Australians at War Film Archive

Okey doke. Well I was born on the 11th of August 1943 in Stanmore in Sydney. My father was a police officer and I subsequently travelled around New South Wales in my younger days with Dad, and Mum of course. We went to country

towns where Dad was policeman in one-policeman towns. I then went back to Sydney to finish schooling off and whilst I was in Sydney, when I was 15, I left school before I finished my education, and I joined the PMG [Postmaster General’s Department] as a telegram boy and then from there I had the choice of going as a linesman, Telstra linesman or PMG linesman, as it was in those days, or

join the army. I saw an ad in the paper and the army won over. I joined the army in 1961, the 3rd of January, and did 38 years in the army travelling all over New South Wales and overseas of course. I got out of the army some five years ago in February ‘99, and now I reside in Gleniffer in New South Wales with my wife Cathy.

Yes, I went to Vietnam in 1966, May ’66 and I left Vietnam in June 1967. Whilst I was there, or before I even went there, I was what they call a medical assistant and I was attached to an artillery battery, a 103 3rd Battery and I was their medic for the time that I was over there.

Yes, I can remember, I guess I was about three year old when memories came to me, and I remember I used to run around with a gas mask, because I guess obviously that was, well that was ’46, I suppose getting towards the end of the war, but certainly I can remember. It must’ve been left over from the end of the war. Dad might’ve had it being a police officer and that, and I can remember running around there. I can remember we were in a double storey

terrace house and I remember it had one of those wrought iron fences around the front of the house and they are basically what I can remember at Stanmore, yeah.

Yeah, both did. My grandfather was in the First Light Horse Regiment and he served in, he went to Egypt,

but then Gallipoli and everything was over so he was then transferred to France. And I know that he got very, very sick over there with bronchitis, pneumonia and everything and I know that he then got sent home, and yeah. He got a soldier-settlement allocation block at Gilgandra in New South Wales, and then my father, he

was a gunner as in artillery gunner, coastal guns at Darwin, and he only did about 12 months and he came home and I think he … Well I’ve been told my grandparents or his father got him to get out because he wanted him back on the farm, but Dad didn’t stay there long. He then went and joined the police force. He was an electrician, sorry, he was an electrician. In fact he put a lot of

electrical wiring and that in at Concord Hospital, but then he joined the police force, and yeah. So he only did 12 months in the army in the Second World War and never went outside Australia and joined the police force, yeah.

Nothing. I was very surprised Kirsty [interviewer], that nothing, not a thing about it. What surprised me was when I was in Vietnam I used to write to my grandparents

because they were alive then, and my grandmother used to do the writing back, and then she said, “Oh, Pop wants to know things like do you come under aerial attacks?” ’Cause they didn’t obviously know the set-up of the Vietnam War and what was going on and, were we under aerial attacks, did we have camouflage? It really surprised me because my grandfather never talked about the war before and here he was asking his grandson all these

war questions. It did surprise me very much. Unfortunately he died when I was over there. That was probably about August ’66. I got a telegram actually, believe or not, a telegram that came out to me in the bush and they just said that my grandfather passed away. There was never ever thought of me, I don’t even know if I could’ve come back for his funeral or anything but I just didn’t, yeah, I didn’t think to. I guess I thought I was there and I couldn’t

go through that chain to get home and I never ever pursued coming home to his funeral. But yeah, very surprised at those couple of letters I got that he mentioned the war. It was the first time, and yet I thought I was one of his favourites, if not his favourite grandson, because I was the first-born and I think he was quite proud I joined the army, but yeah, never ever spoke about the war. No, never, except for those letters.

Yes, well

I feel sorry for my parents because if all my siblings had’ve survived I would’ve had a lot more brothers and sisters than I’ve got now. Can I go into the, you know? My first, I was the first-born then I had a brother, Dennis, and he died of a condition called Pinks Disease.

It’s a disease, well it was just a term used, it was when children had croup and everything at that age, and he was only one year old or something like that. He had croup and that and the treatment in those days I believe was arsenic, obviously diluted very, very much so, and the babies that were on it, it was a common treatment I believe, and their skin used to turn pink, hence the name Pinks Disease. But he

died anyway and they found out later that it wasn’t obviously the right treatment to do, as in other children. I don’t know if there was too many that died from it. I think there was quite a few actually from what my relatives tell me, and he would’ve been a year older, a year younger than me. So he would’ve been 60, 59 now. Then I had a brother born in Walcha, New South Wales, Barry, who’s still alive and he’s at Dubbo.

Then the next one that came along was my sister, Sandra, and she was killed in a fire accident, three year old, playing with the next door neighbour with matches, a little boy same age, matches in the toilet. You know, outside toilet and they were lighting the toilet paper and everything and her dress went up and a

next-door neighbour heard her screaming and put the flames out. And that devastated me because it took me a couple of days. But she survived for a few days and then she died of her burns and everything and it’s like everything else I suppose. If the same accident had happened nowadays she probably would’ve survived with what they’d done in the burns, but unfortunately we’re looking at roughly about 1950, probably 6, about that area, and she died, and

yeah. It hit me about three days later. I got very upset over that. And then the next, my parents then, about two years after that had another child but it died soon after birth. So as you can see they’ve had a, and then finally my sister who is alive in St Clair in Sydney was the last of the children, and as you can see my Mum and Dad had a pretty

tumultuous life with survival of their children and everything, but yeah. So that was, so there’s three surviving and three that didn’t survive.

I would’ve been about three years old I think, what I can recall. Dad got transferred up to Emmaville in New England near Glen Innes and

I can, you know, remember. Yes, about three year old because that was my first school I went to, but I know I was up there for a little while before I went to school as a five year old. So I would be three or four year old anyway when I left Stanmore, yes.

Yes, I did. That’s when I did my first schooling there. I wasn’t there for long. I would say at tops a year, and then Dad got transferred to Walcha Road which obviously is in New South Wales again, out of Armidale

and that’s when I continued my schooling, primary school. We had to walk about seven, eight kilometres to school and that which us kids don’t mind.

I was pretty proud of Dad actually. Yeah, no, I enjoyed it. I was very proud of my father. Yeah, it was good, yeah. I certainly didn’t have any hassles from anyone about being that, and yeah, it was,

I was quite proud of Dad so I had no hang-ups or no hassles from other people about being the son of a policeman.

There was other kids my age around there. It was just a little; Walcha Road was a one-man police station and the closest big town was Walcha, and it was just a little village consisting of a general store, a pub and a railway station that serviced

that area and consequently there were a few families there and I used to go with kids my age, used to walk to school.

Oh yes, like five, six year olds, throw stones in the creek. And I can remember we used to cross a creek and we used to try and step from one stone to another and all this type of thing without falling in, and just like kids do, you know, throw stones in

creeks and that type of thing, yeah.

Overall? I would say average. Yeah, I had average schooling. I guess it’s a bit like the army, and I feel sorry for my children in one way, but with Dad being a police officer you’re all over New South Wales and I’d just go to one school, to another school and I’d find you know, obviously new friends and everything like

that. So in a nutshell, average. I wasn’t a brilliant scholar by any means. You know, just an average student, average passes, things like that.

Well in those days it was just I guess, arithmetic, writing and reading as they used to say. That’s in my younger days. Certainly when I went to high school I had woodwork, metalwork, social studies. I loved very much, you know, Australian history, social studies, I always excelled in that.

And of course maths and English and that, but mine was a technical school so the other subjects were metalwork and woodwork.

History I suppose, Australian history, yeah. I liked, you know, all about Australian history, when it was first discovered right through, and enjoyed projects on wheat and wool and things like that. I guess coming in a way from

an agricultural family with my grandparents on the farm, and as a child I loved to go to the farm all the time and I found that very interesting, because if there was anything on wheat or wool, well I used to just write to my grandfather and he’d send me down, or my grandmother mostly. She did all the correspondence. She’d send down a sample of wool or wheat and I guess I related to the land because of my association with my grandparents on the land, yeah.

And I liked history and dates and things like that. Only mostly Australian history but I do like history in general, even now today.

Yeah, probably the gold rush days, early Australia, very much so. The gold rush, opening up Australia, and I found that interesting, how Victoria or Melbourne was opened up and then Tassie and

Adelaide and all that. So early Australian history, definitely.

Yes, well that’s a story. At the time when I turned 15, no, before I turned 15 my parents split up. They only split up for about 12 months and I went to live with a very dominating aunt, Aunt Lily, and she was from the old school.

’Cause even in those days, she was probably 70 then, and she was, how can I, yeah, very dominating and she used to say to my mother, “He’s not doing any good at school, he’s not doing any good at school. He should get out of school and get a job. Get a job, get a job, a trade”, and all this type of thing. So I guess Mum relented and said, “Alright”. So I left school when I turned 15 because you had to be 15 before you could leave school,

but unfortunately that was in August. If I had’ve had a birthday in December I would’ve at least got my Intermediate. I’m pretty sure I would’ve passed my Intermediate Certificate as it was in those days, now called I think a School Certificate. So I think I was forced out of school by a dominating aunt is the bottom line, yeah.

At Bankstown. She owned a boarding house actually and she took me. I mean it was very good of her to take me in. I mean my

mother then lived with my grandparents in a one-bedroom flat at Marrickville. So it was very good of her to take me in. Don’t get me wrong and everything, but she was good that way and certainly cared for me and I didn’t want for anything like that, but I did regret it a few years later that I didn’t finish my education at school. I’ve obviously got it since then, but yeah, I was very upset about that, yeah.

Yes, the most that sticks out predominantly is when I was in the PMG I would’ve loved to have been a technician rather than a linesman, but because I didn’t have an Intermediate Certificate I didn’t even get a look in. You had to have that as one of the qualifications and I was quite convinced that if I had’ve had my education I would’ve become a PMG or a Telstra technician,

but as linesman I could in fact, you know, become a linesman, so that’s the most predominant thing. And I guess later on when I did join the army if you haven’t got education it stops you from doing courses and promotion and things like that and I had to do it the hard way if you like. When, if I’d have my intermediate or my education I would’ve found it much easier to, yeah, to you know, to move up the ladder and not have to go and do all the study

again which I had to do.

Oh yeah. My first job was actually, I hated it, it was; again my aunty said, “You’ve got to get a job, you’ve got to get a trade”, and there was a job going up near where they live at Bankstown, cabinet-maker. That was what it was going to be and I was going to be an apprentice cabinet-maker. So I went to this factory, and even now I get shudders over it,

and I went in there and I remember the interview, my aunty there, and he was an ethnic man, I think Italian, and he said, “If you take the job”, he said, “You don’t sit around all day looking at the flies on the wall and all that”. So, “Yes, yes, alright.” So anyway I joined and I hated it because I was in a factory, inside all day. You had to start at a certain time, you’d clock on. As I said, indoors all the time, machinery going and noise and everything

like that and I; obviously being only 15 then, I got all the terrible jobs, sweeping up sawdust, plugging holes in woodwork, you know, when they were doing the chairs and everything and I’d have to fill all the cracks up with putty. And they’d blow a whistle or siren for morning tea, and 10 minutes it was, and blow the whistle to go back after 10 minutes, and lunch was the same. And I just hated it and I did that for about six months and

when I left it, gee I was happy. I just hated it with a passion.

PMG. I can’t recall if I went to my aunty and said, “Look, I can’t hack this”, or whatever or she saw that I wasn’t enjoying it or whatever, and there was an ad in the paper looking for telegram boys and I decided to try for that. And I remember I had to go down to the city and sit for

an exam, which was only very basic arithmetic, writing and English and very basic, and then I got the word back that I’d been accepted and then I joined the PMG. We’re probably looking at about 1958 I think this would’ve been now, yeah, about ’58, and my first job I got was to work in the post office at Marrickville as a telegram boy, which was,

yeah; and then I enjoyed that, believe it or not, pushing the bike around, but I enjoyed that.

Yes, what would happen is telegrams would come in on the printer. The boss would then fold them up and put them in an envelope in a little bag and away, I mean I was with about six other telegram boys and you used to save up. As soon as a telegram came in you wouldn’t rush straight out with it. You’d probably

wait a while because in those days they were really coming in. It was a big post office, Marrickville, and then when they had a few telegrams saved up, say for the one direction, I would go in one direction and the other guys would go in a different direction. And we’d deliver the telegrams on a pushbike to the houses, knock on the door and if the people were home you’d give them the telegram. If they weren’t home you used to leave a slip of paper there, cardboard, saying there is a telegram for you

at the post office, you know, and other details, what time it came in and things like that, because obviously a telegram is supposed to be delivered post-haste, so we’d certainly try and get the message through, yeah.

Didn’t like it, no. Didn’t like it one bit because, as I said, I idolised my father and everything like that and obviously loved my mother very much, and yeah, it did upset me a lot. Dad used to come and

see me after school. He’d meet me, you know, outside the school and walk me down to the station ‘cause as I said, well I went to school at Belmore and my aunty lived at Bankstown so I had to get the train home and to school. So Dad would walk me down to the railway station and we’d talk and things like that, and no, I didn’t. He was living with another woman as well so that didn’t particularly make me happy,

and the day they got back together, which as I said was only about 12 months they were separated for, was the happiest, well one of the happiest days of my life. So yes, it did affect me, I hated it, I hated it.

Yes, we went to, I then obviously moved out from my aunty’s and we went to live at Narraweena over Dee Why way. Dad got a

flat there. When Mum and Dad split up he was a detective and had been for a number of years when we came down from, which I mentioned, Walcha Road. He was into plain clothes and became part of the 21 Division which was a very famous police squad in those days. But when they had the break up I remember my grandfather, Mum’s father, he got very upset and went to the police headquarters and that and I don’t know the ins and outs or the politics

of it, but he was then put back into uniform. So when they got back together Dad was in uniform and worked in Sydney Headquarters in Sydney and used to get the bus and that from Dee Why, Narraweena into the police headquarters there. Yeah, so we moved there, Narraweena.

No, no, no. He went there after Darwin was bombed, yeah. No, he might’ve even

left before, but he certainly wasn’t there, no, no.

Well I suppose I can blame the colourful ads, if you like, in the paper in those days. At Lismore I was now. When we left Sydney Dad got transferred to Lismore as a Licensing Police Sergeant up there, and as I said I was always

going to pursue a linesman, PMG linesman. But at the same time was I just about, when I say due, I put in an application to become a linesman, at the same time I saw in the paper a glamorous, a job description for army, you know, be a sniper or a rifleman, you know, all this type of thing. I didn’t even consider a medic, which I guess we’ll go onto later, and I was so enthralled by the ad and thought, ’Gee, that would be

a good lifestyle, you know, outdoors and all this type of thing, I’ll apply for it’. So I did. I sent an application off into Sydney. It was a box I think, I can still remember it, Box XYZ, GPO Sydney, and I sent it off to there and then an application came back and said they wanted me to go to Brisbane because Lismore as you probably know is only, even in those days was only about, I don’t know,

three, maybe four hours in those days away, whereas Sydney was about eight or ten hours. So they said I should go to Brisbane to the recruiting office there with this letter they sent me and that type of thing, yeah. But I had to have a medical in Lismore first before they, that’s another story, but I had to go up to Brisbane, but that’s where I saw it, in the ad in the newspaper. That grabbed me.

Yeah, just something like, wanted,

something about a new lifestyle or try a different lifestyle, the army or the defence forces. I think it had; no, I’m sure it was just particularly an ad about army, not necessarily navy and air force and I think it had a picture of a soldier there like that with a rifle and this type of thing and yeah, but I think it was just the thought when you read it, you say, you know, that wouldn’t be a bad

life, you know. I’d enjoy that, which by the way I have, and I thought that would be a good life and I think just the thought of being, yeah.

No, definitely not, definitely not, no, no. I liked the idea in those days, as a young 17 year old, of firing guns and that, yeah sure. You know, I liked the idea of that because if I went to my grandparents property I used to shoot

rabbits or something like that and that excited me as a young 17 year old. But you really don’t think about one day you could have bullets coming at you or whatever, no, definitely not.

Yeah, well I was lucky to get into the army because when they sent the application back, sent the, well I won’t say acceptance, but they said that they would consider me. They said I had to go to a local doctor and they

told me the doctor’s name. It was in the letter, you are to report or you are to go to Doctor Smith, I forget the doctor’s name, on Tuesday, such and such for a medical. So I went. This is just a local doctor in Lismore and I went over and saw him and he knew nothing about what medical requirements were for the army, ’cause as soon as I walked in and I went into his office, he said to me, “Oh, your glasses”, he said, which I’ve had s since I’ve been 10 year old.

He said, “You can’t join the army”. He said, “I’m sure they don’t take people in with short-sightedness”, which I had, and he said, “I don’t think we should go any further”, and I said, “But I don’t know”, and he said, “Look”, he said, because he must’ve seen my jaw drop and he must’ve thought I was upset…. And I was skinny, oh, I was skinny in those days too; you could count rib on my body and I used to have old women cry because I was so skinny. They wanted to fatten me up,

and being six foot six and that, or in those days I was six four, you know, that was another thing. He said, “Oh, you’re too thin, there’s no way the army will take you”, but again, as I said, he must’ve seen that I was so upset, not physically but he saw the disappointment on my face he said, “Look, I’ll send you up”, he said, “but I’ll pass you”, he said, “but don’t expect to get in the army”. And luckily he sent me up and of course I went up there and I had no troubles.

That was not a problem being so tall although it did affect my early uniforms and things like that particularly. But basically I was lucky to get through the medical, because the doctor didn’t know the requirements and therefore he nearly rejected me there and obviously I wouldn’t have gone any further. The army wouldn’t have pursued with my interviews and that.

Yes, yeah. I only

weighed, in our weights now, about I’d say 60 kilos, 60, 70. I was thin, I was pathetically thin, you know, I really was and really I didn’t put on any weight, but it’s hereditary. Dad was very thin until his mid 20s and I was the same thing. I was very thin until; very athletic and everything as far as that goes, but I mean just so skinny.

Tennis. Loved tennis, played a lot of tennis. Went out, went out with the boys as 16 year old, 17 year olds will do, and down behind the shed at the park drinking Barossa Pearl and things like that, and my Dad being a policeman up there and a licensing sergeant and everything,

but up to mischief like that I guess. No big trouble at all, firing I think sky rockets down the middle of Lismore streets and getting sprung by Dad’s partner, police partner and said, “If your father knew you were doing this,” and I said, “Yes, yes.” and he’d send me, he said, “You get home quick smart”. But for entertainment I guess movies, because in those days movies were very popular and I used to go Saturday night,

and tennis. And Lismore was about an hour, three quarters of an hour from Ballina and we used to go swimming down there of a weekend, or swim in the Richmond River which went through Lismore. So that was about, yeah, entertainment.

No. I mean I was very interested, but no, no. Never had a girlfriend, went out a couple of times with girls but I guess adolescents, you know, I was very shy

even to, you know, hold a hand or anything like that. I was petrified actually. You know, I’d be sitting in the back seat with this girl I’d met, and my mate, he had a steady girlfriend in the front, I was terrified, absolutely terrified, yeah.

Not long. I would say within three weeks. In fact my application,

or my successful application for linesman, came through at virtually the same time as the acceptance. Well it wasn’t really acceptance, but certainly to go through the procedures to join the army, and I had to make a decision then, and at that time as I said, the army really appealed to me, the thought of defence, going into the army and what it might do for me. And it won over and I decided to, I would think that I would’ve had the linesman’s course to

fall back on if the army did reject me in Brisbane, or in fact that doctor had rejected me. And I have a fair feeling, I often wonder, which you do if you take a different career path, you know, what I would be doing if I had have stayed in the PMG. Would I still be in there as obviously a Telstra linesman now, how high up would I be in Telstra and all this type of thing. You know, you just often think about that from time to time, but I have no regrets of joining the army by the

way, yeah.

Yes, you did, yes, certainly, and Dad was as happy as anything, you know, he was, yeah, he was, probably a bit proud but I think it was a thought that I was going out into the world, that I wouldn’t be tied to home and everything. And of course he knew in Lismore, or he did move back to Sydney in the police force, but it was going to be very hard for jobs and everything like that and he knew that.

He always used to say get a government job, you know, and that’s why the PMG was good, and he was quite happy for me and he had to sign the paper and he was quite happy for me to join the army. Except when I got the tattoos, that was another story. He wasn’t too impressed with that the first time I went home on leave, but yeah, but anyway, yes. So he had to sign the paperwork ’cause I was only 17 see.

Yeah,

we went into the recruiting depot there and I went through the tests again, the medical, arithmetic, writing. You had to write dictation and a bit of arithmetic, very simple, ‘two and two are four’ stuff almost, and reading. You had to read to see that you could read from a book from that, and the medical, and that was pretty well it. I passed that obviously and then I

came back to Lismore and then I finally, which wasn’t that long, I think about two weeks, I got the letter back saying - I don’t think they said congratulations or anything like that in those days - you have been accepted to the army. You are to report to the recruiting office in Brisbane. I can’t think where it was. I know it was in the city, on the such and such a date at 9.00 o’clock, and ’cause I used to go to and from Brisbane

in the bus, Kirkland’s Bus, and so they sent warrants down, as they did when I went up for my initial interview, they sent a bus warrant down and I just went to the bus company and bought a ticket with it. So after a fortnight they said I’d been accepted and off I went to the depot and there was about I suppose 10 of us. There were 10 other guys in there. In fact when I was

waiting to swear by almighty God and that on the bible, the Courier Mail photographer came in, and I didn’t know, but he must’ve gone to the recruiting people and asked if he could get a picture of new recruits and anyway, myself and actually a Canadian guy who joined the army, ‘cause in those days you didn’t have to be an Australian citizen and he was joining at the same time as

me. So the photographer came up to us and said, “Can I take a photograph of you two for the paper?” So we sat side by side. It just said “Brian Mortimer from Lismore, the newest recruits for 1961”, ‘cause we joined the 3rd of January and I think that was the Monday after a long weekend or the Tuesday after a long weekend, Brian Mortimer from Lismore and I forget his name, Chuck some one or other from Ontario, Canada, “first recruits for 1961 to join the army.”

And yeah, so that was, and then we went from the recruiting after we swore on the bible and all that, we then went out to the personnel depot at Wacol and that was my first; this was it. I’d signed up, this was it. I had six years and I was a bit apprehensive and I guess that’s when I started to get apprehensive, you know, have I done the right

thing?

Yes, yes.

No, I can’t honestly say. I know we all did it together and I think it went along the lines obviously obeyance [obedience] to the army or the defence forces, not the army, the defence forces and also to the Queen and to the country and

then yeah, that was it.

Yeah, loved it. No problems, yeah. Again a 17 year old, that’s over your head type of thing. All you’re thinking of is the excitement of joining the army. As I said at that stage, I got a bit apprehensive after that, but yeah, it was all excitement. I mean this is a boy that’s been with his mother and father if you like

for 17 years and all of a sudden, you know, I’m off by myself. Hey, there’s no Mum and Dad about. I’ve got to fend for myself if you like, although I felt comfortable because there was other guys in the same boat as me as I said, yeah.

No, no, no. It was civilians; we didn’t get our first uniforms until we went to recruit training at Kapooka

and that, so no. So we were in civvies even at the Wacol depot when I was there for a week we were in civvy clothes, yeah.

Nothing really, just sat around, absolutely sat around and did nothing. I palled up with a Queensland boy who took me home for one weekend to his parents’ place and that was good. I enjoyed that, and I remember there was a

garden as in like a, what do you call them? As in, well, watermelons, they grew watermelons in a property. We used to go out and raid them of a night and knock off the watermelons, ‘cause this was just after Christmas of course and the watermelons were in full, lovely and everything like that. So we used to raid this farmer’s place and knock off these watermelons and have some fun with those, yeah,

but otherwise nothing. Really just sit around all day, maybe we might have to do some kitchen work or things like that or a bit of raking of leaves or that, but that was very boring and that, yeah.

Well it was just a series of huts. It was what they call a personnel depot. I guess they would’ve had other army units in there but we were in a different section of the camp and everything. There

was army, plenty of army huts and everything in there and I guess there was army units in there at the time. Again I didn’t, you know; all I was worried about was my little world then, and we used to sleep in the huts and then go to the mess for our meals and then of a night they had a canteen. ’Cause see television was only just not long in then so I used to go up and watch the television of a night before we came back to our bed, yeah.

Well as I said, all of a sudden I’ve left home, I’m by myself and I didn’t know if I’d made the right decision because I was starting to get homesick I guess, that’s the bottom line. I was starting to get apprehensive, I was starting to get homesick, missing Mum in particular. I wouldn’t say I was a mother’s boy, but I liked Mum obviously, and my father and I was missing home already and I thought hell, I’ve only been out two or three days,

you know, and I’ve still got to go through a lot and the hardest days of my army career, was the first two or three months or three months anyway and that’s why I was apprehensive. I guess leaving home for the first time and I was on my own. No Mum and Dad to tell me what to do and not to do and that, so yeah.

So when we left Brisbane we went to Sydney to Watson’s Bay and obviously the New South Wales people caught up with us and then I remember we went on a train to Wagga and we got off at Wagga

about the 10th of January now, maybe the 12th. But the thing is it was so hot, and this was about 6.00 o’clock in the morning, it was so hot, and then on the way to camp I remember the officer who was later to be our platoon commander said, “We’re in fire danger. If I catch anyone throwing cigarettes out the window I’ll cut your fingers off”, all this type of thing. So we went to Kapooka and the first

couple of days was settling in and it was a bit of a thing with the new recruits. And the older recruits that might’ve been there a couple of days, sorry, a couple of weeks or more, they used to try and stir the younger fellows that just came in. And I can remember we were there about the first night or second night, all of a sudden our hut door crashed open and in walked this guy with a great-coat on which I thought was a bit strange in summer, but anyway, and he had

the officer’s rank on his shoulder and he had an officer’s cap on and he said, “Righto recruits, up you get, out of your bed”. Of course we were all terrified, you know, and he said, “Righto, out the back, start marching”. And this is at night, and he marched us out into the scrub and then we kept marching and marching until someone said, “There’s no more voices”, and we stopped and it was a big joke. They’d taken the platoon commander’s coat out of his office, this is the other squad, and they got his hat and put it on

and stirred us. I found the, I guess a lot of the stuff was very hard for me being so tall and so skinny, you know, climbing over obstacles and that. In fact I had very much difficulties in doing the heaves, which is you place your hands over a beam and you’ve got to pull yourself up until your chin comes up to the beam. I guess being so skinny I had no muscle tone and no muscle power and I found that very difficult. In fact at the end

of my recruit training it cost me an extra two weeks I had to do there. When the rest of my squad went their way I had to stay behind. Yeah, I found it, and the beds were small so I found it hard there. So it was very trying. I enjoyed some aspects of it. I enjoyed the sport part of it because I did like my sport. I enjoyed going to the range and firing weapons and everything like that. I enjoyed that.

