Pre-Vietnam career
The job I had at the time as an apprentice, I hated. An opportunity came by to get out of that and join the RAAF, and I never looked back … 38 years, I did … lots of different jobs in that period, mainly centring around aircraft maintenance and flying and a couple of jobs there, went down to Support Command in Melbourne didn't go over very well. I was stuck in an office, as I literally say, counting nuts and bolts. I hated that and managed to get out of that and spent nearly four years in recruiting, which I found very enjoyable. But glad to get rid of that and back to the aircraft again. Did my recruit course, recruit training at Richmond in 1957 and from there down to Wagga where all the technical training takes place, you're there for nearly a year by the time you do the different courses, and over to Pearce in WA. I was working on Vampires, and we had a Dakota there. We did a bit of work on it, that was there for nearly two years and back to Wagga for more fitter course training and then up to Richmond on to 11 Squadron, Neptune's, which is, that was good, good unit, good flying there. I wasn't flying but it was a good aircraft to work on … they weren't originally fitted with just the two engines. Later on, before I got there, they were fitted with two jet engines C 34, E 34 jet engines because I guess they put, modified the aircraft over the years, they were pretty heavy, so to help them take off for that extra weight, but they were old, 1966 and I guess their time was up and the Air Force was buying those P-3s, the Orion aircraft, and at the same time they acquired the Caribou It was a little bit before that, they acquired the Caribous. Applied for loadmaster training on the Caribous, was successful, next, training at Richmond. Numerous courses, numerous exercises to New Guinea and whatever, and then eventually to Vietnam in December that year, 66.
Home pressures
The wife had it pretty hard, actually. She didn't drive and we were in married quarters in Windsor, but it's a fair way to the shop and no family there which meant she had to basically push two kids in a pram up to the shops and bring all the tucker home, or whatever, and it was pretty hard on her. And later on when we got back from Vietnam, I was kind of interested in going on to Hercs as a flight engineer and she said, “Well, ken without me.” She was not interested in that. So we abandoned that career path. It was very hard on her and there was a few occasions there that her mail was torn up. The unknown persons. I'd sent back some packages and they were smashed. So, yeah, it was not a good time for that, for her.
Vung Tau
I think it was a bit of a resort town, a French resort town it used to be, but there was no military activity there in the nighttime and you were pretty safe to go wandering around. Not that you had that much opportunity to do. We initially lived in the villa which was right in town, pretty basic old building, but it was good. The cooks there, they had a mobile kitchen and they did a tremendous job in the facilities that they had there, and the number of people that they used to feed. Some of the food was, they had etherised eggs took a bit of getting used to but, yeah, they did a pretty good job. Vung Tau wasn't too bad.
Flying Caribous
Everything starts early in the morning. Everybody wants to go flying at 8:00, which means the ground crew have got to go preflight the aircraft, have it all ready for you or for the crew and you'd get out there a half hour beforehand, do your own preflight, which was basically just doing a walk around, removing PA covers and all those sort of things, removing undercarriage pins and getting your aircraft ready. The pilots would follow shortly by doing their little bit of a walk around and then from the Wallaby flight line, we taxied around to Charlie ramp where you'd pick up your, usually passengers first thing in the morning. Air movements would give them to or load them onto the aircraft and normally we'd go out via Luscombe Field or Nui Dat which is only a 15, 20-minute flight and you'd drop them off or pick people up, the engines running, they didn't shut down and normally you'd go straight up to Tan Son Nhat then and depending on what run you're going to do, off load there and then we come under the control of the Americans, 405 mission you'd go north, 406 mission you'd go south. North was up to Nah Trang, Pleiku, II Corps area and six was down the Delta, down to Long Xuyen, An Chau, and those sort of places and you're usually there for about half an hour an hour loading, whatever, off you go for the rest of the day, landing, taking off, landing, taking off, carrying mail on those two missions, 405 and 406, American mail and Vietnamese mail. A little postman used to come with us. He was the only real Vietnamese contact we ever had, and they were pretty good. Most of them could speak English and they'd help you and there's one particular fella, Tan, I used to come across him quite a few times. He was quite friendly and, yeah, a good little fella, and on the 405 we used to have an aircraft up in Nah Trang on detachment, they'd go up for a week. So, I think it was, I get my days mixed up now, but you'd go up there Thursday and the aircraft that was there, you'd take over from them, you stay, Thursday, and then you work out of Nah Trang for the week. It was just the crew. We used to carry an extra groundie with us. Usually try and pick a friend but I was engines and so I'd try and pick an electrical, radio, or an instrument fellow to come with us because they could help service the aircraft, and then you'd be working for the Special Forces doing resupplying out to, I think they call them the A camps, they were little small fields out in the bundu. They were pretty interesting places, some of them quite small. One that comes to mind was Plei Me, that was 1100 foot long and there was not much room to spare there and that's where the little fellas in the black suits didn't like it much, and so they used to take pot shots at you. So, you'd come across about four or 5000 feet, and then you circle down to low, the pilots then orbit down to land. Invariably you'd get a cup of coffee there, they were all pretty happy to see you. So, you have a bit of a brew, then off you go to somewhere else. Long days up there working out of Nah Trang, usually airborne about seven in the morning. You get back somewhere of a nighttime, service your aircraft, refuel, whatever. You go and have a beer, and then bed. Sometimes get too many beers, but, yeah, it was pretty interesting up there on that detachment, and particularly when the weather was clagged in. It took a bit of some skill on behalf of the pilots to find them because there's a lot of big hills up there and there's other angry fellas and they're all dirt runways. Some of them are slippery and slidey. We're lucky we had some pretty good pilots … any things that you had, any hitches that you had during the day, there usually weren't too many, you'd write them up in the 500 which was the aircraft maintenance logbook and hand it over to the ground crew and they worked basically of a nighttime to get ready for tomorrow. When we were living in the villa, because it was about a 20-minute, half hour drive from the airfield back into town, usually the day people were all knocked off and they're having a beer and a game of darts, whatever. Sometimes you got some tucker or you got the pick of the tucker, but not too often, and when we moved out to the airfield, it must have been about, oh, July I think it was, there was a shortage of water and, of course, we wouldn't get back home until fairly late. For a while there, there was no showers. They had two 44-gallon drums of water. One was a wash and one was a rinse.
