my salary that myself and my Mum lived on

for I suppose 18 months, two years.

Gee, my mother, my lovely mother. My mum had such a tragic life. When she was with Dad, Dad married, she was actually thrown out of the home in Tasmania. Mum and dad, her mum and dad didn’t want to see her anymore after she’d taken up with Dad.

So years later we didn’t learn until her mum and dad had died and some of her sisters had died. It was only about 20 years ago that we were able to trace the family. Anyway so all that time she was separated from her family. Yeah, Mum was a very caring mother but I think she had a lot on her mind, you know, a lot of, she was, she found it,

I suppose she found it hard living with Dad being that age difference later on as a woman would, 22 years later as Dad got older I think there was difficulties for her, but living with Dad and he was quite, as I said before, a very conservative and stern person, she found it difficult but she was always very understanding with me and she was very protective of me,

but then again Dad didn’t want me to be spoilt being the only child. So I always thought I wasn’t but when I was a kid I used to gravitate to kids, other kids that had large families. One of my best mates was in a family of 15. I used to sit down at this table and his mum was a great big lady which you might imagine after 15 children, and her husband was a little guy.

He was a railway ganger and he was one of these guys that had, skinny little fellow and he had, lovely guy but he never said much, he had one of these grey flannelette shirts on and he used to have the baggy trousers with a belt tied around the middle of it, you know, the big broad belt, and used to sit down at this table with 15 kids. A lot of them were still at home when they were about 22, 23, but I used to enjoy their company because I liked being with other kids. I found it too,

what’s the word, boring or suppressing to be at home by myself.

Well at the Albany High School in your 3rd year, I think it was called 3rd year high school, be about year 10 now I suppose, you had to join, you didn’t have an option actually in those days. You had to join either the army cadets or the air force cadets. They had the navy cadets but they weren’t

integrated into the school at that time. I’d joined the navy cadets previous to that and I had to leave the naval cadets to join. The reason I got into the air force cadets, it wasn’t my choice. I wanted to join the army cadets but the army cadets were so popular that the only way that I could be eligible to join the army cadets I had to have some connection. Either your father had to be in the army or been in the army to join,

but all the other kids got first preference, most of them, so except those that wanted to be in the air force cadets, the others, we just ended up in the air force cadets but Ididn’t feel too bad about that because it was interesting. We virtually did the same thing as the army cadets. We ran around with, we were on the range with 303 rifles and we went away. One of the good things we went away to a place called

Pearce in Western Australia and that was the first time I got a flight on an aeroplane was in a Dakota over Perth and it had one of those observation bubbles up in the top of the aircraft and you could look out over Perth as it was circling. Then we went into a camp for three or four days with these guys that showed as all about booby traps and we were able to fire the submachine gun, it was a Thompson submachine

gun then and all these sort of things and I thought that was great. The army or the military side, style of life was, you know, I was very impressed with it and I felt happy, I felt comfortable with it. So the air force cadets was for one year only unfortunately.

I did, yes. I don’t know how, I think it was a discussion when

we were local fellows, the local around town. I joined the CMF, that was good for me because it got me away from, during the days when my father died, this is when he was drowned, I had a motor bike. My father didn’t know about it and I had a leather jacket and black jeans, that sort of thing, Marlon Brando style, yeah, but I used to keep it at my mate’s place but I don’t think those sort of guys were a good influence on

me but when I joined the CMF I met a complete different lot of fellows. They were all much like me. They were apprentices in either plumbers or fitters and turners or whatever or butchers or they worked in Telecom, at that time it was Telecom, and we all joined the CMF and at that time we were about 17, 18. I think we were sort of welcome with open arms and also I was very disappointed that I’d missed

out on National Service at that time. That was six months National Service then. When I joined the CMF there were a lot of fellows still doing their time there because that was part of the requirement to serve so much time in the CMF. So when I joined the CMF, oh, one good thing about the CMF was that at that time of course it was 21 years of age you were allowed to drink alcohol, but when we were in the CMF we could wear a uniform. We could go down to the canteen and drink

beer. So the guys were quite close and I don’t think any of us had cars at that stage. We used to cycle there on our pushbikes and when we were issued our uniforms and 303s [rifle], we used to throw our 303 over the shoulder and cycle home after the parade a bit wonky on the bike but cycle home, and of course one of the difficult things was the gaiters. You know the gaiters around you boots? When you got on your bike they’d fall under your pedals and get hooked

up, yeah. I come off my bike a couple of times with a little bit of drink I had and I’d blown my gaiters, but anyway that was great. It was a great group of companions and the guy that was the warrant officer who was the sort of regular army cadre at the army depot there, he was an ex-World War II Korean veteran and

he was a great guy. He wasn’t one of those “sar majors” you might read about but he was really a nice fellow.

I was at the woollen mills at that stage. I’d worked at the dry cleaners. I’d started off in the building trade and I was up in the ceilings plastering, doing all these sort of things ’cause I left school. I felt that I didn’t want to stay at school any longer ’cause in those days there were jobs. You could get a

job anywhere and it was nice to have all this money. All this money? It wasn’t much at all but it meant a lot then, and then I went to the dry cleaners. I was a trainee manager there where I learnt how to press clothes and run around and they had two or three dry cleaning shops, these people in Albany, but then I went, how it came about, I wanted to improve, I went and did a wool classing course at the local tech [technical college] at night.

The guy said, he worked at the woollen mills. He said, “If you want to come up, why don’t you apply at the woollen mills? There might be a job up there”. When I applied up there they didn’t have anything in wool classing or in that area where they were grading wool as it came into the woollen mills. They said, “We’ve got a job there as a trainee loom tuner”, and I didn’t know what that was but it sounded interesting so that was the job I got, a four year traineeship on being

a fitter on weaving machines, also pattern making. You know, on the loom.

Girls, well.

Yeah, there were I think. When you ask girls, the guys look away like I am and sort of usually try to recall.

Yeah, girls at that time I suppose I was rather, I was a shy fellow. I suppose all guys say they were shy but I was. I had a couple of girlfriends. I think the girls those days, and I think it’s probably the same now, they weren’t as, they weren’t so obvious as they are now. Girls were more interested in the guys than the guys were in the girls. The girls might hint but you just sort of brushed that off. Yeah, there were a couple of girls and

at that stage I enjoyed their company but my relationships weren’t all that serious if you know what I mean.

I think it was infantry training. It was an infantry support company training. What we were doing at that stage I think we were learning how to march and how to be in the military style of life. We had mortars and we had

at that stage I think they were 2.5 bazooka. We used to go out on field exercise around Albany which was great in those days because we could go out and sort of plonk ourself down on a piece of bush somewhere and do lower fire practices. You didn’t need all the authorities and things you might need nowadays, but yeah, we did that sort of training but also we did a lot of, I remember going to Northam

Army Camp as I mentioned, I think I didn’t show you but in the photos there we threw grenades and one of the things we did do, we used to go up by train actually to Northam Army Camp, all the way over 300 miles by train. You can imagine a bit like a troop train, all these kids if you like hanging out in carriages, you know. I suppose we got a bit wild but we used to travel away up there and then we’d have a big parade

in Perth, jump on another train from Northam Army Camp, take a couple of hours and go down and march through Perth. One of the things I did do that comes back with the CMF, you might recall the Commonwealth Games in Perth, I’ve forgotten what year it was. We were the main unit on the parade ground during the Commonwealth Games in Perth and we used to travel up from Albany every weekend religiously every three months to do

this training, all the way up and all the way back on a weekend just to do the march, you know the marching, march outside sort of training, but that was interesting.

Communism, well it was a mystery, wasn’t it? I don’t think I got to know much about socialism, communism at that stage until later. I

knew at that time that the communist terrorists were in Malaya or Malaysia at the time, but I don’t think it entered my mind. I didn’t know what communism was. To be honest I never got an inkling of what communism was until I joined the regular army.

Yes there were. There were veterans from the Second World War. Some of them had been tail gunners in aeroplanes, you know, been in the air force. Some had been in the Korean War.

No, not really.

I’m trying to think. One personality that did stand out was the warrant officer who was in the regular army, a fellow called Alan Tompkins. I’ve never forgotten his name, but Alan meant a lot to me later ’cause he was the guy that actually got me into the regular army ’cause I had difficulty getting into the regular army but I can cover that later if you like.

I think it was about, after about two years I’d been in the CMF, just over two years. I was in the CMF for about two and a half years. At that stage I’d been promoted to corporal and I didn’t know where my life might be going at the woollen mills and of course at that time

there were some nice brochures about things in the army and I was looking at these brochures and of course overseas travel and I could travel. Actually I could go to the eastern states and places like that. So it was all like that. I wanted to get away do my thing and the army appealed to me because I felt that I could make some contribution and improve my own life, you know. It looked like it was interesting. Even though I

was in the CMF, I was in the infantry at that time, what caught my eye was the unit I’d like to have, or the corps I’d like to have gone to was engineers. You know I wanted to be a plant operator. I could drive graders and bulldozers and all this sort of thing. I think it must’ve been when I was a kid playing in the sandpit, but that appealed to me. I thought the job I could have if I ever got out of the army.

That was traumatising because, at that time it was. I applied locally ’cause they had a local recruiting office but very basic anyway. I went to Perth, we used to travel up on the train again, when you travelled by train it was overnight by train, got to Perth and

did all the tests they asked you to do, all the intelligence tests and interviews and so on, and then the medical and X-rays. Anyway I felt reasonably confident, there was another half a dozen other young fellows there. I came back home and anyway a few weeks later I got this letter in the mail to say I wasn’t accepted because of a medical condition.

Well, I was only 18 at the time. I thought what medical condition it was, so I went to my local doctor who’d done the original medical tests before. Anyway he rang a day or so later and said, “You’ve got an enlarged heart”. He said, “I’ve asked for the X-rays”. Anyway, and when he told me that he said, “A large heart or aorta”,

and I thought, “The army won’t accept”, I thought I was gonna die within a matter of days or weeks, and of course I was rather worried. I went back to the warrant officer and I said, “What’s this all about?” I said, “You know, I didn’t know, I thought that was the end of my life, you know, normal life. I thought I’d be thrown out of the CMF.” Anyway he was very good about it and took up my cause

and followed it through, but what he did do for me and the local doctor, they said, “Anyway for the benefit either way we’ll really find out what this is all about”. Anyway I had many tests. I went back up to Perth a couple of times and had other tests and eventually they said, “Oh yes, we can’t categorically see that you’ve got something that’s going to harm you, but we’ll take you”.

In my own mind from then on I wanted to prove myself. I had to, it was sort of, they put me in a bit of a situation. The army accepted me but I felt I had to owe them something. Do you know what I mean? I had this opportunity to join the army, they gave me that impression, you know. So I thought well I’ll make the most of it and I’ll return the opportunity that they’ve given me. I’ll do my best, whatever I can do.

No. It didn’t mean anything at all. You make a good point because what I did from then on I pushed myself physically. The funny thing, I wanted something to happen. If it was going to happen I felt it should happen then. You know, I wanted to find out,

when I thought about the heart well nothing, it was something whether I was short of breath or I was going to have a heart attack or I couldn’t do physical things, I couldn’t run or I couldn’t do all those things, you know, a high level of activity, but from the day I joined the army or I was accepted I always tried to do a little bit more to find out if this was restricting me, was going to restrict me. When I looked at the photograph,

or sorry, the X-ray they pointed out this enlarged, well it didn’t look enlarged to me. I wouldn’t know what a heart looked like on an X-ray most times, but it, you know, it didn’t appear anything different to a normal heart. I was shown a normal X-ray and it wasn’t all that much difference but obviously they’d picked it up.

Oh very relieved. I was very relived, I was very excited, ’cause

when I was in the CMF one of those things I recall back when I was on a bush exercise around Northam I saw the regular army. As a matter of fact it was the SAS at that time when they were a company. They wore greens which we didn’t. We wore the old World War khaki or were dyed greens at the time and they had this black webbing on and they wore red berets. You know, they

were attached to us as trainers, an enemy. So I thought, “Oh gee, this looks good”. So that’s where I wanted to be. So when I joined the army I was sent to Perth and it was funny, there was a guy being thrown out of the regiment at the time, out of the company, SAS, and I met him and he had all the same gear on, you know. This is interesting; this is when I was at, what was the name of the place?

A personnel depot at Karakana, that’s right, in Perth before I was put on a train all the way to Wagga.

Well at that time she’d met another guy and she’d taken up with this other guy. He was a little Scotsman and

they were thinking about marrying. I don’t know whether that had an affect but I thought “This guy will look after mum so I won’t have to worry about mum and I really want to join the army.” so I took off. I think mum was happy for me, I’m sure she was.

When I joined the army

I went on, you know, when you travelled across by train you had to change trains at that time about four or five times so we went across in this group. As a matter of fact this ex-SAS guy looked after us. He was a sort of transit officer, took us all the way across I think because he was going across to the eastern states. We arrived at Wagga, got off the train, were taken on the back of a truck I think it was, a bus, and we did our recruit training at Pooka [Kapooka].

When I was at Kapooka I was told not to mention my previous time in the CMF because it was thought that that may come back on me by the instructors and I was glad I didn’t I suppose. Someone did mention it.

I think because at this stage at Kapooka the instructors were rather, not all of them. We had one particular instructor, a corporal,

that used to bite your ear if you didn’t, I know it might sound strange but you were standing there and you were being instructed on drill or something like that and if you didn’t do the right thing he’d come along and bite you on the ear. I mean that sounds

Literally bite you on the ear, yeah. A bit strange. So if you’ve ever been, I know you’ve never been

I know you’ve never been

under this sort of situation but they were rather like that. You were taken from being a, nowadays they would be, oh well, that would be terrible. Nowadays you just wouldn’t do it, but then I think you’d been taken from a civilian or most of the people never had anything to do with anything military. You’ve been taken from a civilian into a military environment and everything, this is the way of changing you

into being a military person. Everything was done on time, you know, everything was run to time, you had to change parades. You know, you’d run out in one uniform and race back in and told to change into something else and front up on parade five minutes later. I mentioned before you know, you’d have your bed perfectly made. If they came along and found something wrong in your locker they’d pull your whole locker over onto the floor or throw it out on the floor. You’d call it bastardisation nowadays, you know, that’s what it, I mean

intimidation and I suppose it was.

I think because, you’re sort of, even nowadays referred to reserves sometimes and that’s a shame ’cause I’ve always had a lot of time for reserves and because I became one

later, became a reservist later too, but I think because it was sort of cut lunch weekend soldiers, cut lunch commandoes, the terminology, or weekend soldiers.

Yeah, I think, well that’s right, World War II, the guys that went to the Kokoda. They were choccos, you know, and that was the attitude. That’s right, the regulars at that time, the fellows that came

from the Far East used to look down on them, you know. So it was better not to mention when I was at Kapooka that I’d been in the CMF, you know, because it might mean that I was a bit, I might be a bit too smart for my own good, you know what I mean? But that was different later though, when I went to Infantry Centre, but before I went to the Infantry Centre I always wanted to be an engineer so when it came to the selection at the end of Kapooka, they

said, “What would you like to be, what corps would you like to go to?” I said, “I want to be an engineer”. They looked down the documents and, “Oh you’ve been in the CMF, you were in the infantry. Oh no, we need people in infantry, you don’t need to go in engineers”. So the majority of the platoon out of that recruitment went to infantry ’cause at that stage of course it was obvious they were building up the infantry for another battalion they had in mind

so off I went to Ingleburn to the Infantry Centre.

Good. I enjoyed the training. The discipline and that sharp contrast from what I’d had in the CMF or civilian life was so much different. I mean it was so

full-on all the time. I wasn’t all that fit I admit at that time so I tried very very hard. One of the things I couldn’t do and I had to go back for a retest was I had to do these chin ups, but anyway I passed eventually thank heavens and we did education when we were in Kapooka. If you hadn’t finished a certain level of schooling you had to go and be re-educated if you like, normal high school

education but at the adult level.

I did eventually, I did eventually in the army. Yes, I did, later though because that was a precursor for your promotion.

Warrant officer.

Or eventually if you went to a commissioned rank.

I think there was no bastardisation done within the ranks because your mind was too, or physically you were on the go all the time and you were very tired but the instructors were very demanding. I think when you talk about bastardisation there was only one

or two instructors that were very demanding. At that time I didn’t feel intimidated but some of the fellows would’ve done if they were bitten on the ear or they were, you know, sort of, “Don’t look at me like that, keep your eyes to the front, if you do that again”, you know. Or they used to, you know, even just a butt stroke but it wasn’t, it was just, it was trying to intimidate you, frighten you to see what you were made of or whether

you reacted, but I think on inspections, you know, like the inspections during the hut inspections if you had something wrong, you know, they’d throw your gear out on the floor from your locker or turn your bed upside down. I think it was just to see what your reaction might be or if they felt that you weren’t pulling your weight properly.

I think that was to see whether you’d change your attitude. I didn’t have much of it done to myself.

Yeah, they were, I think people were singled out. I think if you’re a

little different, I mean to say if you look different or you may react different to different things or you appeared nervous I think they tended to single you out, but I think, yeah, I put my head down as others did and just took it as being part of what the requirement was, you know, to be at Kapooka. I think we were all glad to be out of Kapooka eventually. There weren’t many sort of respites if you know what I mean.

You used to be able to go up the canteen and have a beer. That was on a weekend, or if as you went on you used to get these tags on your shoulder how long you’d been there. After three weeks you’d get one, you’d get a red tag or I think it was six weeks half way through your training. You never got any leave while you were there except I think it was in the middle of your course. You got two weeks or a week off and there was no other, you didn’t get any town leave. That was half way through

and so for three months you didn’t really have all that much leave. You couldn’t see your parents or your girlfriend or your friends because Wagga at that time was a bit isolated, but I think also all those fellows from interstate wouldn’t be able to get home.

Well the time we were there it wasn’t too bad, the weather was. You could sleep on the floor. We used to get a greatcoat because we never had any civilians in our locker. They were all locked away. You didn’t see those until you went on leave so you’d put the greatcoat

on and just take the pillow off the bed and sleep on the floor, the idea was because the bed and the bed pane was stretched out flat and all the sheets and blankets were what they called boxed, they’re all folded up on the head of your bed. So they all had to be perfect and down the end of your bed was your webbing, so that all had to be laid out flat and all in place. So to save time,

and of course you had all your different shoes, your running shoes, your other set of boots, they were all in line under the bed. So it was, in the morning you were up at 6.00 o’clock, that was reveille. You’d be called out on parade, you’d run out on parade with whatever you had on. That was a roll call and you had to be out there at a certain time. If you didn’t get out there in at least two minutes they’d, time was so valuable

to you, if you didn’t get out there in time you were told to go back inside and get changed into something else and come out again. They’d do this two or three times until you got it perfect, but all that time the time was wasted. So half past 6.00 you had to be up, dressed, fully dressed, up and in a queue, not a queue sorry, on parade again to be marched up to the mess. So when you were marched up to the mess you were marched up there and you went through the kitchen and everyone had to go to breakfast. There wasn’t

any alternative and if you don’t want breakfast you still had to march up there. So when you came back from breakfast say at half past 6.00 of course there’d be 7.00 o’clock inspections so everyone had to run around and sweep the hut out, wash the hut out and everything else and inspect and you had to be ready for inspection at 7.00 and then they had another parade at quarter to 8.00. So time was very critical in the morning so that’s why some of us slept on the floor.

That was the basic training. We were then, once we were given our corps allocation, whether we went to infantry, armoured corps, engineers or whatever corps it may be, RAEME [Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers], we were then shipped off to our various corps

training areas. Now when I say shipped off we were bussed off. I recall we went by bus from Wagga to Ingleburn in Sydney. So when we arrived in Ingleburn we were under tents because there wasn’t enough, I think it was the Infantry Centre Depot they called the reinforcement depot at that time, there wasn’t enough barracks

for everyone so we ended up under tents. It wasn’t too bad because at that time of the year I think it was around about September, October. So we moved into the tented lines, there were these large tents which were up on duck boards and the sides were rolled up during the day and there was your bed and your locker up on duck boards during the day. So it wasn’t very private, there was about 10 or 12

in each tent. I enjoyed Ingleburn, I can tell you the reason why because that’s where my CMF training come to the fore because being in infantry I knew most of the minor tactics that we were going to be taught including map reading, which is very important and most of the other aspects of infantry training. That was

three months. I quite enjoyed that and of course, the attitude was quite different and we were allowed to go on leave on the weekends. We had greens, you know, starch greens. We used to wander off in Sydney in our greens and spend all weekend there and whoop it up and come back with no money. We used to have the girls buying us drinks in town because we’d run out of money and then we’d try to hop on the train and jump off the train before it got to

Liverpool. See all these guys jumping off the train, rather dangerous practice to do but I mean

Sydney was very dirty and grimy I thought because I was a country boy and I’d never been to a big city like Sydney before so it was a bit eye-opening for me to see a city like that. I’d been to

Perth but Perth at that time was much open, a big country town but the city was sort of, Sydney was dirty I thought, very very bland. We used to spend most of our time in the pub and these pubs would have a juke box, that’s about the only entertainment. We just sat down and drank. We used to stay at Johnny’s Naval House in Sydney which the army used to stay there with the

navy guys off the ships. We got on fairly well with the navy ’cause we used to share most of the same drinking holes, Woolloomooloo and all those places, Kings Cross, you know. There’s some stories there.

Being young soldiers we used to hang around the red light districts you know, but even on camera I could say that most of our guys were, at

that stage I was still shy. It wasn’t I was going down there for gratification or anything like that. We used to go down there because it was illegal then for a serviceman in uniform to roam the red light district of Kings Cross so they had the naval police and the military police. So every time they used to come we used to run off like, run off into the night. All the ladies were sort of paraded, they used to sit outside their

doors or in the windows and this sort of thing and we’d walk up and down and make remarks but we wouldn’t do that every weekend but most times I think it was a game, you know. When the redcaps, sorry when the military police used to come along we’d all disappear, you know, we’d all run away and then we’d all come back again once they’d gone. It was all a bit of a game.

Oh yeah.

Well it wasn’t all that much different actually. I mean it still had the same strip places, it still had the same sort of atmosphere, women touting on the street but I think it probably at that stage there were a lot more servicemen around because there were visiting American ships, Australian ships and then there was, see, we were all in uniform in those days so we were quite

obvious, and I think, you know the Cross, I think people would tell you it hasn’t changed all that much. I think they try and keep that character for some reason or another.

Mrs Turnbull, yeah.

Look, certainly

can. I mean nowadays it was interesting, later on I worked up there as a policeman, a federal policeman in the drug area so I know, you know, what never changes. There weren’t many drugs around in those days. Well I can’t recall any, I don’t recall seeing any. The drug was alcohol. There’s plenty of that around, it’s more common to see drunken sailors and so on.

