In the CMF
In 1962, when I was 17, I joined the 4th/19th Prince of Wales's Light Horse, out of North Carlton I think it was, and I was with them for two years as a trooper and they initially taught me to become a gunner in a Staghound armoured car which is a 13-ton thing on four wheels. And after that, they taught me to be a truck driver. And in the second year, I was taught to be a Ferret Scout Car driver then I had to leave the CMF because I was posted to Mansfield as a junior teacher.
I did most of the year at Mansfield and then, eventually, I got a one teacher school at Emu which is about 60 miles west of Bendigo and met a chap there who was part of the infantry platoon in Maryborough which was attached to Ballarat (2RVR). So there I go, again, and then I moved schools closer to Ballarat. So instead of going to Maryborough for night parades, I'd go to Ballarat. Two and a half years with them and then into the regular army.
Intense training at Scheyville
I joined the regular army with the hope of becoming an army pilot based on an advertisement in the paper. Okay? And I then got sent to Scheyville which was an officer training unit set up for the national service guys.
Usually a class of about a 116, of which maybe 10 would be potential aviators. And because we aviators were regular soldiers, but we did the six months there, very high failure rate, up to 40%, at Scheyville. And it was very intense infantry training because we had a lot of training to do after that, to learn to fly aeroplanes, and then helicopters.
So Scheyville was a very intense place. Very, very intense…it was the infantry type training, and we had to learn a lot in a very short time because this was the only chance the national service guys had of becoming a second lieutenant. And they went to various corps, not all infantry, but the training was infantry.
But if one of these chaps graduated from Scheyville and went to an infantry battalion he would've spent just about the whole year in Scheyville, six months in the bush, and next thing you know, bang, he's in Vietnam as a platoon commander, which is pretty serious going, so it was full on.
A flawed system
You could go on for hours about why we should have been there or we shouldn't have been there or all the rest of it but I think, subsequently, a lot of people died because we pulled out when we did. Possibly 5 million Cambodians to start with. The British stayed in Malaya for many years to combat communism, and they eventually did, and it just drifted away. And it would've taken us, at least, another 10 years to do the same in Vietnam.
But when you've got conscription, the way we had it, I mean, if you want to destroy nationalism that's how you do it. It's a dreadful way to do it. So, your marble comes out of a container and your number is on it and you get called up whether you like it or not. That's no way to do it. You should only have volunteers.
More training: Point Cook and Amberley
You had to get through Scheyville. And it was very intense infantry training. Once you graduated from there, I had to wait a little bit to get a flying course and that's why I got sent to Puckapunyal, to train recruits. And I finished Scheyville I think on the 10th of October 1968, and I didn't get my first flying course until I think it was Easter of '69.
I went to Point Cook and was trained there by air force and army pilots in the Winjeel airplane, all aspects of flying, the theory, day flying, visual flying, night flying, instrument flying, aerobatic flying, which was a hell of a shock to my system because I wasn't a really an aviator but I got through it. And they had a failure rate there too.
Nothing like Scheyville. And then, I had a little bit of a wait in Queensland, at Amberley, before the helicopter course, and then it was full on again. I think I did 131 hours in the Winjeel and, at Amberley, 146 hours in helicopters. And that was the Bell 47, the Sioux helicopter, which for people who don't know, if you ever watched the movie called, Skippy, the old bubble helicopter, one of those.
Getting one's wings
To start with, you had to do fixed wing. And now, that's all contracted out to the civilians to do the fixed wing side of it. It's the basic flying training. You have to get through that first. And in my day, you have to go to Point Cook. There were nine army pilots started there, I was on what they called, number two army course.
I think seven of us ended up with our wings, eventually. Number one army played up like mad. And I think only three of them got their wings. But then onto Amberley and the training was very intense. The military system doesn't care how much they've spent on you, if you don't meet the standard, they kick you out. It could be the first day, the last day, or anywhere in between. And one of my peers got kicked out in the last week of his helicopter flying.
Learning to hover
I tell people, once you're up and flying from A to B, it's a bit like an aeroplane, but learning to hover is a bit like learning to ice skate. You get up, you fall over. You get up, you fall over. You get up, oh, I've done a whole metre, and you fall over. It progresses like that. And before you know it, after quite a bit of time, you can actually hover.
So, you can get a fixed wing pilot, put him in a helicopter in an oval and he won't be able to keep it in the oval if he tries hovering. But you learn. Okay? And eventually you get to the point, you can go and put the skid on a post. So it's a skill that you learn.
