Joining the Navy
I was born in Levin, New Zealand in 1944 and had just started going to school in Hamilton, which is where we lived in 1950, when one evening my parents said to me, "We’re off to Australia". And that did not suit little Maxwell at all. I was not a happy lad but in any event we went. To be honest, I don't know the reasons why we came to Australia. I think the family was well enough off in New Zealand but be that as it may, we came to Australia, landed in Brisbane.
I did my early schooling in and around Brisbane, a couple of state schools, one of which doesn't even exist anymore now but anyway, a couple of schools in central Brisbane area and then out to Kallangur and Peachtree for my transition to high school. I was a founding student of the Redcliffe State High School. I think that was 1955-ish and then we moved out to a little town called Esk, near the Lockyer Valley, and I just loved that place, it was brilliant. It was country personified but in any event, that was the end of my initial period of high school and then I finished the last two years off down in Ipswich at which point I got my scholarship and matriculated but I didn't have any work to go to.
I was with a friend picking potatoes as an interim thing, wondering who, if anyone, was going to offer me a job and one day I saw an advertisement in the Courier Mail saying the Navy's after observers. Now I had no idea what an observer was but it sounded as though it was related to flying and it was going to be a job if I was lucky enough to get it.
Told my mate about it, we both applied, and a couple of weeks later he and I and maybe 70 odd other people were lined up at some spot in Brisbane and each day as we went through the interviewing process, fewer and fewer people were coming back for the next day's interviews until at the end of the week, my mate and I were the last two standing and all of a sudden I was a recruit into the Navy as a midshipman, the lowest of the officer ranks you can get and all of a sudden I was down in HMAS Cerberus, only a few miles from here, into an environment which is hard to even imagine now.
It was so privileged it wasn't funny, so privileged, but it was the beginning that the Navy had, it was the way they did things back then and so we commenced our training. Now, to be an observer, one becomes a navigator in an aeroplane and you fly, you fly over odd places, and you got to be able to get the airplane back at the end of the mission. The first nine months Cerberus had absolutely nothing to do with that. It was running. It was jumping. It was swimming. It was sailing boats, tipping them over and picking them up, getting them upright again and how to be gentleman officers.
At the end of that nine months we were then posted to Malta in the middle of the Mediterranean to the observer school run by the Royal Navy and it was their training which actually prepared us for the flying of the Navy's, our Navy's new anti-submarine helicopters, which was the reason for the ad in the Courier Mail way back then.
So, by the end of 1962 we, as a group, there was seven of us actually joined up in that first group back at, not back at Cerberus, back at Nowra. The cradle of the fleet era as the next part of our careers evolved to fly the Navy's new Wessex anti-submarine helicopter. So, that got me into the flying game … I was an Air Force Cadet for a few years at the Ipswich State High. Not sure that that was the influence in getting me into the Navy, though, I think my dad had been a World War Two fighter pilot in the New Zealand Air Force, I think that might have been the stronger influence.
Anti-submarine training at Nowra
Sixty-two, I'm back at Nowra and we do our anti-submarine training in these aircraft 725 Squadron and mid, sorry, end of sixty-two, we're back at Nowra. The middle of '63 we finished our basic training and we then posted to 817 Squadron, which was the front-line squadron, going to HMAS Melbourne on the aircraft carrier as supposedly qualified observers, basically sitting in the back of the aircraft with a sonar operator tracking or looking for and tracking submarines …
There was a crew of two up the front of the aeroplane doing that work, and myself and the sonar operator down the back, doing the anti-submarine work and we were telling the pilots where we wanted them to take us so that we could track the submarine and at the end of the day, if it was a shooting match, we'd launched torpedoes and all that sort of stuff … Did my first cruise into the SEATO, Southeast Asian Treaty Organization area up around Singapore and Hong Kong and those places. That was '63.
The Melbourne/Voyager collision
We were ready to go on board HMAS Melbourne, embark on HMAS Melbourne on the 11th of February '64. On the 10th of February 1964, Melbourne and Voyager collided. We were at a barbecue in town getting ready to go on board the ship the next day. Frantic calls for all us helicopter people to get back to the base, has been a terrible accident and all the rest of it.
We had no idea, none at all until we got there. All the lights on all the runways, all the hangars were open and people were running around all over the place. Myself and all of those in 817 Squadron, because we were the only helicopter people there able to do the job, flew out to the scene of the accident doing our best to rescue people, which we didn't do, by the way, I think there was one person who was ever picked up by a helicopter and then flew through the night the next day and on and on it went.
It was a terrible time … I could not get over the fact that a ship had gone down and 87 people were killed and this is peacetime and I'm 18 or 19.
The purchase of Wessex helicopters
The Navy had had helicopters for a long time and since the '50s, Sycamores basically, which did the rescue work for airplanes that might have fallen over the side of the aircraft carrier, that was basically what they were for. In ’59, the Navy, the government decided it was actually going to scrap the aircraft carriers.
In 1960 they changed their mind, because of the communist submarine threat around the world and that was the reason for buying the Wessex helicopters and my reason for joining the Navy, basically. That ad would never have been put into the Courier Mail had the Navy not decided to be rejuvenated and all that.