No. No, we were a bit too young to take that in. It was all just a big adventure for us to be in Kings Cross or to be in Sydney ’cause remember a lot of these guys came from interstate. Some of them came from way out bush so it was all just a big adventure

just to do all these things. I can’t recall even in my platoon at Ingleburn whether there were guys from Sydney, like local. I don’t think there were, most of them were from the bush or interstate.

Oh it was. It was an education if you like. I mean that was the only way we learnt about life I suppose, yeah.

That all went by the way when I left Kapooka when I arrived at Infantry Centre. I was lucky at Infantry Centre, I don’t want to race ahead but at Infantry Centre I enjoyed the training there because it was something I was lucky to have done before and I felt, you know, near the end of my training I ended up being the best trainee for the platoon and the first

three places in the platoon we were offered which battalion we wanted to go to. One of those battalions at that time, the only battalion was overseas at that time was 3 Battalion in Malaysia and I said, ”Oh, can I go to Malaysia?” He said, “Oh yes”. I couldn’t believe it, I was overseas and I’d only been in the army six months. So

I think while we were at Ingleburn, you know, we thought, at that stage they talked about the communist terrorist and that was a follow-on from the communist terrorists in the ’50s, you know the communist terrorists up on the Thai Malay

border at that time. So at that stage when you’re talking about Sukarno Confrontation [Indonesian Confrontasi] later, that was only just starting to begin and I didn’t have all that much knowledge of that.

Not very much at all because at that time

you weren’t told. Like in the army you weren’t told about the politics behind or the moral reasons or the ethics of a conflict. I think it was just you were there to do a job. You know, if you were sent away by your government to go to Malaysia you just accepted that without question.

Malaysia. No, it was Malaysia.

Yeah, independence I’m trying to remember, I think independence, I think it was, I went up there in ’64 so I think independence must’ve been around about ’61. I’m not sure, around about that time. [actually August, 1957]

I was ecstatic, yeah. I went home on leave, told mum,

travelled all the way back home by train and had to be back in Sydney a couple of weeks later. Went to North Head which was the area I had to wait and I was the only person going, I was the individual. So I waited there and it was quite interesting. I was there for a period of time and I didn’t know when I was going. They were processing

my departure but I was a single person going as a reinforcement to the battalion in Malaysia, 3 Battalion and eventually I was taken out to Sydney Airport and put on a 707 and flew off. First time I’d ever been on a large plane like a 707. That wasn’t bad for a 19 year old and I arrived in Singapore at Changi Airport so,

I was met there by one chap and he took me off to the barracks in Singapore, it had a lovely set up. I’m trying to remember the name of the barracks but it was a very garden laid out setting and I stayed in Singapore for about three or four days while they found a train, or they processed me so I could go by train up to Malacca.

Well, my first impressions? This guy wanted to give me the first impressions. He was a corporal and he was in the transport business but he was given the job to look after me while I was there, while I was in transit so he took me into Singapore and of course he took me places like Bugis Street, you know and I don’t know if you know the story about Bugis Street?

Bugis Street was a dive or if you like it was a street where there were many bars and brothels and places like that and also, well this place he took me to I think he just wanted to see my reaction when we went to this bar and of course when we were in this particular bar these ladies were sitting at the table and started to

grope you, and I thought, “Gee, what’s”, again I’ve got to say that I was a bit embarrassed, you know. I looked at him and he looked at me and you know, he grinned and I thought, “Hello, what’s going on here?” I immediately twigged that he’d he’d brought me to a brothel type set up, to a bar, but little did I know these ladies were its, you know [transvestites], sort of thing. So of course when the night progressed on and they were trying to do other things to me I was terribly

embarrassed and I said, ”Oh, we’re going”, but he was laughing his head off. Anyway the next day he said, “I’ll take you to a nice place”, and the next day he took me to this place was a massage parlour, and being gullible and all, I thought I was going to get a nice massage anyway. These ladies massaged but they got into, they really got focussed on things after that and I got embarrassed again, but I thought it was pretty good, I thought, ”Gee,

this is the life in Malaysia, this will do me for the army”. So I left my watch behind as well so I had to go back and get it and that was even more embarrassing, you know, but the ladies kept my watch and gave it back to me, but that was sort of my introduction to Singapore. Singapore was very what I thought Asia might be like, you know, it was hustle and bustle, there were junks in the harbour, there were people on rickshaws and everything was, you know

and the smell, the first thing you got when you arrived in Singapore or a place like Asia was the smell of the cooking, and also the smells of garbage and human waste and things like that, but it was exotic if you know what I mean, and the heat ’cause everything was sort of like that. I’d heard so much about Singapore but it was the tropics and then when you went up into

the barracks everything was laid out beautifully, you know, so different to the city, laid out with lovely roads and lovely barrack buildings and everything like that. So it was very exotic, it was very different to what I’d ever imagined.

Travelled with some young girls. Well, when I got on the train to go up to Malacca, it was a little railway station out in the middle of nowhere called Tampin I think it is, and you

didn’t go first class. They just put me on the train by myself and I travelled with the goats if that’s the girls, and I travelled with the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and everything else and off I went. Now I was the only one on the train and it travelled overnight from Singapore and I didn’t know where I was going to get off so I assumed that everyone else was speaking in Malaysian or Bahasa, Malaysian. At that time I didn’t understand too much about what it was about.

Anyway in the middle of the night the train pulls up and the Malaysian conductor come down and said, “You’ve got to get off here”, and I thought, “Oh”, and I had my gear down in the guard’s van but he had it all on the station. It was a little station and I got off in the middle of the night about 2.00 or 3.00 o’clock in the morning and it was, you know, in the tropical night and I got off and unloaded my gear and

the train took off and left me there. I thought, “Oh, I wonder if they dropped me off in the wrong place”. Anyway I sat there and all of a sudden this Land Rover comes screeching down the road, you know, and pulled up and someon says, “Are you Private Stewart?” I said, “Yeah”. He said, “Get in”. I thought. “Hello, this is all”, loaded up my gear and threw it in the back and we took off, and this guy drove like a madman. I think he

was the battalion driver obviously and on the way back were weaving all over the road. People at that time were getting up early in the morning, you know, the ox carts were on the roads, very narrow roads, and people were going out. They were planting rice and all this sort of thing and it was a terrifying trip back. Anyway we arrived back at the battalion and I went up and he dropped me off at the company up on the hill and at that stage the only guys that were

awake were the guys in the arms corps. They used to look after the weapons in the armoury in case they got a call out so they could issue out anyway. This must’ve been about 4.00 o’clock in the morning, 3.00 or 4.00 o’clock in the morning and they said, “Oh look, we’ll just put you in your room where you’re going to sleep. Don’t worry about the guys down there”. So they took me over to this barracks block and there was an empty bed there and

the guys were in. They didn’t switch the lights on and they said, “If you like to just jump into bed, they’ll look after you tomorrow morning when you wake up”. I thought, “Oh, OK”. So I climbed into bed and these guys are looking out under the sheets at me like, there wasn’t anyone jumped out, “Hi, welcome here anyway”. Anyway I got to sleep eventually, you know, with the fans going. That was the first time I’d ever slept under fans in the tropics. Anyway next morning when I woke up the guys come over and said, “Oh yeah”,

this is about 6.00 o’clock or half past 6.00, you know, “Come and we’ll take you up to breakfast. Here’s a pair of shorts, here’s a pair of boots,” ’cause all my stuff hadn’t been unpacked by then, “Here’s a hat, come on, we’ll go up to breakfast”. Anyway, they took me up to the cook house and I had breakfast and I fronted up on parade and all I had was my dog tags, pair of shorts and a pair of boots and all these new people and I just fitted into the platoon. They all just glanced at me sideways. “Here’s the new reinforcement,

the guy that went back to Australia to do the officer’s course.” So that was my introduction to Malaya. It was entirely

Well it was, yeah.

Oh, that refers back to Singapore when I was down Bugis

Street, that was the lady boys, yeah. Yes, that was when we were talking about before, when we sat down and these girls were lady boys, were feeling, touching me up and all this sort of thing and I didn’t know what was going on. I thought, “This is very”, then anyway when this guy that was looking after me in Singapore said, “Oh yeah, you know these are guys?” I said, “What? ’Cause they were absolutely beautiful the way they were done up

and I said, “Oh no.” I jumped back, you know, I was very embarrassed and I said, “We’re leaving, we’re going”, you know. It was the first time I’d ever encountered anything like this. So

Well that’s right, yeah. I’d never been told anything about anything like this before. I couldn’t believe that there, my whole 18 months, two years in Malaysia

from then on was such an education to me. It was an eye opener ’cause we went on leave and I was taken around to all these places, you know, I was a young soldier being educated. A bit like the

Yeah.

Terendak.

Oh yeah, this is, I couldn’t believe this. After you go through Kapooka, you know, and everything you do yourself and Ingleburn, and then to arrive at a place where you’ve got your own boot boy. Here’s a boot boy polishes your boots and when you go on guard and all your greens and everything is laid out for you on the bed, and the laundry. You know, laundry comes, everything

comes back starched. You’ve got your own dhobi [laundry] mark. You know, out of the battalion there might be 1,000 but there’s a dhobi mark and it’s not your name. I can remember my dhobi mark was a little triangle with two dots at the bottom and that’s put on to every piece of your laundry, and in the laundry the laundry people know out of 800 people whose laundry it is.

A dhobi mark is just a mark. I don’t know how they can get 800 different marks,

but that’s what used to be on your uniform. They put it on the inside of your collar or wherever and that was your, like a signature. That was your actual name, you didn’t have a name, it was a dhobi mark.

I think it must’ve been a matter of weeks. At that time we were still training. It was a very much training orientated situation in Terendak.

I was in Charlie Company Terendak and one thing I remember about we had was, I had a very gruff platoon sarg and I had a company sergeant major was a, I never found out, he was a bloke called Jimmy Giddrick and as a matter of fact the other day I was reading the training team and there his photo was as a warrant officer in the training team in Vietnam,

but he was a big fellow, great lovely, lovely guy, really, but he was big like, he wasn’t Negro but he was sort of Indian features but he was a very well, what word, very noticeable as a particular type chap he was. Going back to what operation, I can’t remember what operation it was. I think we just went out on a job; we were doing some patrol or training.

It was only when later on we started to do operations, actually operations up on the Thai/Malay border. We used to fly out, we used to have what they call air portable. We used to have all our own kit, particular kit laid out and we used to have what they call air portable parades and they’d suddenly call those and we had to all get into our kit and go down to the parade ground and we were all lined up in companies and they’d come along and check that you had all the right gear because air portable

was you just jumped on trucks and they threw you onto an aeroplane.

Well, the term was that you all had to have your kit all ready to be flown out anyway. You could jump on a truck and then you’re going to the local airport and they’d put you on a British aircraft because the British Army used to run all the logistics and sport in Malaysia at the time and you’d fly off to wherever there may be a problem area or problem spot. So whatever kit you had that’s what you

went to war with. You know, there were other pieces of equipment they had, they had ammunition and everything which came separate of course but that was to be issued later.

It was not much different to what I had in Infantry Centre. It was just working as a platoon, working in sections even around Terendak at the time. My own attitude at that

stage I thought was a little slack, but these guys had been trained. I’d come up as a reinforcement so I’d come out of a very high intensity, intensive sort of training, Infantry Centre, and they’d been training to go to Malaysia probably two years beforehand. So they’d done all these things well before that. So they were only just sort of, the training they were doing around Terendak at the time they were just working up to work as a section or platoon away on

an op.

It was up on the Thai/Malay border. It was quite unique in a sense that when we went up there we travelled all the way by, I think it was that time by train, and when we were up on the Thai/Malay border we travelled at night time on the train and the train pulled up in the middle of the night and we all trooped off the train

as a battalion and the companies and platoons all went off in different directions at night up into the hills into the jungle. You just got off and away you went off into the bush, into the ulu as they call it, and you walked all night, stumbled over jungle and everything else and then in the morning or at night you’d go into the harbour defence and then move on under, probably took a day or so under, marched into or you

hiked into an area where you’d set up your operational area and that was an operational area that was a platoon area and these platoons were all out around the hills on the Thai/Malay border.

Yeah, harbour defence.

That was just laying out the sections in all round defence, you know, when you came in and one would go up to the 12.00 o’clock position and they’d peel off and you just had all round defence with the platoon headquarters

in the centre. That’s fairly common

defence posture.

Well the whole idea as we understood as young soldiers we were trying to interdict if you like anyone that came, counter terrorists. We knew the counter terrorists at that time were still, there was still a group up on the Thai/Malay

border but mainly they were operating over the border, moving backwards and forwards but they had their main camps on the Thai side. So the idea was to try and find a sign and set up, we used to set up night ambushes and lay in these night ambushes all night, just lay on the ground with our claymore mines set out in the ambush and lay there just all night waiting for someone to come down the track, but that never occurred.

We never saw any sign. What we did see one day, one of the other sections found this big dead tiger on the track. So someone had come down and shot it. Obviously we’d missed whoever it was and he’d just moved on.

Or communist terrorist, yeah.

Yeah.

Well it all goes back to the early days when Chin Peng was the head terrorist. As you know when Malaya was about to join into a federation, Chin Peng at that time in the ’50s, mid-50s, late-50s, he was trained originally by the British against the Japanese so they all set up

their communist cells and they set up their guerilla warfare and they carried out a campaign of sabotage and blowing up vehicles and at one time they assassinated the High Commissioner who happened to just wander into their ambush in the highlands, but after a while under intense pressure ’cause they moved back to the border, back to the safe areas and our campaign I think was, generally there was

more training than anything else but operations. We had to try and close the border even though there were Malaysian units or battalions at the time but they didn’t have very many units at that stage so the British and Australian units were doing most of that sort of work. So that was our prime role until Sukarno’s Confrontation

built up.

Yes, it was I suppose. We were looking for signs but never found anything. You know, we went out on patrols, we used to go out a day at a time from the platoon position and patrol all day, you know, just as a section and come back to the platoon at night.

I think it was all part of being an infantryman at that time. It was just your normal job. The preparation was done at a briefing where you were going to go out and what you were going to do or whether we were going out to do an ambush overnight or whether we were going out and sometimes we used to take the whole platoon and we used to go out and have to get an air drop. We never got any re-supply except by air. They’d drop into a jungle clearing.

I recall I got an infected leg which if you like was, went septic from a leech bite, you now there were so many leeches and mosquitoes in the area. A lot of the guys by the end, we were up there for two or three months, they ended up getting malaria or leptospirosis and things like that,

but anyway what I got was ended up with a septic leg and they had to drop antibiotics in as well ’cause after a while all your uniforms, you used to wear jungle boots and things like that, all the uniforms used to rot. They’d just fall off you, you know, they’d just rip because you were wet all the time with perspiration and the humidity.

Greens, just jungle greens, what they call jungle greens. They were British pattern with,

they were light weight. I think they were a light weight sort of specifically tailored or made for the jungles of Malaysia, you know, but at that time I think we were up there during the wet and during that time being in the jungle it’s always very wet, always high humidity and it didn’t take, took a week or two before the things used to, like our jungle boots, they just rotted off your feet. I can imagine what the

guys went through in the Second World War. They really had a hard time; they never got the re-supplies that we did.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

On the Thai/Malay border I think there were two or three months at a time, or a couple of months I’d say, yeah. I’m trying to remember, it’s a month or over a month or

two months, I’m not sure.

Yeah.

We used, they were the first I’d run into a claymore mine. That was something I wasn’t taught when I was at Infantry Centre, but they were the first time they were being used at that time, and as we used them in Vietnam we used them much more effectively. In Malaysia they were single directional mines.

So much C4 which is an explosive and ball bearings and they were just set up, they were only about not much bigger than a loaf of bread, weighed three or four kilos. I’m trying to remember the characteristics. I should remember those things.

You’d line it up by, used to have a little sighting mechanism on the top of the mine. You’d site up your directional sighting low down behind it and you’d put a detonator into the detonator well.

Used to have one either side and they’re still used quite effectively, run the cable back and they’re set off by an electrical current, little dynamo.

That’s right, yeah.

At that stage we had self-loading rifles, SLRs, 7.62, Owen machine,

sub machine guns, OMCs [Owen Machine Carbines]. For a section machine gun we had LMGs [Light Machine Guns] which were Bren guns, Second World War vintage but 7.62 Bren guns and that was virtually it. Sounds a bit archaic compared later in Vietnam but that’s the only, very, what we’d call it probably light infantry type

weapons.

Yeah, yeah. When I say tigers at night, there were bears. When we used to at night time, you could smell a tiger. Guys used to set you up of course and say, “I think I can smell a tiger, you know, wandering around” and next day we’d go out and find tiger pads in the mud

and you’d even find elephant pads in the jungle where elephants used to roam the jungle, I never thought possible as SAS later I found out to the detriment. One elephant, or one guy got killed trampled by an elephant, but there were elephants in the jungle. They were running wild and there were tigers and bears, and when you smell a cat or a tiger you could smell like, I don’t know, ever smelt a cat, you know that,

when a cat’s done wee in a corner somewhere like they are, just like that, yeah, but only much more so. So tigers used to circle the platoon at night or various times at night I think just as an opportunity. I know during that time there was one or two people actually taken. As a matter of fact there was a New Zealand fellow in the last,

in that period over the two or three years was taken by a tiger and a British soldier.

I think so, yeah, but you accepted that. You were among all the other fellows so I don’t think we weren’t all that worried about it. Most times we were up off the ground, that was the good thing about being in Malaysia. We used to sleep in a hammock. We’d

make, these hammocks were our own hammocks. We’d make them up out of parachute panels. Mainly those parachutes were the parachutes that used to be dropped to us on re-supplies and we’d take them down to the local village tailor or in Terendak, and he’d make up his hammocks for us. Funny thing about hammocks they used to have a spreader at the head and the bottom of course, and of course if the thing broke or sprung you’d hear these, they used to go out

like arrows, you know, you’d hear it sprung during the night and you’d hear thump, the guy would roll out. This used to occur quite often. You’d hear thump and cursing as someone got dumped on the ground unceremoniously in the middle of the night.

Yes.

I think because the positions we were in the ground was, there were that many roots and

vines and it was very hard in Malaysia to find, especially up in that area generally in Malaysia to find a flat area to sleep. So, and that was the accepted thing I think when I got there, everyone had a hammock and you didn’t worry so much. If anything was gonna happen you’d just fall out of your hammock, you know, immediately you were on the ground, lean over and there you were, you’d immediately land in among your webbing and your rifle and everything else.

Yeah.

Well most times. Lot of the guys used to sleep with their rifle or their weapon slung between the hammock so you could get at it quick.

Rain. Yeah, mainly in Malaya there’s a lot of rain. In the afternoon, every afternoon and at night it rained heavy. It was very wet and damp all the time.

Yes, yes. Lots

of crawly, creepy crawly things on the ground. Not only, the other things was leeches, they were everywhere, virtually and a lot of other things on the ground.

Not so much snakes, more insects and what they had up there was what they call chomper ants. I don’t know whether you’ve heard, these ants used to watch you when you bored in a position, you know like in an ambush or sitting in there on picket duty on the machine gun you’d watch

these ants and they’d come along the log and they would eat everything. They would just clear a trail through the jungle and just eat everything in front of it. So if you were there they’d eat your webbing. You could hear them coming. If you heard them you’d have to move your pack.

You’d hear the chomping, yeah, of them eating it. They’re like, sounds like piranha on the land don’t they, but that’s what they were like.

Yeah, yeah, we did. They used to eat through, they used to take, we used to spray a lot of our gear, make sure we didn’t get leeches and things like this around our trousers, the bottom of our trousers or even scrub typhus, the mites, you know. Had to stop all that sort of thing getting in your gear and mozzies, oh, mosquitoes up on the Thai/Malay border they used to bite through anything. There were thousands of them, there were clouds of them.

Yeah, we were taking Paladrin, it was similar to Atebrin I believe, every day or twice a day.

Used to make you a bit yellow but other than that it wasn’t too bad. We all took it pretty religiously. I don’t know of anyone that didn’t take it. It was

an offence not to take it ’cause you used to have even anywhere we went, a section commander, if say we were in Terendak on parade everyone would go along you’d take it there and physically take it. The sergeant would make sure you took it. Some, we’d just take it after a while without water, you know, you’d just put it in, but there was water available, but when we were in the bush the section commander would come around and give you your Paladrin and you’d take it every day. They used to mark it in the roll book actually

that you’d taken your Paladrin.

They were a British, what they call BT packs and people that might listen, I don’t know what BT, British something, but they were British ration packs like present day 24 hour Australian ration packs, but one thing that was good about the Brit packs they used to have a Mars bar in it. I couldn’t believe it, you know, here was a ration pack with a Mars bar.

Of course, and they used to have these big tins of Swift meat. I don’t know whether Swift is still around but they were made in Australia, these big tins of vegetables and meat, steak and vegetables I think they were, big tins, and what was the other thing? Oh, they had Danish sausages and kippers. Of course they must have kippers ’cause being Brits. You can’t imagine kippers can you, being out in the jungle and Danish sausages and the smell of course?

Wouldn’t it, yeah. I mean I don’t think it worried us in those days. There used to be a lot of trading off among people. Some people liked kippers and some people liked Danish sausages and so, but before you went bush like back at camp, but if you were in up on the Thai/Malay border this stuff was dropped into you, you know, in big tins of ration packs. So you ate virtually everything in the pack but a lot of trading between people. I remember one pocket I used to stick all the

Mars bars in, you know, but after a while they used to melt and there was just a soggy mess. You’d just put your fingers in; just take out a sticky mess, a mouthful of Mars bar.

Yeah, it was, it was a real energy build up. I think that was the idea of the Mars bar.

We used to do a lot of exercises

in between time, a lot of Commonwealth Brigade exercises ’cause we were part of the 28th Commonwealth Brigade which was Terendak. There was an Australian, New Zealand and British battalion but also close by there was a Ghurkha battalion and British armoured vehicles. So there were a lot of brigade exercises around the area. We used to travel all over, fly

away and then later on the tour we went off to Borneo. We went by ship would you believe? From Terendak we went out by assault boat and were put on this cargo, well it was a troop ship and off we went to Borneo and we went up the river in Sarawak up to Kuching

and I’ve only heard about Kuching but again that’s something that was hard to believe. It was this little enclave in Borneo up where they used to fire the gun at midday everyday, a big cannon.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a lovely place, I mean it was just very colonial.

