Rough sailing
We were in the middle of the ship, slept in hammocks. I remember for some reason the toilets must've broken down and we had to go right up into the pointy end of it, and oh, they were hanging out of their beds spewing and there was water lashing up around your feet in the dunnies and it was, geez it was up and down. So being in the middle, we got none of that.
Musicians and medics
The colonel, Peter Scott, wanted a pipe band. Keeping in mind, 3 Battalion at that point was 80-something percent National Servicemen. It was the first almost top heavy battalion they'd sent over. So what he did, and I can almost assume, that when you put your papers in here in Melbourne, you're a musician, that's where you were going to end up. And he'd brought a couple of professional pipers into the military, and I remember one guy had come from Canada, and Des Ross from South Australia, who's still piping. And he came in as what they call a pipe sergeant.
Anyway I find myself in a pipe band, never played drums in a pipe band in my life. But I enjoyed it. But of course, and I'm surmising what they latched onto, was the stretcher-bearer thing from the First World War, and they termed us as stretcher-bearers. But all of us got trained as medics, and probably reasonably intensive training, but only for what we were going to encounter. One of the strange aspects was we were trained in childbirth. You would wonder why, going to war.
So yeah, anyway, and all the National Service medics in the Third Battalion bar the few regs were musicians. Well, you're thinking why? Yeah. Well , we've wondered why, the musicians. And we've often asked the question when we've got together over the years, and I think it was the last episode of Spicks and Specks which Karen and I watched, and Richard Gill's on it. And he makes a statement at the end, he said, "In my opinion, every secondary school student should do music as a compulsory subject." And I'm waiting, and one of them said "Why?" and he said, "Because musicians use both sides of their brain at the same time and they are incredible listeners."
And of course you do. If you're reading a chart, you're playing and you're listening. And one of the things they teach you being a medic was when you get to your wounded bloody soldier, get them talking. A, to find out where they're hurting, but to prevent shock setting in. So the major thing you treated first up was the shock because it would be the shock more often that would kill them. And as soon as he said that, I thought "Geez, you don't realize you've got that skill."
And we met Richard in France probably, might be six or seven years ago now, in a maze of all things. And we were talking to him and I mentioned that, and he said, "I'm amazed the army knew that at the time, that musicians had that skill." So you were the infantry soldier in a contact, you then had to become the medic, and then you had to get to your patient and get them talking as quick as possible. So you're under the pressure of a contact, but you're listening like anything.
First impressions
I suppose you were taking it all in. I can remember, I think was Baria, the town we went through, and there was a big brick building there and someone said it was a picture theatre once, I think two story. It was like you saw out of the cities in Europe. Shot up and bombed.
And I've only recently read that there was a big offensive there that the Viet Cong used as a stronghold and the Americans went in. So that was possibly the aftermath. So you're sort of aware, I don't think any of us were really aware of what we're in for.
They possibly... I'm trying to think now whether they purposefully did it, but we were given the impression... I certainly had the impression they were just farmers...we were going to come up against and it was far from that.
So whether they did that here to sort of cool us down a bit...That was my thinking and I can assure you most of the other guys were the same.
Baria family business
But I can remember going into a laundry in Baria, and it was this bloody bombed-out joint that I mentioned earlier. Why we were there I couldn't even tell you, but I was talking to a young girl my age. She spoke perfect English.
And I asked her, and she was educated in Sydney, and I remember saying to her, "Why are you back here?" and she said, "I grew up with this. It was going on when I was born and my parents run the laundry."
And that's always intrigued me. The family business. But she spoke better English than what I spoke.
Acclimatizing and officers
Look, we probably all shaped each other once you got over there, once you knew it was for real. As I said, they... I forgot how many days we spent in the wire, as we call it, when we arrived. Might've been three or four when you got shown the latest booby traps. Acclimatizing they'd call it, you'd acclimatize.