But some of it was hard for me, you know, I took a lot of skin off my knees and my elbows and that from having to jump on the ground and do different, through obstacle courses and things like that, and again I found it very difficult doing ropes. I could never climb the ropes, you know, rope dangling from about, I don’t know, 20 foot up or something and you’ve got to pull yourself up. Again I didn’t have the strength to do that and that went on for about, I think we did in those days about

12 weeks at Kapooka and that, yeah.

Yeah, very much so. When we first went there that was the first time that we actually got to wear a uniform, but in those, as a recruit we only got, how can I say? Not scungies, but they were just work clothes. They were khaki, you had your boots, your khaki

and that but they weren’t the recognised dress uniform. It was just something that you would wear as general duties clothes, and my trouser legs came half way up my shins. My sleeves were short and I looked absolutely pathetic. I really, I’ve seen old photos of myself and it was pathetic, but then we also got issued, sorry, we also got measured up for a uniform, which was your dress uniform in those days, which was still khaki and everything, and the other guys went

straight to the Q [quartermaster’s] store and got, the clothing store, and got their uniform no worries. But because they couldn’t fit me with anything they did it tailor-made for me, and that stopped me from doing guard duties and that because I just didn’t have a uniform. It took them about a month to get it in so whenever we had to do guard duty and that I wasn’t on guard duty otherwise I’d be the odd man out because I didn’t have a uniform. So I had to do,

you know; I was a bit jealous of the fellows that were on guard and they did pickets as such. I had to do dixie bashing, like working the mess out, cleaning up the pots and pans or working in the latrines cleaning them out, but towards the end when I got my uniform and everything I could do guard duties and that, yeah.

Very,

yeah, very. Corporals were God. Even lance-corporals were God. What he said, went, and there was a lot of shouting, a lot of jumping up and down. You know the old saying, you say jump, and you say how high do I jump, that type of thing, but I guess that’s part of the discipline, you know. Obviously when I look back not long after I got out of recruit training I realised that was

a good thing. Some of the guys couldn’t take it. We had a lot, well a few, shoot through as we say, go over the hill. At night they’d just disappear and you’d never see them again, never come back. If they got caught obviously they were discharged from the army. So some of the blokes couldn’t hack the discipline. I could. I found it difficult but I never got into trouble. I was quite proud of that. I never got into any trouble at Kapooka. A lot of fellows got CB, confined

to barracks, and punishments and that, but I managed to get through all of that without getting any punishment, but the discipline was very strong and I appreciated it actually in retrospect.

The only one that I ever had was, well, that I saw was probably doing

a PT [physical training] and that. If you didn’t do a push-up properly you might have to do extras. Or if you were talking when you shouldn’t have been the PTI [physical training instructor] sergeant, there was a hill there at Kapooka and he made us run up the top of the hill and back down again, but as far as, there was no physical, except that. There was no hands-on slapping across the face or maybe a poke in the chest and things like that, but that was basically it. There was discipline handed

out, I might add, between soldier and soldier in the confines of our barracks when all the NCOs [Non-commissioned Officers] and that had gone home or everything. Like the guys, and I guess everybody would tell you this that you interview, there were some grubs in there that never showered and that. And you’d get them and take them out to the shower and force them under the shower and use the bass broom, which is a big broom with hard bristles on it, and that type of thing. And the other

thing that was naughty they used to do, is strip them and put boot polish in their private areas, you know, and things like that. But that was dealt out within your little group because a soldier wasn’t toeing the line and sometimes he was getting the rest of the guys into trouble. Like if his bed wasn’t made properly then they would discipline the rest of the barrack block by making them stay back and not go

up to the canteen and things like that, but certainly no physical by the instructors but only the physical by your own peers.

No, not in my time anyway. They were obviously, excuse my French, they were obviously smart-arses. They’d been there, done that and yet they’d only be about a month ahead of us and

they thought they knew everything and all that type of thing. But really we didn’t have that much to do with them except after-hours and of course up the canteen and that, but no, not really, no. A couple of times they turned the fire hoses on us in the barracks and that, but that’s 17 and 18 year olds being silly.

Oh yes, oh yes, no worries, oh yes.

For sure, yeah, and of course they had different things like, “You’re a Mary”, you know, like their own particular catch-words or catch-phrases they used to have. Some of them escape me now but certainly yeah, yep.

At Kapooka? Very good at Kapooka. I thought it was very good. It was tough, it was hard, but that’s what

they had to do for us. I was, again I can look back on it now. I was, yeah, impressed with the training we had then, definitely.

For a 17 year old who could eat the jockey and the horse that I did, I enjoyed it. I mean I enjoyed it but I didn’t get enough of it. Yeah, I found the food all right. I mean even all my army career I don’t really complain

about food. I eat what I get given too, but that was the only thing and in those days if there was anything left over the cooks used to sing out, “Backups”, and you’re looking at 300 guys rush the meal point again trying to get what was left over. But I didn’t mind the food, it was basic, obviously basic, but yeah.

That’s correct, yeah,

because I didn’t pass my physical training part of it, because as I said I couldn’t do the rope or do the heave and I….. Later on, to become a very good friend of mine, was a doctor there, Mike Norton, the captain and later to become a very good friend when I worked with him, when I went up through the ranks, and he said I had glandular fever. So they let me get out of Kapooka, graduate from

Kapooka on medical grounds because he said I had glandular fever, I didn’t have the strength to do the ropes. So I always thanked Mike Norton when I saw him several years later about that. So yeah, but sorry.

Well to be honest, not at all, no. It didn’t change at all, no, not an ounce. The only thing I did know is that I put on two inches probably in the first six months in the army I reckon, six months

to 12 months in the army. I was six foot four when I joined. It was in my records and I know that later on I became six foot six or 198 centimetres, yeah, but no, not a thing, no. Maybe a bit fitter, that’s about all, a bit fitter.

Yes, we got two lots of leave. No, take that back, we got one lot of leave. I think it was about four days and it

might have even been Easter because as I said, I went in January and that, and it might’ve been Easter and I came back to Sydney. They put on a troop train from Wagga to Sydney and I assume probably one for the Melbourne people, but I went to Sydney and my parents were still up at Lismore and I stayed with my grandparents at Marrickville for those four days and then I, we got the train back. So I had four days leave from

Kapooka. At a certain stage during our training, when we say did week eight or whatever like that, or week six, we were allowed to go into Wagga but that was only a night and wasn’t overnight either. A bus or truck or something, trucks, buses, they’d truck us into Kapooka say at 6.00 o’clock or 4.00 o’clock and we had to come, we had to pick up the trucks to come back at say midnight and that was once every

two weeks I think like that. A Saturday night it used to be, so you could do what you wanted, go to the pub and you wore your uniform and everything. You had to wear your uniform and of course they had plenty of MPs [Military Police] around patrolling all over Wagga to keep an eye on us because most of the guys headed straight for the pub and everything and that, yeah.

No, I never saw any, no, but again as I said, I was in my little close group, close-knit group and as far as I know there wasn’t any. We never had any

in my days, any fights or anything with the locals and we certainly were in the pubs where the locals were and that, the same age as us too, except they were civilians of course.

In the last week of the recruit training you start to look at, they ask you where you want to, what corps you want to go to. I think you had to list two corps you would like to go to.

So I listed, because I’d been in the PMG, I put down signals corps and I thought as my other choice I wouldn’t mind going to engineers, so I put down engineers and I got medical, but that was before, about the week, and you went in before a board if you like, “March in Recruit Mortimer”. And then, if I recall, there was three people there, a psychologist and a couple of other officers there and they said, “Oh, you want to go to medical,

to signals corps and engineers. We decided that you would be better going to medical corps”, and that’s when I first heard about, knew about medical corps, when they said. I subsequently found out anyway within that week after I’d been for my interview they were looking for, each platoon had an allocation of numbers. In that platoon of 30 people they wanted 10 to go to infantry, 10 to go to artillery, three to engineers,

etcetera, etcetera, and from my platoon they wanted three medics, and obviously with my tests and psychology thing and everything I got medical corps and I thought hell, you know, medical corps, and again my jaw dropped and I said, “I don’t know about this”. But there was nothing I could do except later on in your army career you could apply for a corps transfer and everything like that. I didn’t know at that stage and yeah, I came out of there knowing I was going to medical corps, and then from there I went down to Healesville

in Victoria and that, I would say, that was the time I started to enjoy the army, when I got out of recruit training and I went to Healesville in Victoria.

Only because I thought it went with being in Telstra or the PMG I guess. I don’t know, I assume,

I had to pick something as a 17, I’m still 17 and I had to pick something and I thought oh well, I’ve got a, if you like, a background in communications so I’ll go to the signals corps, and just engineers sounded exciting. The name, engineer, sounded exciting and that’s why I picked that. I had no aspirations to go to infantry or artillery and I guess I might’ve escaped that anyway because again, I was so big, tall and gangly, you know, that

probably I didn’t look like the infantry type or I didn’t look like the artillery type.

Very, again I use that word apprehensive, because medical, you think of doctors, you think of patching people up and things like that and I had absolutely no experience, no first-aid course, nothing, and it made me not frightened but a little bit, well

I’ve got to use the word again, apprehensive, but how would I be a success at that? I couldn’t see myself being a success as a medical person and I didn’t even know what it entailed anyway. I didn’t know what I had to do and that, so yeah, I was a bit taken back by it.

By train. We went from Kapooka to Melbourne and then at Melbourne at Spencer Street

Station the School of Army Health bus picked us up. Well it was only three of us, so it was a car that picked us up and drove us an hour and half to Healesville. And by this time it was April, May so it was very cold down there and of course up in the mountains was very misty and misty rain and everything like that but a beautiful place. I mean compared to Kapooka and the personnel depots I’d been in it was just,

yeah, it was, it was just so different.

Yes, they were. They were in the same platoon, but I must, you know like, even in a group of 30 people you’ve got your two or three mates that you pal up with and I didn’t know much about them guys, but obviously we got to know each other going down the train and certainly at Healesville because we went through the same recruit course, or indoctrination courses, as

each other. So no, I didn’t know them before that but I got to know them well during that post-Kapooka three or four, more than that, a month, six weeks.

They were keen. I think they wanted to go into the medical corps so they were keen, and I think if I recall, one of them had a bit of medical background as in scouts or something. I don’t know, he did first-aid courses and that so he was quite happy, yeah, about it, yeah.

Five-star compared to Kapooka and everything, absolutely five-star. They had a series of little huts there in Kapooka and I managed to get a one-room hut and so I had my own room after sharing a dormitory of fellows, you know, snoring and making noises

all night and getting up at all hours of the morning; ‘cause some guys were conscientious, they’d get up an hour or two hours before reveille. I’d sleep until the last second, and I had this room to myself, and a lot more freedom. There was no “You’ve got to, you can’t go out of a night, you can’t do this”. Although the first obviously week or so I stayed in camp. I didn’t do anything until I got into the routine. But oh yeah, five-star compared to, I thought this is all right, this

is good, you know, if this is what it’s going to be like, and had a weekend off which I’d never had before, and yeah, it was tremendous.

The first initial training was really first-aid type stuff. In those days you did corps training which they called corps training which was basic first-aid

and yeah, just basic first-aid, putting bandages on, signs and symptoms of bleeding and snake bites and things like that, and then from there you then got posted out of there to a unit and this was your first solid posting. 90 Percent of the guys got posted to 2 Field Ambulance which was located at Woodside in South Australia, but this was after about, if I recall about six

weeks I think it was. A couple of guys during that period of time elected, they were looking for clerks, store people and that type of thing, and they put the offer up if anyone wanted to do it they could do that. So that’s what happened, a couple of them dropped out. Not dropped out but they went in to do clerical type work and the Q store but I pursued as

the medical side of things and I got, after six, about six or eight weeks at Healesville, I then got posted to 2 Field Ambulance, as the majority of the people did because it was a new unit forming up and everything, yeah.

I enjoyed it, yeah, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the, yeah, something different.

I found it, I didn’t find it as difficult as I thought I would, that is, learning about medical stuff, bandaging, signs and symptoms, all that type of thing so I began to, that’s when I started to enjoy medical corps if you like, or being a medic, but remember I was only a basic one. I was probably only, even after I finished Healesville I was probably only basic first-aid qualified even then. And of course subsequently

through my career, the early one in particular, you got more qualified, but I thought this is not too bad being a medic, yeah.

As what? As far …

Well they were all experienced NCOs. They were fully-fledged, if you can call it that, medics. They’d been probably guys that had been in Malaya now were senior NCOs and sergeants,

warrant officers, but certainly experience of being in the army and some of them since the Korean War. So they were our, like most instructors in most training units, are the ones that have been experienced and can instruct were at Healesville, yeah.

At Healesville?

Indoctrination was probably about…I think about six to eight weeks, so two months, yeah.

Yes, at

Woodside in South Australia.

Again by train, everything until later life, everything was always by train. We went to I think Balhannah. Balhannah was the station closest to Woodside. Again the train stopped, it was in the middle of nowhere it stopped and there was a vehicle to pick us up. Us being about, I think about again three or four of us went because there were other guys, although when I was at

Healesville there were other guys that were there before me, but they were waiting around until they had X amount of people before they’d start a course and that. So we got out at Balhannah and an army Rover picked us up and took us to Woodside and that was in the middle of nowhere, Woodside. It was an army camp, ex-National Service accommodation when obviously National Service was in, in the ‘50s. Heaps and heaps of huts

everywhere although we only occupied and were the only unit there, we in fact were the only regular army unit in South Australia, and we occupied a certain area. Obviously the more modern if you want to, of the area close to the kitchen and things like that. Yeah, it was, and again I had my own room there so I was happy with that and you like to be independent, don’t you? It was an interesting stay there. It was

very cold. Once again we were still in winter then and when summer came it was very hot. I spent nothing, no training or anything. I might’ve had the odd first-aid training there but again it was raking leaves, painting fences or whatever things like that because again we weren’t qualified. Some of the guys, not in my lot, but some of the guys who were at Woodside before me, had been

there for some while, they went off and did what they call a medical assistant’s course which was back at Healesville. I was never, I was too junior, you know, to do that. The most significant thing that happened going to Woodside was before that we used to wear the khaki uniform when belts were khaki in colour, that green khaki, we wore little gaiters on our

anklets, on our ankles, sorry, but when you went to 2 Field Ambulance, it was a unit in the pentropic division [divisional structure, based on five battle groups], which was the magic set-up of the army then, and 2 Field Ambulance along with other units, infantry, artillery were pentropic. And when you went there you got to take your belt off and you had to blacken it to black and you got rid of your little gaiters and you got these big American type gaiters that came half way up your shin

and they were black. Everything was black and you were in pentropic division, you know, you were pretty special to be part of this thing and that was pretty good changing from that. And the other significant thing that happened in about August 1961, see, medical corps was never armed. We weren’t allowed to bear arms at all and I remember the commanding officer was a little Scotchman, a lieutenant colonel. We had a muster parade and he said, “As from

the 1st of November 1961 all medics will be now armed”, but the catch thing was they were armed for the protection of their patients. Later on as you know, well, it was later on for your own defence as well if obviously you were being shot at or that type of thing, but that was the basic statement from him saying it was to defend the patients at that stage, and that was all buzz, buzz, everyone talking, “Oh, we’re going to be armed

you know”. Because before that, I’ll just go back a second, I was lucky enough as soon as I went there I did my promotion to corporal which I thought was pretty good because I’d only been out of Kapooka by less than 12 months. And here I was doing my, not because I was a bright boy, but they were running courses and I wanted to do it, and a part of our course was to do drill, weapon drill, and because we didn’t have weapons,

medical corps, we had to do all our drill with stretchers. So it was things like you had to, some of your instructions might have been to give instruction on how to form up stretcher squads, or how to unfold and fold stretchers and all that type of thing. So when the weapons came in of course it switched from stretchers then doing that to doing weapon drill, and I remember then for weeks after that we got all these brand new boxes of SLR,

self loading rifles, in grease. You know, they were packed in grease, grease paper, and we spent hours every day cleaning them down with, I don’t know, whatever it was, turps and everything to get all the grease off, clean the barrels and then from then on the whole unit was honed up to doing weapon drill, both sloping arms and shouldering arms and saluting, all that plus firing our weapon which was the SLR, and that was,

that was, yeah, that was Woodside. I did 12 months there.

Yes, it is, but in those days there was no medical equipment to carry on your person, you know, you had panniers and everything but that was carried by several people and set up. At this stage I didn’t have to carry anything personal,

medical stuff, on me at all ‘cause I wasn’t qualified.

12 Months, well no, less that 12 months. I got posted there roughly May, May, June ’61 and I went on leave. This is the first time I’d been home to my parents. I got whatever it was, a month’s leave and I went home to Lismore which was an

epic journey itself in that South Australia, Melbourne, Sydney and then up to Lismore. But luckily the army would give you what they called travelling time, so if it took you four days it didn’t bite into your official leave holidays you had. Anyway, that was an epic. I went up there and as I said about tattoos, when I was at Woodside, peer pressure.

Went into Adelaide, which we were allowed leave, weekend leave. We could go, as I said, freedom, and I got tattooed, one tattoo put on me and then I got another one put on me which subsequently I’ve had removed, I might add because they were on my fore arms and quite pronounced and I remember my Dad picked me up at the station and he just went off his brain, you know. He saw these tattoos on me and, “Why in the hell would you ever get those?” So he give me a

bit of a burst about tattoos, and I enjoyed leave with Mum and Dad and everything like that and I think he was pretty proud of me, now being in uniform and that, because we had to wear uniforms home in those days, it’s all different now, and wear all the time. And the thing that struck me then was all the old Diggers used to come up to you. They’d see the uniform and they’d come, “I used to be in the army and the war”, you know. “What do

you do now?” and all this. When I came back from leave at Christmas ’61 we had our first parade we had after Christmas. They wanted three volunteers to go to Sydney to join a new unit being formed, called the 3rd Casualty Clearing Station or 3CCS, and I volunteered because at this stage now my Mum and Dad, or Dad looked like getting transferred to Sydney. All my aunties and uncles and everything lived in Sydney.

So I thought what a great idea, I’ll be close to home and family anyway. So I volunteered and a couple of other guys and we subsequently got posted then to the 3rd Casualty Clearing Station which was at Ingleburn and that.

What were they?

One on this arm was a dagger

going through a wreath and it had mother on it, and of course Mum wasn’t too impressed, and on the other arm I had a devil, a little devil sitting on top of a football with Lismore under it and that, and so yes. And they were quite big actually, and as you can see I’ve got rid of them, and that was the best thing that ever happened.

Very proud, very proud, yeah, for sure, you know, and I even think they were proud. I never knew them, some of them, but yes. I was proud to wear the uniform. I looked terrible in it as you can imagine, a bag of bones, and I wasn’t a very good sight in uniform and everything but I was proud, yeah, definitely, and Dad was proud to show me off. Not so much when I was in uniform because

obviously, once I got home I got into civvies, but Dad was very quick to tell, “Brian’s in the army”, and you know blah blah blah.

A height of activity as far as, I often think it’s sad now. Well I went back there, even after Dad got posted there ‘cause I ended up marrying a girl that came up from that way and in my days there, Lismore

of a Saturday night in the main street was absolutely chock full of people. They had people shoulder to shoulder. It was a big night out going to the movies or just walking around the shops and it was sad to see a few years later, and I guess it still is now, that no one, you know, you could fire a gun, as they say, down the main street of Lismore at 8.00 o’clock at night and you wouldn’t hit anybody. In those days, and I’m talking obviously ‘60s, mid ‘60s, early ‘60s, mid ‘60s, you know, the place was absolutely a hive

of activity, the whole town. All the hoons going around, you know, trying to pick up the girls, around their little cars and that, you know, and doing wheelies and all this type of thing. So it was a busy little place and I liked it because it was full of a lot of sporting things like cricket. I played cricket up there, I played tennis and I find even here in Bellingen country towns are more prone

to have good sporting links like the local football team, the local cricket team, whereas in Sydney you get caught up in other things, surf, and going surfing or clubbing or things like that, but in country towns they have good sporting ties and that, yeah.

Mates, caught up to mates.

Well

actually I think they were jealous. I think they were a bit jealous because here they were stuck in a country town, born there, lived there, never gone out of there, and here I was already only, so what was that? Yeah, 12 months after I joined the army I’d been to Sydney, well southern New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, you know, in the space of 12 months when, you know, those fellows

had never been out of Lismore, maybe gone to Brisbane once in their lifetime type of thing. So in a way I think they were jealous of me, yeah. This is of course before Vietnam and everything, but I mean, yeah, in those days.

No, because as I said, as soon as I got home I got out of uniform, you know, so I guess I wasn’t wandering the streets in uniform, no. Again I was still very shy of girls, very

shy.

No, no. I just did my subjects, which I was glad to say I passed for corporal, no, still a private.

Yeah, 3rd Casualty Clearing Station, yes.

At Ingleburn, just a brand new unit formed up, yeah, and that was, I would’ve been there in about January, February ’62.

Well a Field Ambulance is a mobile unit. It follows the battle if you like. It can pick up sticks, a bit like you see on MASH, [television program] you know. It can pick up sticks and it can move with the battle as the battle goes along and advances. It’s very mobile. CCS is not, it’s back behind the front line if you like because it’s so hard to pack up and move quickly,

that it’s got to be far enough back from the front line that it really doesn’t come under enemy attack. Obviously if it was planes and things like that it would be different, but certainly infantry-wise or troop movement it wouldn’t come under fire, and also more substantial medical treatment, surgery, you know, operating theatres, things like that, yeah.

Initial injury. What do they call it, the word I’m thinking of? Initial treatment, stabilisation. So the guy wounded, they at least can stabilise him there enough to move him then back to the Casualty Clearing Station and then further back there’s a general hospital and so on and so forth, but yeah,

so that’s the stabilisation unit if you like.

I was just, again I’m not qualified, fully qualified. I’m probably what they call a med [medical] orderly, I’d be a med orderly. The things I did, certainly when they weren’t in the field, our exercise painting rocks, raking leaves and it’s a very big canvas component

of it. It had heaps and heaps of tents and marquees and everything and we were always putting up and pulling down tents. You know, we’d leave them up for a week, we’d pull them down and then we’d put them up again. We were forever doing that. When we were out in the field I just used to work in one of the wards and just, well just look after patients but do no medical type work at all. I’d just take them their dinner of something when we had

fake casualties coming through, or whatever, like that during an exercise. I’d take meals or clean up around the area, that type of thing, yeah.

Well, at the stage we were at now, not at all, no. Although I thought at the time if I come across a car accident I could render first-aid, but I guess that’s about all. I still felt inadequate at this stage because the training I had, which was basically nothing. As I said, it’s just basic first-aid.

As we go on it obviously developed more.

Yes.

At Ingleburn were 3CCS. I don’t know, I thought again they were looking for people to do what they called the medical and dental stores.

That was to be a storeman, and I thought at that stage, I thought well perhaps that might be the way to go because, I’ll go back one step. When I was at 3CCS I was put on a course that was to go for six months at, and this was now the start of being a fully fledged medical assistant. It was a course to be run at the HMAS

Penguin over at Balmoral and I was to go on that course with some of the other guys from my unit. I think in all about a dozen of us went across and we were to go to work in the naval hospital there and the idea was that at the end of it, if we were successful, we would then graduate as medical assistants. I only did about, I suppose about a month to six weeks there and I thoroughly enjoyed it because

not only did we do theory stuff in the classroom and everything, we did practical, like working on the wards over there at the hospital, working in the operating theatre, which I enjoyed, things like that, and I remember that was the first time I ever saw an autopsy. Not there at the hospital but certainly as part of the course we had to go down to Prince Alfred Hospital in the morgue there and see an autopsy

and [I’ll] always remember. Obviously that’s the first dead body as such I’ve seen and that will always stick with me. Again I’m only 18 now so it was a bit of a shock for the system. But anyway, unfortunately I obviously wasn’t coming up to par. I was finding it difficult to cope with the course. Not because of that but just the academic stuff and everything. So they decided that I shouldn’t continue on the course, which disappointed me greatly

and when I went back to CCS then they said, “Well perhaps we better put you on a different type of career as in storeman”. So I said, “Alright”. Again I’m only 18 and I go along with the flow and I ended up getting posted to the medical and dental stores at Maroubra, Fitzgerald Avenue in Maroubra, as a storeman driver and that was my posting order, and I went there and I didn’t mind one part of it. I was driving a vehicle around picking up

stores, medical stores, from all over Sydney and the railway stations and airports and all that type of thing. So that got me out of the unit and on the road and I quite enjoyed that. The other part I had to be a storeman and had to do storeman’s jobs or learn to be a storeman and select medical stores from different bins and shelves and things like that, and that was on-the-job-training. You did that gradually and then at the end when they felt you were proficient enough

you sat for a trade test. Anyway I went along with that and as I said, I enjoyed that, but I didn’t like the storeman’s part of it ‘cause the unit, in a way, was a bit going back to the old cabinet-maker’s days. Because we had probably 70 percent civilians work there and 30 percent army it was again start at 8.00 o’clock with the whistle. You’d have whistle for morning tea. I remember the CSM [Company Sergeant Major] there used to blow the whistle and you’d go to morning tea

and then ten minutes later whistle would blow again, finish morning tea, whistle for lunch, and I’m an 18 year old. And as I said I could eat anything, and I used to only have, we used to only have three-quarters of an hour for lunch, and for me to go to the mess was up in Randwick which was about, I suppose at least 10 minutes, quarter of an hour to get there, and I used to rush up there and sometimes I’d come back late.

And of course by the time I had my lunch and tried to get back, and the civilians used to whinge because, “Private Mortimer, he’s coming back quarter of an hour late”, and all that type of thing which irritated me a bit because I thought, well, they’re civilians, they should keep out of it. But then the CSM, he then thought he better say something to me and he said like, “You can’t have an hour for lunch”, and I said, “But everybody else in the army does”, and he said, “Well you can’t, you’ve got to stick to our

timings.” He said, “If you’ve got to have something”, he said, “get the cooks to make you sandwiches and everything.” Well as I said, sandwiches to me, you know, I didn’t like, ‘cause being so tall and so skinny and everything the cooks used to, at Randwick they were quite good actually, they couldn’t fill me. You know like they used to give me, I think they used to say, “Here he comes again, let’s test him out.” They’d give me something like, I’m not exaggerating now, seven or eight sausages, a big pile of

mashed potatoes and whatever and I’d whoof that down. I mean I’d eat it and then I’d have sweets and everything after that, and here was them trying to make me eat sandwiches you see. So I had a, I won’t say run in ‘cause I was pretty placid and went along with the flow as I said, and that got me a bit upset and I said to the CSM, “Well you know, it’s a bit unfair that the rest of the guys get an hour”, and he said, “Well you’re here and that’s what you’ve got to do, you know, you’re upsetting the civilians”, and I was

a bit upset because they were really dictating to what I should be doing. But anyway I managed to let him still let me go up but I just had to get everything down quick and get back on time, and that was, but I hated the storeman’s part of it. I loved the driving, going out and driving, but I hated the storeman’s part and during the time there, I suppose I was there about, oh, I was there a couple of years,

part of the medical and dental stores was a field component of it which consisted of a pharmacist, a sergeant and a couple of corporals and they would go out when these exercises came up. They would go out and set up like their field medical and dental stores, and although I didn’t belong to them, they were a sub-unit if you like of the place I was posted to, I used to be, you know, pretty friendly with the pharmacist.