Well when we went in there I,

being a young soldier I took all this in. It was sort of very oriental, it was like something, all big grass lawns and everything. Anyway before we knew it we were on trucks and we were shuttled off up into the bush to a place called Bau which was an old tin mine, a big hole in the ground. It was filled with water, and this is what we used to swim in actually. It was about 200 feet deep. It was blue water, must’ve been the affect of the tin on the water,

this big hole. Anyway that was our sort of rear camp and then we were flown from there up to a place called Sarikan, was a fort on the border, all these forts along the border. Each company had a responsibility for an area and a fort just like something I saw later in Vietnam that the French set up during the Indo-China war. Anyway this place was Sarikan. We used to call it

Sarikan of the Rats because the place was infested with rats and when we got there we took over from a Ghurkha unit. So we flew in, I remember I was on the advance party this time and so we took over and where you lived in these forts there was a company in each fort so there were three platoons there and you lived in the fort. You lived in among the sandbags in the holes, while we were there we improved

this fort, Sarikan base.

Well it was, I’m trying to remember. I think it was four-sided. It had a tower, like a tower machine gun and a searchlight and on each corner of the fort, you know, it was built of sandbags and corrugated iron and local timber. We were continually improving it, but also on one corner there was a fire support base.

There was a British artillery unit there and they had a 103 Howitzer set in on a round like in the corner of the base where they had their gun and that was our support, you know, if we went out on patrol and every night they used to fire H and I, harassment and interdiction fire, up on the border. So every night this gun would go off. You were trying to, you never got,

every time it went off you’d hear the round go over the top, shoo shoo, you know, and of course every time it went off all the sand and the rats used to get upset and fall out of the ceiling, fall out of the sandbags.

They used to have along the border where there were crossover points and one of the things in Borneo that the Indonesians were doing, they were sending across special force groups and particular

indigenous groups across the boarder to carry out terrorist acts and meet up with other groups, larger groups to carry out sabotage and, well guerilla acts in Sarawak at the time and that was all up and down the border, and where the crossing points were that was where the harassment and interdiction fire used to go. They used it in Vietnam as well. So

Well I think we were pretty well aware that at that time that Sukarno didn’t want, he felt threatened by the Malaysian Federation that had already come into being. So he felt that the Brits, you know, the colonial side, he didn’t want that to occur, but I think also he was having problems with his own internal things at the moment because there was a very strong communist

party in Indonesia at the time. So it was very much, what he was doing on the Malayan, on the mainland as well as in Borneo was sending these small groups across. Even in Malaysia we were called out there but we, one of the companies went out and were involved in a fire fight in a swamp which is quite funny for two days.

No, no.

No. We went as standby company. They were, it was Delta Company I remember at the time.

Oh yeah.

Well that wasn’t, before I get to that,

the Ghurkhas were issued as we were, when we were even on the Thai/Malay border we were part of the issue, we used to get a demijohn of rum, a large demijohn of rum for the platoon and that was issued each night. You used to get an issue. Sounds like the navy, doesn’t it, Royal Navy, but that used to be the issue and that was part of tradition anyway. When we arrived at Sarikan the Ghurkhas were still there. We were the advance party anyway.

Unfortunately we talked the Ghurkhas into giving a little bit more than the issue rum to us, a little bit more. They’d had a stash ’cause they’d been there for a while, they had a stash stored away there and we got on the grog that night and it was our duty to go on the gun that night of course as it was, but there was a bit of firing that night. I think we brassed up a few pigs that had come into the wire. I think that might’ve been a bit, anyway they got into trouble

’cause they had mainly British officers as their platoon commanders and company commanders and anyway they were very embarrassed.

They did, yeah. These horrible Australians led them astray.

Oh yeah, yeah, they were good little fellows, they were, yeah, very friendly and they’d like a drink of rum.

Oh, not very long after. We used to go off in platoon. The border was on a watershed and of course, we’re down in the valley on the Borneo side and East Kalimantan was on the other side so we had to travel right up onto the border on the watershed to patrol the border

and most times, I think it’s well known, we used to go over the border. What the Indonesians used to do, every now and then we were subject to a couple of times Indonesians were over the other side of the border but they used to run up, the Ebans[?] used to trade on the border between both sides and they’d be in the middle in a little market, but what the Indonesians used to do is run up behind the Ebans on a market day, set down with a mortar and fire a couple of rounds at us then

zip across back across the border. After a while we had a thing called a, it was a direction finder, artillery location battery that was set up with the gun for the Brit gun unit, and they used to try and locate this mortar before it, because mortar was a great thing, always was, to set up and fire a few rounds and then bug out again.

Yeah, oh yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Not much. They used to get their location battery and used to fire rounds back but they were too frightened, or I think they were very careful not to upset the locals in hitting the locals but sometimes they used to send the platoons out to try and ambush them to do this all up in the hills overlooking, and direct fire into the area. Sometimes, I don’t think it was very successful

Ah. We were patrolling initially but after a while we started to set up ambushes over the border on the river on their supply lines.

That’s right.

He was the company commander. Blue was, Blue Hodginson he was a character. I mean when I say character a very fine soldier you might think. He was, I think his background was a farmer and I found out later he’d actually moved to Canberra and I met him later, years later and he

still had this fine stature, a big fellow and he used to walk like he’d been riding horses, you know. This is just meant to Blue if he ever sees me, he was a fine man yeah, a very, always knew what he wanted to do. As a matter of fact, when the Australians started to ambush over the border he used lead, the platoon commander, but he used to be in it too, the platoon, the company commander

was actually going over the border with the platoon. So a very aggressive sort of person but as you might imagine a very fine sort of soldier, yeah.

Oh he was, yeah.

I think that was after, I think we were three months in Borneo. It was after about a month or so. I think that was to, I don’t know what policy it was. I think it was something that was quite secret and was for many years after at that time.

I think it was just, what I saw

it as at the time was that we were on the offensive. So when I say on the offensive we were just to respond to something before they got us if you know what I mean, ’cause what they were doing they were using the bases across the border to send out these excursions over the border into places like Kuching and so on. So

Oh yeah, they’d travel.

Yeah, travel hundreds of miles, overlander. You could,

many times we picked up a sign on the border where they’d had these little overnight camps. They didn’t hide the sign or I don’t suppose they were trained to even though there were Indonesian Special Forces with them at the time.

No. Sometimes they were people that originally had been in the area, been trained by the Indonesians

and sent back, were coming back and some of them were bringing back Special Forces people with them you know.

The idea was to get into the urban population. They carried out some ambushes and bomb attacks in Kuching at the time and populated areas that were closer on the coast at that time.

Oh yeah, they were very, very

covert. They were travelling inland mostly away from tracks. They used to follow the ridge lines, you know.

We knew at that time, I never was involved in an ambush on a river. Mainly there were

a couple on a river where they were being resupplied, the Indonesians being resupplied. We were a back up, remember a couple of times we were on the border because as the platoons went deeper into the east, I think it was West Kalimantan, yeah, East Kalimantan I should say, on the border area they needed a sort of a backup if you like, a support base as they came back through after they carried out the

ambush they would come back over the border.

Oh yes, they used to put a platoon along the river bank and as the boats used to come up the river with their resupplies and their reinforcements they’d ambush the boats on the water, quite successful a couple of times.

Yeah.

Right, yeah and that’s

what they were doing and very successful.

I think it was the relationship with Indonesia at the time which was always, even nowadays is tentative, you know. At that time I think the arrangement was that when we were in Borneo we were holding the border, you know, we were patrolling the border from excursions and I think it would’ve been embarrassing to say we were on the offensive to stop this going over the border.

So I think that would, and also I probably thought at the time all this dialogue was going on to try and stop the, you know, the confrontation so I think that was best not said at the time. Of course you’ve got to remember that SAS at the time, the Australian SAS and the British SAS were operating well over in, over the border as well.

Oh yes, yes. They were

doing reconnaissance and ambush and so on.

The landscape itself very typical rainforest, you know, jungle. Mainly, except where the locals had been where they’d cut down the jungle as they do, they burn off and put a garden in and then when they’ve done the garden,

like bananas, tapioca or other like yams and that they would move on, leave it, but mainly it was all tropical rainforest, big buttress trees, all that sort of thing. Under foot, except near the slopes, it was quite clear, it was quite open, you know, very steep, very steep.

No, it was just a range of mountains, range of mountain on the

watershed. When you were leading up there it used to be very very hot, you know, they used to call the lalang which is what we call in New Guinea kunai was that long grass, and to get through that you probably had to walk for half a day up through that, very very hot to get right up until you got into the rainforest and we used to hate the march up into the hills because it took so long in the heat of the day and was so exhausting

and then when you got into the rainforest it’d be fantastic.

Oh yes, yeah.

Probably every week or so. We’d be out there for a week or maybe two weeks, then come back, then go out again patrolling all along the border, over the border.

In Borneo

we got mortared a couple of times and had the mortars crashing down around us probably 200, 300 metres away but they were sort of firing wildly. They weren’t sure where we were anyway on the border. The only significant thing, I always remember we had to go back up and relieve another unit up on the border. One of the guys had stepped on a mine, that was when the Indonesians had put out along the border, put out these M16

jumping jack mine as they’re commonly called. They’re the mines that took such a heavy toll in Vietnam.

A bloke called Reno Whelan. When we went up there he’d stepped, a sergeant he was, he was an ex-SAS member too before he went to 3 Battalion, a company member. His name is on the rock, but anyway he’d stepped on a mine and blown him

apart and I remember the guys who were coming off there, it was my first sort of, his parts were carried in what were called food bags. I think there were two or three food bags. These are these British issue food bags, they were a sort of canvas type bag, and that was all his remains was left of him.

Quite a bit of impact, yeah.

It brought to home something like mines I think are very terrifying and so on because you don’t know where, from then on there were two people killed with mines in Borneo. From then on we’d always keep away from the typical tracks or on ridge lines around the border area ’cause that’s where the Indonesians planted these mines.

That’s right, yeah.

Ridge lines. Where the ridge lines, like the high point across the border where all these tracks or ridge lines that go across, before confrontation, they were all used as crossing points normally everyday, so that they were all tracks, even the animal tracks would follow them, so most times we’d contour. Do you know what I mean by contour?

Contour along the side of the hills anywhere near the border.

Oh, it wasn’t so much, yeah, I suppose it was a war of nerves. It wasn’t, I think we were there, we knew we were there to stop the excursions into Sarawak at the time but I think the Indonesians had the idea they were playing the war of nerves. I think that’s why we decided to, or why the

powers to be at the time decided to go on the offensive, have offensive operations over the border, and I think that did work because the Indonesians, once that occurred they didn’t come up with their, they stopped doing their sneaky bit with the mortar, racing up on the market days and throwing a few rounds here and there.

Oh for sure.

You’ve got to remember they had a resupply coming up the river. They used the main rivers to supply their camps on the other side, you know their own defensive camps on the other side. So they got very very wary about travelling on rivers so everything got slowed down considerably, you know, trying to resupply and move their reinforcements up to the border.

Lots of gear.

Lots of gear. Excuse me. I was a Bren gunner by the time we got to Borneo so I carried the gun and I carried spare magazines. I had a 2IC [second in command] who was number 2 on the gun but I had about four or five magazines on me plus the gun, the Bren gun around my neck plus we had to carry water ’cause once we were up on the ridge lines during the dry we couldn’t, plus all our seven days ration.

Pulling up right from the base, right down on the plain, right up into the watershed, we must’ve been carrying about 90, I know it sounds a lot of weight, but 90 to 100 kilos of weight, packs full and all ammunition, claymore mine.

It did, really did. Some people did suffer from heat exhaustion, not a

lot but a few very badly.

Yeah, especially when we were tying to pull up out of the valley up into the hill carrying such a lot of weight.

We’d have to take all their gear off and put them in the shade and wait until they recovered, most of them went on. So we couldn’t hang around out in the open too long that’s all.

Oh it was a platoon, about 25 to 30 people, yeah. You’ve got the platoon commander, the platoon sergeant and the three sections, nine, ten people there.

No, they were all Australians.

Yeah, all Australians from the same 8 Platoon it was I was with at the time, Charlie Company, 3 Battalion.

My platoon commander, as a matter of fact my young platoon commander, he was only a very young subaltern at that stage. He ended up being my squadron commander in the SAS regiment much later.

I don’t think it was, I think we always felt, we didn’t feel it stressful in the jungle, in the rainforest or the jungle itself. It wasn’t stressful. I think that’s where you felt, most of us felt at home. I mean not at home but it was, you were, except for heavy rain where it got very very muddy I think it was

much easier to, it was cooler. I think we used the jungle to our best advantage. I think what Australian troops mainly were trained in before they went anywhere. So we used to move as a section. A lot of the time we were on tracks because it meant we could move faster. It wasn’t safe but I think we felt we had superiority but even when we contoured and went across it was

fine. I think we felt that we were just as good as anybody else, as the Indonesians at the time or their, you know, their indigenous forces they were using.

The border patrol itself was about a week or two weeks and then you went back and resupplied and

another platoon went out or they rotated. There always had to be one platoon back at the base at the fort as protection, you know, to provide protection for the company headquarters and the gun, you know, the 105 Howitzer, Back Howitzer it was.

I think it was up to about three months

and then we were relieved by Ghurkhas again. We flew out to the HMAS Albion which was a sister ship to the [HMAS] Melbourne actually and the [HMAS] Sydney, the Australian Navy. They flew us out in a Wessex helicopter and then we shipped back to Terendak after three months I think. Yeah, that’s right; a Ghurkha battalion took over from us, yeah.

Before I go there, there was an interesting point going back to when we went back to Bau we were relived back at the, and we went back as a standby group. While we were there we, I’ve got to tell you the story.

I picked up bloody crabs off the toilet seat and that’s the very truth of it too. Don’t look at me like that. The thing about it was that when we were out patrolling

everyone knew that I’d picked up these gentlemen crabs and I was isolated away from the rest of the section so I had my own little area that was where I slept, but I had this aerosol bomb and I had to spray myself every night with this aerosol can. Of course, I don’t know whether you know crabs but they lay their eggs on every bit of hair on your body. There was one option, to be sprayed with this aerosol can or be shaved completely including your hair

all over, you know so that they wouldn’t affix themselves. So at this camp, we got redeployed out there on a 3 Para [3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment] on a border got attacked by an Indonesian group and we reacted. We got flown out and flown in the next morning after the attack. We tried to follow the Indonesians up but they got back over the border. We had tracking dogs as well but that was a bit of excitement. We saw what the camp looked

like when it was overrun.

No, this is after we went back to the rest camp at Bau in Borneo and we’re the ready reaction force.

About midway. We were back there for about two weeks and we were put on ready reaction. We didn’t, we weren’t there long. In between picking up bloody crabs and reacting we were out there, we were there

for a week and then got flown out for another week searching along the border for these Indonesians that made the attack on this 3 Para camp. When we got out there of course I think the 3 Para had suffered a couple killed. The Indonesians had lost a few but they’d made it back across the border.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Oh it was mainly just,

as a matter of fact the (UNCLEAR) had lost an eye and he was still there at the time, but yeah it was, they put up a pretty good fight the 3 Para people but the Indonesians didn’t actually capture the camp. They tried but they were unsuccessful.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Well they were another little fort along the border but

they were up on a little knoll as I remember it and they had a very tight little camp, a little fort like up on the top of the hill and unfortunately they were surrounded by jungle and they’d cut the jungle back I suppose about 200 or 300 metres and put wire, concertina barbed wire but of course the Indonesians would’ve been able to walk up right to the edge of the jungle and then fired on them from there. So you know,

yeah, there was, you could see where they’d fired rocket launchers, RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] which is the first time we’d encountered these sort of things. RPGs have been around for 30 years now. They still use them, rocket propelled grenades. I can tell you later about those

It was, and you know what I had to do as well? I had to; they gave me this long comb. So when I sprayed with the

aerosol I had to comb all these things out and crack the eggs. Oh, it was….

Oh, about three or four days.

No, no. No showers, no, nothing of that.

Yeah, the aerosol was quite a challenge, but the medic used to check me every second day to make sure I was doing it so it did work out in the

end, yeah.

Not that I recall. This is what made me so worried. No one else, unless they weren’t letting on, but no, I don’t think I can recall anyone else but they were worried that they were gonna be infected because they were highly infectious things.

As I recall I think we went back into normal training. At that stage I think confrontation

was starting to wind down. We ended up doing some patrols, like we ended up doing what I might call patrol but check points along river mouths. We got these aluminium assault boats and we had a searchlight and we had a group of probably about a section of people and we used to sleep in this little sandbag bunker system right on the river and we’d go out and check fishing boats coming and going day and night.

Along the coast, yeah.

Yeah. No no no, in Malaysia on the Malay Peninsula. I think I remember north of up around about between Port Dixon and Malacca on the coast. Yeah, there were a couple of river entries to the sea where the fishermen used to go out and fish and come back in, but they were always so problem areas for infiltration. A lot of the infiltration was coming in by boat from Indonesia because it was only

20 minutes away by fast boat.

No, no. We didn’t see anyone. We used to get out there and go through the fish at night and switch the searchlights on these boats and yell out, “Bahinti!” which is Malaysian for stop, and then we’d race out in our boat and do a check but I think after a while they just avoided us, didn’t come into that place on the river, you know, ’cause they could’ve picked anywhere up the coast.

Oh yeah, yeah. There’s some funny sights, some funny fish.

Well one day they come in with this huge swordfish, you know those fish, you know these things with the big tooth on the, yeah, had one of those and amazing, was about 20 foot long and it took up the whole boat. When we got on there we wondered what this thing was hanging, the bill was hanging over one end and the

tail was hanging out the other end. They’d caught this huge fish and it was still tangled up in the net.

Well the whole village must’ve rejoiced. Yeah, they did.

Yeah. When I, I don’t know how the selection came about but we, a group of us out of the whole battalion, I think there must’ve been about 20 or 30 of us were left a couple of

or a few weeks before the battalion was due back after the tour. The battalion was going back to South Australia, back to a place called Woodside up in the hills or that. I don’t think very many were too happy about that because they originally left from Enoggera in Brisbane so there was a big difference from Brisbane to Woodside. So anyway we went back to Ingleburn and we were immediately put into, went into training as

instructors ’cause at that time National Service, the ballot came up. So, and they were starting up new basic recruit training camps and basic infantry camps, training camps at Singleton and Puckapunyal and Ingleburn.

I think there were about 20. We were a special group from the battalion plus there were a few others.

We were there for about three to four weeks training as instructors, as infantry instructors on infantry tactics. So being back from Borneo we were the old stagers at that time ’cause no one had been to Vietnam up to that time, very close. I think one battalion would’ve been leaving at that time to go to Saigon and Bien Hoa. So we finished there we were farmed out to each one of those

establishments as instructors. I was lucky enough, I think I was lucky or selected to stay at Ingleburn which was good for me. The only thing about staying at Ingleburn was that I ended up getting back the same RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major] that I’d only what, 18 months previous I’d been there at the Infantry Centre and there was a bloke called Gunner Stephenson. He was a real old gruff old bloke and he had, he also had this big Alsatian dog used to follow him everywhere

and when I was there I ended up living at the rest of the hut with the trainees. I had my own little room at the end and that was, I was very much in focus there because I had to keep my room spick and span like the rest of the trainees had to. A couple of times I ended up doing extra weekends guard room duties ’cause we were corporals at an establishment where most of the instructors prior to that were sergeants

at the Infantry Centre. It was a bit prestigious to be posted there actually if you were a sergeant in infantry, and we were corporals sort of running around doing sergeant’s duties. As corporals we used to wear a red sash which was a sergeant’s sash which was most unusual.

The RSM.

Yes, oh yes. I got caught out a couple of times when they had room inspections and the OC [Officer Commanding] of the Depot Company wanted to have a look at my room.

He said, “Oh corp, we might have a look at your room as well”. I opened the door and oh, I’d had a bad night out that weekend, wasn’t really up to standard so I ended up getting a few extra duties as well when I was guard commander up at the front gate. Everything was so, used to have to do the normal change the guard and new guard and old guard and formal guard every time you came in the gate and used to have piped bugle music for reveille and

it was really very formal in that way.

Oh yes, an Infantry Centre, when the guard was. The RSM, his office was in a little room or little hut right across on the main gate so he was able to see everything you did. In the guard room everything was polished including the drawing pins and the brass fittings around the lights and the taps, you know brass taps, everything was highly polished.

Drawing pins, no, I’m not joking.

Oh yeah. We used to go through some cans of Brasso. All the trainees used to, of course when you slept on guard duty like they’d be there all night, they’d just sleep completely, they’d come back after, hand their rifle in and just sleep completely kitted out fully (UNCLEAR) and just lay on the bed. It was to get a couple of hours shut eye,

you know.

What, the national servicemen?

Very good actually, they were good, they were a good bunch of blokes mostly they were. I only had one in with a national serviceman. I don’t know whether it was particularly because he was national service or not. I think it was, I don’t think he was, when I say that I’m not saying he was a conscientious objector for being there, I think he just because, remember they were mostly, being 20

they were mostly older than the regulars most of them at that time.

No, the regulars were much younger. They were only 18, 19 like when I joined.

Oh, I’m just trying to recall now. I think it was to do when I was inspecting the lines and I said something to him and he told me to go and get stuffed. So I said, “Do you really, are you gonna do that or are you really telling me to do that?” In those days it was a bit like, he said, “Yes,

I am”. He said “Get stuffed.” so I said, you know, it was like, “I don’t know whether you recall.” he said, “Corporal.” and I was a corporal and you say, “We have to escort this man up to the guard room. So you’re under arrest, you’re being charged with insubordination.” So left right, left right. So up he goes and marches up the guard room, clang, you put him in the cells. Sign in what he’s going to be charged for and you charge him.

A bit straight forward.

I suppose, yeah. I mean law, military law has changed a lot since then, a bit arbitrary in those days.

Well after that, that’s happened to me. I’ve got charged a couple of times. You know, you frame the charge. He would be told what he’s charged with. He didn’t have a defence or he didn’t

offer any facts except the facts were offered when you march the man in to the charging officer or presiding officer. You’d march him in, escort one pace back, you know, march left right, left right, you know knees up, halt and escort one pace back and then the officers used to say, “What’s the evidence?” You’d read out the evidence, that he did on so and so, and he’d ask him, “Is this correct?”

Not many times I think somebody said, no, it wasn’t correct, and then he’d have an action of the charges under that particular charge and he’d read out the verdict, this particular guy got taken off to the corrective military establishment.

Yeah, it was a place where you got locked up for insubordination and if you’ve

ever been there it’s a place where it’s something like out of, what was that place in that film on Singapore where march them up and down certain areas and they call out where they are and they go back in their cell. They lock them up and they polish things all day, oh, very archaic. You wouldn’t believe what it was like. I think he spent a month or two there.

I didn’t think much about it at the time. I think the reason is we were obviously involved in Vietnam and Malaysia. I thought well, they’ve made a decision that obviously there’s not enough, there’s not enough in the army to do the task that we’ve been asked to do, but later on

when the, you know, months later the way they were doing it I thought that’s totally unfair. Not unfair but at the time there were so many people that wanted to be there anyway, why not all the people at that age? Why select a few that come out on a marble, on a lottery?