5 – Becoming a pilot
Vietnam couldn't have been further from my knowledge or comprehension, really. We knew it was on, we knew what was happening. There was a government in Vietnam, South Vietnam, that was in trouble and people were trying to help them but as far as that was going to affect me, no, no chance.
Let me just jump very quickly to my next phase of an observer, which was being sent to fly with the Sea Venom people and doing air to air intercepts. Incredibly dangerous work and it was in that time that I decided, "Well, look, if I'm gonna get killed, I'd rather do it myself", or at least be it my fault. And so I put my hand up to be a pilot and was eventually accepted and in 1967 I did a pilot's course, still not expecting to have anything to do with helicopters as it turned out but that's another story.
I did go to helicopters, even though I was first and second in all of the subjects during the flying training. I was sent to helicopters and my best friend was sent to fly the new Skyhawks that the Navy was buying, which is what I really thought I was going to do as well but that didn't happen.
So I'm back into helicopters now sitting in the front seat of the Wessex helicopter that I'd been in the back seat sometime before and in June 1968 one of the pilots in the second group of people who were going to Vietnam killed himself, sorry, got killed in a helicopter accident. I remember the day someone said, "Oh, you're off to Vietnam" and I said, "No, no, I'm not". A then guess what? A couple of hours later, I'm up to the commander is office to be told I’m off to Vietnam.
135th Assault Helicopter Company
A number of our people did go to Vietnam to fly with 9 Squadron in Vietnam. Navy on its own, though, had been talking to the Americans in Washington and saying, "Well, look, we've got a hell of a lot more people we could probably let you have. Why not?" And so the answer then came back and said, "Right, we've got a number of assault helicopter companies going to Vietnam, if you can give us a number of pilots and maintainers you'll be more than welcome".
The deal was struck, and in October 1967, the 135th Assault Helicopter Company, itself absolutely brand new. Brand new pilots, brand new aeroplanes, brand new maintainers, arrived at Vung Tau from America and a week later, 48 Australians arrive - eight pilots, eight air crew. There's your 16 air crew, and 30 or 40 odd maintainers.
That was the first contingent of the Helicopter Flight Vietnam. So they went to Vung Tau in October 1967 and almost immediately, we're in the thick of the war. A year later, the second group arrived with me as one of their pilots. That's how I got to Vietnam.
135 AHC’s structure
The only thing that we took to Vietnam were our bodies and uniforms and we, and the amazing thing was that for the first contingent, their commanding officer, sight unseen of any of the Australians said, "Right, when they get here, I will give the executive officer’s job to the leader of the Australians". And that person and all subsequent leaders of subsequent Aussie groups, was the XO of the company with full command when the CO, the American CO, went away on leave.
Our Aussie XO took command of the assault helicopter company and the likes of myself, as a pilot, and others like me became platoon leaders and when I became a platoon leader, I had 10 aircraft under my command, and all the Warrant Officer pilots, 40 of them, and all of the crew chiefs and gunners, another 40 And there was another platoon of the same type. And there was another platoon of gunships. Eight of them were much the same type and there were Aussies all over the place.
Now, none of us when we got to Vietnam had any experience whatsoever, no flying, sorry, we’d plenty of flying experience, no combat experience and so even though I was a lieutenant and reasonably soon yeah, I flew with a warrant officer as a pilot, who did have the experience as his copilot for the first two or 300 hours flying, and after I'd done that I was eligible to be an aircraft captain, which I became.
Most of us did, I think all of us did become aircraft captains and we then took command of an individual aeroplane with a copilot and could have been another Aussie or a warrant officer, American, but always with an American crew chief, who was basically the maintainer of the airplane, first line oils, filters, cleanliness, that sort of stuff and the other person was a gunner, who looked after the machine guns.
We always flew as a crew of four in case, sorry, always with two pilots for a start, in case one of us was shot, always with two people in the back because we had to be able to defend ourselves with the M 60s. Our normal operations were as a group of 15 aircraft. The main one was the air mission commander who would go off and pick up the commander of the troops who, that we were going to be playing with on that particular day.
The flight leader would take off quarter of an hour later because we were empty and faster, getting to wherever we had to get to, would then follow and pick up the troops that the air mission commander had said, "There’s your troops, pick them up at that spot" and off you go to the next or the first landing zone of the day, and we would then have two gunships in company with us.
We rarely, if ever, went into a landing zone without gunship company. If we couldn't get gunship company, we would be always able to whistle up the Air Force from somewhere, almost be like a taxi rank and say, "We’ve got trouble at such and such a point. Come and drop some bombs here".
Air Mission Commanders
Thirty-one aircraft. Two platoons of 10 aircraft each. Twenty, therefore, of slicks. The slick was the H model lift ship, lift aircraft. Slick. American term because there was nothing inside it, just room for the troops to sit. That's a slick. A gunship was one of the C model Hueys, the shorter version but full of rockets, mini guns and, again, the same crew, two pilots, a crew chief, a gunner, two M 60s. Pretty good firepower, actually. Pretty good firepower.
Sometimes not enough. So that, oh, sorry, so 20 slicks, eight gunships, is 28 and three more. One was the mission commander’s aeroplane. One was a spare and the last one to make 31 was in the maintenance platoon, which the maintainers used to come out to us in the field when we got shot down and repair us if they could, and they did frequently, by the way, no questions.
