Early nurses' training and joining the CMF
I grew up in Coorparoo. My sister was three years older than I and my brother three years younger, and my father died when I was nine, which we had a really happy, loving family and so that was a great tragedy. And then I went to school in a convent at Coorparoo for nine years, and then I went to secondary school over at Hawthorne at Lourdes Hill College, and then in my last year I was toying with going teaching, but by the end of the year, I decided definitely to go nursing.
So I went trained at Holy Spirit Hospital up on Wickham Terrace, which is now Brisbane Private Hospital for four years. And then I went to Sydney and did midwifery at St Margaret's and mothercraft at St Anthony's, came back to my Holy Spirit for a couple of months and I was thinking about joining the CMF because I had this great feeling that we should do time in the services if we could.
And so, coincidentally, a lady I was working with at Holy Spirit had been in the CMF for years, and so I decided to join CMF full time rather than the regular army to see how it went. And then about four or five months after I joined the full time CMF, I signed over to two years reg and when I did join the full time CMF I was posted to 1 MIL at Yeronga, which was in Kadumba Street. The hospital's now Enoggera but it was Yeronga then. And so that was my first year in the Army.
1st Military Hospital (at Yeronga)
There were three wards, two surgical and medical and when you worked in the medical ward, that covered the casualty, and so I worked in mainly medical ward for about six months and then one morning after night duty Matron asked, called me aside and asked me, she wanted me to go and do time in the operating theatre.
And I was fortunate because during our training I'd trained with mainly American, German, or Dutch nuns, and they insisted on doing extra time in the theatre, different from the other hospitals here, and so I looked forward to that. And I went up and worked at the theatre there in 1 MIL for six months. And at the end of that time, when matron gave me a post, she said there was a posting to Vietnam and they'd already marked me before I went to theatre, that perhaps I'd be suitable to go to Vietnam.
And that's why they put me in the theatre then, I didn't know that, to give me some more experience and so the theatre at 1 MIL we were doing a lot of DPCs, the delayed primary closures. So we were seeing a lot of the wounded but, of course, they were just, you know, a lot of post-op care … because with the DPCs, the delayed primary closures you don't close the wound until there's no, you know, no infection, no inflammation, no fluid, extra fluids. So, often they'd come back within five days if the medevac flight was coming and so we'd do the DPCs at 1 MIL.
Telling the family
My brother had been, was in national service and he had, he went to, he was going to Vietnam, and he was nearly ready to go when I got the posting but I didn't tell anyone in the family because I thought it was a bit much. So I thought, so when we went to Sydney to see him, no one knew I was going to Vietnam but I remember whispering to him, "I'll see you at Vung Tau in a couple of months."
So I didn't tell, probably was a few weeks before I went overseas, that I told the family. I was lucky in the theatre at 1 MIL because the girl who was in charge of theatre, and I think all the medics, had been to Vietnam. So I learned a lot and I heard a lot from them about what to expect at the theatre in Vietnam. … My brother actually had been in part time CMF here in Brisbane.
So he actually volunteered for national service because if you're in CMF you didn't have to, I think you're exempt from national service but he volunteered. So that's why even though he was a national serviceman, he's still got, he doesn't have a national serviceman's number, he has his CMF number …
I remember being at my aunts place, my mum's sister lives in Coorparoo as well, and we spent a lot of time there, so I waited till we're all up at her place one night, I just told them and I just remember them all looking to one another and then, but they were very supportive, very supportive … they kept saying, just reminded them of the Second World War and I remember thinking, "How can you remember that? It was like 25 years ago." I mean, to me, it's no wonder she thought it was like yesterday. She said it was like yesterday. It is like yesterday when you think of 25 years.
Going to Vietnam
We were leaving from Sydney, so some of the family came down to Sydney to see me off and when I got to Sydney I met up with another girl, Faye, who I'd worked with in Brisbane, but she was working down south then and so we were going together and we went over to North Head, It was over at North Head or somewhere and we spent quite some time and then my cousin who lived in North Shore, we were allowed to go to her place for a few hours and then we all went to the airport that night.