Ah, at that stage not all that much. While I was there at that time , as a matter of fact I was training a lot of the guys that got killed at Long Tan I knew, they were trainees. Not a lot.

No, not all of them. Remember when I was at Infantry Centre

we didn’t have complete national service platoons. They were mixed with regulars and national servicemen. Some of them were national and when I say I knew a lot of them, I knew a few of them that got killed, you know, and they sort of impressed me at that stage, but they were killed at Long Tan.

Pretty good, yeah. I mean there’s always a bit of badgering,

but no, pretty good. As I said before most of the national servicemen were at 20, 21, sometimes they were 22 later on ’cause they’d put off their call up, they were much older than the regular army guys most times. They were, on the majority they were.

Yeah, that’s what I say. So the other guys, the regular army guys looked up to them. You’ve got to remember that also

the regular army guys a lot of them like I was probably one of the few that when I joined, not all of them, but one of the lucky ones that had been employed before I joined the army so the national servicemen had jobs, good, you know. Some of them were all sorts of areas of professionalism they’d been in so a lot of them were pretty bright. They were pretty bright guys.

Well I didn’t get married until much later so I didn’t see my parents. No, I didn’t see, or my mother much at all.

That’s right, yeah. I was still in Sydney.

I was going into sort of, I’d bought myself a car on Parramatta Road.

Still the same. Bought this old battered grey Cortina. I was whizzing off and socialising at the Crossroads Pub just down the road and off into town. I’d met a couple of ladies which I had a relationship then. One was very embarrassing to me. I mean….

Well she was an older lady. I suppose she was about, I was only about 22, 23 and she would’ve been about

30 I think. I suppose that’s a lot older than me and when we broke up this lady used to stomp into the guard room up at the Infantry Centre demanding to see me, and of course it was very embarrassing. The RSM used to go off his rocker. So I got a couple of extra weekends because of this lady, but never mind. I think she got the message after a while. She wasn’t happy

that I’d departed. So, she used to park her car right at the front gate or she’d pull up into the soldier there and she’d say, “Can I see, speak to Corporal Stewart?” I used to tell the guard, I said, “I’m not here”. She knew I was there, yeah, so it went on for a couple of weeks like that, yeah, but I used to go into town but at that stage with the car I got, I used to travel a little bit more widely, go down to the beach and that sort of thing.

Well I wasn’t approached.

Yes, it was a stage when I think the rumour went around that the SAS selection team were going to arrive at the Infantry Centre to select people. As a matter of fact they were looking at selecting NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers] for trainees which

would’ve graduate from the Infantry Centre. Anyway I got to hear about it and another mate of mine got to hear about it. He was with me, like we’d come from 3 Battalion and we went down and asked the OC at the time, the depot commander, could we get an interview, when I said for myself and I mentioned Ian Ramsay was his name and I said, “We’d like

to be interviewed”, and he said, “No, no way would we release you anyway”. I was very disappointed.

I think being the run of the mill type of interview I remember there were three people there and I remember there was the, I can’t even remember the names but there was a psychologist and I think there was a

CO or the 2IC of the regiment at the time and one other person I can’t recall, but we sat down and I answered off I think for about an hour before the questions where I’d been and what I’d done and so on, and I never thought any more about it. I really thought that was a sort of lead in for a more in depth sort of interview and I never thought anymore about it after that. I mean I wanted to go to

SAS because I’d seen them there when I was in the CMF, you know, and being a West Australian I thought, “Oh gee, that would be good”, but I really thought they were the place where I wanted to be. I think after when I was at the Infantry Centre when I was training there I thought, “Well where else could I want to go to where I could learn more or I can do something different?” And at that time the definition of what SAS was going to do

I saw in the coming years wasn’t all that clear but it became clearer to me later. When I say later I warmed to the idea that I’d like to operate in small groups and things like that and I thought, “Oh gee, that would be better than what I experienced in Malaysia and Borneo”, where if you’ve ever ploughed along in a company or a battalion at night or during the day and you’re one behind the other and you stop and then you start and you never know what’s going on up

the front, but I’ll highlight that more later on when I went back to Vietnam and I was attached to a New Zealand company and that sort of thing happened as well when I was taking them back into another area. I had that same sort of déjà vu if you like.

I think it was my previous prior knowledge that I’d had back in

my early days. Then the SAS didn’t as I recall, didn’t have a very strong public relations campaign. I think they at that stage they just started to build up their numbers and they never really got into the public relations area and they were just starting to build up. They wanted more numbers in anticipation to their future commitment and I’d recall the earlier days and the guy that I

went to the interview with or the guy that I was with when we stopped and talked to the interview people that came out of the officers’ mess at Ingleburn, he was a Western Australian as well, so he knew a little bit about it as well. So other than that, that’s how I saw them, you know. They were professional soldiers, you know, top of their profession if you like.

Well I can’t remember what sort of questions. I suppose being a bit naïve at the time about what sort of questions that psychologists would ask me. I suppose he asked questions and I never thought, I just gave a straight answer. I wasn’t prepared, you know, I just gave what a I thought was the right answer at the time.

Well, again we were on the move, you know, the army works like that. You get something through the orderly room and you’re told to be somewhere. Here’s your rail tickets, be there and you know, a vehicle will pick you up and drop you off, so there we were. We ended up in Western Australia a week, well about a week later after the train travel.

Well they used to call it the cadre course

and it’s really the selections course for the SAS at that time. We weren’t there very long, I think it was only a matter of a day or so and we were into the training.

Well that’s another name.

No. We were actually selected when we were told to go there, OK.

At all times though as it’s always been, when you go to SAS if you don’t make it on day one or day 35 you’re told, or you’re not really told, you’re just told that you weren’t really successful and you pack your bags and they’ve got you your ticket back to your originating unit. So when you leave from your unit you’re always, if you don’t make it you

don’t come back. If you don’t make it you go back to where you came from, you know, you don’t get posted somewhere else. You just go back to your original unit.

Well, the courses really don’t change all that much, but it’s a lot of intensification of your basic skills as an infantry soldier and that’s all the

weapons training and so on and your map reading skills and so on. They don’t teach you anything, you’re just given different fire arms and different drills to do, map reading and you’re told to do it. I mean they expect you to know it, but you get so much of it. You’re told to navigate from here, navigate to there, go here, go there, carry out firearms training, do different tactics. They expect you to know the drills. You start off a bit rusty but you

soon pick up pretty quick and you’re told, you know, that’s the wrong way to do it and you pick it, I think I was lucky in being that way, I was being at the Infantry Centre as an instructor, corporal instructor, I had most of those skills pretty well squared away. The only thing I probably didn’t have was my level of fitness because at that time I wasn’t sort of looking at my fitness as running every day but I was reasonably fit so I picked up

quickly, you know, my fitness level. Probably being only at that time 22, 23 I was fairly fit anyway.

I think what I hadn’t done before is mainly as I recall it was long marches if you know what I mean, long distance, long endurance. I hadn’t done

any, hadn’t done very much like that at all. That was day in day out and night and day and that was over long distances carrying quite a bit of wait in unfamiliar areas. I mean you were given a map and you were asked to go from point A to point B and then on to somewhere else and you were kept on the go all the time, you never got much sleep. We did a lot of our weapon training around Swanbourne and then we moved up Bindoowhich is up in the

bush. Live firing up there, we did live firing up there and we did live firing and then physical activity up there and also map reading, and then we moved down to Collie. We did river crossings down there in the water. I think it was roughly, I’m trying to think what time of the year it was. I think it wasn’t quite winter then but it was very cold. I remember the water being very cold and it’s very hilly down around there so we were sent off on different courses and

did different things like we were broken up into small groups, but I remember it as being quite intensive, you know, and on the move all the time. A lot of pushups and do this, do that, you know. So you were kept pretty well on the move mate all the time and I felt at that time I was not used to that, but it was similar to what I was doing, giving to the trainees in Infantry Centre but

there was much more intense of course and in smaller groups.

We weren’t given that sort of skill or we weren’t introduced to that skill at that stage. What it was to do was, the focus was on refining the highest levels of your basic skills that you could do, you know, weapon handling, training tactics, movement, wearing your equipment,

map reading, working in a group, working in a team together. They were all the things that the focus was on and under a lot of duress.

Yeah.

Some went by the wayside because they didn’t have those skills so they couldn’t keep up

and that was part of it. If you couldn’t keep up with your colleagues or compatriots you sort of dropped behind. It was interesting on the course I had, over two-thirds of the course were national servicemen selectees so I think that sort of points back to where the selection team were looking at at the time as well.

Well, they were looking at that stage, they’d made a policy that was the first group of national service that the regiment had actually

selected was the course I was on. Funny enough I was one of their instructors at the time. Not all of them were national service but most of them were.

Yeah, I know where you’re coming from. Yes, I think they were

looking for maturity. I think that’s where it was coming from. When I say, that was one of the things they were looking at but also you had to be, I don’t know whether the right word is intelligent, but you had to be common sense but also able to do things at the same time, be proficient. I suppose they looked at whether you were willing to accept things, see what I mean, that you were accepting or willing to learn quickly. I think that was the way it was.

I think humour is when you do, on the course is a lot of self-discipline. I think that’s what it’s about, it’s self-disciplining yourself, be able to keep on going to be, when you’re humour, we talk about humour, you’re able to look at, laugh at yourself and other people, you know, and sort of joke about it. Was just one of those things if you fell

over in the mud or you know, you hurt yourself it was a laughing matter. So if you know what I mean, it was joking about. It wasn’t, you had to have the lighter side because that helped you through. If you treated it all very serious I think it would be very stressful. Do you know what I mean?

No, I didn’t get any injuries, but there always are on a cadre, on a selection course. There are injuries and that’s unfortunate for those involved because it puts them straight off the course. Once they twist an ankle or they twist a knee, something like that, you’ve just got to have all your faculties and that’s the problem. Even if you

got flu or got a bad cold that would take you of the cadre, you know, if you couldn’t overcome it. Just a lot of demand. You’ve got to have everything going for you and that’s the best way I can put it to make it.

I think, I’m trying to remember. I think it was about six to eight weeks, yeah, six to eight weeks course, yeah. Once

you completed the course or you were successful then it was only a matter of days before you went off to, at that time you either went off to Hills Hall to be trained as a patrol medical. Mostly you went off to do your basic parachute course at Williamtown.

I think the basic parachute course is all a bit terrifying when you first arrive there. You see some of the apparatus that you’ve got to jump out of, you’ve got to train on. We used to have what they call a Polish tower and the exit tower. I can even remember the names. They’re the sort of things you’d sort of jump out the door and you’d leap off without any second thought, but the instruction that you received at PTS [Parachute Training School] was all in, mindful

of your safety. It was all done, you could do it without even thinking. I think that if you’re used to that sort of training you’d done as an infantryman in contact drills and other sort of drills, ambush drills or whatever you had to react to, you had time to think about what you wanted to do, what you could do but it was impressed into you as a drill. So you had a lot of confidence in your equipment and what there were

telling you ’cause that’s the way it was taught.

There’s this sort of tower where you’re up there and the parachute’s there just like one you see in the movie and you’re up there and they let you go, or there’s one, the exit tower, you go out on a cable you jump out, or another one that was on a wind sort of thing, as you jump out the door the wind

turbine slows you down just enough as normal as you hit the ground, but when you jump out you go the full rate of descent. Those sort of things to give you confidence and of course there was swing towers where you swung out and you did your basic rolls to landing. There’s landings, that’s the most dangerous part of parachutes and we used to say, when you arrive, you know, you either

arrive professionally or like a bag of shit. You know what I mean? You land in a big lump. Before landing there’s flight drills you do when you’re in the air with your parachute in the air, your observation that you’ve got to see where you’re going, where you want to go and avoid other parachutes in the air. I can even talk the language years and years later, but then in the aeroplane that’s what they call aircraft drill and

that’s when you’re in the aircraft and you’re numbered off and you repeat your calls, you do your checks and you hook on and line up for the door and all that sort of thing and you exit from the aircraft. See that’s how well you’re taught because you can remember it over 30 or 40 years later.

I don’t think I remembered, it was just getting out the door. I think I recall it was a Caribou and later we used to call it the gentleman’s exit.

Remember this is all static line parachuting where you’re hooked on and it pulls out your parachute as you exit the aircraft but you can walk down the ramp in a Caribou and just step off the end, you know, one behind the other, but in a Hercules, a C130 you used to jump out the side doors, either side, sometimes both at the same time. When you’ve got to the door you had your hand sort of, whatever dive, whatever exit you were going to dive, you had your hand outside, just outside the

door and then you dove out and of course once you got out the slipstream would just take you, whip you down behind the aircraft so quick you wouldn’t recall. Sometimes you’re looking back over your head and you can see your parachute deploy, you know, like streaming out behind you, is it dropping.

Canopy.

Yeah.

A parachute course is just another means of getting there; arriving on the ground and that was what the reason was all about. Later on we’re taught how to get there by air, land or sea, you know, getting us there. So that was a special way of doing it, you

know, parachuting into the, static line parachuting. Later we used to jump from about 500 foot and later on, I never become free fall trained but the others, a lot of the other guys did, specialised, and they were you know, dropped out, as you’ll speak to the next guy. He used to be a parachute jumper instructor and he was very, what’s the word, expertise on free fall.

Well then when you went back to the regiment it was very much geared at that time, the SAS regiment, to prepare for overseas deployment for Vietnam. You might remember, or you probably don’t remember, but there were only three squadrons available or active, what they call sabre squadrons. Sabre means an active operational squadron; they refer to them as sabre squadrons. They were

They’re the ones that were operational. In those days

they used to have a base squadron and support squadron. That was before training squadron came along. So there were only three squadrons so they rotated at that stage through Vietnam. The first squadron to Vietnam I think was 3 Squadron. So, also at that time Borneo was still going. The SAS were still involved in Borneo. So when I arrived there was only one squadron preparing to go to Vietnam and the other two , one was in Vietnam, one was

just come back from Borneo or just still there. So you had these three squadrons rotating so the demand was to make sure they had enough people ready to go for the next deployment which normally it took about a year, 18 months work up, normally about 12 months in preparation. So when I got back to the regiment I think

I recall I was put on a patrol signallers’ course which was learning Morse code and learning how to send at least 15 or 25 words a minute. I think the pass mark I got, I can remember I think I could pass out at 10 to 15. I know I was struggling with it but that’s all right, and then you were taught demolitions and then of course they were the formal courses but at the same time the

squadron was gearing up and teaching patrol tactics. You know, the patrol commander that you went to taught you tactics as a SAS patrol, and that’s on the ground but all your support you needed to know about as well, and then of course the people that got back from Hills Hall they were patrol medics so any patrol you had, you could be cross-trained to do any one of those three at the time plus your weapons skills

as well.

I think I was getting a better picture from the regiment what the big picture in Vietnam was at the time because remember the media, that was in ’67, the media were running a lot of articles on Vietnam at the time, the American involvement and the Australian involvement. So we got

to know a lot more what was going on and formed our own opinions and picture of what was actually happening in Vietnam. I think they were early days when you talked about the division in the community between those that protested against Vietnam and those that well, were supportive or couldn’t care less anyway, either way.

I think I did but in Perth, Perth was always a bit isolated from the rest of the world or if you like, even Australia. You know, Nullarbor Plain always separates, always used to separate the eastern states from the west. So things were a little bit slow in coming from wherever it may

be. So it was never as intense there as it might’ve been over here in the eastern states at that time. You know, the protest movements, that was all happening you know, here in the eastern states.

Yes, it was. In the ’70s, I think the ’69, ’70s, I think that was the height of the protest movement and it was much more visible then, yeah.

I think I was posted originally to 1 Squadron. When I went to 1 Squadron I was lucky enough to, I don’t know whether lucky or luck may have it, but I was posted with my rank. Normally when you go to the regiment you’re told, which I was told, that you may go back to being a private or a trooper, in this case

a private and you start your rank all over again, but I kept my rank so I got posted to a patrol. It was funny going to a patrol of older people that had already been overseas to Vietnam, to Borneo. In this case it was 1 Squadron and I wasn’t actually the 2IC. I think they looked at me, they weren’t sure at that time. Originally I went to 4 Squadron which has never been raised since then or ever since but

it was a sort of holding squad at the time. I went there for a short while and we did some training there and they saw what we were made of and then I was posted to 1 Squadron. Not long after that we started doing a lot of exercises down south and then about that time we went off to Papua New Guinea, we went off to Lae. I mean we were going, we went to Lae and we were flown into Lae and

it was a straight flight from Swanbourne to Lae in one hop. I think it took us about six to eight hours sitting in the back of a Hercules. Anyway when we got to Lae, we were, yes, that’s right, we ended up camped in the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK sheds, the poultry shed on the Lae Showground and we worked out of Lae

and that went a lot into conditioning for tropical conditions. We did a lot of small patrols around Lae and the back of Lae and then we were sent off on a long two to three week long march through the eastern Highlands. At that stage I remember that we were sent with a police boy because we were going up into

head hunter territory and we were actually going up there to Hart’s Mines, were giving medical attention to the locals and also taking a census. So I recall we started out from Wau, we were flown into Wau and then we trekked overland from there and we were meant to be down in Salamaua I think it was about two to three weeks later. All by foot, you know, up through the trails up

into the mountains and that was pretty demanding because we were only five man patrol but on this patrol I got a message that my stepfather had been killed when we were up in the Highlands and the squadron commander at that time was a Major Dale Burnett, put into motion to have me extracted

out so I could be sent back to Australia to the funeral to go back to my mother. I think my mother must’ve asked if I could come back home. I don’t know what the story was. Anyway, we were trying to find a place to cut down and make a landing zone. We were right up in the Highlands and these huge trees we’d decided on the place, the patrol commander had decided on a place and we started cutting down these great big rainforest trees with machetes.

It took us a day or so. Anyway we’re trying to guide this helicopter and it was one of those little Sioux helicopters with a bubble in the front. We could hear it buzzing around somewhere. It made a couple of hops to get up there into the mountains and they took us two days before they found us in the fog and everything. Anyway once I got on there they flew me back down to the coast or down to another area into a bigger helicopter or it was a

plane, a fixed wing, and we flew back into Lae. I flew back into the airport, when I got back off the plane, not the single engine plane, the aircraft was waiting for me, the TAA [Trans Australian Airlines]. The squadron commander was there standing with my suit of clothes, my civilian clothes. I’d been out in the jungles for about two weeks. I wasn’t very nice to smell. I had a growth of two weeks.

And my greens and everything else were pretty tatty. I’d dropped off all my gear, that is my webbing and all that, hopped on the plane and grabbed these suit of clothes and I sat next to this passenger on the plane and he looked at me, you know, and thought, “Oh God”. I must’ve smelt something terrible. Anyway on the way back between Port Moresby and Cairns, the flight attendant got me the toilet on my own. She said, ‘Here’s a bag”, she gave me a big plastic bag, said, “Throw all your gear in there

and wash in the sink”. So I was doing this, you know, dhobi in the sink and having a shave. I came back out there with my civilian gear on and I gave her all my dirty gear and I don’t know where it went from that day, but they looked after me. That was in first class, so I got back to Australia and attended my stepfather’s funeral.

Well I don’t know whether it was or not at that time. They went to a lot of trouble for me ’cause I was in New Guinea and I was able to come back,

so, but I was very impressed by the arrangements. I didn’t expect it. So, and when they pulled me in I couldn’t believe it but when I went back to my stepfather’s funeral of course I was sort of taken out of that squadron and then transferred to another squadron, so I went to 2 Squadron and they’d only just come back from Borneo. So when

I was posted to 2 Squadron I started all the training all over again. Some advantage to me I suppose. I mean things that happened or whatever but, I ended up being a patrol commander in a very short period of time. So and then I went off to New Guinea again and went through the whole rigours of training in Lae it was again this time. We stayed in tents,

as a matter of fact out in the oval itself. The funny part about that was we got washed out with a heavy rainstorm, all the duckboards and everything started to float. Flooded us out anyway. We dried out and got on with it, but it was much similar training at that time. Yeah, I think that’s about a very similar pattern of training

we did then at that time in preparation for Vietnam. I think it was just working in the jungle environment, you know, and at that time we were working against the PIR, Pacific Islands Regiment, as enemies, so they were a good enemy at that time to work against. Very, as I found out later, very much like we’d expect in Vietnam.

Well I think it was known. We knew what dates the changeover dates were for the squadron. That was a 12 month program so we worked on that. So when we were back in Australia, that was the time of the, previously in the meantime I managed to be able to meet my wife, my future wife and when I was in Vietnam, sorry, when I was in Papua New Guinea I got

this letter to say “I’m pregnant dear”, oh dear. So I had to think about getting married before I got back and we were due to go away in February, this was in November so there had to be some quick wedding arrangements made as soon as I got back.

Ah, it was interesting, yeah. My first wife was a, the guys were doing at that stage to train them up to the level

of preparation to go to Vietnam, they were doing attachment to the casualty wards in at the Royal Perth Hospital. It was quite amazing, amusing to see people with white coats on with these green trousers and boots, army boots hanging out the bottom. I think they changed that later so they didn’t frighten off too many of the people, but they got to work on people that had been in

accidents and they got to diagnose patients with various, but mainly they got to stitch up probably drunks and people like that where they’d injured themselves, but they never got to work on anything on the face, if they went wrong with their sutures it might be permanent, but my wife was a nurse there. So I ended up going with the lads in there and I met her that way. She was a trainee nurse at the Royal Perth Hospital.

Yes, it was.

Yeah, I didn’t.

I wasn’t in that side but I just happened to be with the guys. I think we’d went to party where the guys met the nurses. I was one of the few people who had a car so I got invited, see, and I got to go and pick up the nurses and the guys. So Carol was my wife’s, ex-wife’s name, she had, her parents

had a house up at a place called Quinn’s Rocks. You know, it was a beach shack so obviously you can see that, you know, between myself with the car and Carol with a beach shack, we were sort of a commodity that they could use for a party, a weekend party. So that’s what they used to do, we used to have parties up at this beach shack. Of course her parents didn’t know. We used to have to do some really, well we did a very good clean up after

the parties so her parents didn’t know when we’d been there, you know.

About six months, six to eight months, yeah. At that time Carol was pregnant with Robert, my son and when we, I think we got married in November, December and I went off to Vietnam in February.

I went up on the advance party in February.

He was due in March, April so I wasn’t going to be there for the birth and that’s another story.

Yes.

A whirlwind romance and then a baby involved, yeah, and then off to Vietnam I was and Robert was born on April the 2nd,

but that’s another, yeah, I got to know about that later.