So he used to talk the boss into letting me go as their driver and I thoroughly enjoyed that, but during my stay there at that unit an opportunity came up again for me to pursue a medical assistant career again, go back to being a medic. And so I was accepted to do the course back at Healesville and by this time that course that was done at Penguin was over and done with. It was just something they tried for 12 months or something

and I went, I was lucky enough to be sent down to Healesville to do my medical assistant’s course and it was a six weeks course and I passed it and I felt good then because I was almost a fully qualified medic, but not quite. Although you did that six weeks course you then had to do six months practical and it was a bit hard for me to do it at a medical depot. So what

I used to try and do was get detachments like to medical units, only for a couple of weeks at a time to build up my six months. Anyway after the end of two years because I wanted to pursue the medical side of things, they posted me now back to Ingleburn, and CCS that was there had now moved to Queensland, to Wacol up in Queensland and the unit that took over was a new one being formed,

again called 2 General Hospital, which was a general hospital and that, as Matthew [interviewer] said, as Mat said, was that I explained to you, the Field Ambulance is up close to the battle field if you like. The CCS is the next big maybe unit, medical unit back and general hospital is further back still, and I got posted to there and that’s when I got promoted to lance-corporal. At this stage I’m still not a fully qualified medical assistant, but

I am now in a unit where I can get all my qualifications and I end up doing a lot of time over at the military hospital at Ingleburn, which is just across the road from the general hospital. That was a static hospital that saw real live casualties, not casualties so much, but sick and elective surgery people that would come in there, and all that. So I used to work in the wards over there and I got my time up. As I said I got my first

stripe as a lance-corporal and I then did about 12 months there, became a fully qualified medical assistant and then I got called up to the CO [Commanding Officer] and he said, “They’re looking for two medics to go to Holsworthy to 1 Field Regiment Artillery”, and he said, “I think you should go across there.” He said, “I think you’d like that”, and I said, “Yeah, okay”, and this is a bit of fate

now. So I got posted over there in around about September ’65 with another mate of mine called McGee, his name was, Barry McGee, but that doesn’t really matter. But anyway we got posted over there and this is where the fate came in. We went over about 9.00 o’clock, two marched in, you know, the brand new soldiers. I was still a lance-corporal then, and we went to the main orderly room ‘cause I didn’t know what sub-unit I was going to belong to,

and the battery sergeant major of 103 Field Battery was in the orderly room and he said to the chief clerk there, staff sergeant, “Are these the two medics that we’re getting in the regiment?” And the chief said, “Yeah”, and he said, “I’ll take the big tall lance-corporal, he can come to my battery.” And of course the chief clerk said, “Alright sir, yeah okay”, and I went to 103 Field Battery and of course 12 months later we were in Vietnam whereas

the friend of mine, Barry McGee, he went to 107 Battery within 1 Field Regiment and he never went to Vietnam. Mainly because, I mean 107 went eventually but by that time he’d left the army. He did his two years at 103, 107 and then he left the army. So I guess I would’ve still gone to Vietnam, no question about it, but whether I’d have gone with that unit or with some other unit or whatever and if I had to go,

well I had to go to Vietnam. But I was very pleased that I had an artillery unit that I went for a number of reasons I guess we’ll talk about as we go on. So that’s what happened. I was now a fully-fledged medic and I now had my own unit and that was 103 Field Battery, 1 Field Regiment at Holsworthy at that stage.

Yes.

Okay, well I guess I was responsible

medically for about 120 guys, for their medical well-being if you like. That would be their initial medical treatment. In the case of later on, you know, injuries and things like that, I would be their, obviously their initial point of where they would be patched up and assessed anyway, and then moved on or whatever. I would do things like inoculation

parades for them, give them first-aid lectures on various, you know, various subjects from venereal diseases to gunshot wounds, initial gunshot wounds and things like that, yeah.

Yes, and subsequent on-the-job-training, yeah.

A bit of anatomy, physiology, what else? Yeah, probably more anatomy and physiology, just about the human body, how it functions and I guess more details on how to stop bleeding, like sucking chest wounds, how to

obviously splint fractures, things like that. And half of it was, of the six weeks half of it was if you like, not broken down in two halves or anything like that, but half of it was practical stuff, bandaging, putting splints on, tourniquets, all that type of thing to actual learning about the body makeup and all that type of thing, so yeah.

Yes, I did everything. In fact I used to like to get onto the guns. Although I was a medic I attached myself to one of the guns ‘cause I liked a couple of the guys there and when we went out on exercises out in the bush at all I would hoochie with them, like sleep with them, eat with them, all this type of thing, and that was Delta gun

and I was part of them and to the fact that I used to help them on the guns. One of the jobs on the guns is to calibrate the gun or get the gun lined up and I used to do that for them. We had rulers, gun rulers and that and you’d be given instructions and you’d set the coordinates up and then you’d give it to the guy and he’d put the gun into line and all this type of thing.

It got that way that during an exercise we had the director of artillery from Canberra come and visit the unit in the field and I was still lance-corporal then, anyway I was a corporal and he said to me, ”Bombardier”, which is the equivalent to a corporal, “How are you going bombardier?” And I said, “I’m not a bombardier sir, I’m a corporal”. He said, “What?” And then the gun sergeant said, “This is our medic sir, he likes to get on the guns and he enjoys it”. He said, “Very good”, colonel it was,

he said, “Very good, I like to see that”, that type of thing and yeah, it was good. I enjoyed the guns and I’ll get back to the, what was it our question was? I just used to look after them and that. I found the most important thing was you had to win their confidence and you did everything they did, Kirsty. Like you would help them dig in, help them unload the ammunition, set up everything like that. You just

wouldn’t sit back and let them do all of that, you know, and if you did that you certainly, they thought you were okay. And then the training, that’s right, the training was, I did everything they did except I remember when we went to Canungra, well first of all if I may say so, we were, I went to join them in about August ’65, I think August, September ’65 and did a few field exercises with them and we did a few exercises

down at Nowra, a place called Tianjara just out of Nowra and we used to do quite a few down there. Anyway I remember we flew down there in Caribous from Bankstown airport and we flew back. This is about, now this would’ve been about I suppose after Christmas, about February ’66, and we got off the plane and meanwhile Vietnam had started in ‘65

as far as our first commitment of troops was with one battalion and another artillery unit, and when we got back to Bankstown after this exercise down there our battery commander, Major Gere, said to us as we walked to the terminal there at Bankstown Airport, “Well fellows”, he said, “You’ll hear about it in the paper tomorrow morning”, he said, “but we’ve just been warned that we’re going to Vietnam in May”, and that was when the hairs on the back of your neck stood up and all this type of thing.

And sure enough it came out in the papers the next day that the Australian Government have committed a task force now to Vietnam and one field regiment will be part of that task force to go including another two battalions, and yeah. So that’s when I knew, and getting back to the training bit, that was the only time I trained with the guys. We went to Canungra and everyone has to

go through Canungra jumping off towers, doing route marches, everything like that. But because they were so frightened, see, I’d been with them now for six to eight months, because they were frightened that I might do myself in, like break an ankle or arm or anything like that, they might lose me, so they wouldn’t let me do it, and I wanted to do it, you know, jumping off towers and all that, but they wouldn’t let me do it. So what they just said, “No, you’re our medic, we can’t lose you now”. So I used to just go in the field with them with my medical

kit and just, you know, well just go from one activity to another and if anyone cut themselves or whatever I’d patch them up. But before that all exercises, we had to sometimes pull the guns apart and carry the gun so many kilometres. Well I used to help them do all that type of stuff. Everything they did I did, except this was the only time I never did it, yeah.

Good, yeah, I used to,

yeah, I’m sure they, I know they did because we used to go on, you know, out together and do things together and things like that, so yeah. It was very good rapport, and I taught that later on when I became an instructor in medical corps to the guys, the young students and that I had that, whether you go to an infantry battalion or artillery and everything like that, you’ve got to be one of them. You can’t be a high and mighty, I’m the medic, I don’t do this or I can’t do this or I shouldn’t be doing this. You bog in, help them

all and then you find when the chips are down and you can perform you’ve won yourself a lot of good friends which I’ve still got now, yeah.

Only what I read in the paper and that and I guess again it doesn’t really hit home to you. It didn’t hit home until I went there which was later on, but

I only read there, I might add, now I’ve got to be honest, I was excited. I was, yeah, as all the guys in the battery were excited because all we’d done is just do exercises, you know, go down there, fire a few rounds down at the range near Nowra and all that type of stuff, and then back at camp you’d do military type of stuff. It might be a bit of drill or it might be lectures or something about anything.

This is it, and that, and the build up to go into Vietnam was incredibly exciting, you know, incredibly exciting. Example, your training became more intense, you got issued with things that, you know, that you’d never been issued with before.

Yeah, like new webbing. We used to get a kit, we got a kit with a booklet of Vietnamese, basic Vietnamese and all their ranks

and all this type of thing and yeah, and the build up and the guns. Our artillery guns were painted. They were that olive green, but then they were painted like a dull khaki, obviously for camouflage. They didn’t shine and stick out so much, and we took them to Vietnam. They were all painted and just, yeah, just the whole, everything was just so much change and

very exciting time. It really was. We went to Canungra as I said. We had to go to Canungra. Every unit had to go to Canungra as a unit and go through there. I think it was only about two weeks at Canungra. We had a couple of, we had an incident, actually we had, may I tell you two incidents building up to Vietnam? The last exercise we did before we went and our battery commander told us we

were going to Vietnam is we were down at Tianjara and it was lunch time and one of the guns was still firing, you know, and we were lined up for lunch and what had happened was, when they fire an artillery shell it’s all different charge bags on it. They’re little bags about this long, like little bean bags actually but they’ve got cordite in them and it all depends what

charge they’re fired at as to how much of these, how many of these little bean bags, they’re all on a string tied up, how they put in there, and as they don’t use the ones they throw them to one side and eventually you get a little pile of the bean bags if you like, or cordite bags and in the end they’re destroyed. They’re usually burnt or something like that and when one of the guns was firing, the soldier pulled out the shell and you throw your shells into another pile of you like. Once the mission’s over, the

fire mission’s over, then you tidy up and everything like that. Well a bit of cordite was still burning and it fell onto this bag of charges and it went up, and it goes a tremendous flame and we were all lined up for dinner and I remember the, or lunch rather, and the battery sergeant major roared out, “Clear the area, clear the area”. And of course what had happened the bags had gone up and on top of that was, so flames about I suppose

two metres, three metres tall, and hit the camouflage net which is nylon and it was going up and of course everyone had to clear the area because the shells started to go up and be spread everywhere. This is live shells like that. So we, I got two casualties from shrapnel wounds. They were, actually ‘cause the shrapnel went up in the air we were all laying flat on the ground behind trees and everything. The shrapnel came down and hit two blokes on the back and

cut their backs open, not too bad. A few stitches they had to get in there, and we weren’t allowed anywhere near the area ‘cause there were live shells everywhere or shells everywhere and we made the ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission] news and all this type of thing and then we had to go and sleep just out in the open a few kilometres away from the area and then they flew down the next day the ammunition technicians to check the whole area.

And they went through and they put tapes down and we were allowed to go in and get our gear and bring it out and then after the day, at the end of the day they made the area safe and we were right then to resume and then as I said, ‘cause when they fired the last round they couldn’t remember if there was a live round in the gun or anything like that. But quite exciting times and that at the time, and anyway then we went, we were still building up to go to Vietnam, we went to Canungra we,

as part of the Canungra course they go out into the scrubs at a place near, I’m just trying to think of it. It’s near Kyogle anyway. They actually come down from Canungra in buses and trucks and they send them out on patrol for about four or five days. This is the last week of there, just live in the field and that for a while, and we lost two blokes. They got separated from…they sent them out on patrols. They broke them up into patrols, and two of these blokes, again we made the ABC news ‘cause they

couldn’t find them. It’s very thick jungle up there around Kyogle, and they had to get helicopters down and scour the area for them, and as I said, we made the ABC. This is all within six months we made the ABC news. They ended up finding the guys, one of them was reasonably burnt because they made a fire and during the night he rolled in it and burnt the side. Not, you know, reasonably bad but not too bad,

and he, but they found them when they made their way to the dingo fence and they stayed against that because they thought that would be a good landmark, and it was. One of the army helicopters went along there; they saw them down on the ground. They waved and we evacuated and that. So that was the two exciting times leading up to Vietnam, and then when we finished Canungra we came back to Holsworthy and this is the time you knew it was really fair dinkum because

the battery commander lined the whole battery up, everybody, even our cooks who were normally in the cookhouse cooking come down. Everybody that was going to Vietnam with 103 Battery were lined up and we were warned that as from now we were on active service and therefore we would come under a new disciplinary code. Before it was obviously non-active service and the rules and regulations and the

punishments and that weren’t as severe as when you’re on active service in the law manual, and that meant things like, well pretty drastic. Like if you went AWOL [Absent Without Leave] technically you were deserting and things like that, and that was an example. I mean it might’ve been a bit of a, can I say a threat or put a bit of a scare into us, but we were then warned for active service and therefore we would come under the disciplinary act of active service. So we knew it was fair dinkum then,

and yeah. So, and that was it, and the final thing before we actually went, the big thing was the big march through Sydney, and that was an experience. I enjoyed that very much. This was the taskforce that were about to leave for Vietnam and they did a march through Sydney. We had our, in my particular case, in fact even to this day down at the War Memorial now, you can catch a very quick glimpse of me in the parade.

Only because I stick out a head above and you can see me, and the thing that struck me about that that gave you a good feeling was when we were marching through the streets we had all the, like all our battery fellows and then we had a Land Rover and hooked up to the Land Rover was an artillery piece which was a 105 Howitzer, a Pack Howitzer actually, Italian gun. And then several people,

guys, as we drove past ran from the crowd and they had stubbies, you know, like a six-pack of stubbies and they put it in the back of the Land Rover because they didn’t have a cover on them or anything, and you know, I thought that was a good touch, just to say have a beer on us fellows, you know, good luck type of thing. So we marched through the city. Of course at that stage there were certainly no protestors as such, nothing to what happened

as you know later on with other units that came back in particular, and that was another proud moment, you know. Your chest was stuck out and people were cheering you and carrying on and later on as we know things certainly changed the other way, but at that stage it was very proud times and we came back from the march and then we went on what they call pre-embarkation leave, which we had a week to go to our families and everything like that. At that stage I wasn’t

married or anything and I had, Mum and Dad were in Sydney at this stage so I had spent a few days with them, and I’ve got an uncle up in the country and I spent a few days up there with their family and came back and here we were ready to go, and that’s the next chapter if you like.

Yeah.

Yeah, up in Canungra they had a village based on a Vietnamese village and they obviously had instructors that had been in the training teams and had done their time in Vietnam, so we were looking at early ‘60s now, and they’d come home as instructors up there and they had this village set up. And the village was very much orientated towards booby traps and that and they had booby traps and that

and how and where you can see them, or where they could be concealed rather, and they had the village with like trap doors in it, ‘cause the Viet Cong used to live a lot under the ground and everything like that, and how they were camouflaged, the entrances and all this and they put you through that. They also had walking through jungle, firing-range, walking through there so that you were, had to fire instantly. So you’d be walking through

a track which they had made up and it was all obviously safety-wise. You’d have your instructor with you and you’d walk through and then a target would pop up and you’d shoot at that. It could be there, it could be there, it could be straight ahead of you, and fire, fire trails and all that type of thing. So they had that and a bit of map reading and things like that, but mostly it was towards jungle type training in, as I said, patrolling through a

jungle and all of a sudden targets come up at you and also the Vietnamese village set up, a replica of it just to give you an idea what you could come across and where you expect things to happen, like booby traps or trap-door holes like well camouflaged, yeah.

Yeah, things like, you know, they would put a grenade under a weapon

so when you picked the weapon up the grenade would go off. Anything, anything that you might, you as a person might touch they had set up. Mostly they used either grenades or they used, they didn’t actually obviously set these things off at this stage, but they had things like unexploded material that may have been dropped from

a plane or things like that. They showed you how they could set them up as booby traps and have, you know, like something innocent on the ground, a hat, and you pick up the hat and bang, something goes off. But mostly like weapons they like, or bodies even, bodies, a dead body. They’d have something under that so when you turned the body over, bang, and that. So this is mostly to show you, not, they didn’t physically blow things up or anything like that, but just to show you how it could be done and to look out

for in particular.

Well they only did it as an instructor type thing. You know, you’ve got to be careful, keep your wits about you all the time and really that was all it was about at that stage because again these were early days of Vietnam of course and these were only, well not only, but they were training team guys that had come home

and had to use their, or they should’ve used their skills, which they did as instructors, but you know, really that’s about it. I couldn’t say they went into any great detail about it, you know.

As I said I spent a couple of days with my parents and my uncle was the manager of a property up near Dubbo and I guess it goes back to I like to go back to the land and I went up there and spent a few days

with him and met a girl up there and she wrote to me while I was in Vietnam for a reasonable amount of time and everything, and just went out with her a couple of times to the movies and then just come back to Sydney ready to go.

Yeah, as a medic I had

a Rover, Land Rover with a stretcher and that in it and a driver and in there I had a pannier, a case like this with all different things in it. But mostly personally I carried on me a haversack which is roughly about that big, about the size of an esky, a small esky, yeah, about half the size of an esky, and in it I had all the basic stuff that I needed and each medic

used to make his own kit up if you like, ‘cause he knew his guys or what he particularly liked to have in there, and I’m talking bandages, scissors, antiseptics, pills for like diarrhoea, what else? Headaches, things like that, pain killers and things like, yeah.

Over your shoulder, that’s all it was, slung over your shoulder. They were a standard thing that

was issued to all medical assistants. They were called packs, haversack, and each medic had one of them. They used to fold out too, they were canvas but they used to fold out and have little partitions where you put your different, but some of the guys used to do their own, make their own up because they knew they needed more bandages or they knew they needed different forceps or different scissors or whatever,

or yeah, everyone had their own little traits that they liked to use in these kits.

Just automatic really. I just, someone sang out, “Quick”. I’m just trying to think of the guy’s name now. It doesn’t really matter I suppose, but, “Quick, Jim’s been hit on the back”, and of course he couldn’t, because it was right up the back here, he couldn’t feel it, sorry, he couldn’t know what it was

like. So all I did was took his shirt off and he had a gash about, I suppose about five centimetres long and quite deep and I just put a shell dressing on it, a dressing on it, stopped the bleeding with pressure. It wasn’t bleeding that much actually, and then we evacuated him to Albatross, HMAS Albatross which is at Nowra, the naval station, the air station down there, and the other fellow got

hit on the back, the lower back but it was only a very small one but he still had a couple of sutures in it. The first one, Jack Smales, that’s right, the first one was quite a large one and he had quite a few stitches in it. In fact I saw him at the reunion three or four years ago and he showed me the old scar, and the other fellow was only a minor one but …

Yeah.

Burn treatment at the time was to flush the area with water because you’ve got your water bottles and everything like that, and obviously the teaching is not to put any greases or any ointments or anything on them. So flush the area, put a moist dressing on there and evacuate as soon as possible, ‘cause remember that my job was initial treatment and then to obviously stabilise,

whether it was burns, wounds, bleeding or anything like that and then move them on. So basically it was flush the area with clean water and put a wetting dressing on it and that, yeah.

Along George Street up past the Town Hall which seems to be the basic place

a lot of people go by. So it was not only us but I think it was obviously 6 Battalion and 5 Battalion would’ve been, maybe not 6 Battalion ‘cause I think they came a bit later, but certainly 5 Battalion and 1 Field Regiment and obviously a few other units and that and it was as I said, a great day. We arrived there in trucks. They formed us up say down the bottom of probably the eastern side of

George Street and we marched straight up George Street and there was quite a crowd there. This would’ve been about a Friday, about a Friday lunch-time, something like that.

Oh yes, enthusiastic as I said. No hint of what was to happen years later or a few years later. There was no, not one protest, nothing. Yeah, it was well received by the crowd and we felt of course very proud

to do it.

Yes, we did. We went and had a few drinks after back at camp in the canteen. So obviously I suppose the officers went to the mess and the sergeants, but us Diggers we went to the canteen and had a few drinks. No, I recall no. The unit put a barbecue and we had a few drinks in our own unit lines and a barbecue and a few drinks. That’s right, and then once that was all over then we went on our leave, our pre-embarkation leave.

Again absolutely exciting, you know. It’s all over and done with, let’s go, let’s go, you know, we couldn’t wait, and I’m not just saying that about myself ‘cause we were all excited, you know, and you can tell when blokes are excited, but I always said in a couple of Anzac Day speeches that I’ve made, it was no different to the Second World War fellows. I mean it was all excitement and that’s pre [prior to] getting over

there of course and then of course things are not, oh well, you know, not as exciting, if you like.

Yes, there was, yes, there was. Obviously the diseases and that you are likely to get in the tropics, i.e., obviously the most common one would be malaria,

signs and symptoms and treatment; tropical rashes which were very common and that; and oh yes, and obviously like bites and stings and things like that from beasties, you know, insects or snakes or things like that, yeah. So that was more pronounced towards the end when we had a few lectures on that, yeah.

Over there?

Definitely skin rashes, definitely by far. Either under the arm, in the crotch, on the general skin areas, yeah, without a doubt, rashes. Obviously caused by heat, heat rashes and that, yeah.

Yeah, I suppose most of the injuries were just nicks and cuts from handling artillery pieces, like jammed fingers in the breach blocks or unfolding the gun. So probably I suppose digital crushes if you like, and a lot of the other gear that’s not associated with injuries so much, is there was a lot of

inoculations, of course. Everyone had to be brought up to speed and a lot of it was courses, three or four injections to bring them up to speed, of the one particular typhoid or something like that. But you had tetanus and typhoid and cholera, a few other things like that and they were always going on needle parades and that. And then we had medicals as well, they all had to have a medical, a full medical again before they went to make sure they were fit to go over there, and in fact a couple of blokes were stopped. They

had some rashes or something and that was a big thing. They were worried about sending anyone over who had the potential to get a nasty rash because obviously it makes them incapacitated for a number of days if they’ve got bad rashes and everything, and that happened later on when I got back from Vietnam and I was posted to an infantry centre and we were sending reinforcements over. That was one of the biggest fears they had because they had so many problems previously with skin rashes that we had to send anyone

that looked like, a pimple, send it to the dermatologist and he had to actually say, “I think you’ll still be right to serve in Vietnam”, but I know that’s just on a bit, but yeah.

Correct.

Without a doubt the soldier

or the medic of nowadays is much better trained than I ever was. The reason being that I think they’re more well-educated than in my days. They’re also more selective in their choosing of a medic and also they have better training, much better training because they do a lot of training in civilian hospitals and things like that, and good hands-on

training with real life cases and everything, yeah. And they go through a strict regime, or shall I say, before they can qualify they’ve really got to be first-class, much better trained. You know, you just take me. As I said I had a hotch-potch building up to be a med assist, six weeks here, a couple of weeks here until,

you know, you get enough, if you like, points together and all of a sudden you’re a med assist. Now it’s from go to woe, non-stop. There’s no breaks, there’s no nothing, which is good. There’s continuity there for a young medic nowadays. They’re certainly very well trained nowadays.

There probably is. I felt that,

and I’ve often mentioned to a mate of mine, a good mate actually who was a medic, we got a bit more freedom, a bit more, we were allowed to do things I guess that the young medics nowadays don’t do. We were doing minor operations and things like that, which is a no-no for the younger medics nowadays. They’ve got strict guidelines and they’ve got to stick to them. In our day we had a bit of

leeway in what we could do and that. But I would say to you that without a doubt 75 percent of my experience or qualifications was being just thrown in the deep end and doing it, you know. This situation has happened, I’ve got a basic idea what I’ve got to do, but actually doing the actual thing when it comes like the shrapnel wound, just a minor

thing like that, actually stopping the bleeding in real life, not just, you know, there’s a pretend wound, moulage, you just put on there. That’s a bleeding wound there; you’ve got to treat it. This is the actual, you know, if the blood doesn’t stop flowing well you’ve got to do something else. Whereas if you’re just doing it on fake casualties, well you put a bandage on and that’s supposed to stop it but sometimes it doesn’t work in real life and that’s why the experience, sorry, the

training, comes from the experience, from what, hands on, you’ve actually physically got to do.

That was probably later on and a different phase of my career, but I was doing removing toenails, warts, doing suturing on cuts and things like that, yeah.

Well in the defence forces it’s a bit unique because if a young fellow’s in the field and everything they’ve got to put a drip bag on, put a cannular in the arm, put drips on and things like that. Now you wouldn’t get a civilian equivalent to do that, which would be, a

civilian equivalent would be a nurse’s aid in a hospital or whatever and they are certainly, they are not qualified to do that. In fact they’d get into trouble. Only a registered nurse is allowed to do that, although we had registered nurses in the army they’re not out with the infantry battalions in patrolling and things like that, so it’s yeah. I’ve often, people have said that to me, you know, compare it to a civilian

equivalent. Well you can’t really because you’re doing things in the defence forces that you wouldn’t do if you were a civilian nurse’s aid or a nursing sister. Probably a nursing sister beyond par, both army and also civilian, but a medical assistant can do things like, as I said, minor ops, suturing and you wouldn’t get a nurse’s aid at a hospital doing anything like that, but I mean a medic’s got to do that.

I mean he’s got to do it, he’s got to learn to do it, put a drip in. You wouldn’t get a nurse’s aid in a hospital doing that. They’re not allowed to. They’re not qualified to do it.

To stabilise the patient. Obviously to, well the ABCs, airways, breathing and circulation, to maintain them. If the medic maintains them, trauma in the field, well then he’s done his job. He’s not expected to do

open-heart surgery. I know I’m being a bit ridiculous, but open-heart surgery. He’s got to stabilise that patient with the skills that he’s been taught and the stabilisation as we’re taught, ABCs, airways is maintained, the breathing obviously and the circulation, the bleeding, sorry, and the circulation, yeah. So if they’re maintained well then he’s done his job.

I don’t know. I think we had a quiet night because, I know I use this word a lot, apprehensive, ‘cause we were apprehensive and that, and if I recall I think I had, I was, we were allowed to go home and I had tea with Mum and Dad at Blacktown. They were at Blacktown then,

and we had to be back at camp by midnight, yeah, we had to be back ‘cause the next morning was the final touches if you like. We were issued with other things like some more things on Vietnam, like some more literature. Make sure that all our inoculations were as in our book. We had our inoculation book because we had to go through different countries.