And we got put outside the wire as a battalion, and there was no enemy activity for, I think 15 miles was the bloody distance they had. So we slept up, and I remember waking up, it was just like a thousand Guy Fawkes nights, it was bloody on. And I probably got a couple of little bits of luck at the expense of others because I was the medic with John Wheeler's platoon in D company, and not long before we went I got swapped into B company, and Bray Finlay took my place in D company. And they got hit, they had the claymores turned around on them.
Johnny Wheeler, who was a reg louie, he got blown to pieces. I think one of the other guys got killed, John Salisman, Salisman I think his name was. So they copped the brunt of that, which I was to the offside of that. John Wheeler was, to me, one of the, how can I put it, the more civil reg officers. Just probably because of his personality. He was a very bloody open and friendly guy. I suppose he had an impact on me as the first person that was not fully regimented.
But you do learn, a lot of the other guys were like that. And what you don't realise at the time was that these louies that are with us, they're the same age as us. While we were doing our professional training, they were learning to be soldiers, but they'd never been in a war, so they were as green as us and yet they've got that massive responsibility. Years down the track you reflect on that.
In the field
Well you harboured up through the night. I suppose we moved around the choppers, probably seems more than we were, so I guess a company would go into an area, the louie would get given the job. If you count the company headquarters there would've been five platoons because they were a fairly big group that moved.
I suppose you got given a sector to patrol or set an ambush up in. I don't know whether we covered a lot of ground some days or... I had 120 pound on my back and I was the medic so I hate to think what the guys carrying the M60s had on. I think they were 26 pounds the M60s. They seemed to have an endless supply of ammo belts wrapped around them. Their number twos carried a load of ammo and they had a spare barrel for the M60, and you had your riflemen that carried link for the M60s, and that was by three.
I think we carried five days of rations, might've been four but I think five. Most of what we had on us was I would say food and water. You might've had a spare pair of socks, perhaps. Ammo, of course. I'm trying to think now whether I had two grenades, I think I carried two smoke grenades, which all the other guys would've carried. Medical kit wasn't that heavy. Trying to think what else. Well, that was probably it.
Psychological warfare
Normally your packs come over your back and there was a strap come across the front and you pull like, I would say a ripcord. So then you could just throw your shoulders back. It was that heavy you couldn't stand up. We walked around bent over the whole time, you couldn't stand upright or you'd go over. But the moment you pulled that and you straightened up, it was off in a flash.
Your webbing was on you, so my... I can't remember how the medical kit was attached to me, but it was with me all the time. So again, you had your pouches full of ammo, you had water, had your two grenades, your smoke grenades.
So you'd drop your pack, you'd hit the deck, you'd roll, because if they had you in their sights if you drop they've got you, but if you drop and roll, which we were trained to do... But you very rarely saw them. Shooting would start but you rarely saw them. They just blended into that jungle. And I think, again what I remember being told, that they were working on morally wrecking us.
Shooting would start, you might have someone hit, you might not, but you'd still been in a contact so you knew they were there. You rarely saw them if you did. So again, they were playing on you. And you knew if there was one shot you'd think “Have they got the bloody tailender?”.
And we got told that as well, they'll work on knocking one of you off so they rattle the rest of you. So it was constantly... I suppose day by day you're getting put into another, I don't know how you describe it, another zone of bloody mental unbalance perhaps. Although you were functioning within that, you were still that killing machine and you functioned.
The wearing down
Every step you take. Is there going to be a mine there? Are there booby traps? which they were renowned for, the booby traps, the bunker systems. Are you going to walk into the triangular bunker system and get caught in it? So you were constantly... you become hypervigilant I think, and just anything, reacted on anything. Which I think in the end probably did mentally wear us down.
Vung Tau leave We went down there for two nights. You'd get choppered back in, shower up because you hadn't had a shower for six weeks. The piss would just fly like fountains, and a big eat up, and then truck down to Vung Tau the next day. I think we were there for two nights, and then back the third. And there certainly wasn't any piss-up the night before we went back out, and you had to go down the helipad onto the choppers and back out. Going back
Being a music junkie, I bought a load of stuff at the American PX which was up the top of the airstrip at Nui Dat. And I had that much of it, I thought I'm going to have to come home on the five days to start shipping some of this home. Probably most interesting out of that, that I've said to Karen over the years is that I came home and Tullamarine wasn't operating when I went but we'd landed in Tullamarine.