What we did, at that time the Tet Offensive was on. I don’t know whether you might recall during Vietnam the

1968 Tet Offensive was significant in the war in Vietnam and there was a big push in February. That was a celebration of Tet and I think it was around about the 14th I think, St Valentine’s Day, but anyway when we flew to Butterworth. It was a change of plan. We flew by civil air to Butterworth because at that time Tan Son Nhut was under threat with being

overrun. So we couldn’t land by civil air so we had to go on to Vung Tau.

What I did see at Butterworth, a plane, during the Tet Offensive there were quite a few Australian casualties and on the way back they used to come back by Hercules and it brought the reality. When it came back, the plane, one of the Hercules there, we were due to go

up, we stayed overnight in Butterworth before we flew in by Hercules. We got the whole squadron on board, or the advance party, and there was a plane there. I don’t know how many coffins or caskets were on board, were coming back from Vietnam to Australia. They were dead Australians, you know, so it was, we knew we were going into a pretty demanding war zone at the time.

I thought, “Oh well”, the Tet Offensive was very very, well it’s intense at that time. So when we took off the next day we actually flew into Vung Tau. When we flew into Vung Tau we were told that we would be making not a direct approach, we would be coming in by, we were told a more direct approach but what they were doing they were worried about, because during that time there was a lot of fighting in the province, in Baria

and the task force were flat out tying to hold the Tet Offensive so when we flew in the approach was we flew in on a circle so that they wouldn’t attract any ground fire. So of course when we got out of the plane and we unloaded all the plane we were looking, everything was, you know, we had ammunition, we were armed up, but when we got out of the plane we thought the Viet Cong were going to run over the end of the airstrip, but that was just apprehensive I think, you know. You weren’t too sure

what was going ’cause the aircraft traffic at Vung Tau at that time was very very, there were aircraft coming and going everywhere. So very intense.

Well I understand it was a Buddhist, I’m not sure whether, but it was a religious festival where it was a holiday, holiday time and that’s when people in Vietnam took holiday or celebrated or went on holiday, you know, took a couple of days off. I don’t know how long Tet

was meant to last for, the period of celebration was but it was at this period that the VC [Viet Cong] and the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] launched coordinated attacks right across Vietnam, very well coordinated. Tthe actual offensive lasted for up to one or two weeks, nearly three weeks, but it made a big marked affect on the war because I think this push was meant to, I don’t know whether it was

meant they were gonna gain any ground, because it was very, if you know what I mean it was very suicidal. When I say suicidal it was such a push that I don’t think they were ever meant to hold ground but they took a hell of a lot of casualties, the VC and NVA but it really threw the American and allied armies really off balance because they never thought that they could mount such an effective attack.

I just saw a busy military airport with lots of helicopters and things running around which we’d never seen any time before except later in Vietnam I saw, you know, some bases like Bien Hoa and places like that. I’d never seen so many planes and fighters taking off. It was just like unbelievable, you know, everything was moving

all at the same time, but they were huge military bases, you know, quite unbelievable.

We didn’t get to see much of Vung Tau. It was only later I got to see Vung Tau ’cause even when we were flying in, as you know, we sort of spiralled in in the C130. I didn’t see much of Vung Tau at all. Everything was going around in circles when I looked out, when we looked out the windows. It wasn’t until months later we got to see anything of Vung Tau ’cause

we were loaded onto trucks and we were in convoy up to Nui Dat which was about, I’d say about 40 to 50 kilometres, about an hour’s drive away. So we all looked out of the trucks at the paddy buns and all the locals going by. We expected to be, we had a fairly heavy escort ’cause at that time I might’ve mentioned in Phuoc Tuy Province which was the province we were working in, generally working in,

the Tet Offensive was going, there was a lot of attacks on provincial centres like Baria were occurring. So they really didn’t know where the VC or NVA or at that time what they called main units were going to pop up. When I talk about main units, these were organised units that were made up local VC,

NVA and other, they were professional units actually working like as a unit in basic warfare.

Well when we arrived at Nui Dat we went straight up to the hill. The hill was, that was our known, that was our place where the SAS squadron was, was the only

hill in the whole area. Surrounding Nui Dat was rubber plantations or rubber and banana plantations and that’s where the first task force was located. So when we arrived at Nui Dat we were shown, well I was in the advance party so I shared a tent with someone else from the squadron that was already there. It was all a bit eye-opening

to say well this is it. I’d only recently moved up there, up to the hill. The squadron that we went to relieve they’d moved up from an area down below so this is some months before. So this is a completely new area and they were working on it, setting it up for ourselves, the SAS.

I think because just an Australian taskforce when we got in there

just going through the check points, the amount of wire that, you know, the concertina wire, the barricades or your barricades were around the place and then the amount of, when we drove in there we drove past Kangaroo Pad which at that time there were still helicopters on the pad. That’s where they came in to refuel. They weren’t based there; they were based in Vung Tau mostly ’cause they wouldn’t leave the aircraft overnight there because of vulnerability,

but the fuel depots were there and the amount of military traffic. You’ve got to remember when you’re in SAS there’s only one regiment in the west and you’re only talking about 1,000 men and you don’t see very much military traffic except ourselves which we don’t have very much, but when you go to an overseas base, a large Australian base, a brigade a bit like was in Malaysia,

there was a lot of activity. There were artillery units and everything, and we passed through an artillery unit on the way up to the hill, and helicopters so it was eye-opening. It looked like everything was in full swing and the guns were firing, you know, like they were in support of operations that were already going on around the taskforce.

At the SAS? You’re only looking at 100 or a little bit

more. That was the SAS lines if you like because that was about a squadron.

Very little because I don’t know if you’re aware but the first taskforce was all entirely Australian-New Zealand.

That was its composition. So we didn’t have all that much to do with Americans until later and we got attached to their unit. See, to the Seal Units or to the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, the “Lurp [LRRP] Patrols”, so I can’t say too much about the Americans at this time because I didn’t have all that much to do with them until later we got to work with them. Also they provided the light fire teams

which were the gun ships support when we were inserted in on patrol.

Well a little later we had a New Zealand troop which was about, I don’t know, I think their troop was about 25 to 30 attached to us. I can’t really say much about the Kiwis except they worked with us and later on they came later in the tour when I was there.

I think they were there for about 18 months, two years and then they pulled out, but they worked. We worked alongside them or they worked alongside us and they had their patrols and they went out on patrol in areas of operations that we did as well.

Well describing it, well

Nui Dat, the whole of Nui Dat?

The base up on the hill, the hill itself?

Well each area, like there were different troop areas. There was a central area where there was the headquarters and the officers mess and the cooking area. They were all sort of, they were sort of Quonset huts and tents. We were all under tents, and there were sandbag bunkers all around our tent lines

and the tents were sandbagged up to the side of the tents and it was all set in among spiked bamboo with tracks running in and out around the area. So we were sort of, it wasn’t unpleasant. In a sense we were all set in among the bamboo, in among the bush but what they’d done there, improvisation, they got showers and a laundry, a little shed and a laundry where

a couple of Lightbeam washing machines, like cement mixer type washing machines, and a big shower which was made up of 44 gallon drums which was heated by wood. That was your hot water and we used to have a shower when you came back in off patrol, but the area was you know for improvisation, was pretty well set out in that sense. It was home for 12 to 13 months basic as it was.

Well the base itself where we actually operated from, that was where we did a lot of work on our own base. We were part of the perimeter, we weren’t, when I say part of the perimeter, up on the hill we had our own perimeter to look after which meant in effect we looked after a 50 calibre machine gun which was up in the hill which overlooked the other side out to the, I think

it was the Nui Tee Vies [?] and that was manned every night, but that was our section of the perimeter even though it was back a bit from the road. That was an easy section of perimeter to look after, but that’s where we prepared for our patrols and that’s where we came back to rest after each patrol. When we were first there, on the advance we went out with the squadron on introduction patrols, just what we call

tail patrols just around the outside out from the taskforce to assimilate getting used to the terrain and the procedures that they use. We also went on a, I’m trying to think, it was a village search, it was a containment. We were part of the perimeter, that was interesting. They caught a few

VC in the camp that night and they were trying to break out. They had these little helicopters, little Sioux running backwards and forwards blasting you know, trying to talk them out of surrendering. Of course they weren’t going to do that, but anyway we lay in this one place all night and listened to this. Rounds were going off over our heads and we didn’t know what was going on. As long as we were just lying there in the dust making up the perimeter for this search of the village, the village search.

Then we went in the next day and we carried out village search, looking down holes and down into cooking pots with fish and all other, under rice. We didn’t find anything. We found a couple of tunnels but we found a lot of propaganda pamphlets and they’d even set up banners in the village and this was only just south of the taskforce, you know, Viet Cong banners and this type of thing. So that was what we did

initially when we got there before we actually took over, before we, the squadron itself actually went into its operation mode, you know, the arriving, we were there when the rest of the squadron arrived to welcome them onto the hill.

Well at that time we were sent out on reconnaissance and ambush patrols. The patrol,

the sequence of the patrol at that stage was to, when you were patrolling it took about normally two or three days by the time you completed briefings and did your reconnaissance. What you first did, you were briefed by the squadron commander on the area that you were going to, your area of operation, your AO. You then got out all the previous patrol reports, any other intelligence you could lay your hands on through the intelligence section.

You went out with your 2IC. You went out on a fixed wing over the plotted area through the reconnaissance squadron, the 161 Recce Squadron, overflew the area, tried not to draw to much attention to yourself but you could pick out where things were, particularly where you might be infiltrated into, an open area and then you briefed your patrol. Your patrol test fired their weapons,

got all your kit together. The particular job if it was reconnaissance you’d work out your rations, you listed your rations, your ammunition and then you broke everything down and then you briefed the patrol what their job would be, and what the patrol routes you might take and what your priorities were, areas you were meant to search and report back on. Just before you went you went up on reconnaissance again with the

9 Squadron pilot who was going to take you into the area, drop your patrol, and you just overflew the area so he knew where the insertion point was, where you’d selected and the same time you’d give him a brief on what the previous activity in the area might have been, and then on the day that you were due for insertion which is a five or seven day patrol, maybe up to 14 days depending on the task,

you would go down to what they call Kangaroo Pad and you’d be all kitted up, all camouflaged up, your face, your hands, all that sort of thing and get ready to go for a five day patrol. Depending what time of year it was depends on what the weight was. If it was the dry time of year you had to take a lot of water especially if you weren’t able to go anywhere near any creeks or rivers, means you had to carry all your water

for five or six days. Normally those dry periods where you couldn’t get near a creek or a river they were five day patrols because by that time with the heat you would’ve used most of your water, you went down to Kangaroo Pad, you got a pilot briefing where the whole patrol sat down and all the pilots from all the aircraft were briefed by what they call the lead Albatross Pilot, normally the senior pilot.

When you’re inserted into a landing zone, you could have up to one, two, three, four, eight aircraft for one patrol, for one five man patrol. It was very resource intensive to insert or extract an SAS patrol.

Well the idea was to give protection to the aircraft

and also the idea was to insert a patrol, well with a deception plan. The deception plan was the aircraft that was going to insert the patrol would be the lead aircraft. They fly in at treetop level. When we took off from Nui Dat we were all loaded up. You’d have the lead aircraft, the lead stick with the patrol, you’d have a

second aircraft, normally you might have a first aircraft and a second backup aircraft, plus you’d then have a lead Albatross and he would fly probably from 2,000 foot out of RPG range or ground fire, that idea, and then back up to that would be a light fire team and initially when we first stated we were using American light fire teams which were gun ships, helicopter gun ships. Sometimes we had

what we called the helicopter, we had the playboys. These were Cobra pilots in black flying suits with a playboy bunny on their pocket, very, yeah, and they were in Cobra gun ships. They would fly in on insertion as well, just hang off in case we needed to be extracted or lay down fire on the ground.

That’s right, yeah. That was the typical,

and they actually had it on the aircraft, along the nose of the aircraft, all black. The aircraft were all black with a playboy bunny on the front.

I think that was, I’m not saying typical American, but that was their sort of flamboyant. I think that’s how they were. But anyway as we reached an area and being the patrol commander, I would sit with a headset on and I’d hear the direction being given by the lead

as we were coming in and then we’d drop. We’d drop down to treetop level and then we’d fly in at treetop level sometimes up to 10 clicks [kilometres], between 5 and 10 clicks, 1,000 metres. Clicks is if you worked it. So we’d fly in at clicks and as we came in at treetop level the aircraft would flare off and turn around into the LZ [landing zone]. Even

some of them were very tight. The pilots were, we had very close, very close working relationship with 9 Squadron pilots, RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] pilots, very close and they’d turn around and come in and land the helicopter. By that stage I’d be trying to look at, pick the LZs. We were coming in, I’d say to the pilot, yeah, this is it, and take off the headset. We’d all get out the aircraft. Another aircraft would come in over the top at treetop level so the deception plan, if anyone

was listening they wouldn’t be able to tell or shouldn’t be able to tell there was an aircraft landed and that would cover that and then the aircraft would pop up and then fly forward and another one would come behind that, that was the backup aircraft, and they’d fly out. Now of course the noise, there was a lot of tension. I’ve got to say this, there’s a lot of tension when you’re flying at treetop level and you’re going in and you’re looking at the other guy. All the doors are open and you’re ready to exit. We weren’t strapped

in. Seat belts or harnesses don’t come into that, not when you’re in that situation ’cause you’ve got to get out quick. We would land, sometimes they couldn’t land, they may hover ’cause, preferably they’d land but sometimes you’d pick an L, landing point, it might have been the wet season and the water had come up and of course if you landed you’d sink into the water. I’ll talk about that later. And you’d leap out, you’d pick out, you’d leap out where you, the aircraft, would come in

the heading you’d want them to come in if it was possible with the wind. You’d head out on a bearing into the treeline. Once the aircraft, once you’re all out of course, a lot of noise and then the aircraft would go, and after the other aircraft had passed over at treetop level there was complete silence and after all this noise you’d be there in the jungle with no noise except what was left after all that racket. Slowly the,

the natural sounds would come back of the crickets and so on and then you’d be very intently listening and we’d move in just off their landing point and listen for about five,10 minutes and then start to move off. During that time the aircraft would go into a holding pattern about 15 minutes or five to 10 minutes away and I’d have my ground-to-aircraft, what we call an Erk 10 just on standby.

If we ran into trouble normally I’d press the button and an Erk, like emergency signal would go out and I’d be able to talk to the aircraft that I was in trouble and they would come back but we would then move off and stop and listen very intently for up to 15 minutes ’cause after 15 minutes if the aircraft didn’t hear anything

from me they would leave and go back to base. So I was, the insertion was complete, so then we’d start patrolling and it was a very slow patrolling depending on the time. If we got hit on the landing point or on the landing zone and we were moving off, well I could call up the aircraft and then, of course it was a procedure to exfil [short for exfiltrate – SAS term] or extraction. We had to

go back out to where we thought we could be, sometimes we couldn’t be extracted from the same landing point. We had to move around or have a backup, because if you had a contact, sometimes you had a contact, the activity there from the enemy would be too intense so you wouldn’t bring an aircraft back into a danger zone even though you felt when you were on the aircraft your job was done and you could take away. You felt relieved but really you were more vulnerable than ever.

So if you did have a contact, verified as a contact at that time when the aircraft were in a holding pattern, you could call them back.

I think the best one was, there was a couple, a lot of the time you got extracted but there was one in particular which unnerved me, unnerved us a bit I should say.

We got in and we thought OK, we’re fine and we moved off and aircraft had left the area. So we thought OK, we’re in and we’re able to carry out our patrol, ’cause once you can move away from the landing zone you’ve got this balance. If you move away that’s your safe extraction and if you move too far at least you can blend in with the jungle and you can get lost, but this particular time we

moved in we crossed a track, a well marked track. Now footpads are like single tracks in the jungle and they look just loose soil and obviously you’ve got this pad about a foot wide and being well used. So it gave an indication there was a camp in the area, a VC camp in the area somewhere close or this was a main thoroughfare track from one place to another. So we crossed this

track. Anyway after seeing this track we decided to lie up, which is LUP, lie up in this place and just see whether we could hear any other activity in the area just because while we were in there we looked around and there wasn’t much area so we moved into this patch of high grass, you know, like kunai grass and we sat in this area which we normally do with your feet back to back and we took off our packs and

we thought we’ll have a five minute break and listen. Anyway while we were sitting there listening we could hear this, because there’s a lot of dead fall in these areas where artillery had brought down a B52 bomb, bombing raid, normally artillery had brought down a lot of branches all over the province. You could get a lot of undergrowth especially in the dry season I think because you can hear people on the dead leaves as well. Anyway we could hear this cracking of a branch every now and then and we thought, we dismissed

it because I thought it’s probably an animal, it might be a deer, or even an ox. Sometimes you get wayward oxen gone feral. Anyway it kept on every now and again getting louder. Anyway I happen to look over my patrol member’s shoulder and I saw this face with a weapon looking through the grass. I got up and of course everyone watches each other,

I got up and I started to aim and slipped the safety catch off, my weapon on automatic. Anyway I think they knew what was happening. They all started to turn around and look that way. Anyway I opened up. Anyway they all stood up and there was three or four there, VC, they’d snuck up on us. They were only about 15, 20 metres away, probably about 15 metres away because they were that close I could see, anyway, we opened fire on them and

we heard a lot of other voices so we put our packs on our back. We’d only been in there half an hour, just on close to an hour, probably, and then we decided, well where they’d come from, they’d come from the LZ so we couldn’t go back that way. So we had to then demount by fire and movement we moved out of there and got into some thicker vegetation. By that time I was able to get out my map and look at where

we could go to. So I had to give a bearing to the forward scout. As he was running off to the LZ the same time we had to stop and call in. Now you’ve got to remember the patrols didn’t have, they could voice with aircraft but we didn’t have any voice with our base. It all had to be sent by setting up the radio set, was a 64 set, laying out an aerial and sending a

code word if we were in trouble. There were different code words for different things. We used to get a different set every time we went out. So we had to lay out the radio, take the radio out of the pack and send a message so we could get extracted. So when you did that, we set up this situation, we sent them a code word and of course when it comes back, you know, what’s the situation? You could pretty well send it in plain. Normally it was sent in code and we sent was in

code one time (UNCLEAR) and so we had to sort of break with the shooting if you like, try and get a big enough break so we could set up the radio, lay out the aerial which is a ground aerial and then get the radio operator. I had to give him a message. Normally he would send the code anyway and get a reply, and tell them where we were going to be, what landing zone we were going to be in. So,

and that was all done in that time, you know, at the same time. Anyway we went off to the landing, we found a landing zone. I looked at the map and we come around in a different area about 200 or 300 metres away but when we were moving through to this other landing zone I cut through a camp, or it looked like a camp. There were some bunkers there, but several well used tracks. So really the frightening thing about it was at that time I didn’t know where I was going, whether I was going

into more trouble, into a more intense area or not. Anyway we got to the landing zone and then we waited and we could hear them coming but by that stage we’d got an air, RAAF, 9 Squadron were terrific. They had an aircraft in there pretty quick. Once they got one aircraft up, the lead Albatross, he could be in contact with us by ground-to-air and we could tell him what the situation was

on the ground and then they could call in the gun ships. Once the gun ships had come in we used to move out to the middle of the LZ or somewhere it was safe enough we could have reasonable visibility and then they would start to lay down ground fire into the trees which they used, in this case was over our heads, mini guns and rockets into the area where they thought these people were, and then

we got extracted from there. So that was the worst case, again when you were just in there and had to be extracted within a very short period of time.

No. No, not at that time. That was about the second or third time.

Well, we were watching the VC at that time and I think when we first encountered the VC,

we worked out in the case we saw, they used to wear, they used to wear obviously black and webbing and they had normal AK [Avtomat Kalashnikov] sort of weapons but when I first saw the VC they were a mix. A guy had slung weapons, one was patrolling, they were about four or five and a couple of women and what they were doing, they were cutting wood. When I say cutting

what I didn’t realise they were cutting wood for the camp. We were on a track and we were watching them and they were moving backwards and forward carrying wood. They were setting up a bunker system. A lot of them, that sort of VC set up I gathered later. I wasn’t sure who they were or whether they were part of a bigger group. The camp wasn’t very far away. There were also dogs at that camp so at that time it was a bit of a worry to me if the dogs got the scent of us or started barking.

But they were carrying logs and this sort of thing, escorted, backwards and forwards with a couple of armed people at each time, but the camp, we worked out later wasn’t very far away from where we’d come in. I think we’d only covered that day, I think it was late afternoon that we’d run into this group. So I stayed there for a couple of days and reported on that incident, on those people there.

Well it was right as soon as we arrived.

There’s a lot of activity.

There’s artillery and aircraft coming and going and you could hear activity like B52 bombing raids. You could hear aircraft and bombs falling, not all the time, but there was always sort of gunfire if you know what I mean, even if it might only have been test firing or you know, in the task force. There was always that activity.

I think the first time I think was one insertion we had where the lead scout run into somebody on the edge of the VC and we fired, but it wasn’t until that second, I mentioned on that second time that occurred, but later one of the significant things, I’m trying to think

where other things occurred, well there were times we were in reconnaissance we didn’t fire but there were other times when we like sprung ambushes and things like that. Some were a success, I never had a really successful ambush in case I didn’t catch any VC in a group except later, much later which was,

but I’ll tell you about that when we were involved in sighting up to 200 or 300 VC at the time, NVA as well, but earlier again there were quite a few incidences where we got caught on the landing zone. They were very much like I spoke about before. There were a lot of sightings we reported on. When we were out there we used to report on anything we could

hear, gun shots in the area. Sometimes we went into an area where another patrol got hit, you know. It was a bit hard to know that patrol was being under fire and we couldn’t do much about it. We couldn’t, we were too far away to be involved or to back them up. Then there was a time when we had an ambush on the fire trail, and we couldn’t go back in to recover. They were on ox carts actually. That was the

aircraft actually crashed, half of the patrol, the aircraft it didn’t get hit by ground fire. We thought it did at the time but it took off after extraction next morning and suffered a malfunction and crashed. A bit unnerving to sit there with your headset on and you get a mayday when the rotor blades stop and there’s all this quiet swishing sound as it goes into

autogyration.

I was on board.