Advanced flying
My training was such that, after the graduating, getting my wings, at Amberley, we did advance flying as well, to practice the skills and things we'd be doing, should we go to Vietnam. And then, I got sent a Puckapunyal on an exercise, supporting infantry. I got sent to Canungra, supporting one of the bat... I think 3RAR, for a couple of weeks. I also got sent to Townsville.
It was very soon after that I got sent to Canungra, to do the battle efficiency course, which everybody had to do below the rank of major, I think. And you went straight back to doing infantry stuff. And from there, bang, you're in Vietnam. And when I came back, I got sent to Holsworthy. And some of the time I got sent to Scheyville to help the fellows out there, with a Kiowa because in the latter part of Vietnam, I was endorsed on the Kiowa.
Arriving in Vietnam
I was at Oakey at that point in time, doing the training, not knowing, and next thing, I got a posting, I think it was a letter or something rather say, well, look, you're off to Vietnam on such and such a date. And I managed to organize to get my wife and, what did I have then?
Three kids, back to Melbourne, to stay close to her mother and before you know it, I'm on a flight to Vietnam…I was met Tan Son Nhut airport by one of the army pilots from Nui Dat, in a little, I think it was Cessna 180, that they flew and, the next thing, I'm at Nui Dat, it was a total blur…Nui Dat was well established by the time I got there.
In my last month, because we were starting to withdraw, we moved to Vung Tau. But other than that, I mean, I hardly ever got, I think I got out in the town in Vung Tau twice, just too busy…I still remember at Tan Son Nhut, wondering who's going to find me, and next thing I see this bloke with his blue beret approaching me, who was David Early, and he said, "Good day. Good to see you. Goodbye." He was home. And this other bloke, I think it was Bob Smith or somebody or other, who flew the airplane and took me to Nui Dat. And then, I proceeded to be indoctrinated for the next two weeks, which learning what to do there.
A quick adjustment
When you go into a war zone, you don't know who's going to shoot you, where, or when. It's a bit like walking through the Fitzroy Gardens on a dark Friday night thinking, “Oh, who's going to pop out from that tree?” And eventually just get numb to it, and you get on with the job. You get over that very quickly.
R & R
On those rare days, I've told you, I got involved in an adoption. So I'd get to Baria, or something like that, and twice I got to Saigon to do with the adoption, but they were rare days off. I'd hitch a ride on a Caribou, get there and come back. And so I only ever got into Vung Tau, which was one great big whorehouse I might add, on, I think, one or two nights, and spent most of the night keeping me out of trouble and the other bloke with me... they had R&C, which is, where people got a week, or a few days off, and they went down to that area.
I didn't get that. I got R&R and I came home very briefly…I was nine months and three weeks before I got to come home on R&R. And my wife didn't think I'd come back. For the last three months she thought... She was pretty close to being right too.
A dunny explosion
We had a little mess, which our guys had built, I think, and we even built a septic tank, septic toilet system. And prior to that, I'll divert in a quick little story. One of the officers there used to drop some sort of smoke grenade, incendiary grenade, down the toilet every so often to get the mosquitoes out so they wouldn't bite your bum.
Okay. And anyhow, we also had this medical type fellow, hygiene fellow, come around and he'd pour into it, a bit of range fuel. Now it wasn't quite petrol and it wasn't quite kerosene, this range fuel's peculiar stuff. They put it in there, and lo and behold, Bob Hills, captain, went up there with his little incendiary thing.
Only about 10 minutes after this guy left. Dropped it in, the dunny blew up. He nearly lost his hair, his face was red. So, funny things did happen. And we built a proper septic system soon after that.
Workdays
Well , every day could start mundane and change very rapidly. But, in any given week, we had three battalions there while I was there. So three army helicopters would leave the base every morning, and one each with the battalion. Okay. And the battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel, would use that for whatever he chose.
He might send us off with the artillery officer or the mortar platoon, someone on a recce prior to a patrol, whatever. Or we might sit there all day. Okay. And so, that left three little helicopters back in the base. And two of those would probably be doing visual reconnaissance work.
You'd be sent out twice in the day, to do your two-hour flight, studying an area of two kilometres by three kilometres, at treetop level, with the forward air controller, which was an Air Force fellow, in either a Bird Dog or a Cessna 337, flying at 1500 feet above you.
He would be plotting anything we saw. We're talking on the radio, I said, "Oh, I found a bunker here. I found this. I found that." He'd plot it on the map. And then, after the two hours, we'd come home, and write a report, which quite often was nil significant sighting. Other times you'd see things. And it was all part of the intelligence gathering. So you'd do the two flights in the day. And then you might play volleyball for a bit at the night.