More often, though, used going around the country scrounging spare parts because at one stage in our company we were down to 17 aircraft and we still had to, and did, provide the 15 every day, which was demanded of our missions. Ten slicks, 10 people in each equals 100. A hundred people in an American army company and the same number in a Vietnamese company, they are modelled on the American thing and so when we landed, we could pick up a company and stick them on the ground.
It was a unit. What's the right word? An effective unit, wasn't broken up into platoons and that sort of stuff. You had a company of guys on the ground. Three lifts, you had a battalion, three more lifts, you had two battalions … we took 15 every day, commander and four gunships and 10 slicks … there were three air mission commanders in an assault helicopter company.
By the way, there are about 60 odd helicopter companies in Vietnam but our company had three air mission commanders, the CO, the XO, and the ops officer, just three people, and they would fly one in three. After I'd finished being platoon leader, I became the ops officer.
So the CO, the Aussie XO, and myself, and now air mission commander and we three flew that role with the, the other ten aircraft, the slicks, being told where to go, but my job was to direct where the troops, talking to the battalion commander in the back of my aeroplane now, telling him where the troops will, sorry, discussing where the troops should go. Usually, he would say, "I want them there" and there wasn't much discussion and most of the time we agreed.
Origins of the EMU call sign
The first, the EMU thing, which was our callsign derived from us being an experimental military unit with the American Army and the Australian Navy, that bit was simple but when we did get to Vietnam, when the guys got to Vietnam for the first time and realized, when they were told that, when the Americans were told that the bird couldn't fly, everyone was a little bit miffed and, you know, we might have made a mistake here but, in fact, we, you know, we explained, "Well, it's a fairly aggressive bird. So that'll work" and it did and the EMU bit stuck.
Everyone was amazed. They knew us as emus, "Oh, yeah, there's the Aussies and the Americans working together". We were known, there's no question of that. We had a motto that derived from something I said, after a very long day’s flying. We used to take off, our base was sort of east of Saigon by 30 or 40 miles, it had been somewhere else closer to Nui Dat but we needed to be closer to Saigon because that's where the action was happening and we need to be able to quickly, more quickly react, but most of the time we spent off down in the Delta, flights of anything up to half an hour or an hour just to get to our operating area.
I'm not sure whether it's useful to tell you how big Vietnam is but South Vietnam or the, even the Delta area is, but it's tiny, it's tiny. It would be about twice the size of the ACT, maybe three times at the most, is the Delta area and it's dead flat. No single part of it was any more than five or 10 feet above sea level. Dead flat. When it rained, it was so wet, you couldn't take anything anywhere except in a helicopter but we operated in these areas frequently.
The main route into South Vietnam was from the Cambodian border on the western side of the country into the Mekong Delta area, and then they spread out from there and on this particular day, we are operating on the Cambodian border and had shifted something like 1300 troops away from a particularly nasty spot, or hadn't actually completed it, we did at the end of the day, we'd got to about 1100 of the troops out and it was getting blacker, and blacker and blacker as the sun went down and the battalion commander was getting very worried about whether we'd actually be able to get all his troops out in one hit because if we didn't, 100 or who would be left behind were going to be terribly vulnerable because it was on one of the routes that had been overrun on a number of occasions.
We didn't he didn't want it to happen again. So, anyway, I get called up, you know, I extend to finish the job and because we're all tired and all the rest of it, and I certainly was, my response was, "Oh, we'll get the bloody job done". It was just a throwaway line but a couple of days later a congratulatory signal came from these guys saying, "Oh, a wonderful job and love your motto" and that's how it is, that's how it is today.
Australian and American operational differences
There is no question that the Americans when they're in a fight will go into it and stay in it and that was probably, that is probably the biggest difference between the Australian operating principle and theirs. They would go straight into the fight and just loved having helicopters. They'd take them in, didn't matter how many got shot down, they’d just bring more in to fill the gap.
Australian Army couldn't handle that and their preference is to go in quietly and engage the enemy that way and to be able to move out if you need to. That's not an American tactic. So, with us in American aircraft, as a mission commander, I never had many options other than to obey what the battalion commander in the back of my aeroplane was telling me.
As a flight leader, I didn't have many options other than to be told where to go and to do it smartly and you got, I know, it's easy to say now, you got used to it, you just did it. The biggest issue was being able to keep the guys behind you, and there was a period in in my time and it probably happened in the others, that, "These bloody Australian foreigners are telling us Americans how to fight our war".
It wasn't a fight between America and Australia, it was more a cultural difference between the very young warrant officers coming out of flight school in America with this proper nationalistic pride in America and so forth, coming to a foreign country to do good for America and then being told by a foreigner how they should actually do it and most of, and a lot of it they didn't like.
And it got exemplified in this business of keeping the flight together in a hot landing zone. No one liked doing it. If you went into the landing zone, and it got hot when you got there, which was frequently the case, that's okay, drop the troops off and get the hell out as quick as you can but it's a very different thing to know that it's hot.
Having been in and having to go back in again, it's a very different thing to be able to say, "You nine guys behind me are coming along whether you like it or not". Case in point, on one landing zone, it wasn't one that I was involved in, 10 aircraft went in with a South Vietnamese company on board, a hundred troops. Six aircraft was shot down in that first landing.