Make sure we had our ID’s [identification] done, our dog tags were up to date, any final things because we didn’t take off until midnight that night. So everything had to be done obviously before then, last-minute things, sorry, had to be done by then.

Well we took over, we had a steel trunk, they were sent over

individually. Like we had to pack them beforehand and of course obviously they would contain extra uniforms and we had some civilian clothes we could put into there because we might’ve had to at some stage wear civilian clothes. You know, basically clothing and that and spare everything if you like, clothing, was in that. When we went over, if I recall we had our

haversack and in our haversack we had everything that we liked, we wanted, that we would be going to use for our trip over like toiletries, gear, change of shirt, things like that, because that’s all we were allowed to take on the plane, see.

Yes, well that was, we took off from Richmond on a Qantas chartered plane and it was in May and it was freezing cold at

midnight and again we were all excited. We arrived out there by buses and my father, as I’ve said previously, was a police officer, a sergeant at Blacktown police and he rostered himself on duty that night and that was another proud moment. And Dad got himself out to, well he got his driver to drive him out from Blacktown which as you know is not far from Richmond, and drove him out and Dad was there to say farewell with me and I was quite proud of that. He came out

and got in there and probably one of the few people that saw their troops off because it was a restricted area, but Dad being a copper he got in there. They let him in and everything like that and he saw me off as we climbed aboard the plane, the Qantas jet, yeah.

She was scared, she was scared, definitely. You know, most mothers are I suppose through time, you know. She was scared, no, was worried that

something would happen to me without a doubt, yeah.

Well I suppose like every 18, well I was old then, 22 or something. I just said, “It’ll be right”. You know, I was impregnable so I’ll be right. “Just don’t worry Mum, it’ll be right. Nothing’s going to happen”, which you think even today, you know, nothing will happen to you, and that was it.

We went to Townsville and we, actually when we went to Townsville and they let us off the plane at Townsville there. We just wandered around the plane. We weren’t allowed to leave the immediate area of the plane. They refuelled enough to get away obviously from the plane when they were refuelling, and then on taking off something happened to the under carriage of the plane and we

just heard that there was something, there was a noise or something or other but they weren’t going to re-land, that they would keep going and our next port of call was Manila. And we landed at Manila and we found out later a pin or something, a sheer pin broke. It was nothing major anyway and they fixed the plane there. We went into the terminal at Manila and we stayed in there for about two or three hours before we got on the plane.

Unlike some of the other guys that went over at different times, they had to wear civilian clothes a lot of the time. I think particularly going through Singapore because the Singapore government wouldn’t let them, you know, Australians going to Vietnam, fighting in Vietnam, to be seen going through their country in uniform and they had to take a set of civvies with them and wear them, whereas ours was a chartered flight virtually and because we went to Manila who was

supporting, if you like, the allies, there was no political hang-up with us landing there in uniform, and then we went to the next port of call which was of course Saigon, and you know, yeah.

Without a doubt the excitement was starting to deteriorate if you could use that word, but the look of, I can still see it, guys

looking at each other and wondering, particularly when we were actually told we were in Vietnam airspace if you like. You know, because I remember looking out the window and you could see the, like the snake rivers and that down there, typical jungle country like a delta area from the air and everything, and then you started to think things like, you know, you hear all these SAM [Surface to Air] missiles and that they’re supposed to have. What about if one come up? So

really all the way from Manila it was just like one big holiday, excitement, but then when you actually knew you were in Vietnam airspace if you like and over Vietnam it was, yeah, the mood of the whole plane changed without a doubt, and yeah.

Yeah, we got into

Ton San Nhut early the next day so I would say, I’m not too sure, but I know it was about mid morning when we got in there. I must be honest with you, I don’t know the time differences, but if you take it, it was probably a fair flight because we stayed at Townsville for about three-quarters of an hour, Manila a couple of hours and then to Saigon, yeah.

Yes. Well, we got off the plane, we got our, that’s right, we had in, obviously the hold, the green kit bag which had some clothes and things in it, and we got our weapons then. They were in the hold of the plane and as they unloaded it they then issued our weapon and that. You know, number 126

34, we all had our numbers written down so we knew, yep, and I’d go up and pick mine. I had an Owen and I picked it up and we got that and then we were shuffled to the side of the airport and I always remember we were all sitting on our bags and sitting around hurrying up and doing nothing and then we saw the Qantas jet take off that brought us over. Off it went, and that was isolation then, there goes part of Australia. The old Qantas jet, I’ll always remember that,

you know. I thought gee, there goes Australia, and we were sitting down there and we were to catch a C120 actually which is a two-engine version of a Hercules rather than the four-engine. We were to catch that to Vung Tau and, as I’ve related the story many times, we were all sitting there and the next minute along came past us right in front of us, was this convoy of bloody coffins.

And that really hit home then and it was, those trolleys that they use at the station to put luggage on and then they had a little motorised machine at the front there, but this was trolleys, about 20 of them, and each of them had four aluminium coffins, American, packed on them and they went past us. We didn’t know what to do.

We were all sitting, as I said on our bags, and we didn’t know whether to stand up and salute, take our hats off. We were just dumbfounded and of course I’ll always remember on the, driving the tractor thing was two Americans and the old American had his feet up on the front of the tractor nonplussed, just driving along like that and we didn’t know how reverent to be. We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know if we should stand up, bow our heads, ‘cause we all knew they were coffins,

and you never mistake a coffin, and that was just another reinforcement. Hey, you’re not here for fun now. This is fair dinkum and I can still picture as I talk to you the coffins on these trailers, four to a coffin, so there would’ve been at least 100 bodies there. So they went past us and then some time after that we were told, righto, pick your gear up and we then

hopped aboard this C130, C120.

Yes, yes, yes, yeah, very humid, very humid and as you said, the smells which sometimes even nowadays I get the smells I can smell, but yeah, it’s really humid and a very, how can I say? A body smell about it. Not BO,

but just I suppose, and all of us were ringing wet of course because we’d come from Australia on a freezing cold night and Manila was warm, sure, and Townsville was, but this was really, grabbed you the weather, and the smells of, how can I say? It’s a marshy type smell, mud type smell, yeah, stagnant mud.

Yes, a lot. There was fighters taking off, Phantoms landing and taking off, landing and roars of the jets as they took off and came in to land. Yeah, well the fact is it’s supposed to be reputed at the height of the Vietnam War it was the busiest airport in the world and you could quite understand that because there was four or five jets side by side taking off and then loaded up with bombs and everything

like that, yeah. It was very noisy with jets and people running everywhere.

To Vung Tau. We landed at Vung Tau airport. I think it only took us about half an hour, but on the way there we were, we didn’t know it at the time, but we were told when we landed we were hit by ground fire, just a couple of small arms fire,

because when we landed and we switched off, one of the crew, American crew, these are all Americans now, they showed us the bullet holes up through the wing, two bullet holes and that. Whether they were old one and trying to put the wind up us I don’t know, but they showed us.

Yeah.

A war, trouble. I might add that on the way over the

Yanks as they are casual, there was the crew master of the C120, he was at the back of the aircraft and he had this, you know, we were all obviously at this stage we were like, you know, like this looking at each other and saying, “What’s going to happen next?”, or, “What can we expect?” And he was real laid-back because I suppose he’d done 12 months over there and he could see the frightened looks on our face and he pulled this flag out. It was a North Vietnamese flag, regulation

size and I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear but it’s a word that sounds like truck and it had truck the Viet Cong written on it, you see, and he’s going like this and of course we all went back, this type of thing, but I think we did it very, you know, scared, well not scared, very apprehensively, like that. So, and he thought it was a good joke, this American Negro

fellow, yeah.

Oh no, we’ve got a young lady in the room, that’s all. And then we land and the Ton San Nhut, the Vung Tau airport was pretty sparse compared to the obviously Ton San Nhut, and what struck me when we first got out of the plane all the tarmac was that, what do they call it? That

steel mesh stuff, PV

Yeah, that’s it, all over the, on the runways and everything because obviously it was a sand runway then they’d put them on there for stabilisation, and here we were, just another step closer.

We were billeted just out of town on the outskirts of Vung

Tau and we were there for a time of acclimatisation. That was the idea of it, to acclimatise us to it, and we just did, the gunners did their bit of drills and I, as a medic, had to keep a more, how can I say it? Overseeing on the troops and everything, particularly as I said with rashes and things like that and

in fact my daily routine was to go around to everybody and see them. They were doing their gun drills and I’d say, “Is there anyone with problems?” Or they’d say, “Doc”, of course by this time I was known as Doc and I just kept a more watchful eye over them if you like just to see that no one was getting crook or anything like that.

Again we were restricted. We were restricted to going into town. You know, after hours if you want to call it that when you finished your daily routine. We played a lot of volleyball, you know, a lot of volleyball and that kept us occupied and that, and there was lectures still going on of an evening. Well VD was the most prominent one as far as medical goes, but there was other ones about the culture of Vietnam. Things like that that just, that wasn’t, nearly every night there was a lecture of some

sort on. We had a canteen. We were allowed, but at that stage we were only, the old saying of two beers perhaps per day. Two beers per day perhaps, and that’s what we were. We were restricted only because of the supply of beer to us coming from Australia and America was very restricted at this stage. So we used to just entertain

ourselves of a night, just talking and having a couple of drinks. I and I don’t know if we had any other recreation type games or anything like that, and then we were allowed to go into Vung Tau but not everybody, just groups of guys were allowed to go into Vung Tau and we’d obviously do the touristy things and looked around and that, and I wouldn’t touch the food or anything in there. I guess that was,

I wouldn’t touch the food and we checked out the sights, including the young ladies and the bars of course.

Oh, they were very standoffish for sure, no question, which you can’t blame them, you can’t blame them at all. We were frightened of the white mice as they call them, which were the policemen. We knew them because they were all,

had white uniforms, they were all in white, and of course you heard tales of if they told you to stop and you didn’t stop they shot to kill. So we were frightened of those, although none of us had any, well, a couple might’ve had run-ins with them but there were no serious consequences from it, but I certainly had and the group of guys I went we never had any confrontation with them at all, but that’s what we were told. If they said stop, you stopped. You didn’t take one more step because they’d

shoot rather than ask another, say another word. But otherwise, obviously the merchants and those people with entrepreneurial skills were all over you like a rash so to speak, you know, the vendors saying, “Buy this, buy that, come into my bar”, you know outside, “Come in,” and all this type of thing, sure. But they were there, their reasons were to get you in there for money and everything but the general population were very, almost go past, you know, with their head down and not look at you

type of thing, the everyday peasant and that.

No.

Yeah, I actually went before the rest of the guys. I went up about a week before because a medic of another battery, 105 Battery I think it was, he hurt himself

and they didn’t have a medic. So of course I was in country and everything like that and they thought, well I could go up to, up there and I took his place up there and that was, and what they were doing, that battery was supporting the elements of one battalion and also the American 173rd I think it was, airborne, and they were in fact at that stage clearing Nui Dat up for the Australians to take that over and make it their base in

Vietnam barring Vung Tau, their forward base if you like. I remember I went up there on a courier run and all the, probably the only time I wore a helmet over there but we had our helmets and I remember all the Land Rover had all sand bags inside it internally at the back of it, just the sides and on the floor and everything like that. ’Cause again we heard rumours about, you know, mines on the road and, you know, I thought this just reinforces

it when you see these sand bags and that, and I wore my helmet all the way up. As I said I don’t think I ever wore it after that, but I got up there and I just, you know, just joined the battery and it was notorious, well not notorious. It got in the Australian news, that battery, for the wrong reasons. The battery commander was a bloke called Tedda, and he in

fact got on A Current Affair in Australia because he give a punishment to one of the gunners up there that was playing up, and I think, if I recall the punishment was handcuffed him in a gun pit, and of course it got back to Australia and of course all hell broke loose. His parents were on A Current Affair and I met, the first person I met when I was up there was the battery commander. I had to meet him and I thought he’s just an ordinary regular guy, but anyway it was just an incident that happened, and I spent

a week up there. By this time Nui Dat was cleared of Viet Cong and anything else, and I just waited for my battery to come up then. As a matter of fact I watched them come in in helicopters and that, and 5 Battalion came up in helicopters, and that was what struck me too, is that in Australia we’ve only got one or two helicopters if you like when you’re training, and there were just squadrons of them, you know like I’m talking 20, 30 Iroquois helicopters, just bringing in the whole battalion, you know,

in one step. It was just, yeah.

Unbelievable, all the helicopters coming in and just the numbers of them all coming in and landing, and wave after wave and the fellows would get out and run into their fire positions and all that.

What, up at Nui Dat? Yes, as soon as they got in they virtually set up, firing

straight away. Can I take a break, a toot break? I’m right.

Well injuries wise, again it’s not injuries, but my main thing was again rashes, terrible rashes. I mean really ugly

looking rashes, particularly in the crotches and under the armpits. The injuries I got in general without a specific, which I guess we’ll talk about later on as we go in, is again mostly squashed fingers, grazes and I tell you what, we got a lot of injuries from, or I did, was from the star pickets, the steel posts,

and the guys used to catch their shins on them and things like that and rip, make nasty gashes and everything. We certainly improvised by putting any cans like about the right size, put a beer can over the top of and then you paint it white or something like that to stop people from doing that, but that was a very common injury, and as I said, squashed fingers. I had one of these gunners had a very

badly squashed finger, really crushed, and it was the first time I’d given morphine. He was in tremendous pain, and you’re taught when to give morphine and when not and I was quite confident that I should give him morphine under those circumstances, so I give him a shot of morphine and he thought it was pretty good about 10 minutes after that. So they were the most injuries I suppose, cuts and

squashes and things like that.

Yeah, I had a very big supply of topical dermatological-type things for the rashes and everything, pain killers and probably a good supply of crepe bandages. I found them very handy. They’re a good bandage to hold a dressing into place,

and probably another very common, I had stacks of which was very common, was diarrhoea and I had the Kaolin powder which was a satchel and all of our stuff came from the Americans of course at this stage, being early in the war. All of our supplies came from the Americans. Can I tell you an incident about that where it did foul

up? I was down on one of the guns, don’t know, having a brew down there or whatever and one of the young fellows come down to me and he said, “Doc”, he said, “Can you do something for my rash?”, he said. I said, “Give us a look at it?”, and I had a look and I said, “Yeah”. I had my medical kit. I didn’t have it on me then, it was only about 100 metres away if that, 50 metres away up in the tent, and I said, “Go up into the tent,” I said, “Open my bag up and on the top left

hand corner of it you’ll see this green tube about six inches long”. I said, “Rub that into your crutch”. This is, you learn by experience. I’ve never done this since. He said, “Thanks, Doc”. So he went up there and so help me God I heard this almighty scream. Oh, it was, I thought this kid had been shot and I raced up and it turned out that in the nooky in the kit he got the wrong one, ‘cause all the Americans’ ointments

and everything were in a drab olive-coloured tube and on them they had written whatever it might be on it, right, and what he went and did was instead of getting the soothing cream for rashes, he picked up the Dencorub, like equivalent to Dencorub, methyl salicylate there, and of course he proceeded to put this on this raw open rash he had and of course it

was just like putting a fire there and he screamed. So I had to rush him then over to the shower block and get him under the shower with soapy water and get him to scrub it out, and of course when he finally calmed down from screaming and everything and got it all off, it was just absolutely as red as red, and I’ve learned, the lesson I learned there is never let anyone near your kit unless you’re there doing it and everything like that.

All my life then I’ve never done that again, but I say you learn by, yeah, poor kid, he was doubled up in agony. He was screaming. So you had to be careful with the American stuff that you didn’t use the wrong stuff. You had to make sure you looked at the label properly before you give it out.

As much as I wanted to. I find that funny in our day and age, like after Vietnam and everything because in the hospitals

that I worked, in the military hospitals and everything there was control, and still is of course, is I could’ve got as much as I wanted. I had about five, half a dozen, they came in the, already prepared up in needles and syringes so you didn’t have to draw it up or anything. It was already made up for you. All you had to do was take the cover off the needle and whack it in, bang, like that, and I had half a dozen of those and there was no, you know,

I may be wrong. I mean I may have been wrong, we might have been doing the wrong procedure when I was there, but certainly if I wanted to go and get another half a dozen from the main RAP [Regimental Aid Post] I would have no trouble in getting. Really, no questions were asked, and that was a question always asked me, did I ever, and you may have been going to ask, did you ever see fellows on drugs and everything? I can honestly say that the 14 months that I was in Vietnam I never saw any drugs being used including

marijuana or any other thing and that. Certainly with the Australians and Americans I came in contact with I never saw it, and if anyone would know I think I would know, but yeah, so I had morphine laid on if you like, put it that way.

Yeah, the problem we had then obviously when we first got up there and these rashes were coming up,

it was decided we could have shorts, you know like, so we had the shorts on and the shirt sleeves rolled up and everything and that was, helped a lot, it did help a lot, but we had malaria breakouts. We had a lot of malaria breakouts and I can remember the director general of medical services came over and he made a decree that in future you’d have to wear

long trousers and sleeves down 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and then of course what happened then all the rashes flared up real bad, behind the knees and everything like that. So they decided then the lesser of the two evils believe it or not, although malaria is obviously much more severe, was to go back to shorts but the restrictions were that come 6.00 o’clock long trousers, sleeves down. Of course the standard joke then with

everybody was mosquitos can tell the time. They know when it’s 6.00 o’clock, you know, and all this type of thing, and then during the day, and the other thing they did was, because if you went into the rubber plantations you had to then wear long trousers and sleeves down which was a bit stupid because we, our actual accommodation was in amongst the rubber trees but of course the guns and everything in our case were out in the open obviously

to fire and everything like that. This silly idea, hell, I’ve got to go into the rubber trees now, I better put my long trousers on, and slowly that slackened off, you know, and except for the fact that you definitely had to wear long trousers after, it was a standard thing. You’d see all the blokes go back to the camp, back to their accommodation, which was only a tent and put on their long trousers and sleeves down, and you got into trouble in fact if you didn’t do that.

Yes, definitely not wearing them,

definitely, and that was, I would say there wouldn’t be a guy in Vietnam that wore underwear. I’d be very surprised, and socks as well. So we used to just wear just boots and no underwear, yeah. Even I, who used to wear them, in the end I never wore the things and I found it much better definitely.

We were lucky because I know that the boots were falling to pieces, the old AB boots as they call them. I know we were one of the first lot, actually we were the first lot take National Servicemen over and plus we were the first ones to take the new boots out that Dunlop made

and that. We had a lot of trouble with, would you believe the green ants and that, used to eat everything. If you left anything on the ground they’d love to eat it. What else? Yeah, the original uniform that we took over, which was the basic jungle greens, was later on replaced by the new designed

uniform which was based on again the rashes and everything, more or less fitting like jackets out, not tucked in. It was a special shirt that you wear outside your trousers and you had more room. It was more airier and that certainly did a lot of, helped a lot because the other uniform was tight fitting, well, reasonably tight fitting and didn’t allow for ventilation.

Obviously a lot of the equipment played up in the hot tropical environment. Yeah, well anything, anything electrical and that you had problems with and that, yeah, always. We had with us the Divisional Location Battery, which was a unit that would be set up to locate incoming mortar or enemy fire and they could pinpoint it by correlating all the data.

It hardly ever worked. We used to just joke, we don’t even know why you’re here, because it was a sophisticated electronic thing and the humidity used to knock it something terrible, but personal equipment, yeah, not too bad. Guns were always, as in your personal gun, you had to clean quite constantly because of the dust. It was either dust or mud, one or the other, you know. In the wet season was the mud and in the dry season was the dust.

Well in those days that was the weapon, the personal weapon issued to a medic in a battery and obviously they were still in when I went over to Vietnam. There was no, a lot of the NCOs got, all the corporals got Owen guns, but two months after they got over

there they replaced them with the M16, the American one. The Americans obviously gave it, well Australians contracted off them, but I never got it. I still had my Owen gun. I guess they mightn’t have trusted me with it. I don’t know, but I had my Owen gun right through there. I tried to talk them several times into letting me have a pistol, as in a nine millimetre, because I said, “I’m a medic and I’ve got to have my hands free”, and all this and I put my weapon down and all this, but they wouldn’t entertain that so I had to put up with the Owen

gun and I had to clean it a lot.

No, only into a weapon pit, that’s all.

Yeah.

When we first got over there it was hoochies, just, that’s the one man, just the plastic poncho sheet over there, over a

fold-up stretcher but as things improved because we were over there first, we then started to get, we got tents then, 16 feet by 16 feet tents, the old type of canvas tents and we then got the American cots that were much better in that they were about half a metre off the ground. They were very comfortable as such and they were better

to put your mosquito net over, and then slowly we got a better mattress and then we got even sheets. We ended up getting sheets which were laundered regularly at the local laundry down at Ba Ria. So yeah, accommodation improved. The longer we stayed there the better it got, and I found it quite comfortable to sleep in and everything, and of course all the tents were sand-bagged

around them for obvious reasons.

I personalised it by getting a couple of crates and making up a cupboard if you like and shelves on it and put my items on that. I bought a radio at the American PX [American canteen unit] and listened to Armed Forces Radio which wasn’t a bad entertainment service. Admittedly when it came to sport it was all

American baseball and gridiron or American football which we didn’t know too much about. And oh yes, we got a tape recorder, the little battery ones and that, and put music on that and mucked around with that, yeah, but most of us got them when we went to Hong Kong or R and R [Rest and Recreation] and that. We got those duty-free and brought them back.

I think the Americans were better set up than us, you know. Their equipment was a lot better than us, and yeah, their whole set up was a lot better, yeah, their accommodation and what have you, yeah.

Well it was obviously pumped into us, you know, hygiene, hygiene, hygiene all the

time. We certainly got a lot of lectures. It was my job as a medic to make sure, particularly feet and things like that, to make sure it was good. Yeah, I think the hygiene overall was pretty good ‘cause guys knew if they didn’t look after themselves and that they’d be in a lot of trouble, and we had the health inspectors go around too. There was one up at taskforce, a couple of the sergeants and an officer and he used to visit all the units and give you

a bit of a touch up if you didn’t have this done properly or that done properly, but basically the hygiene wasn’t too bad.

As often as you wanted to in our particular case, but mostly the guys had it probably once a day in the evening when it’s a lot cooler of course. You enjoyed it more, but we didn’t seem to have any water restrictions or anything like that because the engineers did a good job in finding water and obviously sterilising it and everything for us,

and they had the big water trucks used to come around, just around and around every unit filling up their bladders and that.

Primitive, but adequate. The thunder boxes as we called them, they were in, the engineers would build a suitable latrine, as in a fly-screened off and everything like that and then the pit and then the thunder boxes on top of it, and

that was an experience. If you go in there to sit down and contemplate the situation of the world and the American 155s would fire their shells about two kilometres away all the lids of the toilets used to go up. I think you’ll hear this story a few times. It’s funny, you’re sitting there and you hear this boom in the distance and I guess the shock wave underground and all the lids would go whoosh, like that, and you’d feel the warm air on your

exposed part come up and that, so yeah, and they were well, I made sure that they were well maintained and one of the secrets was, those charge bags I mentioned early on were very good for throwing down there and lighting and burning off any excess and that. They were good like that. You had to be careful but, you didn’t blow up too much things, but they didn’t blow up, they just ignited in flame.

Very impressed. I was very impressed because they come from all walks of life, bankers, school teachers, everything you can think of obviously they came in, in all shapes and forms and really they, you know, I’d been in the army before Vietnam, what, four years, five

years and they only did their six months at Kapooka or whatever it was, three months, and the next minute they’re in Vietnam. Yeah, I had tremendous admiration for them and I thought they did a very good job. You know, they never whinged, never complained about being there. The only thing they were, I guess a lot of them felt in a way that a pity it wasn’t one in, all in instead of just unlucky that their marble came out, but we all

worked in well, the regular army guys as well as National Servicemen and they did an excellent job, excellent job.

On the whole I think very well, yeah, very well, yeah, I had no complaints. I mean I heard no complaints about them. They were just one of the boys. Well really you wouldn’t know they were a National Serviceman except that you knew the guys. I mean if you went to another unit you wouldn’t know the

difference between a National Serviceman or a regular army guy. They performed the same jobs and did it just as good.

No, not really, no.

Well in a way I was bit lucky being the medic, the only medic, I went to a lot of the O [Operations]

groups and everything that the battery captain had and there was always a briefing on what was going on. They’d have the maps there and something was happening up here, but basically it was really for our level, if you like, was just what was happening around us. The general news we really got was from Armed Forces Radio news. Obviously it was all American orientated, as in their units and what was going on and that.

But certainly what was happening in our little area of the world we were well informed. We were well informed by our O groups and that.

Yes, yeah, definitely because, well because of my position in the unit and health matters might’ve come up, either questions for me to answer or ask,

yeah.

Yes, yes. We had what we call a med cap and we, our 1 Field Regiment was responsible for a little village, it would’ve been south of

us called Binghia. If I recall it’s B I N G H I A, and what we would do is we would go out once, I think it was once a week or once a fortnight, very frequently anyway. We would fly there by helicopter, we would take with us a medical pannier with a multitude of drugs and that in it and we’d set up, and then obviously the local community

would come to us and we’d have an interpreter. Now the village we went to was very Catholic orientated. They had a beautiful church there and Catholic priests and it was an old, the people originally lived in the North and when they did the divide they came down from North Vietnam and set up this village and they were quite staunch Catholics and everything. They were very good, and when they knew I was Catholic it was a good rapport

between us and that, and we’d set up this, if you like, a first-aid post and as I said, people would come up to us and we’d have an interpreter there and we’d get what was wrong with them, and I mean, you know, they were just mostly sores and things like that and the odd cut and things like that which we dressed up. At the beginning the doctor used to come with us, which was John Tasky,

he used to come with us. Us being the medics, there was two medics used to go, but towards the, not towards the end but later on then, because obviously his resources were very limited because he had to be everywhere, we used to go out and he would just fly, instead of having him tied up one day at this village, ‘cause that’s what we used to do, come in the morning and the helicopter would pick us up about 3.00 o’clock in the afternoon. He used to come out

in the helicopter in the afternoon and he would stay there for anything that we were worried about that really a doctor used to have to look at, he would look at. But basically we could do everything, ‘cause most of them were, you know, was just and that. We had one chap turn up and he had a cyst on his side, was about the size of a baseball or a softball and we had our second doctor we got, ‘cause John Tasky

went and we got this other one, Ted Heffernan. He’s down at Geelong now and he I think had aspirations to be a surgeon and in fact he is now, and he saw this and he got stuck into it. And he cut this cyst out about that size and we had no suture gear there so he sewed it up with some tailor; ‘cause there was a tailor in the village, and sewed it up with just ordinary cotton, and I

tell you what, we put antiseptic on it and everything like that and except for the nasty looking scar he was fine. It was an absolutely massive cyst he took out of him and that was Ted Heffernan. He used to love cutting. The other doctor we had, John Tasky, is an anaesthetist now in Brisbane, he used to send everything down to Vung Tau, you know, because that was just his philosophy. And we used to get the kids, the kids were very cunning because they used

to, we used to have lozenges, you know, the lozenges which are quite sweet, and they’d go “Dow”, which means pain, and of course they’d go, “Dow, dow”, ‘cause all they wanted to do was get the lozenges off you, so that they could have something sweet to suck on. They didn’t have any pains or nothing, and the other thing was if they had pain, headaches or anything like that, the interpreter would say, “Headache, headache”. This is the older people.