The next day, you might be on what we used to call, a hash and trash day, which would mean you'd leave, pretty much at first light, in the morning, up early and off you go, to do a very low run up the main highway, north, south, and east, west. And when I say low, I'm talking five feet. Five feet. Because we are looking to see any disturbance on the road which might indicate that it's been tampered with, maybe mined or something like that. And that'd be the first task.
The second task was usually, to deliver the intelligence summaries and documentation things, to the outposts, which were usually manned by the, AATTV. These wonderful guys that were over there working with the villagers. And we'd usually drop these intsums in a sandbag with a weight in it, like a grenade, safe, might be in its container, and drop it into the compound or onto the veranda wherever. And once I dropped it into his water container and caused a stir.
After that, you might be sent off to work with the armoured personnel carriers, who occasionally got stuck in bamboo plantations, wild bamboo, and they couldn't find a way through it. And it stops everything. So we'd send the helicopter out there and you could always find a way from the air.
You'd simply find a way, hover, say, "Come towards the helicopter." They'd come there and we'd go another direction. And a funny story, a quick one for you, I was doing just that, and all of a sudden, one of the armoured personnel carriers came to a screaming halt. The back door flew open. All the blokes ran out the back of it and started tearing their clothes off. What the hell? And waving their fists at the helicopter.
While they were tripping along a nest of green ants dropped down the turret and was biting the hell out of them. So they weren't worried about bullets, they were worried about ants. That sort of thing happened… Occasionally I had to go out for the tanks, maybe delivering parts. Sometimes I might be sent out with the SAS to do a patrol in a long distance from the base. And occasionally a little medevac.
I did one with the SAS, one of the guys, a three-man patrol, recce patrol, one of them got bad conjunctivitis. So I got sent out there and they used a little UHF radio. So you'd fly out. We had a rough idea where they were, I'd given a grid reference, you fly high, go out there, make contact with them. They would throw a smoke grenade, we'd confirm what colour it was, then I'd drop down to treetop level, we're talking 10 feet above the trees, and I'd tactical low fly into the clearing, land.
Sit there and wait for a bit, and next thing, this guy would run out of the shrub, jump in, and we're gone. Because we were a long way for the normal Australian troops. And the next thing to contend with, he'd stink. God, the stink, because they go feral. They don't use anything out there. They were painted green and you take him home. On other occasions, on hash and trash, I got sent out with an American Marine captain, to direct ship fire for one of our Australian ships out to sea. We did that too.
Extra eyes
The only time we'd carry a passenger, was if they were directly involved with the task, for example, the mortar platoon commander, I had to take him out and he'd direct his mortars and so on, or artillery or recce a special one. But on the visual reconnaissance flights, there was a spare seat.
Should somebody have spare time and choose to go, we'd say, "Yup, you come along. However, you're stuck with us for two hours even if you're heaving your heart out." So there were times where we bombed the jungle with sick bags. So they were welcome to come. And my attitude was four eyes can see more than two. And so a lot of them got a ride with us.
A Centurion tank mine incident
One day I had to go up into the far northwest of the province. So there were armoured personnel carriers parked in a line and they've always got room to carry extra gear so you always get a cup of tea when you go to the armoured people. Well I'm having a cup of tea behind an armoured personnel carrier and next minute, this enormous explosion.
I thought, “Oh my god, what's that?” Had it been an armoured personnel carrier it would've put him into orbit but a Centurion tank happened to go up the same track and it's wider than an APC and it encountered the mine. Blew the track off the Centurion tank and there was a hole about nine foot deep in the dirt. So, you all have a bit of a laugh at the hole, but these things happen.
Colonel Grey
I have the utmost respect for these colonels, they were lieutenant colonels, who were the commanding officers of battalions, utmost respect. Their job was vital. I believe they knew every person in their battalion, by name, by sight. And I think they all felt the risk responsibility that, they were like a brotherhood, and they wanted to get them home alive. Okay? So you'd be flying these battalion commanders around.
It could be during an actual contact, where there's bullets flying, or you could be doing a reconnaissance with that commander or you might simply be taking him to one of the platoon or company locations. He might want to go and see a captain or a major or whatever and have a briefing about what they might want to do. And so, these guys were pretty special and I can talk about how they reacted under fire too.
Now, Colonel Grey, was a pretty special sort of a guy. Very hard-nosed, very, very strict, but a brilliant, brilliant leader. And you did what you were told with him. Okay. Now I was flying him, one day there, we're on the Long Hai mountains which had been bombed out, they were a haven for the Viet Cong, there's a lot of caves there and we were flying so low we could see the dimples on the ground made by the Ho Chi Minh sandals. And he knew what to look for. He studied the province. He knew things that, through the intelligence that he gathered.