The plane left maybe ten o'clock or something, and then we caught up with the Red Cross girl who'd come over from Perth. And so the three females we were going and the Matron-in-Chief was there to see us off. There was a big farewell and there was an entertainment crew down the back of the plane but I think there was one or two girls there but the rest of it was just all boys and the poor Red Cross girl, when she got to Sydney, she found out that we were going back to Perth to pick up some SAS boys. So, she got in touch with her family.
So we got off in Perth and there they were to say goodbye to her again. So she had an extra trip. So we went via Perth and then we got to Singapore, we all had to put on our civvy clothes to get off for breakfast. I had a cousin living in Singapore, so she met us and took us three girls to breakfast.
Arrival in Vietnam
We got to Saigon Airport and one of the doctors, Peter Byrne, met us and I couldn't believe how busy it was. It was so busy. I couldn't believe there was efficiency out of all this chaos. And I remember the heat hitting us, of course, so then we went up in a, yes, we went up in a Caribou. So that was an experience and then we got to Vung Tau airport, there was a RAAF base there, and then we got to the nurses quarters, but we didn't get to unpack because the Matron said, "Come down because there's a dust off coming in soon and you'll be working in triage tomorrow.
So I want you to see how it works." I didn't even know what triage was. So we went down and we saw that. When we got to the quarters, a girl came and she said to me," Welcome to Vietnam. I'm Ann Hall." And my mother had talked about her for seven years. My mother had an op in the Mater and she kept saying, "One day, you're going to meet this girl, one day you're going to meet this country girl."
And I said, "You're not Ann Hall from Kyogle?". So I said, "Oh, mum, you're right after all." Seven years she'd been talking about her. Then we went down and saw the dust off and we went into triage. Then when the stretcher, when the boys on the stretcher came and one boy on the stretcher asked, you know, "Has Sister Ferguson arrived yet?"
And I said, "Yeah, that's me." And he said, "Oh, your brother says hi." "When did you see him?" "Oh, about 20 minutes ago." I thought, "Oh, this is real, this is war. Here's the wounded and my brother is within twenty minutes. So it really hit me.
A dawning realisation
It was like you're on automatic, There was so much to do and you're going to Enoggera to get sorted out. You're having injections, you were getting the proper clothes that you needed. They told us, you know, malaria, you had to wear long sleeves. It didn't matter that they were miniskirts, but you had to, so you had to get a few proper clothes and pack your trunk that usually didn't arrive for weeks or months later.
So you just took a case and you took a case with you. There were farewells. It was just, I remember being on the plane and Faye was on one side of me and Carmel on the other, I'm thinking, "How did this happen? What am I doing here?", you know, it just happened, just did it because I never, when I joined the Army, I never thought about going to Vietnam. I just wanted to help the boys who were wounded and I didn't think past that.
1st Australian Field Hospital (Vung Tau)
We had, a 50-bed medical and a 50-bed surgical ward and ten bed intensive care ward and the theatre in the RAP, the aid post. So one girl worked full time in RAP and triage and the theatre staff were the same staff and I didn't do a lot of time in theatre, but I did when it was busy or the theatre sister and I didn't go out of the compound at the same time. One of us was always there or she was on leave or whatever. I was always on call.
So, but most of my most vivid memories are intensive care. For some reason, I did a lot of time there before we went matron, before we went to it. Going back before, when I was at 1 MIL, Matron said, "You know, it was a privilege to go to Vietnam." She said, "You know, only certain people are selected and we've been thinking about you since you joined the Army, and that's why we put you into theatre." So we did, we felt it was a big privilege. So, intensive care, I don't remember the first time I worked in intensive care.
I might have worked with a sister, might have because there was only one sister at a time in intensive care, and the rest were medics who were just amazing, amazing boys. Every department they worked in, they did their best. So I learned a lot from them. And the hours were long, usually I worked night duty one week and day duty one week, and the hours were 7 to 7. But you, for that fortnight, you worked seven nights night duty and six days day duty. So long shifts. And you were busy the whole time. If we had more than four patients in intensive care, we often got a second medic, but it was very busy.
Receiving Dust Offs
As soon as there was a contact in the bush a siren would sound over the hospital and it went as far down as the beach. So even if you're off duty, you came in to see if you were needed, because by that time we knew how many, often, well, after we knew how many walkers and how many stretchers were coming in and so if there were four stretchers coming in, we had four stretchers out on the chopper pad ready to put back on the chopper and the boys were all out there meeting and the worst thing was when the second siren would sound which was about three minutes before the chopper landed.