Not only could you give them Panadol, not, well give them Panadol, but what you had to do was cut a little bit of elastoplast off and you’d put a little square on this side of the head and a little square on that side of the head and then you’d give them the tablet, you see, because they couldn’t figure out by taking the tablet getting rid of the pain, but if you put something physically on them they reckon that’s it. So we used to, that was the treatment, a couple of Panadol and two little squares of elastoplast on each side of the head and they were

happy. Lovely people, absolutely. You know, you were talking earlier how we got on when we first got there. They were a lovely village. We, in fact we were invited to a wedding. It was two of the local people were getting married and then we did our med cap and then about lunch time we had to go across to this wedding and went through the ceremony at the church because they were Catholics. And then we had to go to the reception, and ‘cause one of the delicacies over there is

dog and I wasn’t coming at anything that was meat, no way. So, “You no like, you’ve got to eat”, and you were almost offending them not to eat, so all I had was tomatoes and I made sure I washed them before I ate them and sliced up and everything. That’s all I ate, wasn’t going to come at anything with meat because I could smell the dog. But that was very nice of them to invite us to there, and then one other

time we were there and we were just about, the helicopter was about to come and pick us up about an hour beforehand, and this bloke staggered into us and he was cut all over and through the interpreter it worked out that there was a patrol of Viet Cong about a kilometre and a half. He was a rubber plantation fellow and they got him and beat him up and cut him up and they were on their way, we heard. Here we are, two medics by ourselves in this village and we thought the Viet Cong were coming. I thought, oh God.

In fact one of the medics went off to the village. He was in the other part of the village and I had to grab a pushbike and race up and grab him because we didn’t know what was going on, but anyway it never eventuated. We just, not hid, but we got into a house and the helicopter came in and took us away, so that was a bit scary, but that was med caps and they were good. We did a lot.

Pretty basic, but they were happy. I mean, you know, they weren’t squalors but by the same token they weren’t obviously what we’re used to, but they were villages obviously away from the city and everything like that where the slums and everything were. They were just a nice little village set up for their needs and comfortable, let’s put it that way. They were dirt floors and everything, but I mean for what they were used of they were comfortable.

I think a very big part of it, definitely, definitely a big part because they don’t have any access to medical facilities at all, particularly out in the villages out in the country and I think the country people probably, we had a good rapport with. City were a bit different for a lot of reasons. Obviously drunkenness and you know,

people, yeah, don’t like to see, well, drunkenness and louts and causing trouble, but in the village it’s like any country I suppose, any country if you go to the country the people are much more friendlier. If you’re good to them they’re good to you, and certainly in the outer parts I’d say we had a very good rapport with the local people, yes.

Every day. I won’t say all day, every day and half the night ‘cause they’d have H and I’s, harassment ones and intermittent fire, and that was just to keep the enemy, the Viet Cong on their toes. So they fired during the night, any time, it could be midnight, 2.00 o’clock in the morning and then during the day obviously

as our patrols went out in daylight and patrolled, they’d call in fire missions all the time. So we were kept going pretty well day and night.

Oh yes. As I said, I used to when they were firing, had a fire mission, I’d go down to the gun and give them a hand down there and that, and of course when Long Tan happened everybody had to bog in then, but I guess we’ll get to that in a minute, but yeah, we were kept pretty busy for sure.

We were on the perimeter towards the latter part around about I suppose April ’67, the battery moved into the centre of the taskforce, but when we first got there we were on the perimeter and we had in front of us just concertina wire, two parallel,

about two metres high, maybe a little bit more than two metres high, concertina wire, parallel running together with a little gap in between them and, you know, there was one entrance ‘cause we used to have to go out and do patrols and everything, but they were staggered, but yeah, just wire. Sorry, and claymore mines, a bank of claymore mines that were operated from the command post if needed.

Oh yeah. Yes, there was. I did a picket in a

bunker. We called it a transport bunker ‘cause it was near the transport lines and obviously the command post was under ground and each of the guns had bunkers as well, so you’d have for the guys to get into, and trenches as such out near the living quarters so if any big mortars came in, which they did of course, Long Tan, we could dive into

a, but they were communal if you like. There was one per three or four tents, but each gun position had one and also around the perimeter there were two others.

Yes. When I first got there, when we first got there and we were sleeping under these one-man hoochies, one evening we had small arms fire come into us. We all hit the deck and everything like that, but it was told

to us later that it was just a passing patrol that, you know, that just fired a few shots, but barring that, Long Tan was the only time that we come under fire while I was there.

Probably not because basically up until Long Tan we certainly did a few ops. As I said, by the

time we settled down in Nui Dat it was probably the end of May, yes, end of May, early June and Long Tan as we know was in August, so it wasn’t too long after we got there, but leading up to it we did just, we’d go out and support 5 Battalion. My battery, 103 Battery, was the battery that supported 5 Battalion, so if they went out on patrol away from the taskforce, the guns couldn’t cover, then we would go out

and set up a fire support base and then support the 5 Battalion, and obviously we did two or three of those before Long Tan.

Well obviously the original came from intelligence, you know. Intelligence would pass it down and the headquarters would say, “Righto, we’re going to do a

search of such and such an area”, and the guns that we had at that time were 105 Pack Howitzers. They were Italian guns and they had a range I think, I may be wrong here, but 1100 metres, something like that, or 1400 metres. 14, no, what am I saying? 7 kilometres, yeah, that makes sense, 7 kilometres, and then later on they got the American guns

which were much more robust guns. Anyway we would then make sure we were in range of 5 Battalion patrol, and if that meant leaving base camp and setting up somewhere out maybe 10 kilometres from the base camp, then we would. We were always protected by a company of infantry so when we’d set up, around our perimeter would be a company of infantry always. The guns were never left by themselves.

They always had to have a company of infantry protecting the guns. We were still responsible for our own internal security. We still had to do stand-tos and all that type of thing, but at least out in front of us and around us was the infantry battalion.

Mostly flat obviously for guns, and away from the rubber trees. Sometimes we were near rubber trees but we certainly made sure that we were far enough away that the gun barrels

would fire over the trees and everything, but it was always flat country. When we were first there, one of the first operations we did, in fact this is when I got the telegram to say my grandfather had passed away, was in a cemetery because all around the cemetery was rubber trees and we actually physically set up in the rubber trees. And I’m smiling at that because where we were set up, near there was an open grave, as in being freshly dug,

and next morning we were in the middle of a fire mission and from the local village came the funeral party, on foot of course, and they had professional wailers and they make a most ungodly noise when they wail. And they’re wailing and wailing and coming along the road towards us and the guns, we had to stop the guns, and they came in to bury the body and they had the coffin and they

were about to put the coffin in the ground and the IO [Intelligence Officer], who I think was Captain O’Neill who I think is a professor now down in Canberra in, teaches political, not political, but military history or something I think. He was the intelligence officer anyway of 5 Battalion, and he had to check the coffin before it went in the ground in case there was a cache of guns or something in it. So anyway he had to prise open the coffin.

Well the wailing started up again, you know, because it was a 90 year old woman that died and they carried on and cried and wailed again as the coffin was opened. He checked it very quickly and then they were putting the coffin in the ground and it was like as if you were building a great construction, everyone telling everyone what to do. “Move it here, do it this”, in their own lingo of course, and one of the fellows, they were trying to lower it into the ground anyway,

and he jumped into the grave you see, and they lower the coffin down like that and they slipped and the bloody coffin fell on top of him. Well again the wailing started and there’s arms and legs coming out from underneath the coffin, so everyone had to jump in, this is the locals, and grab the coffin and take it out again. Poor bloke, he was petrified being, thought of a coffin on top of him. So anyway they buried the coffin and then they put the, I suppose Buddhist or whatever, they put a couple

of eggs and a bit of rice and that joss sticks and everything and burn them, and then the next day they were all missing and we blamed one of the guys must’ve got hungry during the night and knocked off the eggs or something, but he didn’t. I don’t know, an animal or something must’ve come and got them. So that was one of the experiences of setting up a fire support base.

Well again what I would do, I would

always go with this one gun as I said, and as I mentioned before I would help them set up. They would, the first thing they would do as soon as they hit the ground they’d bring the gun into action obviously in case something happens, and then once they get the gun in action, that is all set up, fired, calibrated, everything like that, then you start to get the ammunition out and lay it out, the 105 shells and projectiles out and then you go into

digging a slit trench at least for everybody in case, you know, something, someone attacks us. And then we put up our, in that case when we just used sleep under, we had a big tarpaulin. We’d just lay it out at an angle and we’d all sleep underneath that, and once we all set that up, that was it, but it was just like you said earlier, you set up here, bang, bang, bang, it was the same as us. As soon as you hit the ground the guns are set up, get your ammunition out, dig the shell scrapes,

set your tarpaulin up and you used to have a brew then, and once you were at the brew stage you knew everything was done and then just wait for any fire orders that come in, and you wouldn’t do anything else because you were there for that reason only. Sometimes you’d sit around for hours and not do any action, play cards, whatever, and then of course sometimes you were flat chat.

Yes, it did, yes, it did. Again it was a terrain where we were. Sometimes it was sandy, easy to dig, other times it was really back-breaking to dig but you had to do it. I mean it was survival if you didn’t, so yes, it was, and of course we had the monsoon season there as well, which caused havoc to everything and got into everything and flooded everything and turned everything to mud.

By helicopter, used to bring it in. If we were close enough to the taskforce we used to get often, and this happened often, we’d get flown in hot boxes with our meals made up obviously back at camp, and fresh rations and they’d fly them out to us and then the next time they came in for

breakfast or lunch we’d swap over, take the empty ones back, and on occasions of course we’d have to have ration packs, we had to live on ration packs. It all depends on the logistics of it all. If it was easy then we had hot rations. If it wasn’t then we went onto ration packs.

When I was first there all American. For the first, probably the first three months, four months was American which I enjoyed, and in fact I used to when the Australian

system caught up to us I used to swap my Australian rations for American ones, because my counterpart, a medic with the American guns, who I met and used to see a few times, he used to like the Australian rations and I used to like his and we used to swap.

That’s what I’m, I don’t know. I don’t know. He just thought they were compact. I mean I enjoyed the American because at least they were something,

yeah, a bit better. Yeah, I don’t know, but I often swapped him. I think he like the compact. See, as you know one of our ration packs lasts for 24 hours and it’s only that big, whereas one meal is probably bigger again than our ration pack, just one meal. So if you had to take all that for three meals you’re taking quite a bit of your space, particularly if you’ve got to lug it with you and maybe that was the reason.

Yeah. Well first of all you’d be given one order which would be, I forget the order now, but that was to pull everything down except the guns. So you do it in reverse. You know, you put your hoochies down, fill in your gun, and the last thing would be cease fire and that would then pack up your gun ready to leave.

And yes, certainly we, and one of the jobs I had was, which I more or less give to myself, I wasn’t told to do it, was all the spare ammunition, sorry, the spare charge bags again. I used to go around the guns and pick them up because the other guys were doing something, I had to do something. So I went around and picked them up and I put them into little piles and then I set fire to them. Again, they don’t explode. With fire they just burn with a tremendous orange flame,

and that got rid of them because you wouldn’t take them back with you. Obviously rubbish and everything we took back with us like in what’s-a-name bags, sand bags, and everything like that, and someone did an emu bob, someone had been, usually one of the sergeant’s would do a quick emu bob and make sure we left nothing there that the enemy could use, if you like. Not that there was much to leave around but just to make sure that no-one left a weapon or anything like that,

but that was always the SOPs [Standard Operating Procedures], yeah.

Yeah, pretty vulnerable I must admit, yeah. It was nice and comforting knowing you had an infantry company out in front of you but that’s all you had, that’s all you had. I mean if there was a regiment of VC [Viet Cong] out there well the company would find it, although they did pretty good at Long Tan, would you know, find it hard and also mortars of course. You were more vulnerable out in the bush than you were back at camp because

you didn’t have overhead covers or anything like that. You only had a slit trench to get into. So yeah, pretty vulnerable, yeah, definitely.

Easy. I can assure you easy, when you’re tired, and I was sleeping as close as you and I are now, which is what? Two metres away from guns going off in the night and never knew they went off. You know, just yeah, you just get so used to it. I guess it’s like any noise, you just get used to it. Didn’t worry me in the end.

I mean to start sure, but no. I suppose you’re so tired and everything you just don’t hear them, you just get so used to them.

Yes, I would conduct…mostly I would go around to the guns of a morning. I’d have breakfast, go around to each of the gun positions

and the orderly room, the transport, wherever, and rather than come to me because I knew they were busy and had things to do, I used to go around to them, because it was only a compact area and anything I could treat I’d treat on the spot, you know. Someone’s got a rash or headache or a cut, anything like that, and I might add I had to give some injections to guys that were naughty guys that went to Vung Tau and contracted gonorrhoea or NSU [Non-Specific Urethritis] or something,

I had to continue their treatment whether we were in base camp or outside, but I had the supplies. Anyway, and anyone I wasn’t happy with and I thought should see the doctor, and the parade up at the doctor’s tent was say 9.00 o’clock or 10.00 o’clock, I would collect all these fellows. There might only be three or four or half a dozen and I would go up there with them and I would conduct the medical. Although there was a sergeant up there, a medical sergeant, because they were my guys I would physically

take them into the doctor, be in there, and the doctor would say this, that and the other, and I’d do the treatment. I’d come out into the RAP, into the main, which obviously had better supplies and do that. Then if anybody needed any further, and it would have to be intensive, more treatment, then they would be either sent down by road, not necessarily on the spot then, but the next time a courier was going down the road.

That was coordinated by headquarters. Different units would go down different times of the day. They’d go down to the hospital at Vung Tau or if it was urgent, in the case I had appendicitis, acute appendicitis, a helicopter which was based at Nui Dat all the time would take them down there. That was the Dust Off helicopter. The Dust Off was based at Nui Dat during all daylight hours. He would fly them down there, and this happened in

this case.

Oh, very. Well it’s known now as the golden hour. If you’re going to help with the survival of someone it should be done in the first hour, and in our case we were very lucky as I think anybody would tell you that the helicopter saved

thousands of lives because you could be, not so much in my case, but an infantry guy could be hit and he could be on the operating theatre within half an hour of him being hit. That’s how, you know, that’s how quick it was and it certainly saved a lot of lives, the helicopter, for sure. And that was most important, the first hour, and it still goes to this day. Car accidents or anything now is the golden hour

as they call it.

Yes, an average would be probably an hour. Would be by the time you, yeah, radio in for Dust Off. No, probably less than an hour because you’re stabilising the guy while the helicopter’s getting there. It all depends on the operational situation. If the helicopter can come bang, straight in, or whether you’ve got to take the patient somewhere where the helicopter can land or

winch him up and everything, but I would say, yeah, over an hour would be something drastically wrong.

Exceptionally good, exceptionally good.

What does?

Gamey, a gamey smell, yeah, a very gamey smell.

Yes, definitely, yeah, and of course I knew the reputation they had as well so that went hand in hand with it. I mean I’m 99 percent sure it was, and it’s a delicacy for them but I didn’t want to take a risk either one way or the other, yeah, but it is a gamey

smell.

No, not really, I’ve got a pretty cast iron stomach, yeah. You mean if I take anything and then got sick or just to look at something?

No, not particularly, no. I’ve been lucky that way.

In quiet times they did.

You know, the couple of guys I had a lot to do with, one was a, like I knew one was a banker, or like a teller I suppose. He was only just starting off in the bank, but I knew he had aspirations to be a pilot and that, and I caught up with him on our reunion actually three, four years ago. First one we’ve had, and he had gone up through the banking system

so he didn’t chase his dream of being a pilot for one reason or another, and you know, just I don’t know, nothing really detailed but just what they did. I had a rough background of what some of them did, yeah.

Oh well, I knew they’d been through a more, probably a bit more intense than I did as a recruit trainee, because I suppose that was ’60, so that was about

say six years after I, five or six years after I did Kapooka and I knew they did a similar training to I did at Kapooka, but probably more infantry orientated because obviously a lot of them were going to go to infantry and that, so yeah, a bit more infantry related, yeah.

As far as I was concerned, you know, nothing. I mean I never thought they were, you know, they were called up to do a job and they did their job very well and I had a good rapport with them and I thought they did a very good job, and I don’t think there was any animosity. The only thing that I thought, as I said, they were ashamed that one in all in it should have been, rather than just the selected people that marbles came out and that, yeah. They thought

that everyone should’ve had a go at it and it probably would’ve been a better system, but that’s the way the system was then.

Oh yes, yeah, probably there was only a smattering of married ones

amongst them, but oh yeah, they talked about the ones at home and often they would read a letter. Obviously not the real personal part of it, but what their wives were thinking at home and they were very worried about them being there, and obviously they couldn’t wait for the day to go home. There’s no question about that, as we all did, but I suppose they more than us because they were only young married people that I guess would’ve been

just called up and whipped over to Vietnam and had no time with their new wife. Yeah, they were even more keener to go home I think than us.

Yeah, I think they took it serious at the time, but

I think it was the old adage it will happen to somebody else, it won’t happen to me, if they get it, and it really got drummed into them. I mean heaps of lectures before we went. When we were over there the same thing happened again and, but I not only give lectures on to the guys that went to Vietnam and were there, but I also did it later on in my career as well, particularly when we went to Singapore and Malaysia and everything like

that, and I tried to do a challenge of some sort. I said that, you know, for example if I had a lecture with about 40 guys in there I said, “If anyone in this room doesn’t come back with venereal disease”, and it was usually say a company or a platoon or something like that, “I’ll buy the platoon a carton of beer”, or something like that as a bit of a challenge. Well I never did, I never had to buy it because, we

had a company commander, Felix Fezekis, he came, they were going to Butterworth and I said, “Someone will come back with VD and I promise you a keg of beer to the whole company”. Anyway they came back and no one had anything and I said to him, I said, he came and saw me, he said, “Sergeant”, he said, “You will have to give me”, ‘cause he used to have an accent, “You will have to give my company that keg of beer”, and I said, “Sir, just wait one more

week please”. Anyway of course, you know, I said, “Sir, you better go and see the MO” [Medical Officer], I said, “I’ve got bad news for you, I won’t be buying you a keg”, ‘cause I needed the medical officer to back me up, but I managed to, as I said, not have to pay for any beer or anything like that. But that’s the type of incentive I did, but we certainly got it pumped into us a lot, you know.

NSU, Non-Specific Urethritis, yeah,

and that.

Antibiotics. I mean I can tell you as story about it, just a quick one. When we were in Vietnam and this young soldier got, some of them, just digressing a bit, some of them used to wear it almost with a badge of honour. When you come to their regimental aid post and they’ve got it and everything you whisper to them or you’d get them in a room and blah, blah, blah, blah like that, and “Sorry,

you’ve got it”, and everything. “You’ll have to go on antibiotics. You’ll have to come and see me every morning for a week and get your needle”, or whatever it was. But when they’d turn up to the regimental aid post the next day they’d say, “Oh, I’ve got a load”, ‘cause that was the expression. “I’ve got a load”, they’d roar it out as if to tell all their mates in the waiting room there that they’ve got it and it was almost a badge of honour. And there was this one chap over in Vietnam and the doctor said to him, John Tasky said,

“Now look, you’ve had that many lessons about venereal diseases. Why didn’t you use a condom?” He said, “I did, sir”. He said, “Well”, he said, “Was it intact, did it break, anything like that?” “No sir”, and he said, “Well you couldn’t have used it properly because you wouldn’t have got it”. He said, “Are you sure now?” He said, “How many times did you have sex? “Did you use a condom every

time you had sex?” And he said, “Oh no sir”, he said, “I had two”, he said, “But I turned it inside out and used it again”. True story, I’m not making that up, believe it or not, but this is how ignorant people are, but yes, it was pretty, but I mean when you get a young fellow, or any fellow that’s got a belly full of grog and an attractive woman walks past and a young man’s fancy turns to love, I

mean you don’t think about those type of things, you know. There’s only one thing you want and if it’s there you’re not going to be fiddling around looking for condoms, especially if you haven’t got them or anything like that. So it was a problem in Vietnam. It didn’t, a couple of people, well a few it incapacitated.

Well because they had it very bad they had to be hospitalised and obviously kept under, control’s not quite the right word, but

they had to be watched or they had to be, not because of their misdemeanour but because it was a particular bad strain and they had to be tested and obviously if the antibiotics didn’t work they had to try another one and also and so forth. The common name was the black pox or something like that they used to call it, and most of the guys had got it. There was a few, quite a few, they would still continue their treatment because when I went out in the field even I would have,

‘cause all the antibiotics were crystalline or propane penicillin which were made up in distilled water, not distilled water, sterilised water, and then you’d squirt it into the bile and you’d shake it, mix it up and then you’d pull it out. So it could be kept, I’m trying to say, out of refrigeration and I used to take them and continue their course while we were out in the bush. So it didn’t really stop them from going out on operations, except as I said for the odd few that had it too bad and they had to be hospitalised for it.

Yes, hundreds of them, yes, no problems with that at all, but again as I said, yeah, when a fellow’s drunk and he’s feeling that way, throw all caution to the wind.

Yes, definitely. Some of them, the guys in Vung Tau, sorry,

well the guys in Vung Tau did have girls set up and everything and that was a common thing, that wasn’t uncommon at all. Nui Dat was a bit different because we were just away from the population obviously up at Nui Dat. But Vung Tau was just like a city, well not a city but a country town. Yeah, a lot of girls, a lot of fellows set girls up and paid for their board and in some cases went home to them every night except maybe the odd time there was curfew on and they couldn’t get to them and

everything, yeah.

Well I don’t know what you call long-term. Certainly for the time they were over there, but I guess once, you know, I know a couple of guys that married. In fact at Healesville, I went there when I got posted there, the transport driver, he was married to a Vietnamese girl that he met in Vietnam prior to that and she was a school teacher I think, and there’s been a couple of others that have married Vietnamese girls

but I think that’s a rarity, very much a rarity.

Where?

Oh, no worries. No, we didn’t, you know.

No, as far as I know. I don’t know how the girls got on with their new in-laws or whatever. I don’t know how that went, but certainly we never frowned on it. It’s no different to Chinese girl marrying an Australian boy or whatever.

I didn’t find any difficulty with that or hear of any difficulties of that, no exception.

Well there’s other antibiotics and everything like that, so plenty of other antibiotics to, but they just needed, you know, just a change in different regimes to get to, they eventually obviously cleared it up. In fact

a few guys were even kept behind that should’ve gone home, and rather than risk sending them home with it they kept them back in Vietnam on medical grounds if you like until they cleared up and they got a clean bill of health. See, every soldier that was sent home was given what they call a VDRL, which is a screening blood test to make sure they’ve got no obviously venereal diseases, syphilis even or NSU [Non-Specific Urethritis] or gonorrhoea and

that was also, how can I say? That was also an indication that time was very short in Vietnam because you once you got back, because you got it in the last few days if you like so that you could have your test done and cleared to go home to make sure you weren’t carrying anything, and a couple of blokes got stopped when that was picked up, just to clear it up and then send them home type of thing.

Well certainly confidentiality, and a lot of married guys did, there’s no question about it. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t, and a lot of married guys did get it and I guess they had to suffer their own personal anguish over that, and I know a lot of guys that wouldn’t go near Vung Tau or anywhere near girls in case they were tempted and they were married and they were about

to go home. You know, obviously a strong relationships at home, girlfriends at home. They were too frightened that they might get it from a weak moment from a girl in Vung Tau and take it home with them because it would be terrible to go home and haven’t seen your husband or your girlfriend or whatever for 12 months, and you know, and say, “Let’s go to bed”, and say, “No, we won’t go to bed.” You’d say, “Well what’s going on here”, you know. So that’s why they, some of

them were that, scared is the right word, but so worried that they wouldn’t go near in case they were tempted, got drunk and then were tempted.

Yeah, yeah, I heard that, yeah.

No, but I heard those rumours and the other things we heard, it gets a bit, how can I, you know, but there was rumours that they used to put things

into their vagina like razor blades on a cork and you know, when you’d go and do it obviously, you can imagine the mess. And this is the rumour that was going around, and like you said, there was girls especially infected to go and mingle with the troops, but certainly we had no statistics of that happening with the Australians. I can’t vouch for the Americans and everything. I think I’ve seen it in a documentary somewhere

recently actually that they were infiltrated into brothels up around the American bases for that reason, but I couldn’t honestly say that we had a rash of cases we could put down to that. It wasn’t, how can I say? It wasn’t rampant but it was certainly quite a few cases, no question. I would say, I wasn’t married

or anything then, but I certainly being a medic, I took precautions and everything like that and I had no trouble, but certainly, be hardly a person, there’s probably, I’m a bit cruel, I suppose 50-50 probably had some sort of VD or maybe 40-60, 40 percent had it and 60 didn’t. Either they took the right precautions or they were just lucky.

Again some did and some didn’t. I’d say 50-50, enough to know what to talk about and everything, but most obviously had madams that spoke very good English and that’s all you really needed I suppose. That’s all they needed to say how much and all this type of thing, yeah. But there were heaps, I’m not going to say the stories, but I mean there was heaps of stories about what went on in them and all that type of thing,

but they were just the basic, a bed, that’s all and that was about it, yeah.

No, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say, no, I wouldn’t say because again it was confidential. It was up to the individual

person if he said anything. Now if he said anything to his wife, and there’d be no reason to say anything to his wife unless as I said, he happened to go home and find that he had a venereal disease and then I would say that would be on shaky grounds, but basically no, because it was confidential. It wouldn’t have got out, his mates wouldn’t have dobbed him in or anything like that and it would be only up to the individual, and I think any man would probably, unless he’s really, you know, got that relationship would tell his wife anyway

and just put it down as an experience she’ll never know about if you like.

No, sure.