A lucky escape
One night, one of the compounds attached to a village was attacked by Viet Cong. They had a name, I forget what they call them now, and then after the Viet Cong have done their attack they run, okay, they just bolt. Now it's dark. So we weren't too sure which way they'd gone. But I got sent out to do low level flying at night over the Long Hai mountains under flares.
Now, these flares were a big canister, tossed out of the back of a, in this case, it was out of the back of a Pilatus Porter. They were a million and a half candle power and they were suspended under a parachute, had about a four-metre diameter, okay? And it would float down and supposedly go all the way to the ground before the flare would extinguish and, unfortunately, there were a few duds, they were going out at a higher altitude.
Anyhow, so you'd be flying, I'm talking 50 feet above the mountains on a dark, moonless night working under flares [to] see if we can find any of these guys. They'd probably find us and shoot us if we had, but anyhow, it went dark a few times. Totally. Now, you've suddenly got to go from bright light onto instruments and fly on instruments to save the day. Well, this particular time that it went dark and ahead of me was a bit of a sparkle, which for a moment I thought was tracer bullets being fired at me, and I banked violently left and in a split second realised I was banking towards the mountain and I banked violently right, away from it. And I heard a thud. It was a bit like a ‘thump' and I thought, "Oh, what's that? Have I taken a round somewhere?"
There was no vibration in the helicopter. All the instruments were fine and I thought, "Well, I think I better, go back to base." which I did. It turns out, the sparkle I saw was not tracer, it was one of these dud flares burning out and I actually flicked the parachute off the main rotor system of the Sioux. So I shouldn't be here. It flicked off the main rotor blades and it tipped the tail rotor blades and bent a strike tab at 90 degrees and I'm still here to talk about it, which is nothing short of a miracle.
A successful ambush
The next morning I had to go out fairly early with Colonel Gray. I was allocated to his direct support pilot for 7RAR. He got me to fly me to Xuyen Moc which was, I think it was about 23Ks to the east of Nui Dat or thereabouts and what I hadn't known or didn't know till then, was that Colonel Grey with his knowledge, intelligence, figured that there's a good chance these guys would run all the way back to Xuyen Moc or near there somewhere.
So he got the armoured personnel carriers to set up an ambush. It was only probably about 3Ks out of Xuyen Moc. These people came into the ambush and the APCs killed the lot of them. So this job I had early this morning was to fly Colonel Grey out. I don't think anyone had come out to check the bodies yet. I can't be sure of that. But we flew very, very low and, in a line, there were 21 dead Viet Cong. It wiped them out.
And now, the gruesome part of that was, the troopers of the armoured personnel carriers obviously had the job of digging a big pit and burying these guys which would've been traumatic for these young fellows and in the weeks following I'd fly by there and have a look and, obviously, things happen. The pigs dug them up and ate them. That's what happens in a war zone like that. Anyhow, that was Colonel Grey.
Colonel Scott
Colonel Scott was quite a different fellow. I was with him in the, I think it was, the first day of the Overlord operation which, I think, claimed the lives of 12 guys over the next few days and he had tanks, he had armoured personnel carriers, he had infantry. I think there was an American complement there too, I just can't quite recall now.
Anyhow, we were dependent on re-transmitters, which means you transmit out on a frequency, the re-transmitter, located on a hill or somewhere or other, swaps it over to another frequency and sends it on. But with that, there was a tiny delay and when you've got a lot of call signs who could potentially use the radio, when you're on radio, you wait till there's no noise, nobody's talking, then you speak. But with re-trans there was a short delay and people would wait, not realising, and they'd talk.
They were talking too early and it blocked the whole system. So there was chaos and the armoured personnel carriers went up the wrong road and all the rest of it. Poor old Colonel Scott was just about turning his hair out or tearing it out and anyhow, between him and myself, we had two different radios in the helicopter, he'd be using one, he'd be giving me information, I'd be writing it up with a wax pencil, chinagraph pencil, on the bubble, on the perspex so I wouldn't forget it and I'd relay the information out on the other radio.
It took us about an hour to unravel it but we did and, by the time I got home, I was mentally, totally, exhausted but between the two of us, we got everything back on the rails. So, that was another job that we did. He was a bit of a character.
Colonel Church
Colonel Church, I flew him quite a few times. He was 2RAR. A different personality. The first time I recall working with him, it just so happened that about two days before I'd been doing a reconnaissance flight to the west of Nui Dat north of the Nui Thi Vai mountains, I think they called it and I found a big group of timber workers, timber cutters, just Vietnamese guys most of whom can't read.
Anyhow, it was supposedly a non-civil access area. Next thing you know, I'm flying Colonel Church out, he wanted to look at the area before he was going to have a bit of an operation out there and I said, "Well, sir, I better show you something." So I went and showed him. I said, "These guys, they're just doing what they normally do. They're out cutting their wood." And anyhow, he cancelled the operation.