And the worst thing was when the first siren sounded and the second one didn't for ages, because you knew that the chopper was under ground fire and couldn't land, so that was quite distressing. And so the boys, the boys were out at the chopper pad, there's lots of pictures of them waiting on the chopper pad for the chopper and the specialist would go out to the chopper pad if we had a severe head injury or severe eye injury, and if the patient needed stabilizing, we'd bring them in to do that.
Otherwise, we'd send them straight to Long Binh the American hospital where those specialists were otherwise they'd come in and the sickest patient would go up to the top bay. It looked like there's no, there was no drama, but it was quietly efficient, everyone knew what they had to do. Someone was even writing down everything that you took off the digger to put in his bag for him and someone would, when they were still on the ground, we would cut up through their laces, right through their clothes, take them off and lift them up so we could examine their back before we put them on the trolley.
And we had trays underneath the trolley that the x-rays could slide straight under and then someone was putting in the drip and the pathologist was standing right by to take the blood at the same time and catheter, whatever, whatever. And the first drip we put in had 20 mil units of crystalline penicillin, which is a big dose. And so by the time the patient was prepped, the medics were inside. You could see if there was, whether it needed laparotomy or cut whatever, thoracotomy, whatever. And so the boys had gone through into the theatre and were already scrubbed and ready.
And, by the time the surgeon came in and the anaesthetist, had the patient there and ready to go. So this all happened, maybe, if the choppers weren't under ground fire, this could all be happening within 25 minutes of them being wounded. So it was a very, very efficient system. You don't get it in an accident centre today because we had the specialists there. You have the junior and senior residents in them, accident units, and then the registrar. So it was the best care ever, best ... one set of doors came into triage and the other set of doors leading to the theatre. So there wasn't any coming and going and taking them out from here and it went straight through into the theatre and, yeah, it was just mainly the medics. I just can't speak highly enough of them.
Musical relief
It wasn't a mobile hospital. It was a fixed hospital at Vung Tau. So there weren't tents to start with. I mean, they were to start with, I think, when the first girls went up but by April 68, the hospital had been established and we did have a bit of light relief because it was so stressful. We had music playing in the theatre usually.
We had two theatres. Two beds in one theatre and one bed in another theatre, which was unusual because sometimes the anaesthetist had to go between the two with the help of medics. But the surgery was massive. Often it would go for eight, nine hours because there was so much to do.
Eight-hour shifts
There was no one to relieve us … some swing doors from the other side of theatre, led to, like, a recovery room area and the boys from the kitchen would bring over the big silver tray, maybe with tray trolleys with food on them. So we'd go out there for a meal break and go back in and then from that recovery room, the swing doors led into intensive care.
So that's how they got from theatre to intensive care. You know, we just, I don't think, we never thought about, "Oh, I've been here for so long" because the work was there to do, so you just did it. You just did it and when we got off, sometimes, we literally had to walk through the mess to get to our nurse's quarters, so sometimes we'd sit in those cane chairs for a while before we got down to our quarters …
Usually in intensive care it was 7 to 7 and sometimes, if we were lucky and we had an extra sister in the surgical ward, you work 7 to 3 or 3 to 11, which was, you know, eight-hour shift and we'd think that's really good, "I'm working only 8 hours today." The girl in charge of the surgical medical ward, I think she usually worked 7 to 5, that was her regular hours …
If we had an extra sister, and you worked 3 to 11, sometimes, occasionally on night duty in surgical ward you didn't have to start to 11, but mostly it was seven. In the nurse's quarters we had one air-conditioned room with two beds in it for the night duty staff, which was nice.
Treating badly wounded soldiers
I was looking in my diary and I've got one patient in particular had ileostomy, colostomy, thoracotomy, fractured ribs, amputation of his leg. So you had numerous injuries for one person, you could have numerous injuries for one person and then, of course, burns where you had to have a thoracotomy and often with a respirator because they'd swollen so much, they couldn't … in fact, a friend of my brother's, I'd met him down at the Badcoe Club just the week before, it was around Easter, I think, and he was in intensive care that night and I didn't recognise him because he was burnt and when I came back the next night, his trachy was out and he said, "What are you …", I said, "Oh, look, I was so busy", you know, "I didn't recognise you.