A faulty aircraft
One aircraft, I wasn't involved, up in a place called Dalat. The pilots, these good pilots, misjudged the taxiway and taxied into a ditch and snapped the undercarriage off. There's a major repair job and I think if it had been an American aircraft they would have just bulldozed it to the side, but our crowd, they sent a ground crew up to Dalat. They were there for a while fixing it up, but jerry rigged the undercarriage up and somebody flew it back to Vung Tau to start with, and they go it back serviceable, flying, and they were going down into that short airfield at Plei Me, that 1100 foot runway and they used to have 40 degree of flap which is a lot of flap to go in there for a landing, you didn't use 40 degree flap very often but this occasion they had it down and pretty late on finals they had it down and went into an uncontrollable turn to the right and they arrived, they were lucky to have survived,. There was something drastically wrong with the aircraft. They got it back and went back to Vung Tail and they tried rigging and all sorts of stuff and ended up there was something drastically wrong with the aircraft at full flap, but just uncontrollable. So, they ended up, well, I actually flew it back, with the crew, flew back to Australia sometime later. That was in 1969, I think, 68, I forget now, but, yeah, we flew a replacement aircraft back up there in 68 and I did some test flying on that aircraft before we headed home, and, fair enough, go up a few thousand feet and put 40 degree flap and then off she'd go, so we didn't use 40-degree flap coming home to Australia, but they put us on a reduced fuel load and we hopped all the way back down to Sydney again. Took us weeks … We went to Butterworth, Singapore, Jakarta, Surabaya, Denpasar, Timor, Darwin, Mount Isa, and one other place, Quirindi, and then went to Richmond. Yeah, lots of stops.
A crash landing in water
Normally we used to go straight from Ca Mau across, oh, a 25-minute flight across to the island, but this particular day, there was an airstrip up the other end, which we never used to go to, I'd never been to it before. We landed there and dropped something off and there was only about a 15-minute flight back down to An Thoi. It was just a short flight. We flew low level down the other side of the island looking for An Thoi which is only a PSP runway. It's only quite short. There's one way and we're looking for the airfield and as you come round the headland, there it is, and it's a case of gear down, flaps down and basically doing like an aircraft carrier type landing. I was in my seat doing my calculations to what we could take out of when we leave and take off from there and next thing was just, bang, we hit the water, yeah, it was a bit, I didn't know what to do for a minute. I guess I must have been a bit stunned or something, but I managed to get out of my seat and there's a bit of an air space there between that and the roof and we had 14 passengers on board plus our mail and whatever and first thought was, “I've got to get out of here.” and the other crewman, my offsider, Dutchy, Dutchy Van Kessel, he was down the back of the aircraft. He had tried to open the cargo door, but because of the water, it wouldn't release and there's an escape hatch on the rear starboard side, so I raced down there and pulled the handle, it fell out and away from the aircraft but most of the passengers were Vietnamese, most of them, and they didn't want to get out, they couldn't swim, but we encouraged them to get out, and I hopped out myself and I could see, the pilots were up the top, they got out the front and one of the passengers we had that day, I can't think of his name now. I think he was the 2IC of the Task Force come out to see how the Air Force operated. Lieutenant Colonel, somebody, anyway, we had a life raft in the aircraft but it was in still inside, so him and I went back into the aircraft to try and get the life raft out but on impact, it had inflated underneath the seats. So, that was a no go. So, we abandoned that and hopped back outside, there was still the thought of the aircraft sinking, was still in the mind … The door that I'd ejected, that was floating. So, there's some of us hanging on to that and the rest hanging on to the side of the fuselage, there's straight type of thing that runs down there and they were hanging on to that, on the back of the wing. It floated for quite some time before they blew it up, I believe, and we're there for about 20 minutes and, of course, the American Navy's at An Thoi and one of their gunboats come Scarpering across to give us a hand and the, oh, because the free board on these gunboats is fairly high and the sailor threw a rope over to me and I just didn't have the strength to hang onto the rope and so a sailor jumped overboard, tied a rope around me and then they pull me up and like, oh, Jesus, that hurt. That really, really hurt because I had some broken ribs or fractured ribs and, yeah, so they then took me over to the, they had a hospital ship, not a ship as such, it was a big barge. It was a hospital barge and they took me over to that, and one of the other passengers we had was a doctor from the Australian surgical team. I think his name is Dr. Hal Stanistry, he was a