The four aircraft that were able to fly away did so and came back five or 10 minutes later with 40 troops on board and dropped them off. In those two lifts there were 125 casualties out of 140 troops. That takes some measure of courage to be able to do that. That Vietnamese battalion didn't recover from that for months but within the next day and the day after, our guys were doing the same thing with another group of people somewhere else and we got out.
It's hard to say you got used to it, but we did. We didn't have any other options anyway. In Australia, I would have flown as a helicopter pilot had I continued with my Wessex thing instead of going to Vietnam, I might have flown 300 hours in my Wessex helicopter if I'd been lucky. All of us in Vietnam, Americans and Australians flew at least 1200 hours, some 1400 and a couple of guys got up to 1700 hours flying.
That's a phenomenal rate of flying … we were regularly flying 140, 250 hours a month. It is, it is, and getting shot down. I mean we, it's easy to say, "Oh, yeah, we got shut down." I got shot down twice but that wasn't the most, one of our guys, Tom Supple got downed four times. An American was down three times before his 21st birthday. We decided he'd better, he'd had enough and we made him the store's officer list. At least he survived the war.
A rescue mission
On the first occasion it was eight hits up in the engine area and when bullets hit things that rotate or need to rotate, something generally goes wrong and you go down. With Vietnam being so flat and where we were, it was mostly open, the landings options were plenty, as long as it wasn't back into hot landings but on this particular occasion, it was all right and down I went and I got picked up and we're gonna go take it home … we looked after our own.
There's the thing. Anyone in our company who went down, any troop on the ground who was killed or injured would be medivaced or evacuated by us. We did our own work all the time. We certainly went and looked after our own crews. I was involved in one rescue one day where I had been the flight leader. Well, I still was the flight leader, I'd gone into a hot landing zone and one of the ways of getting out was just turn about face and go out the way we'd come in rather than driving into more unfriendly fire.
So we did that and all of a sudden, I'm Tail End Charlie, had a new leader. That was okay, we'd done the process before and off we went and one of our gunships got shot down and it's Tail End Charlie's job to go and pick them up, which is the easiest person to dispatch. So I did, off I went. It was almost a funny day.
I could see where the aircraft was because it was on fire. I had a brand-new American gunner with me, myself, the co-pilot and the crew chief were old hands we' done this a lot but the gunner was brand new and he'd been briefed, but we hadn't been doing any shooting and the gunners and the crew chiefs were able to shoot if they could identify where the fire was coming from, they could shoot back without me saying, "Yes you may or you may not".
The command-and-control pilot’s up above us saying, "I can see where the aircraft is and it's here, there" and I can only see three heads and there’s four in the crew and he’s jabbering away to me and I'm trying to give instructions to the crew and all of a sudden we start receiving some fairly serious fire and then, on the right hand side sitting beside, behind me says, "Sir, sir. We are taking fire What do I do? What do I do?" and he kept on, "What do we do, what do I do?" I'm trying to tell him, "Just shut up and do something. Let me fly". Anyway, we got away with it. The fourth head popped up out of the grass and away we went.
Chicken plates and vulnerability to enemy fire
It was your armour plate. We sat in a reasonably armoured seat not much bigger than this actually. A little bit under your backside, a little bit up to your back at shoulder height and a tiny little bit on the inside. So, if this is the outside of the aeroplane, I had, in fact quite a large plate which would slide forward to about this spot but you were very vulnerable for the rest of you and the chicken plate was just body armour that fitted right there. Why was it the chicken plate? I think you were chicken if you [put it on], that was it, and then we had a flak vest over that.
A bullet with a low calibre round, it would take a 7.62 round, wouldn't take much heavier. It would break the plate and probably kill, whatever happened underneath, and the flak vest to stop the flak over the top but we were really terribly vulnerable out the front ... Our first casualty Pat Vickers, Lieutenant Commander Patrick Vickers was killed in a surprisingly safe area of flight.
We used to say that at 1500 feet, you were safe from small arms. The bullet that killed Pat didn't know that but really, it was down close, most of the time the tactic was to wait until the troops had just about or are actually getting out of the aircraft, at which point everybody is vulnerable and with rockets and RPGs, RPGs are almost a weapon of choice for the North Vietnamese in these places. It doesn't take much to take a helicopter out and if you've got the helicopter down, then you've got the crew to have to be rescued somehow or other, the Army is committed there for the day, we are committed to rescuing those guys.
Eagle Flight
Reconnaissance wasn't a big word in Vietnam because there wasn't much reconnaissance. I mean, we had reconnaissance helicopters, and they'd be all over the place with generals and brigadiers and the rest of it looking at things, that's reconnaissance, I suppose. Our Australian Army had reconnaissance helicopters, all right, but that was all they could do was just reconnaissance and maybe the battalion commander would go up when the Aussies were on a patrol somewhere and look at it from above, to see what was going on but it wasn't a command-and-control function that we, the Americans had worked out incredibly well.
They had the H, or the D, Ds or H models, 9 Squadron and H model Iroquois and they use them pretty much as any American helicopter company would. Subtle difference, if I might, what we're seeing is that it's just come to mind, the American or, sorry, the Australian Department of the Air Regulations, orders for 9 Squadron were that they were to go into relatively secure landing zones which suited everybody when things were quiet.