You were so injured" … Just to do the dressing could take ages. You could use a whole big, large tin of … that's that Vaseline, just in a wound because they were often so deep, took a long time … Occasionally when I had time off I'd go with the Red Cross girl because she'd go visit the Australian patients up there at Long Binh and I'd go with her and that was, I think it was the largest American base maybe in the world. It was so big you couldn't see the extent of it. It was massive and the hospital was just, went on and on and on and they had the reverse of our triage system.
They had so many casualties coming in, they had to put their really severely wounded over there because they didn't have time to, otherwise other people would have died. So we treated our worst injured first, but they couldn't often, because they had so many. They had to treat the ones that they knew they could save. So that was horrible for those girls.
Graham Edwards
I think I started night duty one night out about seven when he came in from theatre. Bilateral amputation and he was just amazing, his attitude to life, he was so grateful to be alive and it was such a privilege to look after him. At the Welcome Home Parade, I caught up with him, that was 1987, the ABC organised it and my brother said to me later on, "You know, I've got a photo of his dust off." "What?" And my brother was out in the field that day, in his APC, and he took a photograph of the stretcher being loaded into the chopper and you can see the front of my brother's APC.
So I said to Graham … he said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, send it over." So that was, that was so extraordinary that my brother took the photo and then 17 years later I caught up with him and then I could send him the photo of his dust off … I don't remember ever, even in ICU, you know, saying he was in pain. We kept up the pain medication fairly well, but no, he was such a good patient.
A lot of those boys, even in triage, they'd say, "Oh, I'm okay, sis", you know, "I saw my mate go down, look after him" … He did amazing things, Graham. He became the Minister for Sport and Recreation in Western Australia, Minister for Police, he was head of the RSL in Western Australia. I think he threw his legs away, his artificial legs away years and years, because they were just cumbersome, in the seventies, just much faster to get around in a chair.
28 February 1970
I was having a day off, so I was very excited about that, a day off. So I got up early and got ready and I thought, I'll write, I'll spend the day writing letters home because I got letters every single day that I was in Vietnam from people in Australia. They were so kind, so I was going to write letters and Matron rings up and says, "Don't go anywhere today, we think we're going to need you."
So by, maybe 10:00, I think I was down in triage in theatre and we worked till about 1 a.m. and we went off. We'd done, most emergency surgery and then we thought we'd have a break, but someone was bleeding, so we had to go back, take him back to theatre in a hurry and so we just kept working. I think we finished about Monday afternoon, I think.
It just went on and on. We might have had a break somewhere on Sunday night but we did about 25 ops, which doesn't seem much but when they're hours and hours long, it was. We got, that Saturday, 8 Battalion got into trouble in the morning and 6 Battalion got into trouble in the afternoon. So they just kept coming. I think we got nine dead and about 29 severe, so we, in 25 ops we did, four were wounded but didn't need surgery, so, but the others were severely wounded. So that was a really bad weekend for those boys …
We were just going to save them, we were going to keep working on them till they survived. We had to. See, they were fit before they were wounded, that was a plus. So, all their major organs fit unless they were injured there and then. We just, it was, that triage was extraordinary the way it worked, which was frustrating when you get back to Australia because nothing, nothing, nothing ever compares to it. You can't find that expertise or efficiency or satisfaction.
Difficulty of adjustment to civilian work on return from Vietnam
We lived in Double Bay when we were first married, so I got a job at, well, I went to get a job at St Luke's at Potts Point. "Oh", says Sister Matron, "says here you trained at Holy Spirit. Is that a Catholic hospital?" I said, "Yes." She said, "Oh, we don't have Catholics here." "Oh, okay." It was not, that was Church of England, I think, at the time.
So I found a private hospital at Rose Bay. I thought that was convenient, but that was a bad choice because it was run by two doctors and a pharmacist and they kept reminding us every day, "This was a money making concern." So that was a bit difficult and there was a lot of elective surgery. They were just there for plastic surgery or whatever. So I lived there about six or seven months. It was very hard. In fact, I hadn't heard a bell because we don't have bells in the Army hospital.