No, in where I worked was purely jungle, well not really thick jungle, but

rubber plantations and probably open grassed areas, like grass, tall grass and that type of thing, again because the nature of the beast which is artillery which we’ve got to have flat ground and also obviously low foliage for the guns to fire over the top of them and everything. So yeah, a lot of rubber trees were around but obviously like one

side of us would be rubber tress and then there would be a space or a paddock or open area where the guns could be set up and we might hoochie in the rubber trees and that, put up our little tents or our little hoochies in the rubber trees, but mostly open. No, it’s not so open country, but semi-open country I suppose you could say, yeah. Rice paddies, rice paddies, a lot of rice paddies we had to go near, we used to do a lot of operations

near rice paddies or in rice paddies in the dry season when there was no water in there.

Well the only incident I saw at the time was, that’s talking about specifically Vietnam was in the RAP one morning, that’s the main RAP. There was a chap from one of the infantry battalions.

I think his mate, a medical officer, was on leave and so he came over to our one, the artillery one, and he was, you know, he was really stressed out and I looked at him and he snapped at me and said, “What are you looking at?” And all this type of thing and he was really, but we found out he was a forward scout which obviously are highly on alert all the time, and he’d obviously, I didn’t know at the time it was PTSD by the way,

but on recollection now, or on reflection rather, I know that that’s what he had. He was in a bad way, and I guess the next case I saw personally was when I came home from Vietnam I got posted to the military hospital at Ingleburn, and one of the warrant officers that came home from the training team who was a medic actually, but he was a training warrant officer, he had it as well and he walked around like a zombie. He was

bad as well, but those are the only, and as I said again, only that I know what PTSD is all about now, I wouldn’t have known that that’s what they had. I just thought they were just troppo type of thing, but we know better now of course. Having suffered it myself I know, or suffering it myself I know.

Yeah, I thought so. I thought you’d get to that.

Yeah, R and R.

Vung Tau, they had villas down there. They had an R and R centre down there, what they call, which was an old French villa that was quite comfortable, right on the waterfront, you know, rooms with bunks in them and mosquito nets and you could eat there as well and that. I was unfortunate in one way, but again because I was our only medic, I very rarely went on R and R because I couldn’t afford, ‘cause I felt guilty if I

went and left my unit and something happened there. I felt I’d never forgive myself almost, so I was very reluctant to take R and R. A couple of times I was more or less ordered to go, well not ordered, but say, “You better go Brian”, getting the hint to go, and I suppose I only went down on R and R three times the whole 12 months I was there. I surely went overseas on R and R for one trip, but yeah, that was the reason.

I honestly felt that something would go wrong. I was their protector if you like and I felt if I went away someone would get hurt badly and I wasn’t there and all that type of thing. Although they would’ve been covered by medical, someone else would’ve slipped in the breach, I still felt guilty leaving them therefore I didn’t go.

Oh yes, I’m sure it did, but that’s

how I felt, you know. I would’ve been more stressed out if something had happened. So that’s why, and nothing did I might add, but I mean you just worry. I did anyway, worried about that, you know.

Two days.

Yes, usually. They had blocks, different units would have time down there and I’d go down, I’d go, the time I went about three blokes from my battery went down

and we’d stick together usually and go and drink together and all this type of thing, yeah, so two days and blocks of my guys. I’d go down with them, yeah.

Yes, yes.

Funny thing, no. You always heard about them coming in themselves. We didn’t know if the next one was. We heard that they used to go there for R and R if you like in

a way, but no, it’s funny that, I never worried about a bomb going off in a bar or someone coming around a corner with a gun and firing it. Never worried me at all, no, never even thought of it, something could happen.

Basic, like booths like you see in the old time cafes with the bench type bar, you know, bars with the table there and just

two bench seats on either side, that type of thing, bar with stools on it and that’s all it did, it just served grog, that’s all.

Obviously Vietnamese. I’ve heard stories that there is Europeans behind it but certainly the only ones I ever saw as a young 22 year old corporal were the Vietnamese running it

for sure. You know, a madam usually because it was a brothel as well as a bar just about, and yeah, just locals running it definitely.

Oh yes, yeah, for sure.

Well, well. No, well, you might learn a few tricks here. No no, all jokes aside. What happened, you’d go in the bar and you’d sit down and one of the girls would sidle up to you

and the best trick was putting her hand on your leg and then rubbing your leg type of thing. And of course then she would want you to buy her a drink and if you haven’t heard you’ll hear it a thousand times, Saigon tea, which was supposed to be whisky and coke, but in fact all it was cold tea but you’d still pay the full price, whatever. I don’t know what it was in those days, but it wasn’t much

anyway, but you’d pay for a whisky and coke or a whisky but she was only drinking cold tea. It came out of the same bottle and this type of thing, and then she’d just lead you on, you know, “You want me?” And all this business, and if you did there was usually a back room or down around the corner and away you’d go. That was the bar girls. Otherwise sometimes you didn’t…. They’d sit with you and everything and while you were buying them drinks

or supposedly drinks that was fine. They would get their money and of course the bar owner would get the money from the grog you were supposedly buying them, and of course they had brothels down around side streets and they usually had pimps, if you like, which were sometimes only kids 14 or 15 year old, or older, but mostly male. “You want girl?” You know all that that they say, and they say, “You want girl and bang, bang?”, and all this type of

thing. “Come with me, come with very nice girl”, and all this and of course if you went, you went and of course you’d go in a dimly lit building and everything. You wouldn’t know what you were getting into, but yeah.

No, no, not much bigger than this room it seems in recollection now, very tiny and usually it was a family, but obviously one of the girls was selling herself, and

you know, the whole family knew and you’d virtually go through the family and into the bedroom with the girl, the back room and that, yeah. So I’ve been told.

Of course. But I must, well to be honest I did it once but then I guess I saw the cases of venereal disease coming and I didn’t. I was too frightened, except when I went to Hong Kong. Well that’s a different

story of course, but anyway, yeah.

Well I don’t know. I was by myself and away for a week and I felt a bit more comfortable over there, a bit more relaxed and everything and that, and this is well before I knew my wife and all this type of thing, and also the company was good. I had a girl, a female virtually with me all the time over there, and not only was there that part of it, we went sightseeing

and all this type of thing, but that was common and it was very cheap, and the good thing was the company, the female company that is, yeah.

Yes, yes, definitely.

A bar, again a bar. You’d go, obviously the bar’s frequent and the girls would say, or the madam. What do they call her? They call her

something else in Hong Kong anyway. Mama-san, might’ve been mama-san, she would just say, “You want a girl?” And if you said yes, “I’ve got some nice girls”, and she’d parade her nice girls and if you liked one she sat down with you and drank with you and then you’d take her home or back to the hotel room.

Yeah, well she, mostly it was, you could get them like that for a week.

In my case the girl went of a day and every night I used to pick her up, you know, like out of the bar and bring her back to the hotel for the night, yeah, for about three or four days I think out of the week that I was there.

Oh yes, yeah, definitely. There was females over there as in white European girls, obviously the nursing sisters, the

army girls and Red Cross girls and things like that, but they would say, out of our league. They were obviously involved with, if they were involved at all, I’m not saying they were, but they were officers’ class and would mix with officers and everything. So if there was anything going on there, the officers, but that was a rarity, and of course the odd girl we would see would be a show that would come over from Australia, like Little Pattie or things

like that, but that was purely entertainment of course.

Oh yes. Col Joye, Little Pattie, what was her name? Noelene Battley, a couple of comedians whose name escapes me now. Who else? No, that’s about all I can think of.

A New Zealand girl, I’ve got a photo of her too. I can’t think of her name now? No, it escapes me, the name, but we got them reasonably regularly which was good. Lorraine Desmond come over and that, she came over and they were very good actually. They broke the mundane stuff of Vietnam and brought a bit of home with

them and everything. Used to bring a couple of go-go girls of course. All they were there obviously was for their looks and they’d just do a few hip movements and a few were scantily dressed and all that, but I mean you have a look at any conflict you’ve usually got a couple of girly girls that come along just to make it look good. There’s nothing wrong with it at all.

No, never, never, no.

No, never at all because I don’t, you know, we got it, as I said, at the start we were hardly, we were rationed to two cans a day. Only because of the supply of it, not because they didn’t want us to get drunk, but I would say

after four months you could have, and you did have, as much as you wanted to have at all. So I don’t know why the home-brew, certainly up our way we had no need to get home-brews because the beer was readily available and spirits were readily available as well.

I found that we would drink; you’d always have a drink

every night, but I found that it wasn’t over-excessive except when you come back from an operation you might have a night after you got back, a real night on the grog, yes. But basically in between operations and day to day routine I think the blokes in general had enough common sense to know that they didn’t want to be drunk and something would happen, and if there was any talk of something happening that

night, and often we would get a report that VC were seen in the area and tonight it could be the night that they attack the taskforce, then obviously the canteens were closed and there was no grog allowed, and all that type of thing in case something did happen. But basically except for the odd splurge and that of grog I didn’t see any problems with it all, you know, I didn’t, not really. I mean you had your odd blokes who would get blind drunk every night and you still

do now, you know. It’s just the way they’re made up.

No, not that I saw. In fact I felt we got on very well with them to be honest with you.

Well when I say, at Nui Dat it wasn’t a case of someone was going to sneak in or anything

because it was well protected because there was wire all around there. There was a south gate and a north gate, which was manned by military policemen and everything. So the chances of someone infiltrating was very remote, because as I said, and all the units had their pickets and that around. While we were there one guy did apparently smuggle himself in and tried to blow up something in there and he was caught

before he did anything, but that was only one incident I ever heard of. But certainly in Vung Tau and that when you’re outside, you’re just told things like if they start asking you questions where you come from, you know, the general intelligence type things, you just shut up and if they want you to go to some dark, down to their house or something like that where it’s a little bit suspicious, you don’t go anywhere. And also the most common one is travel in numbers of course; make sure you don’t wander around by

yourself, but that was basically all we were told. We weren’t, I guess as private soldiers they didn’t think we had much intelligence except obviously to tell them what we had at Nui Dat and how it was set up, that’s about all.

Yeah, back to the routine, whatever that might be.

The responsibility of being a medic,

for sure, you know, and the responsibility of 120 guys relying on you, you know, and it still worried me that I hadn’t at this stage had a major conflict to, or a major trauma to do. It still worried me that that was around the corner, and as it was, it was. I didn’t know but it was around the corner, but basically, yeah, and being one of the boys. That’s what I was pleased

about, yeah.

No, not at the time. I’ve subsequently thought of that, yes, I have, but not at the time, no, I didn’t think of it, but I guess what makes me think about it more, like when I first started to think about it, was Anzac Day. You know, I’d see the Second World War fellows and in the earlier days of course the

First World War, when they were alive, and that made me feel, yeah, carrying on definitely; but not at the time of Vietnam or anything like that, I didn’t really think about. When I came home and Anzac Day became more significant to me because I’d been personally through it, then yes, and I’m talking probably from about 19, yeah, 1969, ’68, probably the first Anzac Day after I got home from Vietnam which would’ve been ’68.

I realised then that I was part of the tradition, yeah.

I didn’t march. I watched it on television but I didn’t march. I didn’t march probably, would you believe, until I came back from Singapore which would’ve been in 1972, the

first Anzac Day there, and that was only because a mate said, “Oh, you gonna come to the Anzac Day march?” And he never used to. I said, “Um, er”, and anyway we said we decided to go on one, but I think it was the only one we ever did. But once we did the welcome home parade in 1987 that was a different story, and I quite, I probably only missed one or two years marching now, either up here at Bellingen or where I’ve ever been. But as soon

as, yeah, just about every Anzac Day after ‘87, and I know what you’re gonna say, the significance with the welcome home parade and all that, and maybe that’s what it was. But before that I’d just rather watch it on television up until then.

Great thing, yeah.

Yes, definitely. It was another proud

moment. I got pretty emotional. I still get emotional when I think about it now actually. I got emotional, Kirsty, because there were all our mates. I found the unit I belonged to and we marched and I had a bit of trouble finding them and I was so pleased when I found them, and then we, you know, had a bit of a talk and everything like that and marching through and all the people that were as good as they were when I first went over that I was telling you about,

they were cheering and carrying on, “Good on you Digger”, and all this type of thing. And that was another thing to be called Digger, because to me Diggers were always the fellows who went before me, the World War fellows, they were the Diggers. I didn’t consider myself to be a Digger, but when I heard the people singing that out, “Good on you Digger”, and all that, yeah, I got quite chuffed with that, and then I got quite emotional when my wife then and my children were there at the site of the parade, you know, my little fellow and all that type of thing and

something I’d never done before, I broke ranks and gave them a cuddle and went back again. As I said, I still feel a little bit funny about it now, and it was a wonderful time, it really was, and it was the best thing they ever did. It just got a weight off your shoulders, do you know what I mean? It just cleared the air, it just, it was the best thing they ever did for sure, and then I felt like I could be a part of a soldier, be a Digger if you like, be a returned

soldier, and felt I could take my place in Anzac Day parades and things like that.

Okay, well although I was a medic I had to have my turn on picket and it was my turn if I recall around about 2.00 o’clock till 4.00 o’clock in the morning, and

anyway I was sitting in the pit with a Dutchman actually, Dutchy Woltas, his name was, and I hear the first of the mortars going landing up in the task force area and I said to Dutchy, I said, “They’re bloody close”, you know, “Who’s firing mortars I wonder?” Because I thought it might’ve been going out, but not too far outside the wire, from inside the wire to the outside, and the next minute

we heard the, it’s a very distinct noise. It’s a whistle that goes, and then karump, and you hear, that’s the mortar going through the air, and I said, “Hell, they’re coming in”, and of course we were sitting on the edge of our gun pit and I dived in. It was half full of water and we jumped in there and I said something silly like, “Gee, if one of these hits in our pit here we’ll be both gone”, you know, and all this type of thing. Anyway we,

obviously you could hear, and then I knew, I said to him, “I wish the guns would hurry up”, because I knew once the guns would start firing they’d probably stop because they used to hit and run, the Viet Cong, and you could hear the guns and it was pitch black and you could hear the guns starting to come into action. You could hear the clunk of metal as they were getting the breaches ready and all this type of thing, and sure enough they fired away, but I got a phone call then on the landline on the wind-up phone, and they said, “Quick Doc, you better get

up the lines, there’s been a couple of casualties”. So here I am running up to my lines and falling over, tripping over everything. It was pitch black and these mortars whistling through the air and I didn’t know if one was going to land near me or whatever, but anyway I got up there and I had two casualties. A mortar had landed in the tent lines and one guy had got it in the rump and another guy had a head wound

at this time. I didn’t realise how severe it was, but I checked the one out with the bottom and put a shell dressing on him and see, there was no lights or anything and the only lights we had was down the command post. So this other chap had, I looked at his head. I tell a lie, I had a torch, but I had a look at his head and he had a, just like a boil, you know, a boil that had burst and it was just weeping

puss, but in this case of course it was brain fluid. Like I didn’t suspect at the time, but anyway I got a couple of blokes to leave him on his stretcher and carry him down to the command post and I went in there, and of course all hell was breaking loose in there, but I said, “Look I’ve got to see this guy, I’ve got to examine him”, and then I realised ‘cause he was very delirious and carrying on that he had a severe head wound. Only a very small

piece of shrapnel had gone into his head, but anyway. Then I had to stumble up with a couple of guys helping me up to the main RAP where the doctor was, and the doctor examined him and said, “Quick, he’s got to be evacuated to Vung Tau as quick as possible”. So then we had to man-handle him by stretcher down to the helicopter pad. By this time, this was probably about an hour after mortars first started. By this time the Americans had flown up ‘cause he used to go home of a night, the helicopter,

but obviously the word had got down there and they flew up from Vung Tau which probably by helicopter is only about 10, 12 minutes trip, and they flew the helicopter on there and I saw him off on the, well I didn’t, I put him into the Field Ambulance Detachment that was there and that was the end of my responsibility and I came back to the RAP and whipped down the unit quick smart to see if there was any more casualties and that. By this time it was starting to get light and on the way back I noticed on the ground there was a mortar that hadn’t gone off. I reported

that ‘cause it must’ve nearly tripped, ‘cause I trip over a bloody matchstick. I must’ve nearly walked on it twice going down and coming back, but anyway I reported it when I got back and they ended up blowing it up later that day. They cordoned it off, the military police, and they blew it up, and that was it. Subsequently just to finish the story on this guy, he ended up as I said being evacuated.

I went down the next afternoon to see how he was and I spoke to the Australian surgeon that operated on him. Although he went to the American hospital, this Australian surgeon was attached to it, and he said that he was in a bad way and everything, and I didn’t realise you know, until several years later that he’d been evacuated home, but he died at home from his head injuries. So that was, and I’ll always remember his name, Gunner Norris, and he was, yeah, he was lost and it was a bit of a sad,

well not a bit, it was a sad occasion and everything because, you know, what causes me a lot of problem is I swapped him shifts and everything and he should’ve been down on the gun pit where I was and I should’ve been up in the hoochie. Not that I would’ve been hit, because the tent that got hit was about four or five up from me, and he was in it. So you know, I have problems with that, a lot of problems with that, but anyway I guess you want to go onto that later.

And then the next day, the next, must’ve been the next afternoon. I’m just trying to think in order now. I went down, that’s right, I went down the hospital. It must’ve been the following day, so the next day after the mortar attack everything was quiet. Obviously by day break everything had quietened down and then that afternoon they had Col Joye and Little Pattie came up and did a concert and everything was quiet and calmed

down and everything. So they went ahead with the concert and I went across to it. It was about I suppose 4.00 o’clock in the afternoon. I was sitting down with a couple of mates and all the guns started firing, all the artillery guns, and we had like three batteries there, our battery, 103, the New Zealand battery and the other Australian battery on the opposite side of the task force, all firing. I thought something big must be going on, they’re all firing, and the next minute they made an announcement over the PA [public announcement system] that all,

everyone was to go back to their units immediately and we packed up and went across and the entertainers got off the stage and I subsequently found out they flew them straight down back to Vung Tau, and we went back there. We got the word then that 6 Battalion, the company, had come across this VC battalion and they were under fire, heavy fire,

and it was all hands on deck, and as I said, having palled up with the gun and being with them all the time I went straight to the gun and I started doing what I usually help them do. I’m doing the gun calibre, or the gun, what is it? The gun calibrations and everything like that and I’ll always remember that normally in artillery they might have a couple of rounds fired for effect,

and when they get the target they might fire six rounds on the target, but this was just fire, fire, fire. There was no six rounds, it was keep firing until he said cease fire, and then they’d fire another umpteen rounds and everything like that and we were going through ammunition so fast that they called down all the clerks and the cooks and everything to come down and unload ammunition because each gun had X amount of shells ready to fire. And the rest was kept in the ammunition bay which was a big

bunker in the middle of all the guns and that in the centre of all the guns and that. They had hundreds of round in there. So the cooks had to come down, drag them to each gun, you know, so many boxes. One box carried two projectiles and they’d carry them and drag, ‘cause they were quite heavy, and they were trying to unload them and unpack them and everything for us to fire and then we got this almighty storm up. It was as black, and I reckon I could nearly touch the clouds, they were so low, it was so black and this was at

4.00 o’clock in the afternoon and the heavens opened up. It just poured down. In fact it rained that much that quickly that the gun pit where the gun is kept in, the artillery piece was half full of water. So I was up to my knees in water and the guns were so hot from firing so many rounds that the steam was just pouring off the guns, and we’d hear every now and then when they send

the orders through a tannoy system, like a speaker system and every time the command post would talk you could hear shouting on the radios in the command post in the background and it was quite, yeah, quite frightening really. And we fired for quite a while then and darkness came and of course it quietened down then during the darkness hours, and of course eventually it stopped later that evening.

The next day of course we got a full report at our O group, what had happened, as they know the company came across the VC and followed them and then they caught them in a bunker system and there was a lot of casualties. And then we noticed a lot of helicopters flying out and obviously they were the task force commander and all the hierarchy going out to the battle area because by that time Australians had secured the whole area.

And us as soldiers and artillery people, we never went out, got out to see out that way and we got a briefing the next day by our battery captain what happened and then later on we got a briefing by, just as more or less a thank-you briefing on what the guns did. We just heard they come charging at the Australians with their bugles blowing and the next minute the artillery shells would come over and there would be nothing left of them. You know, they were just,

and that’s how they would do it, a walk in the artillery and yeah, it sounded pretty horrific and as I said, you could, that’s right, when I took this fellow down even the night before you could hear them. You knew something was happening anyway, something big was going to happen, and yes, so and as I said, the next day it quietened down and I went down to hospital to check this bloke out, so that was the day after Long Tan,

and found out he was not in a good way and when I was down there Col Joye was putting on a show for the American nurses and medics at the hospital, at the American hospital. And they had a Dust Off pad right next to where they were entertaining, and this helicopter, you know how much of a noise they make, poor old Col Joye is singing there. He didn’t know whether, he said, “Do I stop singing?” Because they’ve got the evacuation or the stretcher teams and everything

and they jumped out of the audience to race out and get the helicopter and poor Col Joye didn’t know whether to keep singing or stop or what to do, and that was about it. Of course we spoke about it for a few days later and I suppose our best report on it if you like was when we started getting the papers from Australia about it and that, yeah.

Yeah, about, well they were firing before I got there, so I’d say if I have to roughly about 3.00 o’clock

until 8.00 o’clock at night I suppose, about five hours.

Buggered, absolutely, because you’re loading, helping unloading ammunition. As I said, it’s terribly dark, it’s freezing cold now because the rain’s come down and you’re soaking wet from head to toe and standing in water and that, and I remember I, the day before I bought a

new watch which was a new Seiko gold watch that I bought, and I was wearing it and I thought this is going to be ruined so I took it off and put it in what I thought was a safe place. It ended up falling in the mud and everything and I had to fish in for it the next day, but I found it. But I suppose the adrenaline was pumping but at the time, so you really didn’t notice it at the time because as I said, all the time I’ve never been through that experience as far as

firing the guns. In all the months I’d been with the guns we’d never fired so much, so the adrenaline was fairly pumping and that, and I guess you didn’t know what was coming. You thought well, all this is coming out, is something going to come into us eventually? Are they going to retaliate in some way, and we heard the stories after that in fact if 6 Battalion Company didn’t run across them that was their plan to attack the taskforce. In fact they were

thinking of coming up through us, the guns, because we were probably the most vulnerable because we’re not infantry and we’ve only got a couple of gun pits and everything and that was probably the weakest link, and we heard they were going to come in and take the two guns, that’s our guns, the Australian 103 Field Battery guns and the New Zealand guns which were right next door to us, and that would’ve lost a lot of fire power for the task force commander, but as I said, luckily as it was the battalion came across them or the company came across them

and stopped their plan from doing it.

No, not at all, no. They’re quite heavy and they’ve got good shocks and everything. No, not at all, no.

Yeah. As I said, it’s what they call tannoy or speaker system. So each gun pit’s

got a speaker about yay big and it’s got a switch on it and it obviously acknowledges all the orders. So the orders will come through, whatever it might be, charge five, and the gun sergeant says, “Charge five”, back and they acknowledge this signal and the message, and then so on and so forth as all the messages come through, or fire orders come through and you can also talk to them as well about other things, but obviously you

don’t clog it up ‘cause you’re, and they all go and feed into the command post. So because every order that goes to the guns it goes out to all the guns at the one time and that, unless they’re adjusting a gun. They can adjust one gun at a time, that’s firing, dropping it 50 metres or 35 metres or whatever ‘cause the guns are all staggered. They’re not all in a straight line like that. They’re one gun there, one gun there. They’re in a different, within six guns there is, within a rough circle, but you know, obviously,

this gun over here has got to fire a bit more distance than this one over here if you know what I mean.

No, not really. As I said, the only thing that worried me was the mortars, if they sneaked in a few mortars, whatever their detachments, whatever the Viet Cong had. That was probably the only thing.

And I suppose if they attacked, if they were planning an attack and we never knew that. See, we never knew what was going on. At this stage it was just us firing at them and you know, you really didn’t think about those things at the time, but when you sat down, had a brew after it and everything and settled down, you’d think gee, they could’ve come through and that. We were so busy firing we wouldn’t even notice until they were on top of us, but you’d think all those things after the event of course.

Yeah. Well cordite, it’s called obviously cordite, but it’s very intense because as I said to you, it was raining and the clouds were so low and everything seemed to hang in the air a lot. You know, it wasn’t easily dispelled. There was no wind or anything. This thing, just come in and so quiet and it just hung there and there was eerie smoke right throughout the gun, ‘cause you’re

on twilight as well, and this eerie look of all the smoke, the cordite smoke from the guns and that. It was quite eerie, yeah, but the impressive thing was all the cooks and the clerks and everything, and racing mad and pulling crates of ammunition and unloading, you know, these, ‘cause when the shells come out there’s two parts in it. The actual projectile is that long and then the cartridge is about that long. So they’re quite a long length and they’re very heavy. You know, pulling them all to pieces and that

and getting them ready for the firing and that, yeah.

Well, it’s always a bit of us and them. You know, we’re up the sharp end, they’re down the blunt end. I mean they’ve got to do their job, but there is definitely a bit of us and them. We’re the sharp end and they’re the blunt end if you like.

Yes. Yeah, definitely. Everyone bogged in, yeah, everybody, yeah, for sure, yeah.

There was boxes and there was like the cordite bags all over the place. Yeah, it was a mess. I mean personal items

thrown out, everything like that. It was a mess, it was just a mess, but of course when daylight came we’d go into a routine and you’ve got to clean up your position and like everything else. You just don’t sit back and sit on your hands for the rest of the day. You’ve got to go into routine. There’s no slacking off. I mean we didn’t know if there was another battalion out there or regiment of Viet Cong or anything. So you’ve got to be ready all the time, so that was immediately

all tidied up. We got more ammunition in I assume from Vung Tau from the ammunition depot down at Vung Tau, all resupplied. Everything was hectic all that day and as I said, there was helicopters coming and going to the battle area and taking out VIPs and intelligence people and picking up bodies, both ours and the Viet Cong and that. So yeah, it was a hectic day.

I would’ve liked to have gone out there, yes, but not necessarily during the battle because, you know, certainly we didn’t know the full story of it until different things filtered in to us, but I would’ve liked to have gone out, just personally and just seen the battle area but that may be amorbid interest or because with artillery

it’s hard because you’re at the blunt end. In this case we were at the blunt end and the infantry guys are at the sharp end. They’re there and they’ve seen the results of what we’re doing. For us to be able to go out there and see it would’ve been interesting I guess if nothing else. But yeah, I was disappointed I couldn’t get, but I was only a lowly old corporal and there was no way in the world that I would ever get a chance to go out there, and of course I didn’t. The only time I ever saw anything of it

was obviously photographs and that of it subsequently.

Yes.

Yeah.