No, you don't have aircraft losses if you can't replace and you don't have people getting hurt, who again, you can't replace, which is why it suited the Australian Army, drop them off before you get into a hot area, walk the troops forward, go into contact and withdraw as you may need to. American tactics, "Let's get straight into it boys" and they did.
We used to do a thing called Eagle flight and we had, normally went around with 10 aircraft, we'd break them into two groups of five, full of American troops, and we'd land one there and one there. Nothing happened. Don't let the troops jump out. That one goes over there and all of a sudden, these guys are in contact.
They jump out of the aircraft and you bring the other lot over to support them, it was called eagle flight. It was a crazy situation because generally, when they got into trouble, so did the other group over here, and there was a real fight on. Dangerous work, dangerous. It was hard. It was always better to have 10 aircraft than five, let me put it that way.
Aircraft maintenance
As a crew of four, when we came home, we always cleaned the aeroplane down. We did the engine filter cleans and we, if there was any blood and gore around, we wash the aeroplane out. We'd wash it out anyway, it was a muddy, messy environment at the best of times with or without the blood.
At that point, we would hand the airplane over to the maintainers. There was a maintenance platoon quite separate. I forget the number of the maintenance platoon but was part of the 135th but I think it was the 191st Maintenance detachment. Not sure the number, doesn't matter. They were so closely aligned with us. They were all EMU people, just they were maintainers that was it.
They did the maintenance now when every day when we started our flying, we went down at the aircraft at about 4.30 in the morning and from that point on until we came back, and we never came back until the day was done and we'd been released from whatever it was. So I flew close to 14 hours one day, and you add 14 on to six o'clock when we would take off, you're getting back fairly late in the day, at which point the maintainers can have your aeroplane and do all the routine stuff and they did wonders because they had to work at night.
There were virtually no clean facilities. They work in the open in the rain. There were a couple of tent igloo arrangements where they could do some fancy stuff with instruments and engines but most of it was done out in the open. These guys did wonders with the aeroplanes. This is where our Australians really came to the fore because, ignoring the aircrew side of it, the rest of our contingents, 30 odd people were very senior and well qualified.
We had chief petty officers who at that time in the Navy had to have been, to become a chief, you had to have been in the Navy for probably approaching minimum of 15 years and probably 20. So, these are old guys as well and with a world of experience in all sorts of maintenance, and the Australians maintained everything. If you were an aircraft mechanic, you had a hand in just about every aspect of anything that went on with the airframe.
Engine guys are a little bit more tightly funnelled into the just the engine stuff, but they'd have a great hand in electrics and all that sort of stuff. The Americans because of the vast through put of numbers, would train a person for a very specific job. He might be an armourer, and he would only push rockets into tubes and fill magazines up with rounds of ammo.
An airframe mechanic might be divided into half a dozen sub jobs, someone might be very good on tail rotors, someone might be very good at riveting patches for bullet holes, that sort of thing whereas our guys could do it all. And the thing that came to the fore was that we were able to do so much work in house that ordinarily would have had the aeroplane sent away to a bigger repair facility.
It meant that we were able to keep our own aircraft, do dodgy repairs, or sufficiently repair them so that they'd be available the next day rather than having it come back a week later and so we had more aircraft online available to us all the time. So our Australian maintenance people, well, all of them from the Chiefs all the way down to the leading hands were brilliant at this because they really were.
They called us lifers, the Americans called us lifers, as in a life sentence. We didn't mind, that's exactly what we were, we were lifers. Once they'd done their three years conscription, a year in America, getting training, have something be it as a mechanic or a pilot, a year in Vietnam, and a year back home, passing on a bit of knowledge, that was it, they were over but we were still there. We were only in Vietnam for the year, but we were in the Navy for much, much longer periods.
Blackhorse and Bear Cat bases
When the 135th got to Vietnam in October '67, they were based actually in Vung Tau, the port area, and it took about three months of a lot of hard work by a lot of people but, again, led by Australians, in this case, by Petty Officer O’Brien Cedric Ignatius Phillips, better known as 'Darky’.
To this day, no disrespect, he was just dark skinned but everybody knew him as 'Darky’. Darky Phillips and a couple of Aussies and a big team of Americans actually set up the Black Horse base for us because assault helicopter companies were independent operators and operating the farm town one day was fine, but as the boss said, "You're going to have to go up here to a new your base you will go and you'll go under your own steam and, oh, by the way, you will maintain your operation capability at the same time".
The load on the guys was very, very high and so there was a lot of work done in setting up Black Horse. Black Horse was home to the 11th Armored Cavalry, George Patton’s son, that General George Patton son, who was a colonel at the time, it was his base and it had been carved out of an old French rubber plantation and there was a bit of an airstrip there and there were a few dusty spots where our company, the 135th and another one, the 240th Assault Helicopter Company were lodged.
In the dry, it was a dust bowl and when a helicopter came in to land, it basically just whited the place out, you couldn't see anything for dust and in the wet season, as you walked across the ground you grew because you picked up more and more mud and it was dreadful because we lived in tents, on old rocket boxes, stretchers and stuff on rocket boxes and our own man-made, handmade little bunkers outside.
