Peter Conway
In June 1971 WOII Peter Conway, a member of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV), went on leave to Australia. Like many members of the Team, he travelled using the American system, flying Pan Am to Australia and back to Vietnam. Having had that experience Warrant Officer Conway decided to let other advisors know what to expect when their turn for leave came up.
The article provides an interesting glimpse into the procedures men had to follow before leaving Saigon and suggests something of the American experience as well as that of an Australian member of the AATTV.
Warrant Officer Conway recalled only ever having received two copies of The Adviser during his year in Vietnam. The magazine ceased production at the end of Australia's involvement in the war but the Queensland Branch of the AATTV Association continues to produce its successor, a national magazine titled The Advisor, edited since 2003 by Peter Conway.
George Logan
Warrant Officer Class II George Logan was a member of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam between 1969 and 1970. He had already served in Vietnam with the 7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (7RAR) during its first tour in 1967-68. In April 1970, during an operation in the vicinity of the A Shau Valley in South Vietnam's far north, Logan wrote this letter to his father revealing something of how he viewed the war and his part in it.
The letter was written over several days and addressed to Logan's father, a veteran of the Second World War with whom he had often spoken about his experiences of operations in Malaya and later Vietnam. By 1970 George and he agreed that letters addressed to both parents would be fairly innocuous while other letters, for his father only, would convey more of the reality of the war that George was experiencing.
Many years later, after his father's death, George's mother told him that the plan had failed. She had known all along of the subterfuge, and with the words 'You don't think I wouldn't make sure I saw all the letters my son sent from the war?' handed them back to George.
Ray Simpson
Within a matter of weeks in May 1969 two members of the Australian Army Team Vietnam (AATTV) performed acts of valour for which they received the Victoria Cross (VC), the final two of four VCs awarded to members of the AATTV. Warrant Officers Keith Payne and Ray Simpson were both serving in Kontum Province near the Laotian border in operations described in the dry language of the AATTV's monthly report as involving frequent 'contact with platoon to battalion size NVA forces'.
In several of these encounters, Simpson, a veteran of the Second World War, Korea, the Malayan Emergency and now on his third tour of Vietnam, repeatedly risked his life in a demonstration of leadership that he was extremely fortunate to survive. As the accompanying citations show, this was not the first time Simpson had behaved this way in a dangerous situation. Five years earlier he was seriously wounded but continued to lead his men through a violent action until a relief force arrived. For this he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. The citations for both of Simpson's awards are shown here.
Simpson's soldierly skills were born of decades of experience and a lifetime of reading military history. A complex man, he could be blunt and even rude but he has also been described in The Australian Dictionary of Biography as proud, moral and compassionate, without pretension and devoted to his wife, Shoko, a Japanese woman whom he met during the Korean War. Simpson died of cancer in Tokyo in October 1978.