It didn’t worry me at the time to be honest, because like you said, I’m so remote. I guess it’s the same as the

bombers in the World War, you know. They just push a button and what happens down below, if they want to think about it they might get, and I’m sure a lot of them did get emotional and upset and everything like that, and I guess the same with me. I didn’t think. If I’d like to have sat back and said, “Now hang on, I probably”, you know, I may have. I guess it’s, you’ve got comfort in the fact that there is such a thing as comfort, Matt, is that you’re just pushing

a button or something or in my case I was helping them on the guns and you’re really remote from it, and you don’t know. What the eye doesn’t see the heart won’t grieve, if you know what I mean, but if I’d seen the results, if I’d have gone out there maybe and saw there, then it might’ve been a completely different story. I’d probably be saying to you I wish I’d never gone out there and that, but because you’re so remote you just don’t really think about it. I mean,

but then by the same token you can think well, but I may have saved a lot of our fellows lives if, you know, or helped save. I didn’t do it by myself, I was just a little cog in a big team on the guns, and in a way I shouldn’t have been doing it ‘cause I’m a medic, but I felt like I helped the guys and everything. So you know, you just, you think that way, that maybe you’ve helped save a few lives, but I try not to think about it obviously. I don’t think about that type of thing until someone like yourself mentions it, which is, no, no, that’s

fine, but you know what I mean? Because I’m held away from it.

Yeah, I suppose in a way we were because we used to often get intelligence reports would come down, and I mentioned this earlier, that tonight’s the night. There is a battalion or regiment lurking

in the area and they could quite easily attack us tonight, and therefore as I said, all booze was off, the movies were off ‘cause we used to have the movies, and that was all off and we had to be in our lines, lights out, everything, no lights, no nothing and that. So in that way we were prepared that something could happen, but I suppose there was always a chance that an Australian patrol would run across the enemy

and it did happen, yeah.

Yes, Phil Dobson, I ran across. He was a medic with them, because subsequently as I told you earlier, one of our, one of the jobs of infantry is to protect the artillery when we were out of Nui Dat and in this particular time the company

that was involved was protecting us and Phil Dobson was the medic and he got an MID, mention in despatches, out of Long Tan, and he, yeah, we spoke. Like he came over and had a brew with me. His company was all around us and he just wandered over and we had a brew and he was just saying basically what I heard, you know, all hell broke loose and you really couldn’t see a thing. ‘Cause they also

had the rain out there. They couldn’t see three or four foot in front of them because of the heavy rain and all that type of thing, but he managed to get through it all right. I don’t know what he’s like today, but certainly he spoke about it, yes.

No, I don’t think so. I mean it’s a battle and

I don’t think, no, I don’t think there was any medical lesson. There certainly I guess there was a lot of infantry tactical lessons learned from it and I’m sure it has been because it’s obviously used as a lot of training now, but medical wise, no, because everything medical we had in place anyway. That is the, obviously the initial medic fixing the guy up. We had evacuation plan with the Dust Off helicopters and the hospitals and all

that. So I wouldn’t think there would be anything medically we would’ve gained out of that at all.

Well, the obvious ones, gunshot wounds and some horrific gunshot wounds obviously, but basically that would’ve been the main thing. Obviously traumatic wounds and everything, yeah.

I don’t know. It takes a lot. Yeah, how do you? I can’t honestly say until it happens to you, but again in my post-Vietnam training as an instructor I just say to every individual young medic I taught, “You just don’t know, I don’t know how you’re going to act compared to somebody else”, but I think if you’re trained well enough, in fact I don’t think, I know if you’re trained well enough you do it instinctively.

It becomes as an instinct to you just to go into a routine, bang, bang, bang, you know. You’re trained well, and you know, we were trained well, certainly not as the modern soldier is now but certainly we’d go into a routine and you’d switch off any other thoughts or anything and just bang, in there and do it. But it would’ve been, yeah, horrific, you know, I’m sure. I guess if you’re lucky you’ll

run across someone that was actually in the battalion out there and they can tell you a few things, but it must’ve been terribly frightening. It was bad enough with us in the guns and we were seven kilometres or something away from the action, but yeah.

No, no, I wouldn’t wish that on you. No way.

Well obviously he was the least wounded so I said to, I looked at it, put a dressing on it. It was just a laceration, similar in fact to the one with the shrapnel except I didn’t know with this one whether the shrapnel was still in his rump or whether it was out. So I got him and I got him straight

to the RAP with a couple of the guys because I knew he was a walking wounded if you like.

No. It was just a flesh, on the fleshy part of his bum and that and it was pretty straight-forward. The penetration wasn’t that much, so you know, so that was pretty good. That was only a small one too, a nick, and there was a hole in the middle of the tent on the ground because it had just gone straight through the canvas obviously and that, and…

Why? I just had a quick, when I say treat him, I just had a quick look at him, bang, like that. The other fellow was still laying down see, ‘cause he was asleep. They were both asleep, but the guy who was hit in the rump jumped up obviously, ‘cause he was, he was fit to do it and he was the first one that greeted me and he said, “I’ve got it in the arse”, and I said, “Oh shit, give us a look. Yeah, quick, put a shell dressing on that for the time being”, you know, you felt like you had to do something, and then they said, “Oh Doc,

you better have a look at Mack”, yeah, “Mack over here”, sorry, “Norris over here, he hasn’t moved”, except he started getting a bit delirious and that when I first got there. So I saw the head wound and obviously I knew it was a head wound. I didn’t know how much or severe because it rather struck me the hole, the entry hole was oh, I suppose not much bigger than a match head actually. That’s how small

it was, but it came up into a big lump, you know, when someone gets whacked on the head it come up into a big lump like a golf ball, but on the top of that golf ball was this oozing down there, and I thought, well it’s obviously gone a bit further than just the skin and I then, and because he was delirious and everything we laid him down. In fact it took two of the blokes carrying the stretcher and I had

to, that’s right, and half way down there we put the stretcher down. He didn’t want to go on the stretcher. He kept throwing his arms around and all this and standing up and all this because he obviously had brain damage, and so we got him under each arm and we more or less half carried him and half dragged him. And that’s the only place I could think of taking him to was the command post because, you know, with the little torch you can’t see properly, and I didn’t know if he had other wounds on him because the bloke, he was delirious

and I couldn’t get any sense out of him, whereas the bloke with the rump said, “No, I’m alright. I only just got hit in the bum”, and I got him down there and of course at the first stage when I went in there they didn’t appreciate it there because as I said, all hell was breaking loose. The guns were firing and they were giving orders, but I said to the GPO, the gun positioning officer, I said, “Sir, look, I’ve got to examine Gunner Norris”, I said. “I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with him yet”, and as soon as I saw him and it was as bright as we are here, underground,

as soon as I saw that I said to him, “I better get straight up to the RMO.” Meanwhile I think they rang from the command post. I suppose this was a distance of about, had to be at least 300 to 500 metres I had to walk him and again the same thing, you know. He wouldn’t lay down. He was just throwing his arms thrashing all around. So we got the two guys to give me a hand up there and Doctor, Captain Tasky had a look at

him and realised it was a severe head injury and as I said, then we had to drag him down to the helicopter pad and meanwhile just as I got there the helicopter come in. I’ll give it to the Yank pilots, pitch black and they’re still, you know, they’re still firing the guns and everything, and obviously they stopped to let them come in and we got him on board, yeah. No sorry, we didn’t get him on board. I took him to the field hospital there but subsequently he then got evacuated down by helicopter. So that was a,

we had an attachment to the field ambulance within the headquarters of the task force and they had surgeons there and everything, but they couldn’t do anything for him. They just stabilised him as best they could and sent him down to the evacuation hospital, which had major traumatic surgery they could perform, which they did of course.

Oh yes, yes.

I was quite, yeah,

I was cool, calm and collected. That was what impressed myself. I do a bit of running from the gun pit, running, stumbling from the gun pit up to the lines, which again as I said was about, I don’t know, maybe 100 metres I suppose, maybe more, and then still coming down I was thinking maybe any second one could come near me, but the adrenaline kept me going and I didn’t say, hit the ground and wait for a few

seconds and go. I kept going, running, stumbling, running, stumbling, and I was very apprehensive as to what I would find there. All I heard was, “Quick Doc, you better get up”, on the phone, “Quick, you better get up the lines, there’s been a couple of blokes hit”, and when I got up there, these were just two rows of tents and one bloke met me and took me up to the tent there and then that’s when I went into the, but yeah, that’s what I was pleased about. I thought I was reasonably cool, calm and collected in doing

the treatment and getting him up there, and I subsequently, years later, about three years later, the RSM, regimental sergeant major of the regiment saw me in hospital. When I left and came back from Singapore actually I got posted to the military hospital at Ingleburn. I know this is three or four years later, and he said to me,

“Oh”, I said, “How are you going sir? Long time no see”, and he said, “Yes”, he said, “You’re a sergeant now”, because I was only a corporal then. I said, “Yes sir, I got promoted” whenever it was and he said to me, , “Are you missing a ribbon there?” See, I had my Vietnam ones on in those days ‘cause I was in dress uniform, and I said, “No sir, just my Vietnam and my two, my Vietnam ones”. He said, “Didn’t you, you got a medal,

didn’t you, for Vietnam for Long Tan, the night of Long Tan?” I said, “No sir, not that I know of.” He said, “I could’ve sworn you were put in for a medal for evacuating one of your soldiers or something and he got hit in the head or something, didn’t you?” I said, “Yes sir”, and he said, “You took him down to the field in pitch black”, and all this type of thing, and I said, “Yes”, and he said, “I could’ve sworn you were put in for a medal. Anyway I must be wrong.” So anyway that, you know, and I wasn’t obviously or if it was it fell through the cracks

but then so I thought that then he told me that I must’ve done something right that night, even though I never got anything and that, and that’s quite alright. I did my job and that’s all you can ask for.

Hectic. As far as, because as I said, the guns were still firing, trying to fire back on the mortars that were coming in and all this type of thing, so yeah,

chaos. I suppose chaos was a better word. I think the old saying, organised chaos, but because they obviously were doing their job and doing it, and as I said they all abused me for being down there, which I don’t blame them in one way but they didn’t know, they thought I was just stumbling in for a sticky beak or something. But then when I carried this young Norris in or half dragged him, half carried him in and he was thrashing around and everything, then they realised,

and Lieutenant Griggs his name was, he said, “Okay Doc, put him over there”, ‘cause they had a couple of stretchers in the command post for the blokes that would sleep and then if any action would happen they’d jump off their cot and start doing whatever. And that’s when I laid him down there and he was quite happy then when he realised what I was there for, but initially he thought I was invading that at a time when I shouldn’t be coming in there, but as I said he realised what it was and he was happy to go along with

that then, yeah.

Oh no, he realised that. You know, I said, “Sir, there’s no other light and I can’t”, and as soon as I said that, and as soon as he saw that this young fellow was in distress and everything he was quite happy with that.

Yes, yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, yes, that contingency was never thought of. I mean I guess

there should’ve been something like an SOP if you, yes, if I had a casualty, and it could’ve been any injury, not necessarily a battle injury, but it could’ve been someone fallen down a pit like on a star picket as I said, and ripped himself open and that. And really, except for a torch and everything, the tents had lights in them but again we were obviously on blackout completely and that could’ve been another night

that it happened. As I said, often the intelligence people, as I previously said, would say, “No lights tonight because tonight might be the night”, and yeah, so that was probably a weakness. But the RAP was all right, it was blacked out and everything like that because that was where you would’ve taken your casualty and they had good lighting in there and it was all blacked out, but certainly I had, except for the command post really there was no blackout area within our unit.

As I can recall it was all talk. Everyone was talking about it and I guess the story got out of proportion. There was 20,000 of them and 10 of us type of thing and stories about, you know, the guys that were, the Viet Cong would try to take their boots off, their GP [General Purpose] boots off

and there was nothing wrong with them. The guys were just exhausted and everything and the Viet Cong thought they were dead and tried to take their boots off and one bloke said, “Piss off you little slant eye”, or something like that, and so a lot of stories went around and then we got the newspapers from Australia about it and I guess in a way we felt, I don’t know if the right word is chuffed, but certainly

you know, there’d been a significant battle if you like and we performed well. You know, we’re not just over here doing nothing, just going out on patrols and firing a few shots here and there. I mean it’s a sad thing to say there were lives lost and everything but hey, this is something significant, not just a little bun fight over in Vietnam. Look at this what’s happened and it was big headlines as you know, and newspapers full of it and newsreels and it

was quite significant, so yeah. So we realised that then we were in the big time if you like.

We basically got back into the routine of supporting 5 Battalion and operations away from Nui Dat, various operations called Canberra and they were named after significant places in Australia usually, and that was just as I said, a matter of going out, setting up the guns.

Sometimes we took three guns out, sometimes we took six out and just support 5 Battalion while they went out and did different patrols and everything, so they had the guns to protect them if you like. That went on until the rest of the tour really. In November ’66 I managed to get, this was what? Two months after Long Tan, I managed to get R and R to Hong Kong which we

briefly mentioned before, and that was a nice break from Vietnam and I remember on the plane coming back which was full of mostly Americans with a smattering of Australians on it, one of the Yanks got up the back and said as we were landing at Ton San Nhut back after a week away, “Good morning Vietnam”. Because when I was over there that disc jockey was made famous

by Robin Williams was the disc jockey there and he used to say that every morning, and he used to say pay days, Americans got paid once a month, and once a month he used to say, “Good pay day Vietnam”, or something like that you see, and that was a good break away from Vietnam, very good break and that. And I had an opportunity to go again around about February ’67 now, but I declined because at this stage I wanted to try and save a bit of money for a car

or something when I got home, and so I declined that and as I said, we had some interesting operations or deployments and that for the rest of the time there. And then about May we were ready to go home and everything and I had the opportunity of doing an education course because at that stage if I wanted to progress past corporal and everything, I had to have my education which was equivalent to

the Intermediate Certificate or the Higher School Certificate as it is now. So I elected to stay back for two months and go to the education centre which had been established at Vung Tau and do my education. It was six subjects. I managed to get four subjects at that time and the only good point about, well getting education is a good point, but another good point was the guys

that had left two months earlier flew home in C130s and it’s a long trip from Vietnam to Australia by C130 and that, and I was lucky that there was about a dozen of us due to go home and they flew us home by civilian air. And we flew from Saigon, Ton San Nhut airport, by PanAm to Manila and when we got to Manila we flew on a Qantas commercial that was coming from London, like a normal

domestic service that landed in Manila and we caught that home and we came home by civvy air all the way and got all the trapping of a civvy air jet, which was nice meals compared to what we had been eating and you know, we had a couple of beers. In fact a lot of the passengers on the Qantas flight bought us beers, said, “Have a beer on us boys”, because in those days you didn’t get free alcohol or anything on the planes. Yeah, they bought us beer which I thought was very nice of them, or a wine or

whatever you wanted, and we arrived one cold morning in Mascot and I remember Channel 10 news, or Channel O news as it was then, greeted us ‘cause we were a novelty still then of course. This was the early days of Vietnam and took a few shots of us as we came through the, you know, getting clearances, immigration clearances and all that type of thing,

and we were home. Yeah, back to Australia.

When I came back from Vietnam I got posted to Ingleburn, the infantry centre, as the regimental aid post sergeant, the medical centre sergeant. I was still a corporal then and I ended up getting, I had already got my subjects for sergeant and it was only a matter of

time there until the new boss got to know me and then recommended me for sergeant. So I got promoted to sergeant in November ’67 and he, yeah, and I enjoyed that because infantry centre was a very big place at Ingleburn and we were sending over reinforcements to Vietnam, infantry reinforcements, and I got to work with a nice lot of young fellows who were stretcher-bearers. But to

get experience, they used to work in the RAP under men and then obviously as their time came due they got posted to a reinforcement unit in Vietnam and from there they went out to a unit as an infantry battalion needed replacements they filled the spot and everything, but it was, I enjoyed the posting there. It was quite a hive of activity.

I enjoyed it.

I must admit first up I was scared. That was my first, I’d given basic lectures before but that was the first time as part of a syllabus. I had to, you know, the RAP sergeant had to give these young recruits that were doing infantry training first-aid lectures and things like that and I was very scared at the time because I’d never been up before people talking as such, but it was a tremendous experience

and I got around it by thinking well, hey, these are only kids, although I was only what, 23 myself at the time. But I said at least you know they’re looking up to me for everything I say and virtually what I say is true, type of thing. So I got around it that way and I got bitten by the instructional bug then. I quite enjoyed it and subsequently further in my career I became an instructor down at our School of Army Health and so yes, I enjoyed

instructing, yes, I did.

No, I didn’t actually. No, I did not. Often wondered how different people were going and this type of thing, but no, not one. I guess I just come home and we all went our own way and I didn’t get to see them again until 19, sorry, what am I saying? 2002.

So there you go, 2002, yeah, maybe 2001, sorry, 2001. So a fair while after, isn’t it? Yeah, never saw one again or anything like, no, I tell lies. I ran across a couple who’d stayed in the army like me. Just ran into them and we never spoke about Vietnam. We just asked about what we were doing now, where we were, what unit and all that type of thing. I’d say probably three out of

the 120, yeah.

No, not particularly, no.

I don’t know. Yes, I do know. I felt that if I spoke to anyone about it they wouldn’t understand, they wouldn’t understand what I went through or yeah, they just wouldn’t understand or they wouldn’t care. Because at that stage, you know, I’m talking about the year after or so after I got back,

people were getting very much anti-Vietnam, you know, and they didn’t understand it so why talk to people that knew nothing about it, or I felt knew nothing about it. It just wasn’t worth the effort of talking about it. The only time I, but having said that Kirsty, I can talk to the guys that were there with me like I’m talking to you now, no worries at all,

but anyone else that wasn’t there, whether they were fellow soldiers or they were civilians, certainly civilians, you know, friends, relatives and things like that, I just didn’t want to talk about it, but to fellow Vets who had been there I had no worries about talking about it. I just couldn’t be bothered telling my relatives even. You know, I even say if my Mum and Dad was alive now, they would say to you that I never talk about Vietnam at all, and Dad was, you know, being a copper he was

inquisitive and everything and I just give him the bare answers, you know, just brief answers on his questions.

Yes. Definitely, no question, and as I said, while I was in the defence forces I had that comradeship, I had that soft cuddly, it’s silly to say I suppose, but I

felt secure, yeah, secure. But once I got discharged because I had to, because of my age and everything, I turned 55, I lost that security if you like and all that type of thing and then I started to have a few problems and everything, you know, like flashbacks, memory loss, you know, things like that, and I first of all thought I’m getting old until I saw a doctor, actually a fellow,

a guy that was in the same unit as me who I’d seen at the reunion. He was the one that said, “I think you should go and see someone. I’ve got a great doctor down at St John of God at Richmond” and that, and I said, “Oh yeah”, you know, but actually the only reason I would’ve seen her is that she rang me and I still see her to this day, Dr Reinhart, and she rang me up and said, “I believe you might

have some problems, Brian, would you like to come and see me?” And I couldn’t believe a doctor ring me up, you know, working with doctors all my life, they don’t usually chase patients up as such, and I said, “Yeah, I think I better.” So she made arrangements as far as timing for me and I went down and I’ve done a few courses down there and that. So yeah, but to answer your question, yeah, I felt security in the army and I didn’t want to talk about it or anything like

that and it certainly caught up to me keeping it in and that.

Mostly it was through smells. Smells is my main trigger if you like. If I smell for instance after we have a storm, you know, the wet foliage and things like that, it reminds me

very much of Vietnam. In the dry season if we have smoke as in the bush fires it reminds me of the kilns that they used to have for making coke, as in you know, cooking coke, and it used to remind me of those type of things and they’re the main things. The main trigger was smells and everything like that which I believe is not uncommon, but a little bit of memory loss and simple memory loss things and irritability,

and I have no doubt it cost me my first marriage because I kept it to myself and everything like that and I never said boo to my wife, and that was 23 years of marriage. As far as, more as the marriage went on or towards the end of the marriage that I kept a lot of things to myself and didn’t say much, you know. When she obviously wanted me to communicate with her, I wasn’t, and so, and that’s when it caught up to me, when I got out of the

army in ’99.

Yeah. Just different specific scenes. I’ve seen, you know, Viet Cong with, I hope I don’t traumatise you at all, but half his head missing and things like that, and I’ve seen a grave

site where the Viet Cong have buried their people but only in a shallow grave and when the sun’s come out and it has got hot the actual bodies have sat up in the grave and I believe it’s just the tendons and everything shrinking with the heat and everything and they, you know, like rigor mortis type thing and it makes them sit up. I don’t mean upright, bolt upright, but at various angles and yeah, just things like that.

And of course the night of Long Tan and the injuries to that soldier when with a little bit more fate he would’ve been all right, because I was the one that swapped him and he should’ve been, he should’ve been all right, but I suppose that’s fate. Excuse me, that’s better. But yeah, so there is things that remind me.

I was cranky because they didn’t know, again we go back, they didn’t know what they were talking about. They didn’t understand what was going on over there and I was upset with the media and that, and obviously I was upset with the protests and things like that, you know, with the

hippies and the greenies. There weren’t greenies in those days, but you know what I mean, the radicals, and I thought they were protesting and saving our sons and all that type of thing, and I suppose everyone’s got their cause but to me you felt like saying well you people get over there. That’s the last thing they wanted to do. They wanted to bring everybody home. But yeah, I didn’t like them one bit, you know, the protesters and that.

Not much, as little as

possible. Nothing. No, no contact whatsoever, none. I didn’t want to know them or, you know, I wouldn’t even like to confront them because I’d get too upset and carry on I think, as much as I’m a placid fellow, but no. I didn’t want to know them, kept right out of their road. Just got cranky if I watched it on TV or read it in the paper, just got cranky within myself at them.

Only, let me think. I suppose two years. I got back in May ’67, sorry, June ’67. I went to Malaysia in May ’69.

Great, just chalk and cheese, you know. It was a good life.

I was fortunate enough that my boss in infantry centre had been posted there, a major, and he offered me the RAP sergeant’s job with the battalion who was just coming back from Vietnam from its second tour, that’s 1 Battalion, and asked me would I like to go, and I’d only just been married by a few months and I thought what a wonderful opportunity. So I took him up o the offer and we subsequently

got, we went over there in May ’69, not long before Armstrong walked on the moon. So I always remember that if it’s a trivia question, you know, what year, but that was just an unbelievable lifestyle. It’s probably the best two years I’ve had in the army by far, and we did 12 months or 7 months

in Malaysia and then just over 12 months in Singapore, and that, yeah. So two years after Vietnam.

Well, first of all it wasn’t a war. I knew it was almost like a two-year holiday to be honest with you because when I was told that I could

be going I made obviously inquiries from people who had been there and they’d say, “You’re going to have a wonderful time”, because the good thing about it you could take your family with you and really all you would be doing over there would be exercises. There was no danger, there was no nothing that you wouldn’t be doing in Australia except you were in a different country, an exotic country if that if you like almost, yeah.

Yes. My eldest daughter

was born in Singapore, Jillian, she was born at Changi Hospital which was the RAF [Royal Air Force] hospital then, and yeah, she was born in late ’69 and that. So she was a Singaporean for a few days.

I was, as I said, with 1 Battalion. I was the regimental aid post sergeant and our job

was obviously we were there as an agreement between the Malaysian government and the Australian government for hang-over from the Communist insurgents that were there, and we were just kept on. The Australian government kept us on there and also we used to supply 1 Company up to Butterworth for protection for the RAAF, again not that there was any activities going on but it was just a

standard thing that was carried out, a bit like the infantry company protecting the artillery unit, and they used to go up there every, I think it was once every three months. It was rotation, one of the company would go up there, and all we did whilst we were there was training exercises, sometimes with the Singaporean government, with the, sorry, the Malaysian Armed Forces, but otherwise we would just do our own exercises and that up there.

Exactly the same as we were doing in Australia except of course as I said we were in a foreign country.

Well, I still don’t like it. I don’t think it’s, I think of freedom and democracy and things like that. So I’m not a great believer in it, no, not at all.

We had plenty of entertainment that was available to the families in the form of, well, wives’ clubs and tennis clubs and ten pin bowling and cards and all that type of thing, but as a family as far as my wife and I for entertainment we had the

sergeants’ mess because I was a sergeant then, and the sergeants’ mess used to have a magic entertainment. Every fortnight Saturday night we had a band there which was the Australian Army Band but by day there were an army band but by night they were a group, you know, like a musical group and were quite good actually, and we had some magic do’s in the sergeants’ mess, theme nights and things like that. We’d go to the movies in Singapore and we’d go obviously

sightseeing as well, and some weekends we would go water skiing and everything because the battalion had its own boat. They bought it through regimental funds and we used to go and do a lot of water skiing and that because obviously ideal weather for it and that. So plenty to do, yes, and occupy your time, yeah.

The one that jumps straight out is The Russians Are Coming, which I forget who starred in that now. I can see his face, Carl Reiner, and what else was there? Gee, isn’t that funny, that’s about the only one that grabs me. No, isn’t that funny, it’s the only one I can, and yet they used to have regular movies there but that’s the only one that really grabs me. I must’ve liked the movie or something. I’ve seen it since of course.

It’s been on late night movies or something like that, but yeah, The Russians Are Coming, and they used to have a lot of the TV shows like Batman and that in a two-hour episodes of Batman or something like that, would you believe the old Adam West ones and that. I suppose if I sat down for five minutes I’d think of a few others but that’s the only one that grabs me, The Russians Are Coming, yeah.

Yes. We had our own little fold up chair and which you bought locally and was next to nothing, 50 cents, but aluminium with just that webbing across it and it used to go everywhere we went, you know, almost part of our personal effects, and we used to grab that and go up to the task force headquarters and it was open-air and that. You’d take your own chair and watch the movie there. The funny thing they used

to do it, the battalions had their own area where they’d watch a movie somewhere else, and they used to only have say the one movie, so they’d show the first reel at one place and then they’d, when they’d finish that reel they’d go to another place with the first reel and you’d see the second one and they’d follow the whole thing around. So if we started at 7.00 o’clock with a movie, we might be finished the movie, the three reels, say by half past

9.00, but the last one was different. They mightn’t finish until 11.00 o’clock at night because they got the end of it. They had to wait until we finished the first reel until they could, you know, went around the traps and everything. So that was fun, but it was a good entertainment night out and everything, but often it would be cancelled if intelligence people said tonight’s the night, you know, and we’d all have to go. We wouldn’t be able to go to the movies or anything like that.

Yes. Everywhere we went, yes, yeah. If you were in camp you had your weapon everywhere. You got into trouble if you left it on the ground or it wasn’t with you all the time. We had the magazine with us all the time, that’s with the ammunition in it. That was clipped on our person, in our trouser pockets or something like that, and then if you left the task force area and went outside the wire then you put your magazine on and

then from then on it would be a different stage. Like if we went to Vung Tau for instance by road down there, as soon as we got out the front gate it was automatically weapons on ‘cause they used to have signs up there, you know, even saying is your magazine on? And coming into camp, have you taken your magazine off your weapon? But when you went on patrol of course, not that the artillery went on patrols, then they would obviously go through different stages. Like they’d cock the weapon and

put it on safety and all this type of stuff, but yeah, everywhere you went, and even today in exercises in peace-time in Australia the troops are taught to have their weapons on them at all times, going to dinner, going to the shower, toilet, everything.

