Early schooling and Duntroon
I was born in Melbourne and brought up in a south-eastern suburb called Ashburton. My parents moved there in 1939, just before the war, and I was born just after the war. So, I'm a baby boomer. I went to primary school at the local school and then to secondary school at Carey Grammar School, from whence, when I matriculated, I applied to join the military college.
Then I went to Duntroon. … My father had served during the war and my uncles as well. But we grew up with the war in our background. We were so close. As I was reaching the end of secondary school, I looked at going to university – and I could have gone to university. But the course on offer was an arts degree, and I thought, If I get an arts degree, I'll end up being a teacher.
That didn't really appeal. So, I went up to the local shops and there was a recruiting element there and I picked up a brochure for Duntroon that said you could get a degree. I was actually quite attracted to that, the physical aspect of being in the Army, because I was actually quite a good sportsman at school. I finished high school in 1963. …
The school I went to had no cadets – so I'd not been a cadet at school, unlike very many of my classmates at Duntroon. So, it was learning it all from the start. And, obviously, on leaving home, we were all seventeen – I was just about eighteen – so it was quite an early age to leave home and the transition was sort of hard. There were all sorts of stories about bastardisation at Duntroon. Yes, you did get a little bit of that hazing sort of stuff – in my case, not too much. The company I was in, the Staff Cadets, were broken into four companies.
The company I was in was quite relaxed, apart from one or two individuals. So, it was a difficult transition, I suppose, but, in a sense, it wasn't too hard. … The companies were all led. There were four years of cadets at Duntroon. So, the cadets in their last year filled the leadership appointments in each company, and the companies were in a battalion. So, the battalion sergeant major – the BSM – was a cadet as well. …
We were supposed to be the first course to go through that would get a university degree in our time there. The classes ahead of us did academic studies, but there was no promise to them of a degree. … And so, we worked our way through, and the college was teaming up with the University of New South Wales. We got to the final year, and they said, "Oh, we haven't quite got it fixed up yet."
So, we all graduated with Diplomas of Military Studies, and I still believe the promise was that we would get this degree in retrospect, but – as it turned out – we didn't, and while some were sent on to university from Duntroon, many of us went back on our own initiative, took whatever credits the university would give us.
Knowledge of Vietnam
Some of the fellows who graduated in our first year there had been deployed to Vietnam by then. So, we actually knew them personally. For most of us, I think the war was a continuation of the Army's commitment to regional conflicts that had been going on before we even joined. So, in a sense, it didn't seem unusual.
And, certainly in the arts course, where I was, in our last year, the history we did was all concerned with the Vietnam War. So, it was Bob O'Neil who was our history instructor. And we went through the French side of the conflict and the beginnings of our involvement.
Choosing artillery
In your final year, you put in a preference and, depending on what the army needed and what the staff thought of your capabilities, I guess you either got your preference or you didn't. I think most of the Duntroon fellows would have got their preference because, in those days, there was Duntroon and Portsea and Scheyville – three officer-producing establishments – not to mention the WRAAC school, for the women.
I don't know this is true, but I suspect the Army would have said, "Okay, we will give the Duntroon graduates their preference and anything down the line would be filled up by the other two places." … [After] three years of camp training at Duntroon, as an infantryman, carrying a machine gun or the machine gun spare parts bag and tromping through the bush.
It was a tough decision, really. I knew I wanted to go to one of the combat arms. I didn't want to go to one of the service corps. Intelligence, I thought, might be worthwhile, but in the end, I said, "No, I'll go to a combat arm." And so, I chose artillery to go to. … In the final years of the camp training, when the corps is out on an exercise as an infantry battalion, the artillery graduates are all filling forward observer roles or something like that, but you didn't have any specific training for it.
And so, for everybody except infantry, I think, the first three months of your commissioned service was actually doing a course in your particular arm or service, to change you from being an infantry platoon commander – which is what Duntroon turned out – into being, in our case, a section commander of an artillery battery.
Assigned to 105th Field Battery
Whilst we were on the young officers' course, the artillery staffs came down and said, "Okay, we've got these regiments and these vacancies in each regiment. Put in your preference." So, most of us chose to go to the regiment that was training in that year. So, now, 1968, training to go to Vietnam in 1969. It was very rare for someone to finish the young officer's course and go straight to Vietnam.