I was sitting on the floor. I’ve got the rest of the patrol inside the aircraft, got in the aircraft and we were going down. We’d come down from about 3,000 feet on autogyration. I had the headset on ’cause I could hear the mayday going out. There were two aircraft lucky enough at the moment, at that time, and the other aircraft was taking the other half

of the patrol. It was a ten man patrol. We crashed into a paddy just below the Long Hais [Long Hai Hills] and myself and the door gunner were the only ones injured. I was on the floor when the impact hit. We were moving forward ’cause autogyration can’t, you know, the aircraft comes in and tries to land forward

’cause it hasn’t have any, in this case it didn’t have any hydraulics so it couldn’t sort of hover in any fashion. We went over a bun, over a paddy bun, tail boom broke off at that stage and the blades hit the ground, but the pilot and the crew were very good. We stayed inside until the blades, the engine, well the engine wasn’t running, but the blades stopped. I’d hit the floor and hit a tie-down bolt with my forehead and

I was bleeding from the forehead and I didn’t know why. I thought I’d cracked my head open but you know, it was only a superficial thing. Later on I found out, a couple of stitches, but blood was running down all over my face and my eyes and I couldn’t see out very well. A guy helped me out, the poor old door gunner, he, I think he broke his nose. I broke my nose as well, he lost a few teeth and we got out on the ground and laid down until the blades stopped and moved away from the aircraft. The other aircraft was able to come in and land behind us, but

that was a traumatic event.

Close call, yeah. All of us got out of that OK and it was due to the skill of the pilots, you know, they were very good.

None of us were strapped in ’cause when you get on the aircraft we just, I sat on the floor, ’cause normally our drill was, the last person in the aircraft was the patrol commander. He made sure everyone’s on board in the aircraft and then you get in

’cause you do the headcount. Everyone’s in and then I jump in and I throw myself and lay on the floor and as the aircraft takes off you sit up and just sit on the floor. The rest of the guys are sitting on the seat and I think I had someone else on the floor, three on the seat and a couple on the floor. So it was lucky, I don’t suppose no one got more injured than they did.

It was interesting, for an SAS patrol commander what your role was you were leader if you like or senior member by rank of a patrol, but

The SAS patrol commander, by rank definition you’re the leader of the patrol but, you know, you’re normally a sergeant but it doesn’t have to be any NCO rank. It could be an officer or a captain in the days of Vietnam, but you lead the patrol. The whole patrol normally will decide on a decision,

when I say a decision, you make the operational order out but they will influence what you actually state in the operational order.

Well you have to respect them as being one of the patrol. Everyone has an idea. If they want to see something done differently or have an idea or how they should see it being done they have their chance to say that. It’s normally

a group decision. It sounds like a Chinese parliament, doesn’t it, but it doesn’t really. You’re still the patrol commander, you still make the final decision but you ask everyone for their opinion. On the day of course when an incident occurs you normally would direct, but again they do have some influence on what your decision is on, ’cause they may know something that you don’t know at the time or that can influence you

to make a definite decision about something.

Well it does really and that’s what it is. If you say that and when you asked me the role, you know, the patrol, I can say we do this, we do that, but really whatever the patrol task is you actually direct the patrol what you’re going to do, but in the end it’s a group decision in some decisions. If it’s not, if someone is doubting

or has a doubt about their safety or they’re worried about the outcome, you need to clear that with the whole patrol because if you don’t that will be there when you’re actually doing the job, and you don’t want that. You want to be all clear on what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. Like to say we never, there are

times when we could’ve changed direction but most times we never had that problem if you know where I’m coming from. It meant that everyone was satisfied with what we’re doing.

If you want to debrief something, brought the point out after an incident or after a patrol then we’d bring it out on the debrief. We’d remedy the problem, it was frank, it was open, do you know what I mean? If I’d made a mistake or they questioned my judgement they would say it then.

I think that was the way to do it most times. Some would rather be more tactful but that was most times.

Well when you action up a weapon you bring the weapons if you like from the instant, or sorry, from the ready to the instant and that means, well the instant actually is when you can have the safety catch on or off,

but as we know as actioning up you’d actually put one round if you like up the spout, as they call it, or in the chamber. So it only meant taking the safety catch off and you could fire the weapon or the weapons, whatever it may be, and that was normally done before you ever went into an operational area. Like at Nui Dat, we didn’t carry, we always had our weapons wherever we went at Nui Dat around the base, but let’s say those weapons weren’t actioned up. They had the magazine

on, they were ready to go. It means we had to cock the weapon but when you went outside the wire if you like or were inserted anywhere, in that case you would action up, but there were always different cases. You’ve got to remember the safety aspect and what the situation would be at the time. If it was demanding that you do that you would do that.

Well mainly it was in

Phuoc Tuy Province. We virtually went all over the province. There were a couple of areas I didn’t go into. I might have been lucky or unlucky I didn’t go into it. One of those was a place called the Long Green which was down on the coast which was very close to where the mine, they had a minefield which was a barrier minefield which they originally set up. A lot of those mines were lifted from that barrier.

That’s a contentious issue because the mines were left in place without oversight if you like, so someone couldn’t lift them even though they might’ve been set up to anti-tampering, but those mines were relocated in the nearby area which is the Long Green and a lot of people lost their lives and limbs with battalion fellows stepping on mines, and we lost, well not lost, one of our own

patrol commanders which was an officer at the time, a good patrol commander, he lost his legs in an incident which was very very, well let’s say it was very shocking to us because it was an area we found it hard to operate in if we were under the influence of an area where there may be mines, if you know what I mean. It really curtailed our operational

effectiveness.

This occurred while I was there actually. It was in the squadron I was in. As I recall we had two bad mishaps. I think there might have been others but the two most, we don’t lose anyone on our tour of duty but we lost, well one chap was, when I say didn’t lose anyone we lost one person from our own friendly fire.

That was Harry Harrison as we called him, Harris I should say. He was shot by a member of his own patrol and Lieutenant Simpson he was caught out with a mine and blew his legs off.

Well that goes much deeper than, well I’m

not trying to avoid the issue but that goes back to a decision made by a taskforce commander I believe, to lay out that particular barrier minefield. It was meant to contain or stop people moving through from Horseshoe area to another area to the Long Hais at that time, and that was a stretch, it was a minefield stretched out and it was protected by barbed wire, but what I’m saying is that normally and as everyone understood, when you lay a minefield you need to oversight it so no one

can tamper with it and this stage of course they didn’t. They left a lot of mines from that area. It’s a very contentious issue. I’m sure the person or the persons involved still sort of lie, you know, lie uneasily with that decision.

Well I want to put it straight. They left mines in the ground underneath a concertina fence which is to ops as a barrier to deny someone

moving, in this case the VC moving from one area to another, but a lot of those mines were lifted even though they had anti-tamper. The VC were very adept at doing anything like that. That’s another thing they should’ve seen at the time. I think there were a lot of protests against it but the, of course the powers that be on the day, so.

When you lift a mine you actually lift it out of the ground. These were

M16 mines for want of a better name. You know the Jumping Jack mines? But they, when they’re stepped upon, they’ve got three prongs that sit at the top, they’re stepped on, that fires an igniter which then sets off a charge at the bottom and sends up. It’s virtually about the size of a normal mortar round, OK, and that goes off at chest height or head height, so you can imagine how devastating they are.

Sometimes when they’re stepped on and the person’s there they go off in the ground and they don’t get a chance to jump, so sometimes that’s very lucky.

As I said there was the Long Green, there’s Long Hais, there was the north to the, I think it was the Long Khan border, it was up on the Bien Hoa border. Generally in Phuoc Tuy Province,

even though we did go out of the province a couple of times, I went to, on attachment to 9th Division up in Bien Hoa, I attached to the LURP, Long Range Recce Patrol of 9th Division and sometimes some of the other patrols actually went up on special jobs outside the taskforce area as well. One of the notable areas, the Long Hai Hills or the May Tao Mountains which are right up in the

western part of the province. They were all if you like sensitive areas.

I know that they were areas, not no-go areas, but they were areas where they knew there was build up or infiltration moved in, but also mountainous areas where it was difficult for battalion soldiers groups to operate, and it was also difficult for us in some ways. I think

because when we were in the hills, operating in the hills it was difficult to get in and get out.

Oh yes, NVA.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well you have NVA, North Vietnamese Army, they were infiltrated into the south and they made up a body of a lot of the local main force units. A lot of, they were very regimented

in a sense, the VC, they had the various levels. They had like the NVA, their main force and then you had local if you like provincial units and then they had village units if you like. That’s how their structure was and they were sometimes, let’s say they were intermixed at lot of the time which is natural. So you might find, except down the village level, they were local guerilla groups that were sympathisers. You’ve got to remember they were opportunists.

They would do a lot, supply rice or food and may pick up a grenade and drop a grenade here or set off a mine but very much like what’s happening in Iraq at the moment so the, what’s the word I’m looking for? Doctrine has been around for a long long time.

They would go to a holding area well away from the insertion area.

Well we went off to patrol then and what you actually were doing, you were looking for any sign. If that was the mission that you were given, to look for sign, and then maybe there may be a combined

mission reconnaissance cum-ambush patrol which, when you’re talking about an ambush patrol whatever, if you held an ambush it was not necessarily on body count, it was what you could glean from the bodies, whether it was paperwork or whatever they carried on them or the uniform or whatever you could take back for intelligence reasons, you’ve got to remember that the taskforce commander was looking for any indication at all what

units were in that particular area or moving through the area, ’cause that

Yes.

It was, we were, I mean you could probably put us down as colloquially eyes and ears of the task force and that was mainly what we were trying to do. I mean there was other intelligence areas as well. Other units were gathering intelligence from the air and from technical means, from

infrared, you know, from infrared to even sniffer, you know, aircraft but we were on the ground and that, the taskforce commander used us at his disposal to search out an area and I’m sure you’ll hear this from other patrol commanders, or it’s a special mission. You know, if there was a radio in the area that the VC were using or there were certain units in the area they wanted to, even we went down a snatch.

The snatch parties, I mean they were something again, but not all those, I don’t think any of these were completely successful but we tried a few methods. I went out on a large one which was nearly squadron size I think. We were gonna use CS gas (tear gas) but it was in powder form and had baseball bats because we didn’t want to shoot them, you know, we wanted to be able to gas them on a track, set off a small explosion and as they were affected by CS,

run out and bash them around the head with a baseball bat and catch, oh, we went through a whole rehearsal for this. Thank heavens we probably didn’t come off.

It’s the same riot CS gas that you use nowadays in, as you see in street demonstrations, you know, that they through or that are projected by a gas gun.

Yeah, same thing, tear gas I should say.

Yeah, tear gas, that’s CS gas.

Yes.

Yes, at an appropriate time we’d go into a lie up place. That was somewhere where we could feel reasonably secure. We used to backtrack on ourselves as a lie up place because that meant you could ambush your own track into the position, come back around on your own track. That’s not an unknown

technique, and of course when you lie up on that place you do that when you stop for radio communications which is once in the morning and once at night, once in the afternoon, to report on what you covered if there was anything to report.

Well, a lie up place visually, trying to find a lie up place which would be very thick, let’s say thick jungle or vegetation where you could move

into and you could virtually look out, but also if anyone else tended to move in that area they’d be disclosed if you know what I mean. So it was very hard for them to see you but also very hard for them to locate you, but also gave you that reassurance that you could be there, but one of the difficult things was when we’re lying up in say bamboo which is spike bamboo, it also put us in the position if we had to break out of there, it made it

very difficult with spike bamboo ’cause you leave half your clothes hanging on the spike bamboo and your equipment. So you always had to have an exfiltration point to get out of the place, but when you lie up there you sort of sat back-to back most times or very close. Back-to-back was at night time when you were lie up, and that’s where you would sleep like that. You’d sleep with all your gear on and you’d have your pack or your weapon alongside you or across your knees.

Yes, if it was a lie up place we’d spend probably a minimum amount of time if we had to set a sked [schedule], which was sending our radio message back from one of the two skeds per day. The second time we’d probably lie up for midday or there used to be a siesta period, very hot. During the dry season it got very very hot during the time from about half past 11.00

to about 2.00 or 3.00 o’clock in the afternoon and a lot of dry leaves on the ground because they were either defoliated or it was just the time of the year when you get semi-deciduous tress and every time you walked it was so quiet and still it was very loud. So normally you would just move a bit slower but if you thought you were anywhere near the enemy camp or near anywhere you would try to lie up

during that period of time and that was very very hot, during the hottest part of the day, and the VC used to do that most of the time. We thought they did, not all the time they did that, they still moved ’cause they used to be able to move along a track which was cleared of leaves anyway so they didn’t make any noise.

Yes, when you’re in a lie up,

in a place come back on our own track, we’d send out a sort of one or two man clearing patrols just out on the perimeter in case you missed a track. You could prop alongside a track or a camp, very hard to see. When I say, the camp perimeters of a VC camp or NVA camp, staging area you would never know. So you sent out visual distance and then they would go out and search the area and come back in, whichever plan you decided on. You’d

point out where you wanted to go. Of course you wouldn’t need to do reconnaissance on the area you’d just come in but anywhere to your front.

And listen.

Yeah, I think

you had to readjust to the sound, the sounds of the jungle if you like or the bush and you got used to hearing those sounds again and as the patrol went on day after day, it was like, like the critical times were when you were LUP, just on last light, you’d listen if there was any change in the sound in the jungle. At certain times there used to be these screeching beetles, you know, very high pitched

screech and they’d go on. You know, they’d rise up to a crescendo and then they’d drop right off, you know, or you used to get bark, you know, noise of a barking deer, like someone coughing, or you’d get these lizards, these big like the big goannas you’d get out here and you’d hear them coming through the scrub, you know, and they’d slowly walk like someone’s walking, or the other thing, after a while you could tell the sounds

or like the wild pheasant, the wild fowl like you get in the rainforest up north. They’d be scratching away and they’d walk right up to you. The trouble is, not with birds and that sort of thing, you couldn’t suddenly make a move because they’d then take off and squawk into the trees and if anyone was around well that, you didn’t want that to happen anyway but sometimes, excuse me, you felt quite secure, but you’d try not

to disturb the local wildlife, that was what it was about.

Yes, monkeys were difficult. I’m glad you mentioned that. Monkeys were, let’s say they were some of the worst things you could have. One evening we parked under a tree and we didn’t know this tree. We should have looked at the ground more closely, but we parked under this particular tree and the monkeys then moved in at night time and they knew

we were there. So they ate this lovely fruit on the top of the tree and then they shat on us all night and if you saw what it was, it was the round horrible blood looking, oh, whatever they were eating it was terrible. We did have to move away during the night a bit further away. We did it quietly but I suppose, then again of course you couldn’t disturb them. As I said, if you frightened them they’d all take off and of course the locals, VC,

they knew what the signs of a panic of a monkey was. If the monkeys wanted to dob you in they would, you know, if they got over-excited about something. So that was again, it was a consideration not to try and upset the local wildlife.

Traps? I don’t, I think in our colloquialism it was an ambush. I mean

if you were oversighting a track normally you would set up your own protection. You would put out the claymore mines as I said before, but again these were all connected in a series of claymores, connected together by detonating cords so that they all will go off at the same time.

Normally three or four. Depended on what front you wanted to use, where you wanted to use them, on your flanks, the main killing area, or to your rear

protection.

Now, they were normally put out if you were oversighting a track, as they call it, or whatever area you would normally put that out for your own protection but also as part of your killing zone. If it changed, most times you set up that way because if you, an opportunist target came along and I mean the VC came along, a small group, three or four,

sometimes they initiated up to ten, depended on how well you knew the area, how confident you were and what you viewed of what the type of enemy you might be dealing with. If they were well armed and they looked well, let’s say well-trained as you saw them come into the ambush site, you might have second thoughts, but if they were local VC, whatever, you would take that opportunity. So it was all up to the patrol commander whether to

initiate the ambush or not.

Virtually what I said before. If on numbers,if the coverage of the people in your ambush site, in your killing zone, I know that sounds terrible, in the area that you intended to kill people for your claymores and your own small arms afterwards, if they came into the ambush site

and they were well trained, sometimes they were off the track, they had scouts out or they were moving in a tactical manner. A lot of them sometimes just threw their weapons over their shoulders and just strolled along the track, or if there seemed to be a main group coming along behind. One instance I had where we were set up for an ambush and we counted over 160 people through,

I remember my 2IC who was the right flank man, we thought that’s where they were coming from, he was giving me the thumbs up and then all of a sudden, we were even communicating by call as well. I saw him out on the flank and then he gave me, no, he gave me the thumbs down for enemy and then he shook his head and that was the signal, no no no, because after the first 15 went through I was ready to go, ready to press

the initiator on the claymores, and everyone was waiting, everyone was very tense ready to go. He said, no no no no no, and they kept on coming through and when they came though they came through with heavier weapons. Some with 12.7 heavy machine guns and that sort of thing, well we let them go through. We counted them through. One day they came through and it was the same area. A day later another

group came through, about 80 or so and at this time as you remember we were trying to seen by CW, by Morse code, but I went back out in the area again not very long over and they put a balloon up at Nui Dat and we were able to get direct coms [communications] and as they were coming through, I’d like to have kept the tape, we were counting them. One, three, four,

five, 16 up to 17 and we were counting, they were hearing back at the base. When we had a good time communication they asked for a light fire team, and American light fire team. You know one of those little Kaisers [helicopters] come out, they were, that was a team (UNCLEAR) and they had Cobra gun ships and before that I asked for artillery. The trouble is the artillery wouldn’t get close enough and it wasn’t defined on the tracks so they fired in the area, but the ,

as soon as the VC heard it they just stopped and when they leant over I didn’t realise what they, this is how good they were at this sort of camouflage, on their back where they had their big packs they leant over and they were camouflaged when they leant over, they just stopped.

Well that’s virtually right. I could see why they, and this happened later. When we got the light fire team come in, the gun ships, they were looking for them and we were just off the track.

They were right in front of us or just past us actually. I think it was just past us and we told the light fire team by radio where they were. Of course the light fire team, the Yank, this helicopter, he was only a few feet, only 20 foot above me, he’s saying, “You guys, show your panel, show your panel”, and I’m lying on my back there. He wanted me to throw smoke first up. No, I wasn’t going to do that. I said, “I can’t do it, I’ll be compromised”. Anyway he said, “Panel”, I’m lying on my back showing this panel and he couldn’t see me and here was

VC just out there. They could have shot him out of the sky, didn’t realise how close he was to death that guy. Anyway he did see my panel and then I started directing him and the light fire team onto the enemy but I don’t know how successful it was. He said started to see and started to shoot but they scattered. The reason that they didn’t fire back because they would draw fire and once they drew fire the light fire team and then of course everything

would come in on top of them, so they were very very disciplined if you know what I mean.

Depended. Normally probably 15 minutes to half an hour. You could try and do it quicker if you could because when you sent out your flank protection that means people would go out either side. They would give you the signal that things were clear, then you’d go forward and recon,

do a reconnaissance of the ambush site and you may only just do that before you actually set up. You may withdraw then work out where you were going to put your claymores and how you were going to set it out when really you’ve got your line, your actual initiating line have to be wound back to your site. All this would need to be concealed including the claymores. I know, we had claymores out when the aircraft came over one day. They enemy jumped off the track and I thought they jumped on the top of our claymores

and I thought, “Well, I’ll have to keep watching unit I think, if they’ve discovered it I’m just going to have to let it go”, but they didn’t, they didn’t pick it up. They just jumped off and when the aircraft had gone they got back on the track and off they went again.

Oh, it is, yes, it is, yeah. Many, I didn’t have it happen to me, but some patrols got compromised

and got caught setting up and that was difficult because the patrol was spread out, but sometimes it was an advantage and some of them may tell you.

Well they had an enemy come down the track maybe one or two and they had a patrol out on the flank sometimes, that flank protection group opened fire and took out a couple of the enemy so they had two, they had two bodies if you like, that they were able to take off intelligence from, whatever they had in their pocket.

A lot of the VC carried a lot of information and one or two times that they were couriers they were the paymaster, full of money, yeah. I mean you look at me now, I know you’re saying I wonder how they accounted for all that ’cause sometimes it was in American greenbacks, yeah.

Yeah. They were paymasters, they were probably, they move very fast, one or two people, they had a lot of money or they

were keen or eager to get to another area and they’d have a lot of information on them sometimes.

Oh, that’s a Day-Glo type panel, very bright. The same ones you use for when you’re offshore. You know, very bright iridescent red panel that would indicate where you were because they wouldn’t do anything. They wouldn’t fire even if they saw them until they knew where

you were. I mean your own patrol. I mean you could throw smoke but it wasn’t very convenient to throw smoke. Not only would they know but the aircraft in this case, the light fire team, but somebody else would know. I wasn’t prepared for that. I didn’t want to be high tailing it out of there

with an angry horde hanging off my behind.

Ah, it depended. It depended not so much on you, but if you gave the headquarters any messages that the track had been heavily used, but if nothing had come along the track for a day or so well then you’d pack up and move on to somewhere else. A lot of the time VC used to indicate, when they were moving anywhere they’d fire signal shots. A strange system, I know, all over the province at times at night or in the afternoon you’d hear signal shots and these signal shots

were when they’d pass a certain point when they were coming into a camp area. That would indicate to them that they were coming, and sometimes you’d go to these signal shots in the area. You’d record them, take a bearing, estimate how far away ’cause they were all reportable things that you reported on and if the OC of the squadron wanted you to move to that area or you would move towards these shots ’cause that’s where indicates where there was activity. Sometimes you’d never find

where the tracks were because they were running at different parallels, you know, they may run across your front or you may be walking parallel to it or it may take a turn somewhere.

No, I don’t think that was ever the case, but it could’ve been. I mean, yeah, by all means I would never think that wasn’t the case.

Wouldn’t discount it, yes.

This instance where we located or counted so many enemy through the position, we were there up to a week. You don’t move out of that position. Sometimes you eat there and you don’t cook anything.

You eat everything cold. A lot of cases you try not to use anything that makes a lot of noise like tin food, anything that’s strong in smell. You pee, you shit in the area, you virtually sleep there, you virtually don’t move anymore than three or four foot. So you’re there for up to a week in your mess if you like. You try not to, sometimes it’s better

to shit in a bag. Everything, all the rubbish has got to be taken out and that’s, you don’t have a crap at all.

Oh, the imagination can run wild but normally it drifts back to Australia, your family, your kids, but then of course things are brought back into perspective. Sometimes you can have a little snooze while someone stays

awake. We take turns in having a snooze, that’s if people don’t snore. We always used to have a big long stick, not a long stick, but a stick to jab someone at night or during the ambush site to make sure they didn’t snore. During the wet season we had a lot of problems with people getting colds. I’m trying to think, bronchitis I should say, broncho and even though we didn’t

like to send people out on patrol with bronchitis it got that short sometimes we had to, and the poor fellows used to have to sit there trying to suppress their coughs with their sweat rag down their throat. I never got bronchitis even though I was a smoker as well, but some of these guys were really going through hell, and if they coughed you looked, everyone would scowl at them.

I know how bad they must’ve felt, but some people got very bad bronchitis, yes, because of the humidity and you know, I suppose smoking as well, but in that sort of climate sleeping on the ground which we did all the time in Vietnam. Slept on a piece of plastic, that was all we slept on.

No, no, no. In Vietnam it was entirely different to when we were back in Malaya or Borneo.