Someone would just call and there would always be someone always in the ward, you know, staff. So the bell rang, "Oh, oh. Bell" so I ran and she was sitting up saying, "It's half past eleven and you haven't brought me my brandy before lunch." Well, so I just really lost it, told her how dreadfully selfish she was and, I have to say, her husband clapped and said, "You know, I've been trying, I've been wanting to say that for years", but that's beside the point.
I just said, "I'm getting out of here, I can't deal with it." It was terrible. So I left there and went to a oncology ward for a few weeks until I started paediatrics certificate. We were all, I noticed all of us did a lot of postgraduate certificates of study. I think we were trying to emulate the sort of satisfaction, but it never worked.
Knowing the patients
A lot of them wrote to me when they went home. I got a lot of letters over the years, you know, the next year particularly or while I was in Vietnam, I got a lot of letters from them. Yes, because the fact that I can still remember their names. Look, intensive care, because it's virtually one on one rather than a 50-bed surgical ward, so you got to know them much, much better.
And you were, you we'd do ten- or 15-minute observations with everything. So, you were there by the bed all the time doing things. We used to load the drip. We didn't have broad spectrum antibiotics then, so we used to have to put five or six different antibiotics in the drip bottle which meant we had to take some fluid out of the thousand-millimetre glass bottle, otherwise you couldn't get the antibiotics in.
Sometimes you'd spend ages loading and then the pathologist would come and say, "No, no, we need different, you need different fluid", so that would have to be discarded and you start again. So that was very time consuming because the pathologists always there taking the bloods because they could go off so fast. So you were there by their bed working with them all the time and got to know them really well.
Time off in Vung Tau
If you got to work at 3 to 11, you thought, you were out until 2:00, you know, you had time off. Days off. I went with a couple of the boys went to the orphanage. We used to help out there. One of my friends who actually stood on a mine on the 24th of April but until then, he used to come to the, if he came down from the Dat he would bring his extra rations and we'd take those out.
And so he came to the orphanage a few times and even after he went back to Adelaide, one of his mates helped me with some rations. Went to the beach. Wrote letters home. Went into, there were a couple of nice restaurants in town we went with people, That's about as much time as we had. Oh, and I went up to Long Binh with Carmel, the Red Cross girl, she also did the radio station over at the RAAF base at Vung Tau.
So I went over there to the RAAF, to the radio station with her a few times … She had a program on the radio, Carmel. Oh, the Red Cross hut, sometimes I'd go in there because the boys had occupations there and things to do and I'd go. Sometimes. I went down to the beach with her. They had a Red Cross van to help the walking wounded.
She'd take them down to the beach and I'd go with her as well … . The Red Cross girls were quite busy and they had a lot of access to areas. They seemed to be able to go wherever they wanted to go. The fact that she could just get on and go to Long Binh and I don't know how she organised that.
Meeting Denis Gibbons
The first time was in Vietnam, I worked in the theatre and when we finished work, it was about 5 o'clock, I think, that day, June, who was a theatre sister, said to me, "Let's go to the medical ward. I've got a friend there, a patient". So that's where I met Dennis and I don't know how long he was in for that time, but he he'd been out bush with my brother, so he knew who he was.
So he was in and out of hospital plus he was up and down from the Dat. So it just grew. Just talked to him sometimes for ages on the phone, which wasn't very private because often when he was, even in Cambodia or Can Tho, wherever, you'd have to go through three or four or five switchboards, so they'd all listen in, interrupt if they thought, so, that was really tough. "Get off the phone." I'd say, "Oh, sorry, ma'am, sorry, ma'am". So, yes, and it just, I can't, it just grew.
Denis Gibbons' problems with adjustment on return to Australia
Dennis was always in the bush. See, a lot of journalists worked from office, the office, they didn't go out as much as he did, but he was always out in the bush … I remember once somewhere, and this fella was, and Pete, my brother, was there and his fellow saying, Oh, da de der, you know, he was talking about some experience and he said, "And he we all were on our stomachs trying to withdraw, fighting away. ", you know, he said, "Look, I heard a click and I turned round to shoot him but it was this mad bugger with a camera." So he said, "We were trying to withdraw and he's crawling up the path to take pictures."