Well I knew from my training

that their job was to be up the front that and they had to be very vigilant and alert at all times because you just didn’t know what the next step would bring and it would be a very highly strung job I would think, yeah. So, yeah, that’s what I knew. It wasn’t the best of jobs because obviously if you come across it, if anything happens you were going to across it first whether it be something, a mine you step on

or someone’s up there laying an ambush, but yeah, you’re the one that was more vulnerable than anybody else I suppose.

I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t honestly know. I mean maybe, I think everybody had a turn in it. I’d be surprised if it didn’t rotate through the platoon that everybody had a go at it, both the forward scout and the rear scout were the two most vital parts of it.

So I would say everybody had a go at doing it unless you were particularly a radio operator and that’s all you did, well you manned the radio, but otherwise everyone would certainly have a go through it and they would rotate them regularly ‘cause obviously for being more alert and everything and not getting too blasé.

Oh yes, yes, definitely, yeah. As I said, every morning, “Good morning Vietnam”. If I recall,

he used to come on about 9.00 o’clock something like that, early morning anyway he used to come on.

The ‘60s music, yeah, basically what you heard, Wonderful World and all those. Yeah, all the ‘60s music, yeah, and also prattle on about different things like he did, yeah.

Yes.

Since? Oh yes, I’ve seen them.

It may be morbid interest to see what they’re about, but yeah I have seen them, like Platoon and the Odd Angry Shot, the Australian one, but anyone that’s going out, yeah. Some I find distressful and others don’t worry me at all because I think, excuse my French, but I think it’s bullshit, American, so I just take no notice of it. Some things would come home to roost or some scenes or something that I can assimilate [relate] to, and yeah, I do

get a little bit of a twinge and that, yeah sure.

Probably mostly the scenes about children and that getting hurt or villages and that. You see the American movies where they go into the village and they torch it and throw the peasants around and all that type of thing. I find that discomforting to watch that type of thing. I suppose, you know, you see

obviously them shot and everything, believe it or not it doesn’t particularly really upset me that much, but that business where you see them come in, you know, the steel boots and they kick down doors and put torch, and children scream and things like that, that particularly gets me.

No, I didn’t. In fact I participated in a search and destroy, as they called it, in a village and I thought it was conducted very

well by the Australians in that the cordoned off a whole village and then they go through and they obviously herd everybody out and interrogate them in case there’s some Viet Cong mixed up with the local villagers, and then they search the village for booby traps or hidden caches of food or weapons and things like that, and yeah.

About 200, maybe 300.

Yeah.

All they do is, before first light they go out in usually APC’s, armed personnel carriers, sometimes helicopters, and you know, all around, they surround the village. The troops all get out, the infantry get out and they surround the whole village. That’s obvious to stop anyone from running out, and just like a big fish trap if you like, and once they cordon it off another group goes through and gets all the people out of their huts in a very

civilised way and moves them to a certain area, maybe 100 metres from the village and sets them up there and if possible when the Hearts and Minds people come in, and give them whatever they give them, drinks and you know, food or something like that to say, “Look, sorry we’re doing this but we’ll give you something in compensation”. And while they’re there the, if there’s any suspects or anything the intelligence people are probably used

to the right aims for military or they don’t look right or whatever they interrogate them, and meanwhile another company goes through and as I said, checks out every building, everything that could hide a cache of weapons or food. And if they find them obviously they destroy them, and yeah, that was a common thing in Vietnam to do that around our way, like the villages around our way every now and then they’d do that an that just stops the

Viet Cong from having hidden weapons or food caches in those village, ‘cause a lot of the villages were obviously, the Viet Cong frightened them into keeping their weapons and food there, yeah.

No, no.

When I say that I was involved

in the medical side of things. They were looking for a couple of medics and that was another thing we did, like when the people were altogether, “Has anyone got any problems”, and all that type of thing and that’s it. So I was, yeah, I was just one of the few medics that were on hand if the people wanted any help medically wise, similar to that med cap that I mentioned before and that.

No, no, they were

quite healthy as they can be. Sometimes you’d see someone cough and carrying on and you’d ask them, well you couldn’t ask them, through an interpreter, but they didn’t want any help. They were quite happy, but no.

Yes, it was, yes. We had quite a few cases of malaria. Thank God I didn’t get it, but again being a medic I was very disciplined in taking my malaria, anti-malarias

which was Paludrine every day and all that, but yes, we had quite a few cases of malaria.

Oh, the malaria drugs? I never saw any. Chloroquine, the Chloroquine seemed to make the dark-skinned guys we had, if we had any dark-skinned, as in not so, we had a couple of Aboriginal, or one Aboriginal, John Burns, but and Islanders, an Islander extract,

they would turn a bit, their eyeballs and that would turn yellow, like very pale yellow, but I never saw any side effects as such, you know.

The sweats. Shaking uncontrollably, sweats and that was the basic sign of it, and obviously feeling very unwell and everything, yeah, but they would then be evacuated down to Vung Tau because obviously

they had to be hospitalised for control of the malaria, both again the drugs and also to keep an eye on them.

Certainly we had recurring ones, yes, yeah. Not a lot, not a lot, but because, I’m lead to believe a lot of this happened after Vietnam. Like you know, it can happen quite a time after you get the initial malaria but certainly a couple of them had recurrences, yes, but not a great deal in my time in my particular, who

I looked after.

John Burns, he was a gunner. In other words he worked on the guns and everything, yeah so I ran into him like at the reunion and everything. He went back and did another tour actually. A lot of guys had gone a couple of times to Vietnam. I only ever did the one of course, but he went back. He was involved with Coral and everything. Coral was another big battle that happened ‘68

I think, ’68, ’69.

Okay. When I came back from Singapore which was in 1971 I got posted to the military hospital at Ingleburn. That was very hard to take because it was the first time I’d been, I had done detachment to the hospital, a fortnight here, a month here

through my army career when I was trying to become a medic, but this is now posted full-time to an established medical unit, and I found that very hard after being my own, well almost my own boss. Obviously I had a doctor above me, but almost my own boss, you know, and here I was amongst other sergeants and nursing officers and doctors and I was just a small, I was a sergeant, a small cog in a big wheel.

And it was a bit of a come down whereas I had the run of the mill and all of a sudden I had to be told what to do and what not to do, and I got into trouble a couple of times, and when I say into trouble, we had a couple of young fellows come in cut their hand open, and because I’d done suturing for 10 years before that instead of calling the duty medical officer I said, “Look, come into casualty”, because that’s where I was working at the time. I said, “Come on, I’ll do them for you”,

and I sutured them up as I have done, quite good, and the doctor found out later on and said, “Well that’s why I’m here, to do that type of thing”, and then of course the administrative officer called me down and he said, “What are you doing that for?” I said, “Well I’ve done it for 10 years now.” He said, “That’s beside the point”, he said, “You’re now here and you obey the rules and regulations of what we do in the hospital”, which is that I’m not supposed to do it and going back to what Matt said before, you know,

with the difference between a civilian outside, equivalent of what they can and can’t do, but see, a bloke, or sergeant in a hospital can’t do suturing and yet when I was in the medical centre in the battalion I was doing suturing all the time, but anyway that was just, and it took me a while to settle in until I got into the routine, and toe the line if you like, you know, the rules and regulations of that unit.

Two years and then I got posted to Melbourne

to another medical centre down there where I was back to being the boss again, and that was good, back to running, looking after about I suppose 1,000 people for the medical needs in Broadmeadows in Melbourne. Did that for a couple of years and then I moved up to, got promoted to warrant officer and went up to the School of Army Health which is in Healesville, was in Healesville

in Victoria as a warrant officer instructor and went back to instructing. I did an instructor’s course before I went there and was the instructor there for two years, three years which I thoroughly enjoyed, teaching new recruits coming into medical corps and also established medical corps people that were going for promotion to sergeants and warrant officers and that and I taught them different

subjects like mostly in medical administration and things like that. So I enjoyed that.

Oh yes, often, yeah, yeah. You know, just thought, of well obviously things that happened in Vietnam, oh yes, you know. I’m happy to say they’re infrequent now as to what they were three or four years ago, five years ago, but I still get them from

time to time. In fact Cathy made the comment when you went for lunch. She said, “It will be interesting now if you don’t get a few funny dreams of a night now”, and I may have. It will be interesting to see. I’m not worried by the way that you guys are stirring things up or anything because I find that the more I talk about it and get it off my chest the better it is, and that’s why I found going to down to St John of God was a blessing, you know, and that. But yes, to answer your question, yes I still do, but infrequently now thank goodness.

I had a couple but I guess I just put that down to the fact that I was still involved with the army and everything like that, but yes, I did, and towards the end of my army thingo I was starting to get a bit irritable and forgetful and things like that, and as I said, I put it down to getting a bit on in years and

everything like that, although I was only 55. And until of course I did a course down at St John of God with a fellow, a guy who is the same and when they started to say the same things to their counsellors and everything in group sessions I said, “Hey, they’ve all got the same thing”, and I realised there was something wrong, and as I said, my best mate pushed me to seek to help ‘cause he realised there was things happening and that, and then obviously when I had my marriage break up

it was, it compounded everything, yeah, so you know.

’92, so what’s that, 12 years ago.

The military hospital.

After coming back from

And Singapore, yeah.

Okay. After I left the military hospital I went down to Broadmeadows in Victoria where I was the regimental sergeant down there, the medical sergeant, and then we went to, did two years

there and went up to Healesville and I think we mentioned that, and I was an instructor up there. I spent four years, I think it was four years at Healesville. I thoroughly enjoyed that.

Yeah, I went there in, got posted there in 1977, January, on promotion to warrant officer class 2 and I became an instructor there instructing young recruits that have done their recruit training

at Kapooka and then they get posted to Healesville to the School of Army Health to do their corps training and they do the basic first-aid and that, and of course similar to me in a way, they then either elect to go and continue as a medical assistant and do the courses or they might become a clerk or hygiene fellow or whatever.

First-aid.

Well,

as I said, I always tried to, in every lecture I did whether it was on the signs and symptoms snake bite or whether it’s the control of haemorrhage or whatever, I tried to tell them how not to switch off because you never know, one day you might, well I’m teaching you now, it might come into, I’m in trouble,

into practical use. You know, like to say things like, “Someone in this room at some stage may come across a car accident and wouldn’t it be nice to know to do the first-aid correctly”, and all that. I tried to tell them about my experiences without boring them of being in an infantry battalion in particular where the guys rely on you and I reckon if any of them get the opportunity to be posted to an infantry battalion as a medic, they

should take the opportunity because it’s a wonderful experience in as far as getting, you know, a decision-making experience in that you’re the only medic out in the field and you’ve got to make the decision. I said it’s a good choice to take. So yeah, and obviously it was, relate stories even at that stage I had done what, nearly 20 years, well had done 20 years in the army nearly and so I had plenty of experience to be able to pass on to them.

Well while I was at Healesville I was lucky enough to get a trip to England on an exercise called Long Look where a certain number of Australians from all different corps, different trades, everything, about 120 of us go to England and 120 British soldiers come out to Australia, all ranks, and yes, that was, and I

did that for four months. That was from August 1980 till Christmas ’80 and I went to Aldershot and had a tremendous experience and I was lucky enough to, whilst in England, to do an exercise in Germany, which went for a fortnight. If I recall it was exercise Spearhead or

something like that, and it was the biggest military exercise involving British, American and German troops since the Second World War and I managed to get onto a general hospital, a British reservist general hospital and work with them for a fortnight and I found that very interesting, and then on my return to Australia at Christmas ’80, I was then promoted

to officer class 1, RSM [Regimental Sergeant Major], and I was sent up to 9 Field Ambulance, to Townsville in Queensland of course, where I became the regimental sergeant major to 9 Field Ambulance which again was the first time I’d worked with reserve as such and thoroughly enjoyed it and found them, although reservists very professional in what they knew and what they did and treated it very seriously, and

I did

Something I never thought I’d achieve to be honest with you, for a starter, and quite proud and I worked hard for it, I worked very hard for it in that passing exams, promotion exams, education which I said earlier I never had, and I got all my subjects for equivalent to HSC so I was quite, you know, quite

proud that I got that far and, but no, if you had have asked me even when I was a corporal and said, “You’ll make an RSM”, I wouldn’t have believed you. But of course, yeah, I came a long way since then, and I found the job very rewarding as an RSM ‘cause you’re working with soldiers which I like to do, and helping soldiers and I thoroughly enjoyed that role, and I spent two years there, well actually 18 months at 9 Field Ambulance.

A bit of travel involved because we had the headquarters was in Townsville and we had a detachment at Mackay and a detachment at Rockhampton and it was my role to visit these different centres from time to time, and the coordination of getting all the units, the three sub-units together for one exercise usually at the Townsville training range. It was logistics in itself and we had to send aircraft and that to pick them up and bring them up for a weekend and that, but again it was all

very interesting, yeah, so I enjoyed that.

Very much. Luckily it didn’t affect my girls so much because one’s a school teacher and the other one’s a registered nurse, but my young son, he found it difficult, although even with the girls it was hard to make friends and once you make them you’ve got to move on somewhere else, but educational wise it didn’t affect the girls, but my son it did. He’s now a panel beater.

He’s got a trade, which is, I’m very proud, very pleased he’s got that. But yeah, it was hard on them, but particularly it was also hard on my wife. She was a registered nurse and she would obviously get into a hospital somewhere and get into the routine and what have you and then we’d have to up stakes to move to another state. So luckily in her profession, being a nurse, a registered nurse, you can get a job anywhere in Australia but

I know for a lot of army wives who want careers it’s very, very hard to get a career when you’re moving around from place to place. So it was hard on the family, yes.

Yes, I got posted down to the 1st military hospital at Yeronga in Queensland in, that would’ve been in about August ’82 and I

did what, two and a half years there, or two and a bit as the RSM, and I then was asked to take a commission or consider taking a commission early ’84. I decided I’d like to go down that track because I’d gone as far as I could as a warrant officer class 1 RSM, and all I would’ve done is move from unit to unit as one of those. So I wanted to, you know, reasonably ambitious, or I’m ambitious and I’d

like to go on higher if I could so I took the opportunity to get a commission and I was commissioned on the 1st of January 1985 as a captain, prescribed service officer, PSO.

Because that was the promotion route if you like in that in the old days, it’s a terrible cliché, but it used to be a quartermaster’s commission which was a lieutenant’s, you went straight from

sergeant, warrant officer to a lieutenant. You did a course at Canungra for a number of weeks and if you, after a very strong selection criteria, and if you graduated from there then you became a lieutenant. But in my case because I guess it was usually warrant officers that got it, and because I guess I had so much experience or we seemed to have so much experience then we, and obviously passed the psychology

and the selection board we went straight to captain. Another reason was the pay structure as well. If I had gone from a warrant officer class 1 to a lieutenant I’d have dropped money. So by going to a captain I retained the same money pay scale and that’s how it was, but this time I didn’t have to do a course at all. All I had to do is be recommended by my corps to be commissioned, and then pass a selection

board and if I pass that selection board than I was promoted to captain. So I became an officer on the 1st of January ’85 as I said and got posted to another army reserve unit, 10 Field Ambulance in Hobart and became the adjutant of that particular unit, and I had an enjoyable time in Tassie for two years. I managed to take the unit out of Tassie for the first time in 20 years or 25 years, moved them up, took them on an exercise up to western New South Wales

around the Hay area. We joined three brigades in an exercise up there, sorry, one brigade, and some of the young kids we took had never been outside Tasmania. If they go anymore than 50 kilometres they reckon it’s unbelievable, but to take them by Hercules up to Melbourne but then do a big exercise with the regular army in western New South Wales, they thought that was very good. So that was a good achievement to get them off the island for a couple of weeks.

Yes.

I quite liked it, I just thought it was a natural progression and that, and I thought it was a good progression as well, you know, it was well formulated and well staged out and everything. So I had, in fact when I was a captain in the mess at

Hobart, they didn’t realise I’d been promoted from the ranks to officer. They thought I was an OCS [Officer Cadet School] graduate although I must’ve looked an old one, an older one, but they thought obviously I fitted into it naturally, and they were quite surprised the other officers, they were quite surprised that I was commissioned from the ranks and that. So I think the progress was good and I had no worries about it.

I then went to an interesting unit called the Army Malaria Research Unit, Ingleburn in New South Wales, and their role was to develop regimes for malaria because malaria is a disease that once you find one resume to stop malaria or prevent it, it becomes old hat and you’ve got to find another one because it gets immune, the

mosquito and that or the disease becomes immune to one regime of drugs, and they carried out experiments there as far as different drugs to help troops and everything in different hot spots throughout the world where Australian troops might go to. And I was the administrative officer there and all of my fellow officers there were all scientists and that, either entomologists or pharmacists, and I found that an interesting job. I did

four years there and we had monkeys, we had rats and rabbits and we had vets there, we had two army reserve vets, and a new unit in the army. It’s now up in Queensland now, they moved from Ingleburn, and as I said I did four years there. And then, keep going? Then I went up to, I got posted to the administrative officer at the first military hospital where I was the RSM

and I had the privilege of having my name as the president of the messing committee of the sergeants’ mess up there as the RSM, and then on the board I was also the PMC [President of the Mess Committee] of the officers’ mess. So that was something a bit unique and as I said, I became the administrative officer at the military hospital and one of my achievements there that I enjoyed was that towards the latter part there which was the end of ’84, ’94 sorry,

the new military hospital was being built over at Yeronga and I was involved in the planning of that during ’84 with the architects and the builders and everything like that. So I quite enjoyed that, going to the different conferences and that, and I left there in ’84, sorry, ’94, and got posted, my last posting was down to Randwick and the 2nd Division

where I was the SO2 health admin at the 2nd Division and I saw what, four or five years out down there and, four years, just over four years down there where as I said I was the staff officer and my highlights down there was that each year we would run an exercise up in the Northern Territory with the Aboriginal communities. Being health services I coordinated, only regular army

officers there, my other staff were army reserve doctors and dentist, and I had to coordinate all our medics and we had medics in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, to deploy them up to an Aboriginal community as selected by the Northern Territory Government Health Services to send these young medics into, to do well, health work for the community. Either

work with the local health workers there or in one case we set up a big field hospital and everything up there and did operations and that and managed to get onto the news and also on A Current Affair and that, and I did that, as I said, every year for four years and it was a very rewarding experience.

In February 1999 I had reached retirement age. In fact

I was just over retirement age by six months and I was asked to stay on for six months which I did, and yes, I retired up here to northern New South Wales and that’s about it.

38 Years, just over 38 years. 38 Years and one month.

Yes.

Exactly.

Yes, that’s fair to say.

I miss some aspects of it. I think the modern army was getting a bit too much. I mean the modern army was computers and the almighty dollar, you know. You had to stick to a budget and if you didn’t you got your wrist slapped and if you didn’t get enough money then you had to work within those constraints and sometimes

I felt it jeopardised different activities. So in a way I was happy to leave because all these constraints were coming in. I miss certain aspects of the army, obviously the comradeship. I miss the mess life of the army, the formal dinners and the other functions we had in the mess, and I miss some interesting things like, as I mentioned, the exercises we did in the Northern Territory, but I

think I’ve adjusted reasonably well to civilian life, except a few emotional problems I’ve had as we discussed earlier, but otherwise yeah. I try and keep myself busy and I think that’s the most important thing, but it’s nice not to have to worry about, as I said, trying to find a budget and work out a budget and trying to work within it. So yeah, I’ve adjusted I think.

Certainly better equipped, better trained, and yeah, I think they’re the two main things. Better trained and better equipped to what I was. In my days the thing that kicked everything along was Vietnam. Of course we were just basic, everything was basic, but then of course heaps of money and everything were poured into new equipment

then, and then once post-Vietnam I felt it dropped away again, but obviously governments now have realised that we need a modern well trained army and I think it can only been seen as in Iraq and Afghanistan as in no casualties, except one in Afghanistan of course, but I think that’s an achievement itself, that we’ve got through all that without at this point

any casualties. So yeah.

I think in a way they don’t look after the individual soldier, to be honest with you. I think they need to concentrate more on the soldier and make him part of a team if you like. You know, just,

I mean, I just think of it when I was in the army and I suppose it’s modern day as well. We stuck together a lot as private soldiers and corporals and everything like that, but the modern soldier seems to have his own thing now in that he clocks off at 4.00 o’clock and goes home to his family or whatever, whereas in my days, you know, after work we used to have a drink or get together or something like that, and that

comradeship seems to go out of it. You know, what I can gather, that I feel anyway, that the comradeship has gone out of it a lot.

Oh, very much so, but that’s society in general, isn’t it? No matter whether it’s private business or the army, and I think it’s a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with it. The girls do just as good a job in most

cases as the army guys. I don’t know about combat and everything. I draw the line at combat roles, and I know the policy is at present that’s what it is, and I wouldn’t like to see, I don’t think I’d like to see girls in combat. I know the Americans and that do it, but that’s the Americans, but certainly I think it’s a great thing that’s happened.

No, I don’t think so. I think that

they’ve got the one culture, the one training and whether you’re male or female you’ve got to abide by that or, sorry, you’ve got to come up to those standards or obviously you don’t get certain jobs. You know, if you want to be a pilot in the army then you’ve got to perform the same as a male pilot and there’s no compromise and that, and I think it should be that. Although you’re a woman you’ve still got to earn your stripes so to speak.

Yes, I think that’s a fair statement. I think they’ve got to toe the line with the government of the day and yeah, and if you’re outspoken then I think you’re treading in dangerous water. So yeah, I do, I think they’re politically aligned to whatever government, and they’ve got to be. They’ve got to toe the line.

Now? I think it’s certainly changed to straight after Vietnam. I still think there’s hang ups out in the community about what went on in Vietnam, mostly coming from I guess movies and that that don’t show the

nicer side of Vietnam, but I think now they’re tolerated. Even the RSL [Returned and Services League] people who at the beginning snubbed the Vietnam Vets, and I think that’s well documented, only the on the grounds that they didn’t think Vietnam was a war. You know, it was just a little skirmish and all that, although fellows lost their lives and everything. So I think that, but nowadays, yes, and I guess it might even come from the fact that the oldies are

getting too old now for, well they’re 80, some of them are in their 80s and they know that if us Vietnam fellows don’t carry on the tradition well the RSL can collapse, and I think that’s why they’re more coming across to us to be on our side now.

I haven’t personally, no. I haven’t. I must admit I must have been in good branches or whatever, but no, definitely not, no.

No, I haven’t, but I know in town here, even in town I’ve been told that five years ago there was a little bit of animosity towards the Vietnam Vets, but since I’ve been here, it’s probably before five years, but since I’ve been there they’ve encouraged me to join the sub-branch and I’m now vice-president of the sub-branch and they’re trying to encourage the other Vietnam Vets that are out there who perceive the local RSL people as being anti-Vietnam, but I can assure them, and I’m

trying to tell them that, that they’re not now. They might’ve been, I don’t know. I can’t account for them before, but certainly not now.

Yes, I think that’s a fair statement, yes. Yeah, because not only did I go there, yeah, but I’ve served out 38 years. So yeah, I’d agree with that statement, yeah.

Yes, yeah, for the opposite reason, because they’ve only done a short time and everything like that, yeah, but I can assure you now the RSLs are going out with open hands begging National Servicemen whether they’ve done overseas service or not, to please join the RSL because they can see that if they don’t get these people in the RSL will collapse.

It mended a lot of bridges. There were a lot of innuendos,

slinging off at Vietnam Vets, yeah, along those lines and I think as I said earlier, with the overwhelming crowds that were there in the street, through George Street, that I saw and the enthusiasm of it, of the crowds and everything, certainly wiped out of my mind any fact or animosity that I thought the people had, yeah.

So yeah. It was a wonderful relief I kid you not, after the parade and we all went away with our mates and had a drink and or whatever and felt, gee, that was good. It was almost like going to church and getting your sins, if you like, or you feel better when you, I feel better now, I’ve been to church, and it was almost a feeling like that to me anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

I feel the same thing. Everyone that I spoke to have said it’s the best thing that ever happened to us. It was almost the finalisation. In fact if I may say, since the welcome home, they thought that was good. It was well run, it was well received, etcetera, etcetera, but it’s inclined now to try and have all these

revisits again, and most of the guys I talk to now have said enough’s enough. You know, we don’t want any more reunions as far as mass reunions. I’m not talking about our unit reunions and everything which is good to get back to the guys, but we don’t want a 30 year post war big parade again and we don’t want that type of thing. I mean there’s been a couple of returns to Canberra, you know, unveiling the memorial

plaque and all this type of thing and a lot of the guys I’ve spoken to have said there’s no need for that. We had our wonderful welcome home parade in ’87 and that should be it now. All we do now is join in with all the old ex-Diggers in Anzac parade and if we want to commemorate the guys we lost and everything and remember the Vietnam War that’s the day it should be. No special above, the ex-Diggers don’t have it, the old Second World War fellows don’t have it, so why should we have any special one? We should just do it with them on

Anzac Day?

Well first of all I guess at the time I thought it was a good thing to do. I’ve had obviously second opinions now. It was a waste of time, and that’s the annoying thing about it. There were a lot of lives lost, not only by us but of course the allies as well,

and for something, nothing, it was a waste of time. Yeah, it’s a sad thing that happened, but that’s not to say the same thing’s not happening in Iraq now. At the time it seems good but, you know, in a few years time we, well even now we’re starting to wonder if it was a good thing to happen, and that’s how Iraq’s going like that now. People are thinking hey, was it a good thing to do. I must admit at the time I thought it was a good thing to do, go into Iraq,

but now I don’t know. I’ve got my doubts now, and the same as Vietnam. At the time I thought it was a good thing to do, but I certainly don’t think it was now because it was just a waste of lives for nothing, for nothing, and we didn’t make the place any better.

Great profession,

but they must remember if they want to serve their country they’ve got to take the consequences with it, which is perhaps fighting a war somewhere overseas. It’s a great lifestyle. I think it is and I think they should enjoy it, but they must remember if they join up like I did and thought it was one exciting holiday and career, and it has been in a way,

there’s always a black spot and of course in my case it was Vietnam, and they’ve got to be prepared that they might have to go through that.

The?

Yes, yeah, I’m immensely proud of what I’ve done and I’ve enjoyed it, and I think that’s only in the, that I’ve done 38 years. I mean I could’ve got out any time and I elected to stay on.

Although in the end I was probably, as I said earlier, happy to get out but maybe if they’d offer me another two years I would’ve maybe stayed in it. I don’t know but no, I certainly I enjoyed it. I haven’t regretted one day except of course some of the things that come up and caught up to me lately in the last five years, but basically if I could take them away, those bad elements away, I thoroughly the army

and the life, yeah.