I think it was determination to see that you had a job to do. I think that’s, I don’t know whether that’s an SAS soldier but that’s something, that’s part of his trait or his selection I think that he sees through something,

to carry on through something and that’s part of what the job is. I think that’s determination to see it through.

One of the things we used to use was normal hand signals, you know, enemy or OK, you know, come over here or it was just virtually, oh, one of the things we used to use was a clicking sound. Not your fingers, ’cause

you had your hands on, used to te te te te te, te te, or things like that and that was to get someone’s attention, but most times people got used to looking at each other. You know what I mean? We’d always look around, and some people would even pull out a book and might read it, have a read somewhere when you’re (UNCLEAR) and everything was quiet and we’d always

look up, you never look at each other. If there was a sign you’d always see by the look, ’cause a lot of the time some people suddenly saw something and they’d start to bring up their weapon and of course there was nothing said, that means that they’d seen something, movement, which was quite right, and once they started to take up aim with their firearm everyone would be switched on and look where this was or look around ’cause sometimes it wasn’t just in that particular area, it may be somewhere else as well.

Not much was said, it wasn’t you know, “There’s the enemy, there’s 15 over there”. Nothing was said, it was just the look you gave to someone. You could tell by the body language what was happening.

Yeah, the attack was actually after the incident we sighted many of the enemy on the track and we actually thought we saw a Caucasian which excited the task force commander at the time and we saw various types

of packs and radios we thought, but after we’d been pulled out of that particular position for the last time I think the taskforce commander made a decision unbeknown to me that I would go back in another day or so later and lead in an infantry company back into the area. You know, to make contact with the larger group.

Yeah, when we pulled out of there we got flown back to the taskforce commander back at the fire support base. I’ve forgotten the name of the fire support base but we met the brigadier. Here we were, this helicopter landed in the fire support base and there was the brigadier waiting for us, shook my hand, he said, “You’re patrol, come up and have a cup of tea”. So he took us up into the

operations area of the taskforce at the fire support base and he got me to give a briefing to these company commanders and other people, the intelligence people I think they were, on the map of what we’d seen over the last few days. I was quite impressed. I think it was Brigadier Sandy Pearson at the time. So then we were flown back to our base. Anyway a couple of days later

I was briefed by the squadron commander at the time, Major Brian Wade. He said, “How would you like to lead a company back in the area?” I said, “Oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea to find out what’s really going on there, to see what’s happening”. Anyway the company I was leading back in was a Kiwi company, Whisky Company it was called, attached to 4 Battalion I think at the time, the Anzac Battalion. They used to call it the Anzac Battalion,

4 Battalion. Now if ever, when I went down to the taskforce I went down to the Whisky Company, here’s all these big Maoris. Very impressive, I thought, “Gee, these are guys, if they run into these I’ve got no problems, they’re really going to acquit themselves”, and they were all standing around ready to go. They had all their belts of M60 ammunition, you know, typical Maoris, and each one of them, they all had a claymore each. Everyone in the company I think, including the company commander. Anyway I was

introduced around and they all looked at me. I think they were a bit sceptical and said, “Oh well, yeah, they’re gonna take us back in?” Anyway, we went out on these APC, armoured personnel carriers, we got off on a fire support trail and I led them into where I’d seen all these people. Anyway on the way in when we got off,

it’s typical in a company. As I said, I was in the middle with the headquarters group with the OC of the company and the company sergeant major so I travelled with them and their signalman and everything else. Anyway as we got in there you’re heading, you know, when you’re moving with a large group like that, you’re bumbling along and if you’re in the middle you’re just part of the big group you’re not very switched on, anyway because you’ve got the platoon out in front and you got one at the rear and you’ve got the flanks out. Anyway

we got in there and there’s a contact at the rear and all this, all this firing breaking out at the rear. I still just went to ground and the boss just sits down and gets on his radio and says, “What’s happening up there?” He said, “They’ve got two VC following us up at the rear”. Anyway they shot them, they got two bodies there. Anyway about another hour later they crossed the track, they found the track that we’d been sitting on, not exact same place, but then they got contact with another group at the front.

So all this fire fight was going on. Anyway they accounted for another two bodies, VC, and it was sort of strange to know what was going on. Anyway we pushed on. By that stage it was late afternoon, the Kiwis have got a wonderful, well I thought a wonderful system anyway, they’d form up in a triangle and they’d put one side of the triangle down the track and the rest all around at each point, there’s a

heavy machine gun and we were in the middle and all around is claymores out from this triangle. Terribly powerful sort of set up, protection. I think the company commander was on to it if anything was going to happen it would happen that night after these two contacts. Anyway that night just after last light sure enough on the flanks all of a sudden there was a great karoompa. Anyway the VC had come down the

track and then all hell broke lose for about an hour and a half. I was in the middle, this is entirely alien to me to sit there and not able to do anything, fire back or go anywhere. Anyway there was a machine gun about 20 metres in front of me and the VC had decided to come and sweep around on that wing and they fired rocket propelled grenades that

hit the machine gun just above there. One guy, a couple of guys got wounded but a couple of the grenades hit the trees behind me and brought down the aerials that the company commander had strung up. Anyway they got a temporary aerial, the (UNCLEAR), the whole lot of the claymores went off, I think they had a terrific sound. Anyway we had a forward observation officer with us who was an artillery observer in the headquarters group and he started directing the artillery,

the 155s, self propelled guns from the fire base, fire support base, and these things came crashing in. Now I didn’t have a shovel but they all got the order to dig in and the SSM [squadron sergeant major], he was busy running around as an SSM making sure of the ammunition and looking after the wounded. He tossed me a shovel, he said, “Here you are, dig in”. So I couldn’t do anything else, so here was me throwing

dirt everywhere and I was down in that ground pretty quick I can tell you. So I just had my head up above so I could see what was going on. But once the 155 rounds started landing in there they really brought them close, all around the perimeter, and after that they called in the Puff the Magic Dragon. Do you wonder what Puff the Magic Dragon is? You’ve heard about Puff the Magic Dragon?

That was from the

song, it’s a DC-3, an old Dakota, and it had mini guns and when they used the mini guns, these are mini guns either side and just a stream of white light. Now all this was happening, back at the taskforce, back at the headquarters they were all watching this. The guys knew it was me out there with all this artillery fire and Puff the Magic Dragon was setting down this pattern of mini

gun fire which was about a round every two inches, around the perimeter or in the area where they thought the enemy may form up. But anyway, whatever the group was, they ambushed these people on the track. The Kiwis got I think about 5 or 6, but during the fire fight the VC dragged the bodies away so there were blood trails next morning, but that went on for most of the night. There were probes down around the perimeter. I think the VC thought they’d hit an

SAS patrol ’cause they knew, they must’ve found our sign later after we left the area and I think they thought they were lucky they were going to capture an SAS patrol because we had quite a bit of money on our head. It would’ve been a real coup for the VC to capture a patrol.

They did withdraw, yeah. It was many months later and it was always a wonder to me for many months later it was they, when I say many months, not

many months later there was a Long Binh Rubber which was only just a few thousand kilometres to our west I think it was, there was a major group contact with tanks and that, and that was a known battle in the Long Binh Rubber. I always wondered there was never the two matched up but I’m sure it was. They were the same group that we accounted on that night that I’d seen over the previous days.

Yeah, at that time, yeah, that was the most, yeah. In that consistency at the time, yeah.

I didn’t have the control I suppose. I couldn’t call the shots and I didn’t know what was going on. I had to listen to the radio but the company commander had the

radio operator to find out what was going on. I mean I was some few metres back and I could only overhear and he briefed me after what went on but I didn’t know what was actually occurring and on the night of the attack I could only hear various snatches of conversation what was happening through the radio operator.

I suppose it’s all a stress in a way but it’s not much, I mean I understood what it was like to be back in, as an infantryman if you’re on the inner perimeter you can’t fire out unless you know you’re left and right of arcs and you’re sure that you can fire without, well without shooting anyone else in the perimeter, and you’re there as strength if you’re overrun but you’ve just got to lay and wait. You’re in support.

Unless you get a specific fire task, you know, someone directs you to fire in that particular area at the target that you can see.

Yes, that was another patrol. I was out there and of course I knew my son was going to be born sometime in April, but as you might imagine

when they send a message out, the message I got on one of the sched [scheduled] times was, and that was that small piece of paper I showed you, anyway, the message come through that “Son born two”. Now of course they immediately accept was born in April so that was, I thought hell, I said to the radio operator, “Check the message, check the code will you?” He said, “Yeah, son born two”.

And I thought, “Oh, I’ve had twins or something”, and I didn’t know until I got back and he said, “Oh, you silly dill”, of course they were trying to use the minimum message. They didn’t want to keep us on the air longer than they had to. They didn’t want to, and that was the whole of the sched, you know, the base would minimise our message and it was sort of a code within a code itself. So when I got back I saw the message written out on the one time letter pad, you know, it was son born to

Alan, you know.

Yeah, that’s right, yeah. It was to, but it also meant the month, you know, it was to, yeah that’s right at the time and on the second of April, you know, and so

Oh I think we all had an extra drink of water. I think we all shook hands and thanks very much, I got congratulated. I felt good, yeah, it was good, yeah.

I think so. It was later when Penny was born back in Australia, she was born in 1970, I’d probably say Robert was a New Guinea baby, or before New Guinea and Penny was a Vietnam, after-Vietnam baby. So she was born in 1970 two years later and I was there for her birth but it was, yeah, I’d

say we’ll cover this a bit later. When I got back and I did see Robert when I went home on R and R [rest and recreation] for five days. He was nearly six months old then and when I got home he was nearly 12 months old, so I’d missed if you like, I’d missed 12 months of my son’s growing up, and coming from Vietnam, I can cover that later.

It was something to, trying to adjust to.

No, no. Out of 22 patrols that we went out on we never lost anyone. The squadron never really lost anyone to enemy fire.

Oh yes, there were a lot of people wounded.

I got superficially wounded but that was only from my own fire.

Oh yeah. We had M79s and we used to fire M79s into a contact area but they used to arm after, I think I recall after about 10 metres, arm themselves. An M79 was a grenade launcher. We used to fire them from underneath as a 203 or they had their own M79 grenade launchers or 40 millimetre it was.

The trouble was that sometimes they’d hit the trees on their way through and sometimes you get the shrapnel, so this day I got peppered with all these bits of shrapnel. They were just under the skin, they were just like little lumps and when I got back I didn’t know. I felt I had all this, they had to pick it all out of me. It was like gun shot pellets ’cause I had all these things sticking out of me and they tried to

say, we’ll need to report this and it will go back to your wife. No no no, don’t do that ’cause she’ll think the worse, but anyway most of the patrol just got the odd nick or two but nothing from gunshot wounds. Some of the other guys were wounded, one guy had a tree fall on him after an ambush. A claymore blew the tree backwards onto him.

Oh fairly. I think he got

broken, as I recall he got a broken hip out of it, hip bone, but there were a few gunshot wounds, yeah. Some, yeah, you had to be sent home for being wounded. We were very lucky. Near the end or the beginning of the end of our tour, or the beginning of the next tour the Kiwis were still there and one of their guys got killed unfortunately from enemy fire.

We used to be able to smell. We used to smoke out there quite often, but again we used to cook too, but again we used to smell a camp. We could smell someone but you could hear someone. It didn’t take much ’cause they talked, you know, and you could pick up

or they’d cough, you know, they used to get bronchitis as well. You could hear them spitting, you know. We’d hear the rattle of something and you could pick that up a long way off. Sometimes you’d hear it and it was quite some five or ten minutes later until they came into view. That sort of thing, and I think your senses were very very acute, or became acute.

Oh, I think you trusted in each other completely. There were very few times I felt mistrust within a patrol member that I’d known for some time. I think you trusted each completely in a sense. You relied on each other to do the job.

I think it was just the sign. They’d move in a position to be able to defend themself. Your weapon was your extension of your body language. I mean when you’re there that’s how you defended yourself. You got yourself in a position where you were able to fire back, you were able to defend yourself and the patrol

and that was the way it was. You’d never sit anywhere or stay anywhere. I don’t think people understand that when they’re being trained, until you’re there that you’ll always be in a position where you’re able to bring your firearm up and able to use it. You’d never be away from where you’d have to make two moves to get to it or something like that, it would always be in reach if you know what I mean. Even the signaller, he had his hands full all the time, he had to make sure he was protected while

he was sending out the signals and doing paperwork, but he’d always have his weapon handy because it came down to the defence of your individual. A lot of the time a guy would pick up the enemy when he was aiming at a member of the patrol. This has occurred in another patrol, so a lot of the time, a lot of times a guy’s life was saved by another member of the patrol ’cause he may have been looking the other way, but the other member picked up

the sign that the enemy was about to fire or take aim or had actually aimed at that person.

Mostly, yeah.

Forward scout. Used to call him the forward scout, the person that was in front of me. He was the eyes and ears, he was out their searching. He could pick up the tracks,

he could pick up noise before any of us could if he was in front. I think, yeah, he was the most important person I felt in the patrol. Next came the signalman of course. Even though some of them were cross-trained, if he was a good signaller he’d know just by looking at his compass. Everyone had a compass and a map in SAS patrol so if we got separated and we were on our own we could make it back to the last RV. I don’t know whether you knew the RV system. If we got

fragmented in a contact we’d note where the last RV or the last stop was, that’s where we’d make back and that would be say two hours. If nothing, no one turned up there in two hours there’d be the next RV and that would be four hours back and then back to the next. That was in case we got hit and we got split up.

I think you wouldn’t leave, it was imbued into you that you would never leave someone behind. I think, unless there was a chance, I don’t think I’ve ever, if someone went down the whole patrol, that was when they were most vulnerable. We’d obviously try and recover the guy. He may be wounded. If he was shot dead

and there was a chance that we could make a break and we couldn’t take him with us that would probably change but I think that’s where we were most vulnerable. If we would stay there probably until the last and say, well we can’t really get away or we’ve got no chance of getting away, we’ll stay and fight to the last. I mean we knew the VC weren’t going to take prisoners and if we were taken prisoner we knew that we weren’t going to get a very

good time. So really it was best to try and extract yourself with all your patrol than try and break away because you’d probably be run down at that stage. So it was best to get to a consolidated position, get that message out that you needed help and then help would come for you and take everyone with you if you could. I mean that was part of the reason that,

originally in Borneo, we understood that they operated a four man patrol. Some of them five man, but the Brits used to operate religiously if you like virtually, the four man patrol, but we thought if one man got hit, another man, two men to rescue someone, carry someone out, you’ve only got one man to do your fire fight, you know. He’s trying to extract you from a problem. So most of our patrols were five, it was your basic five or more.

We thought the extra man, the extra person would make that difference.

Yeah, I think so, definitely that would be yes, definitely.

They wouldn’t, you wouldn’t, you don’t, we never mention that. That’s all part of your, I think we all knew what each other may be experiencing and that was again just by looking at each other. Remember we were so close to each other.

Maybe days on end, you know, we’d be sitting in that position. I don’t like to talk for other people but I thought that people understood each other, what each was going through. I don’t, you know, that wasn’t asked. It wasn’t discussed. I think when you went back after patrol, as you might imagine, you’d been out there on that sort of patrol or the guys had set off an ambush they’d let steam off.

You know what I mean?

Alcohol. I felt it must be very hard, I believe East Timor and certain operations now are dry areas. I wonder how they let off steam, how they actually unwind after a very tense period? You know like they’ve got a break. But we get back and we’d have a beer or whatever and normally it wouldn’t be,

we’d talk about it, it was all fun, you know it was all like you’d been out, been out and had, been out and done something like an adventure. As you talked about before you wouldn’t talk about what was actually biting into you, what you were frightened of. You wouldn’t mention you were frightened. I think everyone knew. Anyone that wasn’t frightened or was tense at the time would be, they wouldn’t be normal.

Only once, yeah, once or twice, only one individual.

Well I talked to him afterwards because he sort of compromised the whole patrol in some ways because his action was actually over-reaction I thought, brought disrepute on the patrol, do you know what I mean?

Well I think he reacted to something, a couple of times he like initiated a firing at something that I didn’t see and I couldn’t confirm, neither could anyone else. So I was very troubled by that because we had to be extracted, exfilled [exfiltrated] on a couple of occasions but I couldn’t verify what he’d saw, but once he’d opened up with his firearm

and blasted the whole bush around where he was, I mean he compromised us at that stage. Once or twice, sorry, once we had to stay there after that occurred. I wasn’t very happy with him. I mean he was a good soldier mind you, but I think at that timehis nerves had got to him. He settled down after a while. I’m sure he saw my point but I was a bit worried about him. He wasn’t one of my regular patrol members I’ve got to say.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it was only when I went to work with the Americans near

Bien Hoa, what they call Bear Cat, the 9th Division Long Range Recce Patrol that I got to speak to, actually talk to and we went out with Americans and they had some of these, what were they called, PRU, they were provincial reconnaissance units. What they actually were, ex-VC and when they went out on patrol I always thought it was always a bit of problem. They were all dressed in their black with all VC equipment

on them including AKs. They were very good. I mean they were, I got invited back into the hut and we sat down and we ate their food. They cook up their food on their griller and everything else, nice people, they were. They used to hate the VC, ex-VC, they had hate for them. Obviously I didn’t go, I never got into detail but the guys did say there were some incidents the way they were treated or their family were treated and

they were executed. When I went out with the Americans that was something again. They were good to work with but they were very blasé. They lost quite a few people actually, up to 20 or 30 people out of their Long Range Recce Patrol but they had a very heavy area where a lot of NVA were and main force units were moving through that area to get into Saigon ’cause they were on, across that route if you

like, but we used to go out at night with the Americans. They’d have one helicopter, they’d drop us in and then of course, funny thing, they were very noisy when they moved and they’d walk down tracks. You’d think, “Hello, what are we going to bump here” and sometimes they did bump the main force and got really badly mauled.

Yes, yes.

Finesse is an interesting word to use. I think it was to know what their role and job was. I don’t think it was,I mean they were noisy most times. Some of them were very good soldiers. Look, I mean there’s always two, but most times they were very noisy. They’d walk down the track; they’d be looking for a contact. When they wanted a fix, I know this is because when they

bump someone they relied heavily on artillery or fire support from gun ships. When they’d bump someone they’d merely come up on the radio ’cause they had direct coms they didn’t have CW. They used to be in the area, they used to put up a balloon, you know like with an aerial on it, and for instance when they wanted a fix on the ground where they were they’d call up this aeroplane and over it would come and he’d

give them a fix, you know, and sometimes they’d even put up a balloon or throw smoke so they could indicate where they were, so that would give them a direct fix on the ground and that was, I suppose it was very reassuring that their artillery would then adjust to that position. Do you know what I mean? So every time they moved they always had this close artillery backup. It did work for them a lot of the time, but it was a bit of go out and

rattle the drum and see who rolled up to answer your call. Do you know what I mean, bash the symbol and see who came out of the scrub? When they came out, we got you know, we’ll zoom in on to you with the artillery or light fire teams. I mean they were very, I used to call them quite brave, but I don’t know whether they were brave or silly sometimes. I was a bit worried

From February 1968 until February 1969. All up it was nearly 13 months.

After that what happened?

Well I went home.

We worked with Americans for two or three weeks, we were on attachment. They sent a group up to work

with our patrol so I went to, what they call Bear Cat near Bien Hoa and I worked with them on their patrol on their Long Range Recce.

Yeah, I think it was in late ’68. Their bases were quite different to the taskforce. There wasn’t a tree on the place, it was denuded. They

never had a tree anywhere. They had big buns bulldozed up around the entire perimeter, had all these watch towers all around, even though it was, like Bien Hoa, it was a huge place and the thing that you always got, they used to have in their toilets, we had deep hole type, they used to sit on the toilet, and I know I don’t want to go into this, but they used to sit and do it on corrugated

iron and next morning they’d wheel this out and they’d burn it. I couldn’t understand it either, and the smoke and the smell. They used to burn it with like, dowse it with kerosene or aircraft fuel and the smell of this burning excreta and fuel drifting over the camp everyday, I don’t know how they ate breakfast.

Yeah, yeah.

Well they thought that was very hygienic.

I don’t know, it may have been the ground water there, they couldn’t dig holes to, deep hole like latrines, but you know, that used to amaze me on the bases in that area. They mightn’t have done it for all bases but that was generally what they did there.

I thought I was very tired. I was sort of,

I felt a bit run down, a bit washed out and of course at that stage we were getting a lot of newspapers from Australia. We used to get newspapers a couple of weeks late, later. You’ve got to remember we couldn’t pick up a phone and ring home. I don’t mean that any different now because you’ve got e-mail. Guys go to war and they can go back to base and talk to mum and dad or ring up on the satellite phone or use e-mail. We used to get this quaint system, other than write letters which the posties used to

go on strike in Australia and I used to get these things like bash a postie because the mail would get held up in the system somewhere because they’d go on strike. I mean mail was very critical and if you got a telegram, like the telegram come through from my son being born, that went to the squadron. It was this quaint system that you paid 25 cents for a group of letters like “I love you” and these would all be selected in this page of the book. That’s

how you sent telegrams. It was very, what’s the word, informal.

Poor postmen. I don’t want to cause any industrial problems because I’ve got sympathy. During the time they had some dispute with the Postmaster General and I suppose they thought that they could use the lever, and the wharf stevedores did at the time too, well they were against Vietnam,

and they wouldn’t load anything for Vietnam which included mail or sometimes parcels, not only war stores, but the posties went on strike, they wouldn’t handle any mail. So it came out, these messages went around back to Australia, the troops were bash a postie when you get home, you know.

No, no. I think there were some unkind words said.

Yeah.

When I came back, while I was away my wife bought the new car and she hadn’t had a driver’s licence by that stage. Anyway, there she is waiting

at Pearce. When we came in we had a very sort of violent storm, the old Hercules was all over the place. I thought, “Hello, this is a nice beginning”. Anyway got through the storm and they were all waiting for us at the airport, at the RAAF base. We wouldn’t go into a civvy [civilian] airport at that stage because of the sensitivity. She was waiting there with the new car, she’d learnt to drive and bought the new car so there I was, I jumped into gear and we quickly got off the planes and the customs were very nice. They processed us

very very quickly which was nice of them, there was no stuffing around and off I went, and that time my wife, Carol, had organised for the, I met my son, was there, my baby son and we went immediately off to the beach shack up at the coast I mentioned about before. So we spent a couple of weeks up there trying to wind down but my, when

I met, saw my son again, it was I had a baby and I’d just come back to something that was so strange, to go from, like going from black to white. I just didn’t realise it but I just had as many others did, had, I couldn’t adjust so quickly. I was trying to adjust.