So I guess that's what you did. It was a bit frustrating for him when we came home because working for UPI, you could work as a photojournalist, but back here the unions they'd let you work only as a journalist or a photographer. They said, "You're taking away someone's job". So that was very frustrating for him that he couldn't do both.
United Press International, Saigon
In the UPI office in Saigon, all I remember is the clacking of those machines, those machines that, with the news coming in and out, whatever. There was a lady, there was a female journalist, Maggie Kilgore. I don't know where she worked but she seemed to come and go and some of the others, no, they seem to be hanging around Saigon, they were …
Denis was never arrogant, he was really humble with what he knew, but if you talked to him in depth he was so informative and I think that's why he didn't involve himself a lot with the other journalists in Saigon, although he knew them really well because we'd often go to the, not often, we went to the Caravelle, there's a bar right on top of the roof garden up there, which we went to again in 2016.
But they used to have, they used to have stories more than he did and I remember, even at the time, thinking, "How do you know all that when you're in your office?" He knew it all from personal experience.
A marriage proposal and engagement
The first time was over the phone because I remember saying, "One doesn't propose to one over the phone." And he said, "But I can't get down to the base." or, whatever, whatever. And I said, "yeah, but …" He said, "I can't, I can't get down to … " whatever, he was somewhere up with the Montagnards, I think, then.
Anyway, so that happened when he came down to base and we had an engagement party in the mess, which was lovely and I remember a lot of people came down from Nui Dat, from it, people he knew, I didn't know those people, I just knew the ones at the hospital. So, in the meantime, I used to just get lots and lots of letters, lots and lots of phone calls, poetry and then we were able to get into Vung Tau to the restaurants there quite a bit and my brother was even there a few times with the other people from the hospital, which was really nice and the C.O. had a sitting room in his hut, so we could often go there for a talk or down the beach if we didn't want to go to our own officers mess.
When my brother came down, because he was a trooper, he wasn't allowed into my officers' mess. The CO used to let us have his hut to catch up in if we needed or I could go to the OR's mess with my brother. …
Return to Australia
You couldn't stay in the army if you got married and I wanted to get married more than I wanted to stay in the Army, and Denis was sick, and said, "Oh, let's go home." and I had to get married within a month, I think it was. So, we got married about ten days later when we got home. We got married about ten days later in Brisbane here at Cooparoo and then we went to Sydney.
That's where he came from and he worked in Sydney … I came back on an Army military flight and he came back a couple of days later. He didn't come back on the same plane as I did, but my brother did … Mum didn't know he was, she thought he was coming the week later, so that was an extra surprise when they all come out the airport and he was there as well.
Photographic record of 1st Australian Field Hospital
I think Mike Naughton, the CO, had asked him to take some specific photos, maybe of theatre, and he said, "Do you want me to do the whole hospital?" So he did and it was such a record because Denis never asked, when he took photos he never asked anyone to pose. He always just, even with the children, he just took them and I think it's really effective in the coverage of that hospital is really unique, those photos that he took and the fact that he did it when I was there, it's really wonderful because I know most of the people in those, all those photos. When I went to Vietnam, the first two or three days, I started counting people I knew from Brisbane and I got up to 60 and then I stopped counting.
A privileged time
It was the most privileged time of my life to have been there and it's the best nursing I did and could ever have given under the circumstances and I've never been able to replicate it here, even though I've gone on to have, I don't know, seven certificates or something. I was trying to be able to be the best nurse I could and then I went and, you know, did a degree. I was trying to, dear, find some of the same satisfaction but it never happened.
So it was the most, in my nursing career it was the most privileged, the most satisfying time I ever spent and it won't ever happen again, you know, just can't. And the fact that everyone over there at the hospital, it was in the middle of ALSG, the Australian Logistics Support Group, there were two thousand Australians down there in Vung Tau and everyone was military, which gave a real cohesion to it, you know, the pathologists, the dentists, the outpatients, the people in the kitchen, you know, the maintenance people, everyone had this common, we're all in the military and everybody was there to help the wounded, the boys.