Black Horse was a mess and the interesting thing is we got sent back there on a number of occasions when the next place we went to, which was Bear Cat, was being rocketed and bombed and all the rest of it. So, out of the frying pan into the fire. The reason for the base changes though not from Vung Tau to Black Horse but from Black Horse, which by the way was, is, was about 30 kilometres north of the Australians at Nui Dat.
So, we did some work with the Aussies, I did four lifts in my whole time with them but the longer we were with the Americans, the longer the 135th was in company in country, the further and further we got removed from the Aussies and as the RAAF got their act together, they were able to look after them without us anyway.
So we went to Bear Cat. Bear Cat was the Thai base, the Thai Army base and there were about 10,000 of them there and we kept well away from them. It became drug central. In about the middle of 1968, about the same time that drugs became a serious problem in the US and the US military. The distinction I hope, it came in America and it wasn't a Vietnam thing.
It was basically an American continental thing as much as it happened in Vietnam as well but being on the Thai base, was not fun just having to be careful that you didn't get into any cross-cultural difficulties with them because they were so aggressive about getting drugs into Vietnam and to the Americans, it was basically a form of currency which they could then take home and become richer for having been involved in the trade. Difficult place. We did very few operations with them.
I don't recall ever doing one operation with the Thais. Good soldiers, you sure as hell wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of them but wasn't a good place to be but it was, as a base, it was much more convenient convivial, less mud. Still got wet, still rained the still flooded our bunker which we built at great expense but at least we were slightly better accommodated, no tents, we had a two-storey building in which we could live, where the officers lived.
The enlisted people had their own two storey buildings, not quite as, we had privacy. I had a cabin with which I shared with an Australian friend of mine whereas the enlisted just basically had open barracks areas, but at least it was under a tin roof and relatively dry and relatively comfortable.
A growing drug problem
Until the end of my year, which was end of 1969, whilst the drug problem was growing, it hadn't, I don't believe and I think from talking to other guys in the third and the fourth contingents, the 1970 and 71 groups that went to Vietnam from of our people, I don't think the drugs ever infiltrated into the officer level, Warrant Officers up, okay, but from the enlisted down, yes, it was a problem, there's no question of that. We got involved, all of us got involved in what do you call them? Drugs raids or locker searchers would be the polite name for it, but two or three o'clock in the morning, it'd be like the officers would be woken up, okay, at that time.
You go down to the enlisted stores, you block the entrances and exits, couple of guys would go inside, lights on, lockers open. Dangerous work because on one night, lights on, lockers open, search starts, all of a sudden the lights go off and there's a mighty bang and leading seaman Ian Shepherd, one of our guys, cops an M16 round.
He is so lucky to be alive. An M16 round hitting anybody, anywhere, would just about take whatever it hits off you but this one just glanced his left, I think its his left arm, took out a huge hunk of his arm but at least he lived through it and went on. Bob Ray and myself, the guy that I actually bunked with in Vietnam spent the rest of the night interrogating two African Americans trying to work out which of the pair had actually fired the round, we knew it was one of them. It was all about drugs.
HMAS Cerberus: A gentlemen’s club
1962, Cerberus was the most amazing of establishments, people lived on board, unless you were married, and most people weren't married. Cerberus had a population of probably 3000 people. The officer group would have been 200, 300 people and we midshipmen, and as I say, callow youths and all the rest of it.
My uniforms, every single one of them, were tailor made for me and the six other of our seven in the group had exactly the same experience. And I came away, as I said to you, and I started off picking spuds, when I saw this advertisement. Well, my fingernails were a lot cleaner and I had nice leather calf gloves, thank you, and a scarf as part of my uniform.
I would arrive for breakfast, but the only thing I had to serve myself was whether I wanted cornflakes or not. The rest of the time it was, "Would Sir like two eggs?" and "How would you like them done?" Lunchtime was white linen, evening meal with view formalities to go on before it was black tie, bow tie, fancy frilly shirt, waistcoat, jacket, trousers, very shiny shoes, pumps, table service, right down to the, being served. My bed was made in the morning.
A steward or stewardess would come and say, "Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?" "Thank you very much. I'll have orange juice today please". It was a very privileged operation. We were taught how to use a knife and fork. Most of us didn't know anyway. It really was a gentleman's club par excellence. It rebounded a little on the Navy, I think, in a number of instances where professionalism actually was lacking over a bit of time in that period.
I think people were living off the bonuses of having come from the British side of the world with, and most of the Navy people actually fought in the British Navy. A lot of RAN ships, a lot of them were commanded by British officers and at the end of the war, I think everyone after the war, that war, people relaxed a bit too much. So whilst it was an amazingly privileged lifestyle and, really, I don't know that it did any harm to us just because we had it, it at least gave us an opportunity to see how both sides can live and hopefully live together.
Casualties and VC recommendations
I mentioned Pat Vickers, who was the first to be killed in February ’68, whilst I'm at Nowra, by the way, quite oblivious to everything but, I do recall going to his funeral service or memorial service and the whole base turned out. It really rammed itself home to me in August 1968 when I'm well and truly booted and spurred to go to Vietnam with the second group when we had our second and third casualties, deaths.