They met me, the family and now my present wife. And I spent the five days, went back got on the plane, flew back up to Nui Dat and back out into the jungle, and I've said to Karen over the years, "You'd wonder why I went back," and she said, "But that was normal to you, back here wasn't." And that makes sense… I got the bit of gear, I knew I had a load to bring home on the initial trip. Yeah, I didn't hesitate, so probably it was, as much as I hate to admit it, it probably was normal.
Bureaucratic cynicism
I remember we went out the last day, but you had to be medically fit before they would discharge you. And I had, probably through tick bites, little peas under my skin everywhere, really hard, calloused, and they'd be itchy.
And I can remember getting sent to a specialist and he burnt them out, cauterised them out. And it meant nothing to me at the time, but I can always remember this. But I call him an a-hole now because he was a bloody a-hole, but he said to me, "Don't think you're going to get a pension because of this."
Well I didn't know what a bloody pension was or any of that. But I've never forgotten that, him saying that, because I thought at the time, "Why would you say that? You knew nothing about that stuff.” But he was just, again, he had to make a point of that.
Attitudes toward the Vietnamese
I remember one of the things I picked up on in the police force very early, that they liked to think, in my day, which was a different police force, that they had that mateship and that. And I used to think “You bastards wouldn't know what it was”.
So there's a difference between working shifts with guys and then not seeing them for... well, the small stations which I worked on in the hills for the first 12 years you were constantly working with the guys, but the bigger ones you might not.But it was a different feeling to every step you took, you're relying on that guy and he was relying... Excuse me, relying o n you. So that I picked up.
And I can remember when Malcolm Fraser started to bring in the Vietnamese refugees. I'll generalise in saying this, but at least 50 or 60 per cent of the coppers I worked with hated them.
And I used to say to them, "You've never met any." I had met a few, and they were really... well the girls in the bars, they were fantastic company. And I'd say, "You've never met them." And I said, "I was bloody fighting them to stay alive, " and I said, "I've got no animosity against them, and yet you buggers that have never spoken to one in your life, you've got this massive hate campaign against them." And that used to intrigue me.
Agent Orange
We carried a lot of water, a heck of a lot of water. I think we sometimes got water drops from the choppers, other times from the creeks. And we had a pill I think, a tablet we put in the water. Yeah, I can remember at one stage them telling us not to eat any of the seafood if we went through the villages, like I suppose prawns.
And of course you learn later on it's the Agent Orange. And I can remember them saying the prawns, I guess again, came to the surface to breathe, so that would be where the... But we weren't aware of Agent Orange. We were aware of getting sprayed. Again, it wasn't until you got back and some years later when that started to come in the media all the time, or the vets talking about it.
Nightmares and flashbacks
I, like the rest of them, suffered the nightmares and the flashbacks for decades. The nightmares I don't know might've lasted 10, 15 years. Flashbacks were totally constant, were all the time. Yeah. Karen would say I'd be thrashing around in bed.
One of the most reoccurring ones, and I was conscious of it, was there'd be a knock on the door and the MPs would be there, and I'd say, "What do you bastards want?" And they'd say, "You've got to come back with us," and I'd say, "I've done my two years," and they'd say, "No, you were short of a month, you've got to come back." And I had that for... so the fear of going back I suppose was... but I'd say mainly the flashbacks, they've only been gone in the last, I don't know four, five years.
If I go out on a limb, five years. But I can be talking to you guys having a beer here or anywhere, and suddenly for no reason you'd flash. And you hear that from most of the guys. It'd just come back like it was yesterday. Not even a trigger, no. It would just come back, you wouldn't need a trigger.