fairly well-known doctor in the Wangaratta area, and he stayed on board the hospital ship with me, looking after me, but I could remember him in the fairly late hours, he was trying to plead with one of the crewmen or the sailors on the ship, you know, because they don't drink grog, on American ships, “Surely you've got some medicinal alcohol I can have?” because he was pretty shaky too. So, he fixed me up. Had a few bits and pieces missing and the next day they flew another aircraft down and picked us all up and took us back to Vung Tau. The culmination of that was, because we had to go back to Ca Mau to refuel for the next stage and as we were, and I was sitting here and the two, my CO and the other copilot were sitting there opposite and as we were circling to go in to Ca Mau, there's a hell of a bang, and a tracer round come up through the floor, through the roof, frightened the hell out of me. I don't think anyone else was too impressed either but, yeah, so back to Vung tau, the 36 Evac Hospital there, Americans run that and were pretty good. I was there for, I can't remember, must have been two or three days and then they shipped me over to 4 RAAF at Butterworth. One of the problems I had there was that I had blood in the urine, so I used to go to hospital every day, take samples, and after a while they said, “You're right.” So, I spent about, oh, nearly a month over there. I was trying to get back to Vung Tau but just couldn't get an aeroplane back.
Ground fire and a fuel drop
Ground fire was a thing but never got any serious hits, we didn't anyway, but it was kind of like a badge, you weren't in the club until you got a few holes, but luckily for them, they always seemed to heat up the back … These special forces camps were out in the bundoo, the boondocks type of stuff and Charlie was, I'm guessing, pretty close by, looking for anything to shoot at or whatever. So, they'd come across four and a half, 5000 feet, establish communications, this is the pilot, they'd establish communications with the camp to establish that it's safe to come in. They would then throw smoke in the wind direction, and then you circle, as tight a circle as you could over the camp to land, and the same thing as when you left, you're empty, of course, but take off and circle out. Sometimes it wasn't always possible, in bad weather. One out of Pleiku, a lot of time we'd carry fuel, drums of fuel, Mo gas petrol and I had a groundie come with us to give us a hand, a bloke called Curly King, Red Tech, and we were going from Pleiku to a place called Plei Mrong. We had 15 drums of petrol on board, and still wasn't that far, so the pilot selected low level, of course, that was low level, a little fella takes a shot at you. Anyway we got there safe, dropped off our drums of petrol and went back to Pleiku, another load of 15 drums of petrol, back to Plei Mrong again, and this Curly King come up to me and he said, “Isn't this the same way we went last time?” He wasn't too keen to go back the same way again, but they never had a shot at us next time.
Innovative jungle bombing
Before 2 Squadron got up there, I can remember on one occasion there was a plot was to try and set the jungle on fire and drive the bad guys towards the army forces, out from the diggers. So, they mixed up, I'd say about ten drums of fuel on the back of the aircraft and the safety equipos, John, corporal, I can't remember his surname, he rigged up little parachutes onto smoke cannisters and under the top of the drums and the idea was, the 9 Squadron choppers when these things, when we dropped the drums of fuel out, I can't remember how we would have been, probably a couple of thousand feet, I can't remember now, but when the drums hit the slipstream, these little parachutes would pull the pin out of the smoke grenade or the smoke generators, so the choppers could see the drums and whatever, and shoot them with their machine guns. I don't know how successful it was. I don't think the jungle caught fire either, yeah, that was an interesting one.
Moving livestock
Out of Pleiku. Out of Nah Trang, we used to carry a lot of cattle up there, chooks or fowls. A lot of people had pigs, I never had any pigs, but there were a lot of cattle and they were always co-operative … they all had nose rings and you tied them to the seatbelts, and they all had a great affinity, they didn't have toilet paper and they all seemed to ruddy like do their business as soon as they got on the aeroplane, so there was crap everywhere. We'd get the fire trucks to come up through the bottom hatch and hose out, yeah, good job.
Entertainment
Jim Gussie and the ABC band and Lorrae Desmond, they put on a concert there. There was two camps, we had Vung Tau and the 9 Squadron fellas were at, I think their camp was called Ettamogah, I think, but they put on a big concert out there. It was pretty good. There were thousands of us out there, but that was about the only real entertainment. We used to get movies pretty often. Amongst the stuff we used to carry around in the mail, we used to take movies, you know, old movie reels out to the special forces camps but they invariably get delayed one day. So, we'd watch them before we'd take them back out again, so we always had a really good supply of movies.