So we saved quite a few lives there I believe. Another time with him, very sad time, right up in the northwest of the province he had one of his platoons, I think one of the companies was actually a Kiwi company that was part of 2RAR, and one of the platoons had been on ambush all through the night and they'd actually triggered the ambush. They'd killed, I think, two Viet Cong guys and obviously the Colonel heard that this was happening and he wanted to go out to there.
The ambush is over and the lieutenant, platoon commander, and one other private soldiers went forward to check out the bodies. They're about to do that. I'm flying to the area, I get roughly over the site, it's timbered a bit, I couldn't see them at that point and then, this horrendous explosion, “Oh God!” And next thing on the radio, I think it was the platoon sergeant said, "Sunray is dead." Now Sunray is the code word for the leader of the group. If he's the battalion commander he's Sunray, a platoon commander, he's Sunray for that group.
He's dead. And so, what had happened was, I mean, I'd gone over the top at about 40 knots. There wasn't a breath of wind from me and I didn't even quite know I was right in the area but during the small arms fire for the ambush, they'd fire the M60 machine gun and the SLR and probably the M16,and they had Claymore mines set up, they've got 500 ball bearings that fly out of them, and what happened was, the small arms fire set off a small grass fire, the small grass fire got to the det cord, detonation cord, which promptly set off the Claymore mine and killed the platoon commander. Totally tragic… And so those sad things happen. Now, Colonel Church handled it. He was okay.
Colonel Hughes
The last one I flew with was Colonel Hughes, the 4RAR. Different style of leadership. He was a born manager of men. Now, he wasn't the very, very strict disciplinarian but every bloke in his battalion knew if you're told to do something, he does it. He was still the boss but he was a very good manager of men and he really impressed me because when we got into the battle of Nui Le, I flew a lot that day, and I'll get on to that later if you want me to, but when he realised it was a significant battle he got me to fly him back to the command post.
Now where should a CO be when there's a big battle? In the command post, managing the battle, supporting his troops. He doesn't need to be out flying around his damn helicopter. He's got to get back there and make sure things are right. Not his deputy. He should be there and he did it and he's, in my estimation, he became top dog when he did that. And it was an extremely busy day.
The Battle of Nui Le
I got rostered on as direct support pilot for 4RAR on the 21st of September and I did a lot of reconnaissance work during the early part of the day and it obviously became apparent, from the tracks that I'd found, and others, and even the smell of wood cutting that one of the previous visual reconnaissance pilots smelled in previous days, that something was going on. Okay. And the tracks led from south to north from one of the villages, I think it was Binh Gia, we pronounced in the Aussie way.
So it was a well-used track. Anyhow, 4RAR were in there, in particular Gary McKay's platoon, and next thing you know there's a major contact and particularly Gary McKay's platoon, he lost four guys, he was shot himself and when you talk to Gary McKay, he describes the bullets as ‘withering fire'. Every time they pop their head up they were shot at.
So they had a major, major problem, and his platoon was running out of ammunition and so Colonel Hughes got me, by now I'm flying a Kiowa, to take one of his chaps out, I think his name was Corporal Neale, and load up the back of that helicopter with bags full of ammunition and grenades, as much as we could carry, and take it to Gary McKay's platoon. And Gary, in the meantime, had put up one of these little balloon things just above the canopy so I could find him.
So I went there and hovered while this other fellow dropped all this ammunition out and I think I did it three times and so it helped them but by the time I did the third run, obviously, it was getting very hectic because I had an American Cobra Gunship doing gun runs right beside me and he was firing an automatic grenade launcher and all I can hear is this hellish noise, boom, boom, boom, boom, and each one was a grenade. Later on there was artillery and all sorts of things.
So I got the ammunition there and then I was back to the base to do whatever they wanted and I got back to my base late at night. I'd flown 11 hours and 10 minutes. So if I get a bit emotional here, it happens because we had six guys killed that day and 30 wounded which is just tragic. And Gary McKay was shot twice and he was at Scheyville with me. I didn't know him well. I knew more of him but that's as close as I got to him and he went through Hell. And even the chap there that brought in the artillery, he had to be doing it from lying down almost.
Based on memory, he had from where he was...now, they'd walked through thick scrub, forest, jungle, and he somehow worked it out and brought in artillery in very close in prompt time and pretty well saved the day. They had, apparently Viet Cong were up trees shooting at them and all sorts of things. So it was a full-on battle. By the end of that day, I think, 4RAR organized for people down at Nui Dat to load magazines with ammunition.