Another lieutenant Tony Casadio and Petty Officer Phillips who I mentioned as the guy who set up the Blackhorse base, they were killed. This was only a couple of weeks before we would go to Vietnam. That really rattled it home because Judy and I, for example, have only been married a few months and here am I off to Vietnam.
Anyway, so Tony Casadio and Petty Officer Phillips are the second and third to be killed. Third of January, a dreadful day in anyone's count. It was raining, the cloud was down pretty well on the ground in Vietnam and Tony Huelin took off in his aircraft for a support job, basically going hither and thither around the country, and I took off in my aircraft, going to another place to do exactly the same job.
I decided I'd climb up through the cloud, get up on top of this and then head off South and find a hole to go down at the other end. Tony decided he would go low level and that was his mistake. He ran into power lines only 10 minutes after take-off. Killed all four on his, all four on his aircraft were killed including himself.
That's number four and now I can come to Noel Shipp. On this particular day, Noel, by the way, and I had actually flown together a few times, but I flew the slicks mostly. I did a bit of gunship work but not much. Noel did a little bit of slick time and that's probably when I flew with him or he with me and then he went off to the gunships and stayed there.
The date, the date, the date, 31st of May 1969 and the slicks and the gunships go off to a very difficult landing zone, it's already hot and the South Vietnamese troops on the ground are having a bit of a hard time and they started shooting at us. They're, sorry, I wasn't there, they started shooting at the aircraft coming in.
Be that as it may, the gunships were just off a bit to one side with Mike Phillips and Steve Martin in the front seat and Noel Phillips on, sorry, Noel Shipp, on the right-hand side in the back, spotted some enemy on the ground. Gunship rolled in for an attack and Noel was last seen actually standing outside of the aircraft, as was common by the way in the gunships, with his one foot on the skirt and the other on the rocket tubes with his machine gun trying to knock off the enemy.
At some point in that attack, it's a bit hard to know, no one knows exactly what happened. It's assumed that the captain of the aircraft Mike Phillips was hit but the copilot wasn't and we don't know why he wasn't able to take over. It doesn't matter, they didn't and the aircraft just crashed into the ground and Noel was seen firing all the way to the ground and must have known what his fate was but he sure as heck continued to keep firing.
The aircraft hit the ground and pretty well just erupted into flame and out of the mess, literally out of this mess, Steve Martin walked out of the aeroplane. Now ordinarily you’ve got to unbuckle, get out the side door and then you can, Steve was just seen to walk out and the poor bugger was pretty well on fire.
The other gunship, the gun and another gunship was behind them, was pretty well full of rockets and as a result was incredibly heavy. Gunships couldn't hover. When a helicopter takes off normally, it hovers and then moves into forward flight. The gunships, and our use of them, we filled them with fuel, fill them with munitions, and their method of taking off was to bounce along the ground and eventually they get up enough speed and they'd be able to get into the air.
Bob Anders, in his gunship, landed anyway and tried to pick Steve Martin up, got him on board but couldn't get off the ground and they were getting into trouble by being shot at themselves and although he was doing his best to fire off a few rockets and things it just wasn't working and so the command-and-control aircraft was able to land and pick Martin up and take him to the nearest hospital, which wasn't all that far away, but he was then transferred to, the serious burns unit in Saigon later that evening, very quickly, but later that evening he died without saying another word.
So, back to now, incredibly brave, no question of that. That was 1969 and it took until 2011, might have been 2010 but '11 when the inquiries report came out. Anyway, Navy didn't have a VC went up until recently. There were in 2011, thirteen names put forward as potential VC candidates. Noel Shipp was one of them but the likes of Simpson and his donkey from Gallipoli, Stoker with his submarine in the Dardanelles, and a number of other people in World War Two and on.
I mentioned Simpson and Stoker only because they were British, and could never been awarded an Australian Victoria Cross. I don't know why they were on the list anyway but be that as it may, they were there. The other name of the 12 other than Noel’s, that was on the list, was Teddy Sheean and he definitely, and ultimately did, get posthumous VC, very rightly so, I would have to say.
I appeared at the tribunal and although I knew Noel, knowing a bit about what's required for a VC, could not really support Noel’s, the contention that Noel should be awarded a VC. Move forward a year or two, Sheean didn't get his VC recognition then, by the way.
When I went and spoke about Noel to the commissioners, anyway, the people who are running the inquiry, I put forward two other names for them out of our group. I might come to them in a moment, keeping it with Noel, it took until 2012 for Navy to decide that one of the recruit schools at Cerberus should be renamed in his honour and it so happened, for which I am in 100 per cent agreement.
I was there for the inaugural graduation parade of that particular first class of ship division in 2013 and I've been to practically every other one since and each week before they graduate, I go and talk to the class about what it was like to be in Vietnam and how Noel showed all of the requirements, bravery and so on, that the recruit school is now trying to instil into you people, which is why I do the talk. So that's Noel. Teddy Sheean we know has got his VC, right and proper. I think that's absolutely right and proper.
Visitors, reportage and home
I certainly recall, a lot of people who did fly with me. The command-and-control ship was the easiest one for journalists and visitors, generally, to fly in. More or less up and out of the way. 2000 feet was a good place to be when it's getting a bit hot on the ground and so it was a good place to bring out the admiral or general and senator and all the rest of it who did come in their droves to visit us but there were any number of people who did fly in the aircraft that were going into the landing zones, and a few people did that with me as well.