Well in Vietnam

even when you’re back at the base, you know, there was still tension because there was, there could be mortared or and the dhobi, a few days before we came home the ammunition dump blew up. I think I might’ve mentioned that, when the ammunition dump blew up we heard these bang bang bang like mortars hitting the ground. I thought, oh, we’ve been mortared. I was up on Nadzab which is our landing point and this poor guy was up in this tower. He was the tower controller for aircraft coming into Nadzab, into Luscombe Field which is a

long runway which the recce and the Caribous used to fly into. Anyway there was a Caribou just come in then. We were up there and these bangs went off and I’m looking around, we’re looking around to see where they’d landed. He was up in the tower and I saw this Caribou, he came in and he heard these bangs, looking down over the hill and he turned around and he took off. Caribous are very short take off and landing aircraft, a Stoll aircraft. Anyway he must’ve taken off from about 100 metres because he just revved everything up.

Everyone got thrown out the back to give them light and he just took off across the field across the rubber, and this guy up in the tower just babbling away. I said, “Come down out of there”. Anyway there’s the ammunition dump blew up. There was all this, we rushed for the bunkers and in the bunkers were all our goodies we bought from the PX [American canteen unit] to go home and we’re sitting in among the video players and everything else and all this stuff is raining down around us and the bush was catching alight. Of course when the bush catches alight there was grenades,

you know like whole grenades, most of them didn’t go off thank heavens but the white phosphorous ones did and that’s what I think set the, and all this ordnance was falling down over the place like, a couple went through the officers’ mess and one was right at the bar. This grenade went right through the roof, whole grenade and there it was sitting on the floor. So we’re out fighting and then everything caught alight and there was lose ammunition in the bush and it started to go winging and zing off around there ’cause people had dropped ammunition or

whatever and this is right at the end of the day.

When we come back to the showers.

Yeah, the grenades weren’t actually exploding, I think some of the grenades, I think they might even be white phosphorous or whatever they were. I don’t know whether you understand what white phosphorous is but it’s a type of grenade, but the fragmentation grenades they just came

down in one whole and some of them because they went up so high and came down and went through the rooves of various things, they just went straight through the roof and through several layers of metal and just embedded in the floor or wherever. I don’t think we found everything later on when we searched and looked around for a number of grenades. I don’t think we could account for them but we found as many as we could. I’m sure there must’ve been a few we never found

that were in the bamboo somewhere.

There were two, unfortunate there were two guys that must’ve been in the ammunition bay they were sort of ammunition technical officers down there. They were sort of sorting out something down there when the accident occurred. They set a chain reaction off, they were both killed so that was most unfortunate.

Oh yes, when I talked about video recorders I meant tape recorders that were in the bunks and bunkers and radios and all this sort of thing that we had to share with. I don’t think most of us knew the guys couldn’t fit it in the tents somewhere so they stuck them in the protected bunkers so when everyone rushed in there they got confronted with this great big box. “Who the hell’s gear is this?” ’Cause we had our helmets in there as well. You’ve got to remember at this time when the ammunition dump, this is sort of the end of the day when everyone was having a

shower, about that time. You know we were all sort of in our track suits and flying suits at that time. So there was guys running around when this thing was on with just a towel around them, you know, running back with their flip flops on trying to get back to the lines ’cause they didn’t have a clue what, I thought most of the guys, we were lucky we were right up at the top of the hill. We had an idea, then we worked out it wasn’t mortars, we thought, “Hello, that’s coming from the ammunition bunkers just down over, just on the brow of the hill”. So we had an

idea then but the other guys further down back behind the hill in the unit they wouldn’t have a clue. They would’ve thought it would’ve been mortars because every time there was a great bang went off that sounded like a mortar coming in‘‘cause mortars don’t give any indication, as you might be aware they’re not like an artillery round, you can hear the incoming but with a mortar it just lands.

Yeah, well life was so different. I came home on R and R probably six months before but I was sort of prepared for that and I think in that we spent of my time with my wife. We went out a couple of times but when I come back I knew that where I’d come from, that was over, and I’d been there for nearly 13 months. I think it was just a way of life. Life back here was so different.

Well I think one thing it was sort of, I mean we had some funny moments and things like that but when you, there was always tension there, there was a war on and you didn’t have running water, you didn’t go to the tap, you sat on, you didn’t have any toilets or anything like that and you slept mostly on the ground when we were out on patrol. When you’re back in your tent well there’s no TV. It was sort of very,

you knew that you were going back out on patrol in another five days. If you’d just come in from patrol you were preparing to go out again. So it was this sort of constant tension if you like.

Well, I don’t know, probably quite a while. I think I had a lot of trouble adjusting, especially with my child. I used to get angry because the child used to cry,

you know, Rob used to cry and I couldn’t sort of stand the noise of it being a father, you know, with constant attention. Even when we, one, when I was up at Quinn’s Rocks a helicopter come over, a UE helicopter and it still does that to me now unfortunately, you get rather emotional of a Bell UE helicopter because that’s what you hear in Vietnam,

that was, it meant life. I suppose it meant life, not life or death but it meant, it took you into like they say, it took you into battle if you like to say it that way, and it took you out again and it was used for med evac [evacuation], it was used for everything. That was the constant sound in the air.

Oh yeah. If I hear a helicopter, a UE helicopter, one came over here, over

the bay some weeks back, I’ll rush outside and see it, I know the sound. That’s one thing talking about acute sound, you can hear that helicopter well before most people can, especially a Bell helicopter because that’s what you’d listen for if you’d been extracted. On extraction, I’ll go back, if it was a hot extraction you’d go through the same thing as you’d throw smoke and you’d probably signal the aircraft by mirror, they’d pick you up by

by a mirror and hot extraction, well that’s where the gun, but if it was just a normal extraction into the day you’d listen for the helicopter and they’d pick you up and come in. You’d throw smoke to indicate which way the wind was so they could land into the wind.

I suppose they were quite disjointed for a while. I think you’re restless

but what really happened, we never got time in the regiment to settle if you know what I mean. We were back into training, we were back into doing other things. I went back into preparing for Vietnam and then I went to training squadron and I was actually 2IC of the selection course then and I was running selection courses for quite a while and then I was sent to 3 Squadron. Virtually I think

at that time I’d been in every squadron in the regiment from 1, 2 and 3 Squadron to Base Squadron to RHQ, Regimental Headquarters the time I left, and the Support Squadron.

I think it was detrimental to marriage. I think that even later after a couple of years I think I must’ve been, I was very hard to live with.

Very tense, yes, very hard to live with. When I say tense, I think I didn’t have much patience, I think that had sort of gone.

I suppose you know, things would annoy me, sometimes just the normal the way, not specific, but

some things might annoy me and I suppose that affected my wife in that way. You’ve got to remember that she put up with a lot, or they did put up with a lot. The women put up with a lot while we were away, they were under a lot of strain. I mean they didn’t know what was happening. You’d get casualties back, read in the paper, they wouldn’t know what we were doing, you know, where we were, you know. The casualties from Vietnam were quite constant and it was all in the paper all the time. Either it was the protest movement or it was to do with what was happening

in Vietnam.

No. I think the expectation was from my wife that I’d just pick up where I left off, you know, and that was never quite the same. I think she always said, “You’re a little different to what you were”. I suppose I was but you know, I couldn’t pick it up but I’m sure she could, yeah, and remember, I think it was mentioned

that I wasn’t married all that long before I left and then had a child so all these things impacted on when I got back, so life was different. I was trying to adjust to a marriage and a child after being I suppose in a traumatic 12 months. I mean, I see nowadays that most guys like East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq is six months and I think that’s good reasoning because 12

months in a place like Vietnam just ruined too many marriages and too many lives. It was just too constant. It was better to do six months then go back after and do another six months after you’d been home for a while, you know, a short time. I think better reasoning.

I think so because you had the environment always in the army where you always could smoke and when you were overseas you got cheap cigarettes, cheap booze so it was always there, and even when we got back it was there in the mess. We could always drink. I always compare it, I always look at what happened in the First World War, you know, the guys who were under constant, or nearly constant they were. Second

War, I felt was a little different in some cases. Guys went away, they were up the front, then they got pulled back and they had a lot of, not a lot, but they had rest periods. I always felt for those guys that were constantly. I think we, just because in Vietnam it was constant. We were there for 12 months. If you were in the field most of the things were constant all the time, you know, especially the guys in battalion. They were out there for three or four weeks. They may be back for a week, couple of weeks and zoom, they were out again. Their pressure was

on them all the time. You couldn’t sort of go forward, come back and rest, you know like be relieved in places, something like that. I felt that was much the same, like that you know.

I think it was always thought in the beginning and it was never recognised but I think the Viet Cong even during the Tet Offensive didn’t, I mean there is always the wild card, isn’t it, there was odd incidents but it was never a concentrated effort to do over Vung Tau,

you know, because I think not because they were taking R and R there but it was also an area where it was advantageous to them, where they could exchange black market or they could exchange information. It was a port; it was a place where it was sort of neutral ground so why foul it up when it was an advantage to them anyway.

The Viet Cong, yeah. There was

There were other theatres of war where this actually happened and they adopted them. I’m sure it was part of their doctrine that they could make one area or a couple of areas like that where, you know, they could move freely. Not freely, but they could move backwards and forwards and wouldn’t as the old saying, didn’t want to shit in their own nest if you know what I mean. That’s a saying.

Yeah, and I think it happened in Algiers. I think

there was some other area like that was the same thing. That’s what they did there also. So they had this area where they didn’t focus their operations on.

No, I think sometimes there was always the feeling that there was always tension there though. I mean

there was always tension between, sometimes between the local Vietnamese and ourselves. At night, sometimes would you believe, there were fire fights between not only the locals but between the Americans, yeah fire fights. Unbelievable. I mean in civilians. Have a few beers and disagreement and out come, it was like Dodge City, you know, out come

the guns and blast away.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I mean you know, if you understand, you see coming back from Iraq and I can understand what that’s like. It’s another Dodge City, there’s no laws, like in Vietnam, they were so used to the gun and so used to a war all the time it was just a way of life. It’s a shame, I mean yeah.

I was very confused. I suppose it might’ve been said by someone a bit senior to me, used to be CO of our regiment, now the Governor General, I think at the time I think we felt that we were doing the right thing and I still do in a way. It was right for

that time, you know, there was a North and South Vietnam even though the government was corrupt in the south. I really couldn’t, the same side, I really couldn’t say that the North Vietnamese government was all that shiny clean either. Do you know what I mean? A lot of cases they were very vicious. They’d wipe out entire villages if they didn’t cooperate, but you know, at the same time

I felt the inevitability of the whole situation was what worried me. You could in the end see that if the South Vietnamese were going to retain their independence, America and ourselves were going to be there forever, just to do that. Do you know what I mean? And when that was identified, I think that’s why we suddenly started to withdraw and say look, this is gonna go on forever.

The Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese are just going to, you’ve got to remember the border of Vietnam, they had such a common border with everything, the infiltration into South Vietnam was just like a sieve, everything was coming in you know. There was no way you could put up a fence and stop it, similar to Iraq? There’s a parallel there, isn’t there?

Yeah. I think it was disappointing. I wasn’t that angry. I was angry but I always thought no influence. You’ve got to remember that information, the North Vietnamese and the communists you’ve got remember were using it as a propaganda and very well, and of course they’re only told one side of the story, I mean back here in Australia. So it went well and I could understand how people felt about the Vietnam War.

Because also the other thing, it wasn’t winnable if you know what I mean. We always thought in our own mind if it was going to be a win or no win situation why fight with your hands behind your back if you know what I mean. When the bombing of North Vietnam ceased and they started to parley at the Peace Talks in Paris they halted the bombing, but that was an American political decision. As far as the soldiers in the field, we thought well why not bomb the shit out of

them because it’ll stop then. You know, their infrastructure and everything else. So we were disappointed in that way. Don’t bomb Vietnam but they can still infiltrate everything into the south to win the war, yet we’ve still got to fight on and be the goodies, do you know what I mean? That was when we felt, I felt that really, not a lost cause, it was just that it wasn’t going to be a, there wasn’t going to be a co-off, [ co-offensive]

there wasn’t going to be an end.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and that was off and on. So we felt at that stage that was the wrong decision to make. Like at the peace table reading, you know, if you want to bring someone to the peace table it’s best to say, have the strong hand.

When I came back, we were preparing the squadron for rotating and we’d been back six months and then we were into the training preparation to go away again. I was in the same squadron again. We were preparing to go. I had a bit of a fall out with the OC of the squadron at the time,

and a couple of other things and I ended up going to a training squadron. Then I went to 3 Squadron which were due to go back again but I think we had a fair inkling things were starting to wind down. I went through the whole training cycle again but it was much more thorough this time, the third time around because we had helicopter support in New Guinea where we actually had realistic patrols, but you know, patrols, I was a patrol commander again. I was a troop sergeant then. So, and

we were in New Guinea, no, I think it was after we came from New Guinea on a patrol course that we were told, you know, everything was off and 2 Squadron were coming home. They did a nine-month tour up there, 12 to 13 months, and then of course once the Vietnam era finished we then started to go into looking at operating as support to the Australian Army north of Australia, remember it was the defence

of Australia. Then we went into specialised training. I went into water operations. I ended up being the troop and 3 Squadron as a water operations troop sergeant.

Diving, a diver, salt swimmer which they’re called. Beach reconnaissance working with submarine and working, you know, working with the navy on submarines and canoes and inflatables, all that sort of thing

in special operations or we had a special operations course.

Yes, it was. So I think that was the first part of my five years, the next five years was training in special operations and exercises within the regiment. So I left, I arrived in the regiment in ’66 and I left there in ’76 as a

warrant officer. The CO fronted me up when I was promoted to warrant officer and I was made a little, I had to have an operation on my leg so I had to be taken out of the sabre squadron and they found me a job at headquarters as being the Assistant Manager and Family Liaison Officer which wasn’t my bag, you know, ’cause what, paperwork and sitting behind a desk, but anyway I ended up becoming the treasurer of the mess and I got

all these extra regiment duty jobs that everyone else didn’t want because they were moving around. Anyway I bore with it, I did bear with it. Anyway I got fronted up the CO. He said, “We want you to do extra regimental experience and you’ll need to go back to a training unit or an infantry unit”, ’cause at that time the special operations of the regiment

is not like it is nowadays. There’s a whole family of units that come under, that have their own major general now. We didn’t have anything like that at all in our day.

Well, he gave me an option. He said, “I want you to make a decision in the next six to eight months”. Previous to that I’d been to RMC [Royal Military College] on attachment, what they call weeks 1 to 4 which is the first

month of the cadets’ arrival at RMC and they ask for instructors around Australia to go there and assist the staff there and this always went on for quite a while. Anyway I volunteered and went there and I quite liked it. Anyway I said, “Is there an option for me to go to RMC”, if I was gonna be posted, and he said, “Oh yes, you know, through the normal army channels”. So I ended up being the first SAS warrant officer to go to RMC

as an instructor straight from the regiment, and then after that there was a warrant officer every two years and I think there still is.

Two years.

It was, yeah, it was.

Because I was dealing with young officers with the cadets and at that time they were bright fellows and they looked to you, you know,

for guidance and respect. We used to have them around for meals and this sort of thing and I worked with them. I found them very good and being a warrant officer, field training and SAS especially, as a matter of fact it worked out even a couple of us, the COs I had as cadets, later COs that were cadets, they, through me and one or two other people that were SAS warrant officers that came there,

they reflected on how they saw our professionalism and that really gave me a build up and that’s why they ended up going to the regiment eventually as colonels later on, or lieutenant colonel, a couple of them actually. I’m still very good friends with those at the moment, a couple of them are brigadiers and major generals but that’s how, it’s a family at SAS, that’s what it is really, but I suppose it’s a bit frightening in some ways but we are a bit of a club.

A clan, yeah, yeah.

I got approached by the new CO of the regiment that was coming up and he asked me to go back to the regiment but what he wanted me to do first was to do a free-fall course and parachute jump instructors course here at Williamtown. It was a bit like that. If a CO knew a CO, he’d been there

before as a squadron commander and of course he was going back there as the new commanding officer. He would select a lot of people, you know, go back. They didn’t get rid of people but he would select extra people that he knew that he felt that he liked. Anyway so, he told me. He said, “Oh yes, I’d like you to go back to the regiment”. So he sort of wheels and deals, he arranged for that to occur, but I thought about it for a while and a job came up and one of the

guys at the field training thing at RMC said, “Did you see that ad in the paper in the Canberra Times about they wanted someone for counter-terrorism in the Commonwealth Police Force? I said, “No”. He said, “I’ll bring it in tomorrow morning”. So he brought this cutting in and it fitted me. Little did I know that the guy that put it in there I knew. He was in the Commonwealth Police Force as a superintendent. Anyway I applied for the job and got it. The guy that was there was a bloke called

Superintendent Fletcher, Jack Fletcher and he knew me, or knew of me so when I spoke to him I had a foot in the door actually. Anyway the CO, the new CO was very very disappointed and to this day he is too, that I didn’t go back to the regiment. I was going back as an SAS airman possibly. Possibly I might’ve been in contention for RSM in the future see, but what the problem was my family at that time, my wife

was a school teacher. During that period of time, the last few years of the regiment as the Family Liaison Officer, she went back to college, teacher’s college, and I looked after the kids because I was home all the time, normal hours instead of rushing off and doing things all over the countryside and overseas. Anyway she got in the Commonwealth Teaching Service and she didn’t want to move and I understood that ’cause we had two incomes at that stage and the kids

were just at that stage coming out of primary school to go into high school, so another uplift which meant they’re going, coming up here for six months to Williamtown and then going off back to the regiment, but again if I went back to the regiment I wasn’t aware then that I was going to counter-terrorists, but I thought as most others that you could only stay there for another three or four years and then I’d be moved on again as a warrant officer or might’ve been promoted to commissioned rank if I made it and then I’d be moving around all over the place

from one posting to another and I was 35. Now when you’re 35, I was a warrant officer, if you don’t stay in the army then that’s your last chance to get another job, another alternate career, and that was also the cut-off point for the police force, the Commonwealth Police. So I applied and when I got the job I was lucky so when I joined the Commonwealth Police and then the AFP that’s where I stayed for the next 22 years.

On another

Another life altogether, yeah.

I was very lucky to leave Albany and join the army. The army made

my life, shaped my career, shaped my attitudes and my future attitudes and of course the SAS did. What I did now that’s, one of the things, I’m in the coastal patrol at the moment and if they ever see this bit of tape I hope they don’t squirm and I don’t mean it really but we always, in the SAS I learnt that it was on merit that you judged by. You weren’t judged by what you had on your shoulder

or what your rank was. A lot of other organisations including the one I belong to now find that particular culture somewhat hard to adjust to because you were judged on what you did including the CO, the OC of the squadron, the patrol commanders and the diggers. Even, you’ve got to remember that some of the patrol commanders, the officers came there, they weren’t, they got posted into the regiment

after they passed the normal selection course, but they were then patrol commanders and they’d hardly been there but they were judged on what they did and how they did it and when they first got there they listened to the senior NCOs who’d been there a long time.

I look at people and I judge everyone on their merit, on what they can do. It doesn’t

matter what position they hold, ’cause they get sort of positions in the coastal patrol, you know, well if you like it’s a semi-uniform organisation which are paramilitary, it’s sort of modelled on the navy and they have a commandant or if you like they have an OC or a divisional commander and then down their various levels and they’re all appointed ranks and you judge, I always judge

people on what they are, what they can do, how well they do it.

Yeah, yes it does, yes it does.

Just on judgement, you know, people’s judgement.

They make their judgment on the rank because they’ve got the position. You know, “What I say goes attitude”? I always relate it to

the First World War, you know. We only spoke about that before and say, “When I blow the whistle up over the top you go”. I mean these guys were shot in the thousands. They didn’t, someone stupidly said, “You know, away you go”. You should be able to shape the organisation or the nation you’re in what you can do. That’s why what I do now, you know,

sometimes, the saying is I don’t suffer fools gladly. I’m a bit harsh.

Oh yes, yes. Anyone, he can be anyone and we had that situation. New members come into a patrol like and a voluntary organisation and they come in with a lot of skills, not necessarily me, but a couple of others, yet they run him down,

you know, but that’s just politics, that’s so-called backstabbing, every organisation, but just say those people that do that, that run other people down, really don’t have the ability of that person they’re running down, and that’s just a sort of a defensive mechanism, as I put it down to.

Not many, no. The only rapport even in the coastal patrol, I feel comfortable with a couple of people I really like but mostly you feel comfortable with probably relating things with ex-military people ’cause

I think they understand what you’re talking about when you say something and if they’ve been somewhere in combat or somewhere in a war theatre they understand. Generally that’s how old diggers relate, isn’t it? I mean you’ve got to be careful you don’t isolate yourself from the rest of the community.

Yes.

I’m a member of the SAS Association,

I’m a member of the 9 Squadron Association which is the helicopter pilots that were in Vietnam and I’m a member of my ex-active reserve unit that I served in which is 28 Squadron. They were all volunteers, active reservists.

Yes.

My first wife was Carol

and Annette.

Yes.

Robert and Penny and I’ve got seven, don’t ask me to repeat seven grandchildren, but I can but I’ve got to think. They’re all boys.

I’m only just starting to with my son would you believe. Yeah, he’s 35, interesting age isn’t it? I’m only just starting to relate to Rob.

Because we’re much closer now. Rob’s just divorced and my daughter, Penny, I think, she’s 33, and I think they’ve matured a lot and they have a lot more in common than I.

I told Rob I was sorry for what I’d, for how I’d brought him up and wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for him when I was in the regiment and I wasn’t there for him when I was in the police force. I was away all the time, hardly spent any time with my kids to be honest, not much time at all. It’s pretty hard.

Oh yeah, yeah, it is. ’Cause my son’s gone through a pretty shaky life sometimes, but he’s survived and so has Penny.

It is, yeah, it is. I wish I could show more of my emotions to them but I can’t. My kids show more emotion to me than I show to them. I mean when your son tells you “I love you dad” every

time he’s on the phone I suppose that’s reassurance because I brought him up pretty rough.

I hope so, yeah. No, he’s a good boy. I still call him a boy, yeah, terrible, you know. Kids are always kids and parents are parents, aren’t they, but he’s a good man. His heart’s in the right place, it really is.

It’s been a long day. I’ve got to give you that faraway look as I’m trying to pick out something from up in the left hand corner there, isn’t it? Up there somewhere. I think,

I think generally that’s all. I’ll probably think of something when I walk away so you better keep the tape running. No, I think that’s just about it. I mean there’s things like in my early days when dad died or was drowned but I think that’s generally it. I think I’ve done a reasonable job except for what I’ve done since

I was in the police force but that’s another era.

Thanks, I hope you mean that.

Alright. I tried to write it to and know it’s like getting everything off my chest. I think that’s what it is really. It does help and I hope my

kids are able to see it and my grandkids are able to see it one day ’cause that’s you know, helps them understand.

Thank you.