According to Gary McKay, in that battle, we used 140,000 rounds of ammunition and yet when I got back to Australia, the RSL, some of them said, "Oh, it wasn't a real war." Anyhow, they got through it. Poor old Gary, couldn't get him out till the next morning and they got him to Vung Tau, I think, initially and then he got sent to Germany and got rebuilt and eventually he's back in Australia, still recovering.
It took a long time for him to come good… The battle went on for a bit. They sorted it out. Colonel Hughes did a marvellous job and that was the last major battle in Vietnam for the Australians. It was well north of the province, up near Courtenay Rubber, near the border and obviously the North Vietnamese who had been fairly scared to come into Phuoc Tuy province for quite a long time because every time they did we beat them up very badly and even right back to the battle of Coral.
That was not in Phuoc Tuy but they copped it there too and we lost 26 guys in that battle over two or three weeks. But obviously, by now, we were back to two battalions because we were withdrawing and 4RAR was, obviously Colonel Hughes had decided to set up, up north, just in case and just in case happened. Okay. So it was full on.
A Distinguished Flying Cross
21st of September 1971. And I didn't know I was going to get a Distinguished Flying Cross. I didn't know that. I was just doing my job and had another pilot been rostered to that battalion for that day, he'd get it. So I tell people, many of whom didn't even know I had it - we didn't even talk about these medals for a long, long time - I said, "It's a shared thing. Every one of my peers, whether he flew fixed wing or rotary wing, would've done his best. And the helicopter guys would've done the same as me”. Okay. So it, to me, reflects the unit and that unit, a very small unit, got 14 DFCs which is nothing short of outstanding. It's unbelievable. Two went to Kiwi guys on secondment and there you go. So I get emotional over that one because I just think of these young fellows, the last national serviceman who was killed at Nui Le, back in Australia, half the population didn't give a damn, and the next of kin were treated very poorly. And so there you go. I better not say anymore, or I might get cranky."
Totally worn out
I was totally worn out. When we withdrew to Vung Tau, it was a whole different scene. We were still leaving early in the morning. I was missing meals and I was getting back late and it was all very different. So you were lucky to get fed some of the time and I just wore out. I was glad to leave there. You're still jumpy. I suppose they had to sneak us back into Australia.
I come in a 707 into Mascot, Sydney, and you sort of sneak out because any protestors are going to give you a hard time and my wife met me there, she'd come up from Melbourne and we managed to get away from it. I think it was the next day, I had a reaction, some kid let off some crackers and I think I was on the concrete, instinctively.
Organising an adoption
Our third child was a little girl who was very sick and died, okay, when she was four and a half months old. While I was at Point Cook, learning to fly, she died. And so, we had our two sons. Anyhow, before I went to Vietnam we'd had our third son. Okay. He was born in Toowoomba.
And anyhow, but we still missed the fact that we'd lost a little daughter and between my wife and I, we decided, "Well, I wonder whether we could possibly adopt." If I'd known what I was in for I might not have gone ahead with it but it was very, very difficult. Anyhow, with letters to and from Lizzy - and I wrote her a letter every day I was away and the postman even and had a special whistle for her. I'd like to thank that guy, actually, whoever he is.
So anyhow, we decided I'd give it a go and so on one of my rare days off, I got a, still no idea what I was going to do, I got a ride in a Caribou aeroplane to Bien Hoa and I somehow met up with a couple of American military police guys and I said, "Look, I'm trying to see what I can do about adoption." They said, "Well, come with us, and we'll show you."
Well, they took me to this place where they had all these babes, and it would have you in tears, it was a large room, there would have to have been 20 kids in there, in cots. They were half Vietnamese, half American. Half Negro, half American. Half Latino, half American. They had boils. The whole place smelt of urine because there was one attendant and you'd have tears in your eyes, you just could not but have tears in your eyes.
And these are the leftovers, the waifs. And after seeing that, I was very intent on adopting a kid. Now, the Australian troops had, on rare days off, they had quite a connection to the Catholic school in Baria. There were nuns there and it was a place of where you could feel a little bit at ease and mix with kids. So, I mentioned to the senior nun there, sister Augustine, who spoke a little bit of English, that I'd like to adopt. And to cut the story short, she eventually got me a child.
They found this child in Vung Tau, dumped in the streets, probably a week old. My guess is that the mother or even both of the parents, if there were two, was watching from a distance and had placed the child in an area where they knew the nuns went past. And anyhow, I end up with this little girl. No name, no paperwork, probably no more than 10 days old and they kept her at Baria for me and when I got the rare day off I'd go and visit her but then I had to get through all this process of paperwork, which was horrendous.