There's a lot of war memorial film around where you can see that that's happened … I think it was taking the message home. It was a bit triumphalist though. Brian Clark did one for the ABC and I do remember him being there because I remember an interview that took place while some medevacs were going on.
That one is stuck in my mind … the note in that particular series that went to air back here is that, you know, we're winning the war and it's all wonderful. It was far from that, it was far from that and I don't think the tone changed in journalism. I was there at the time when it was changing but I don't recall that it actually changed.
There was unrest. Our mail wasn't getting through to us because the postal people back here decided that it just wasn't right and so our mail would get blocked, which was our only form of contact. No smartphones, no computers, no telephones way back then, the only telephone was back in Saigon at the embassy. No one was able to use that. So a letter, you know, takes a couple of weeks to get from here to home or, well, from Vietnam to home and back again.
So it's a one-month turnaround on the wife saying, "Look, the mower’s not working. How do I get it fixed?" So, back to journalism. Yes, the story was changing. I think the protesting in Australia probably started in earnest around mid-69 and the beginning of ’70, that's when it got going with a vengeance, but again, that was the end of my period in Vietnam. The effect on us? We were in a war, we were going to stay there, there's nothing we could do about it. We thought we were doing a good job.
Time for reflection comes later when you've got time to reflect. We didn't have time to reflect whilst we were there. We were in it, doing it. One thing to walk into a quiet landing zone and all of a sudden find that it's hot. You just get the hell out. That's not bravery. That's just getting out of a hot environment. Bravery happens when you have to go into it when it's hot, a different thing entirely. We would do that because we had to and the reflection comes many years later, "Oh dear. Oh dear. Shit, I was lucky."
First and last days in Vietnam
I can remember my first day in Vietnam thinking, "Hell what if I get wounded or killed today?" and I had 364 days to go. Everybody had a calendar. It was insidious. I could not work out why all of the people that I was meeting when I arrived at Blackhorse, my compatriots in the first group who were going home, I couldn't work out why they were so happy to see me.
No, they weren't happy to see me, they were happy to see all of us arriving because it was their last day in Vietnam and it took me to get to my last day in Vietnam when the same thing happened with the third group and I could smile and say, "Right, this is my last day".
Letters home
Letters were the only form of communication. Simple as that. What was actually going on, I never wrote about in my letters. Very sadly and this is a bit stupid that I didn't keep her letters. When I left Vietnam, I just put them in a pile and I was wanting to get out I should have if I'd kept her letters, we would have today a record of the to and fro, which is a bit sad but, anyway, but there are my letters there, but I generally speaking, didn't speak about what was going on, kept it away from that.
How did we manage? As individuals, I guess. You'd hardly call it a marriage, Jude went and worked for Barnardos, of all places, in Sydney as a housemother for the year and left the job when I came home.
Unit citation
I'm more than happy that the group as a whole was properly recognized for its work. Okay, we pilots and aircrew didn't have any options, we were out in the field, we were gonna get shot at and a few of us got killed. The rest of the guys weren't being shot at, were highly unlikely to be killed, unless by being rocketed in the base camp which happened to all of us anyway, but they did voluntarily come out into the field, with their skills at hand and bits and pieces to put us together when we did go down so that we could have that aircraft back in the air on the day, if it was possible to do it, and, and for that thing alone, I think it's eminently worthwhile that the whole group was appropriately recognised.
Any number, all of the guys in our group or 48 or nine of us went flying. There were only 12 aircrew but the rest of us were told they had to go flying as a gunner at least once or twice to see what it was that we were putting up with and I think that improved their ability to understand what their job actually was and as a result of that, I think the award of the UCG to our helicopter flight, there's only six of them in the Defence Force, four are army basically. One is HMAS Yarra from World War Two, and no one would remember why, and there's our group. We eminently deserve it.
Bob Ray
Bob Ray. We lived together in Blackhorse, at Bearcat, oh and Blackhorse but Bear Cat we had the same cabin. Bob's an observer. Bob has recently died, by the way, only about a month ago. He was an observer at the time and Bob was involved in really heavy hitting operations work at battalion and group level way above the company that we're in.
As I said, I was ops officer but he did ops work in much higher places, doing really techo stuff but we both smoked and we both drank like fish when we were not doing anything else. I had come back from a light mission on one day, evening, and Bob was at least asleep, snoring furiously, but I eventually got to bed he must have woken up at some stage and had a smoke and went back to bed with the smoke still dangling out of his fingers and awoke to this impossibly ugly smell and there's this mattress just smouldering away and about ready to burst into fire.
I wasn't impressed, poured water over the impending flame and flicked a bit on to him just for good measure. No, still asleep. An hour or so later the smoke is worse, the cabin was full of smoke and it really was about ready to burst. I've got a big knife sliced open his mattress and he's still there snoring, literally this far from his face, pulled this almost molten mass of Kapok and stuff out, put it on the chicken plate because it was the only way to handle it, took it outside and dumped it, poured water over him properly and all he did was roll over.
It's getting very late in the morning and I'm ready to head to fly, which I eventually did and left to fly that day. Now Bob never came down to the flightline to see that we were coming home but on this day he was there waiting for me with a can of beer in his hand and we remember that to this day.