So it was, you can't replicate that in a civilian hospital because everyone has their own agenda. And even the RAP girl, she was quite busy because she had to look after the 8000 Australians that weren't war wounded. So that was, you know, they were busy there in RAP. Anyone that got anything wrong with them, physical or medical or keeping up the injections.
Media coverage of the anti-war protest movement
Those protests in America started earlier than here. I think they started here in 1969, 1970. So when I went away, I wasn't totally aware of it but by the time I came back there were protests and I knew not to. I didn't mention it when I was working the first few hospitals I was working at, I don't remember mentioning I'd been to Vietnam for some reason. I just got the impression don't do it.
It was not acceptable. So that had all changed in 12 months because when we first went over, it seemed to me like everyone supported it and I think if it looked like we were winning, they would have still supported it but then, 69 when the casualties started probably increasing and it was only a small group of left-wing radicals that started the protest movement, but then they could garner a lot of people in there and they, yes, it had changed … I read a lot about it in the late sixties, you know, but was just mainly news without journalists putting their own spin on them like they do today and then they were very heavy on reporting the protests when I came back, very heavy on that.
Jim Cairns seem to always be in the news more than Vietnam so that, the journalists had changed. But it's like picking up either, I don't know, today a Guardian magazine or a Spectator magazine. Same story. Total opposites.
PTSD
We didn't know about PTSD in the early seventies. We didn't know about PTSD till probably mid-eighties. So, the nightmares, the not sleeping, the wandering around, the being able to deal with big issues but little trivial ones would set you off. We didn't think that it might have been from Vietnam. We just tried to deal with it. We just thought it was, I don't know, he was studying, I was studying, we were working, I was working, he was working.
Whatever happens, you try and deal with it but then later on, you realise what was happening, it was just so imbued in his psyche that was his, you know, he thought, you could see looking back, you could see he thought about it 24 hours a day. And his work here was so frustrating, as I said, he ended up being the, he ended up doing the microfilming for the state office block so that which meant he had to travel around New South Wales quite a bit to the different schools and unis and that to take the pictures and so that helped him a bit.
He quite liked that, getting out of the office, and getting around but the fact that he couldn't write stories with his pictures was just awful … He could talk to things that he didn't talk to anyone else about and vice versa. There was a lot I talked about with him, but it wasn't enough because I didn't recognise, neither of us recognised the symptoms of PTSD …
One day when I was walking to, before or just before I finished work at Prince of Wales, I was crossing at the crossing there in High Street and a chopper was coming up and I just walked straight into the traffic towards it. "Oh dear, oh dear. I had to do something about this. Not good." You hear the chopper, you go to the triage.
The Welcome Home Parade
It was good for everybody because we didn't know who was going to turn up and 20,000 people turned up, it was extraordinary. They did an enormous job organizing that and that's where I caught up with Graham Edwards after 17 years, at the dawn service … I think it was cathartic for everybody who went, and a lot of people regretted not going after the fact … also we opened our memorial in Canberra in 1992 which was well received.
The thing about the Welcome Home Pride I remember was there were no protesters, that was so significant, walking through the streets and you could see a lot of Second World War men were there … I if I don't make the dawn service here, I go to the two local ones, and then I'll come in to the march and we catch up. We have a catch up after with the group … when I did a tour of the Somme on the Western Front in 2016 … that became very poignant and I was at Villers-Bretonneux for Anzac Day that day.
So that whole Remembrance Day thing is very, has become more significant for me now and Veterans Day we always do something else and I, you know, I help with the RSL with Remembrance Day and Anzac Day, so I help them out the week before that.
Praise for the medics
I just can't speak highly enough of the medics I worked with. It just wouldn't have been viable without those boys. They were so devoted, so caring, went out of their way to help the boys, the patients. I think with the national service fellows. I think in those days if you failed while you were at uni, you knew you were called up, you could keep deferring while you were passing at uni.
So we had a lot of national service fellows that had been studying teaching or science or medicine or dentist but I didn't distinguish who was a national service and who was a young reg but they just all worked so hard and helped each other, but they were so knowledgeable and really never, we never complained about the shifts we were working it just, and often those boys had worked the shifts and then they went and did picquet duty. It was just, it needed to be done. Everything was to sort those choppers out when they came in.