Firstly, she had to have a name. She had to get a birth certificate. So two of the nuns went to the Baria courthouse and they gave her a name. They gave a Vietnamese name, Nuyen, which is like Smith, Thi which means she's a girl, Thu Hương, which means autumn fragrance and they added Mari Xian we call it Marie Jeanne. Okay. And, in Vietnam they always lose the last name.
So she was known as Xian and my name, I'm known as John, but it's really Michael John. Anyhow, I had to leave by the 1st of November. I had to get a presidential dispensation from the South Vietnamese president because I hadn't been married for 10 years and I had other children. So I didn't fit their rules. I had to get a lawyer bloke in Saigon to help me and it went through.
Bringing Marie Jeanne home
Eventually in May of 1972, Marie's passport turned up in the mail to me with her exit permit from Vietnam but I still didn't have an entry permit for her and fortunately I wasn't living in Victoria because the child welfare people here were dreadful. Anyhow, I got in touch with the authorities in the consulate, I think it was, in Sydney and they fast track things for me. They say, "Now, look, we'll have it ready for you.
You go to Vietnam, find the child and we'll have it ready for you before you come back." So off I went and I arrived there. Now, Tan Son Nhut, when I left Vietnam, was busier than Heathrow. When I got back there, you could drop a pin and hear it 50 metres away because all the Aussies had gone home apart from embassy staff and a lot of the Americans had gone home. So I got a taxi, I got wet as a shag because they had a monsoonal downpour before, just as I'm getting a taxi and I went to the only two places, or, firstly, Phu Mai hospital in Saigon. T
o describe it in simple terms, it was like big hangers full of people with every imaginable illness, injury, war wound you can... But there, there was a lady, Rosemary Taylor, an Australian lady who I think had been a nurse and somehow or other she was involved in looking after these orphans, trying to get them out to other countries and she got quite a number out. She could get six into Germany, America or France in the time she could get one into Australia.
That's how belligerent we were here. The White Australia policy. And anyhow, she wasn't there. So I've just gone in, I'm coming out thinking, "Shit, what do I do?" Now, I can't speak the Vietnamese. They only had a few words. It was sort of body language. I'm coming out their big gate and I'm about to merge into a busy crowd of people. Now, it'll be a bit like coming into a busy city street in Melbourne, the busiest, and merging into the crowd and I'm thinking, "God, what am I going to do? Do I catch a Vietnamese bus, to Vung Tau?" Very dangerous. "What the Hell am I going to do?"
And I'm just about to, someone grabbed me, "We've got your daughter at such and such a place." And I think, "Oh". It was like winning Tatts lotto 50 times over. Miraculous. That's all it can be. For the sake of maybe two seconds. And so, I got it. I was given the address. I went to this place. It was a three-story villa on the edge of the city of Saigon which was a Hell of a bustling place. I think there were about 5 million people there and I don't think there'd been a garbage run for five years. But anyhow, when I get there, I meet a lady who was an ex Mercy nun from Adelaide, named Margaret Moses.
She was looking after a small group of orphans whose adoptions had pretty well been finalised, waiting to go to whichever country and she looked after me. I went upstairs. Now, I hadn't seen Marie, as we call her, for 10 months or thereabouts. Here she was, she could sort of stand in the cot but she couldn't walk. She had some boils on her but she was okay, all right? And she was in good hands. It was about, then I realised, "Oh Hell, I've got to have an international health certificate to get her out of here" because that's how you had to travel.
A bit like you need something for COVID now and she hadn't had the smallpox vaccination or any of the others. So Margaret said, "Leave it to me". She made a phone call and apparently there was a volunteer Australian doctor working in Saigon and she said, "Go here to this address", in a taxi it was, "Go straight to the front of the queue" which got a lot of dirty looks, "He'll look after you".
I went in there, this doctor got the little girl, my daughter to be, and jab, jab, jab, whatever they did, wrote out the international health certificate and off I went hoping I could get out the next day which ultimately I did. But I get back to Margaret and then I thought, “Damn, you got to wait 14 days for the smallpox vaccination.” She said, “Give it to me”, and she made a little adjustment of the date and she let me stay there that night. I slept there that night, didn't get much sleep because I could hear howitzers going off on the perimeter of Saigon and I told her, I said, "For goodness sake, don't leave it too late.
You get your butt out of here." I said, "It's becoming very dangerous." And anyhow, next day, by about 11, I was on my way home. And I'll get back to Margaret. I didn't feel at ease until I got past the point of no return. And it was a 737, I got to Kuala Lumpur Airport. That was the first stop. I had to wait there and every time I sat down, Marie cried. Every time I stood up and I got a plastic bag with her gear in, kid under my arm, every time I stood up she was quiet. Every time I sat down, she cried. And she'd never seen glass windows in the airport. She's trying to put her finger through it.
Then eventually got to Singapore, and I thought, "Well, I've got to give this child a bath". Well, she'd never been in a bath. She'd just about crawled up the wall. This is in a hotel thing in Singapore and next day I'm on a flight out to Perth and the Singapore Airlines hosties treated me like a king, they really did. They gave me two seats and I arrived at Perth, I got the third degree there. I didn't quite understand what was going on but anyway, I caught a flight and off I went to Melbourne and it was there that I discovered that five other kids whose adoptions that had been approved out of Vietnam had been banned in Australia because of these horrible bureaucrats and somehow or other they'd smuggled these kids as far as Perth and had the media waiting.
That happened the day before I came in and had I known, maybe I wouldn't have had to go to Vietnam because Marie would've been the sixth one brought in. But anyhow, we got to Melbourne airport, taxi, straight to my in-law's place in Reservoir. And within a day we shot through. So we had no media, nothing. We just bolted and got to New South Wales, and I spent my, the rest, my time in the army there.
Now, back to Margaret, I learned later that, she stayed till the last minute and she got on that Galaxy 5A big aeroplane of the Americans which was loaded with about 90 orphans, it's a two-story airplane and it had failure, decompression failure of the back door. I think it blew out and it took some controls with it which meant they had this terrible crash landing that they eventually did and the bottom floor of this airplane, most of them got killed, including Margaret, which is just so sad. And, Rosemary Taylor stayed there. I think she went off that Free World Building in a helicopter, right at the last minute, and went back to look after orphans and so on in Thailand on the Cambodian border. She died a couple of years ago. So, if you're looking for a saint, there's two.
The RSL
I'm not in the RSL. I joined when I came back to Holsworthy and I went there and they had a very active RSL there, but I'm sitting in there, you might say the induction and the welcome, and most of the guys, this other bloke, "That wasn't a real war." He was quite anti and there were others like that so, well, I really don't belong here and so I've never been a member of the RSL since.
I've sort of had a bit of help here and there with them, I must admit and now that it's pretty well run by Vietnam veterans and other guys, since, there's a chance I might re-join but it sort of blew us out of the water and that's why you had the Vietnam veterans groups started up, they felt just abandoned. In fact, even now, I feel like I'm an Australian outcast and that's why guys have gone bush.
Post-war effects
I had a top cover bloke in the aeroplane. One of whom didn't come home. He got killed in action, too. Steve Scrivener. Loveliest fellow that ever walked the earth. He was a 24 year old American fellow who had been trained up in F16 fighters and now he got sent to Vietnam as a forward air controller. He was a beautiful man. Didn't come home.
His name's on the wall in Washington D.C. It's a very sad occurrence but a lot of guys got really screwed up about it and illnesses, psoriasis, eczema, some of the skin complaints. Alf Argent, Lieutenant-Colonel, aviator. I think he might have been right back to the Korean time as well, lovely fellow, major skin problems from the Agent Orange and we also had a lot of very, very toxic insecticide type stuff sprayed on us.
And it was done in particular, I was there in May of 71, they were spraying our base and this left blobs all over the helicopter. Now we subsequently learned that there was Dieldrin, Lindane, Chlordane, these various chemicals they were using, most of which are damn near banned in Australia. Really, really dangerous stuff and some bureaucrat had the hide to say recently, "Oh, no, it probably didn't do any harm".
Crap. I bet he wouldn't put his family out and let us spray them. It was Malathion and I think Dieldrin is over 260 times more dangerous than DDT. Dreadful stuff...Well, that was sprayed on us. And in fact, I think the blokes, well, whether they're in the base or out in the field they all got sprayed at some point. Anyhow, that was the after. I've been pretty healthy, I have had cancer.
The rate of prostate cancer was studied in the United States, on 50,000 Vietnam veterans. Discovered that the rate was double that of the national average. Here, there was a study done, it's greater but not to that extent. So I got lucky. I got diagnosed and I got the prostate removed. I'm fine. That was six years ago. So I got lucky.
Vital links in the chain
All these guys I served with and even those who were supporting us back here like my brother-in-law. He was an aircraft mechanic for the Aviation Corps. He was doing the e-services a total rebuild of the helicopters, the Bell 47, they'd come out of Vietnam, they'd go to Amberley, they'd work like mad on them and then they'd come back like a new helicopter.
So they weren't sent to Vietnam. They weren't allowed to go. They were too busy back here. Everyone that was involved had a job and I don't care if he was the bloke feeding us, cleaning us, bloody sweeping the floor. It's another link in the chain.