I don't think I ever knew it happened. So, I was lucky enough to get posted to the First Field Regiment, which was the first one to go in 1969. We marched in there, in April, and there was about five or six of us off the course who went, and they broke us up and allotted us to a battery. I was allotted to the 105th Field Battery as a section commander. When I marched in, we filled the junior positions in the battery.
The battery commander was already there; the battery captain [was already there]. The senior lieutenant on the gunline was called a gun position officer. And, in the battery I went to, that was filled by a chap who'd come on to fulltime service from the Army Reserve. So, he had actually worked his way up from a gunner to a gun sergeant, then transferred into the command post, worked his way up, done officer training in the Reserve, and come on fulltime service.
So, I was one of the two – the battery was broken up into two sections, each of three guns – I was one of the section commanders. A couple of the other fellows who came were made forward observers, and then they had to go back to the School of Artillery, later in the year, to do a course to train them to be forward observers. … The 105th Field Battery had been to Vietnam already. It went over with 1RAR.
It was the very first Artillery Battery to go, and so it was the first one to be facing going back again. We had a lot of national servicemen – probably sixty per cent of the battery were national servicemen by the time we arrived, and by the time we were training again. So, the biggest group when we arrived were the ninth intake of national servicemen. I recall that because, for them to go to Vietnam, they had to do six months.
If they were going with us, we were going in February – and they were due to finish their national service obligation in June. So, they wouldn't have done six months in-country. So, the question was: What was going to happen? The answer was that they all got sent up early as reinforcements for the battery that preceded us. So, they did two months before we arrived, and then came back and joined us.
Gun training
We'd been given the basics. So, our time before we went away was spent every day going down and practising. We had to do our command post drills – that is, turning a grid reference into a bearing, an elevation, to be ordered to the guns. You had to understand fire orders that were coming into you. You had to convert that into data, and work with two surveyors.
That was their trade – they were called surveyors – but they were operating instruments which converted grid references into bearings. Then, we had to add on all sorts of effects of meteorology, the difference in height between the gun and the target. We didn't fire far enough to worry about the rotation of the earth during the time of flight, but there are all sorts of little things to add in in order to make that bearing and elevation accurate. It took quite some time for us to do that.
The lesson I learned there – I learned it from the fellow who was the Gun Position Officer. He was a stickler for doing things by the book. There are shortcuts you can take, but he wouldn't take shortcuts. He wouldn't allow us to take shortcuts. In the end, that degree of rigorous training stood us in very good stead once we got there. We could function twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, accurately – and that was our big pressure in Vietnam, on the gun line. It wasn't the fact that the Viet Cong were outside the wire. Our big pressure was that every time we got a grid reference, turning it into an accurate bearing and elevation, so that when the round landed it landed where it was meant to land.
Waiting to go to Vietnam
Once we finished the officer's course, we knew we were going into the First Field Regiment. So, unless something went horribly awry, we knew we were going, and we knew the date we were going – which was 4 February 1969. A couple of guys got sent up early because there'd been a casualty among the FO parties or something. Two of our FOs got sent up early, but for most of us we knew which date we were going on.
We had pre-embarkation leave in December and January. We went back to the Regiment probably in mid-January. The rest of the time we didn't do any technical training. It was filled up with getting injections and filling out all the forms you had to make sure they had and making sure you were dentally fit and medically fit. An advance party went a week before the main body.
That was the battery commander, the battery sergeant major, the gun position officer, and a couple of soldiers. They left a week before the rest of us and, as I said, a couple of our forward observers were already up there. Some of our gunners were already up there. The rest of us were left behind. I was left in charge of the body to bring those fellows up.
Travelling to Vietnam
We had a Qantas 707 come into Brisbane Airport. It already had some of the SAS on board – a classmate of mine was on the same flight as I was. We flew to Darwin, then we flew to Singapore. In Singapore, to get onto the plane, we had to take a white civilian shirt; before we landed in Singapore, we all had to take off our Army shirt, put on a white civilian shirt, so that when we all disembarked, I think it was a bit of theatre so someone could say that this was not a military flight.
Here was all these young people with khaki trousers and white shirts. It must have looked funny! … Australian Tan Son Nhat Airport, in Saigon, you come in over the countryside and you can't see a lot of devastation, I guess, but you can see areas where there are craters and all sorts of things. Then you get to Tan Son Nhat Airport, it's busy with military aircraft and rivetted bays for the aircraft all around.
So, the first impression, I guess, is one of excitement probably mixed with a bit of trepidation. How's it all going to go? From there, they put us on a – I don't think it was a Hercules. I think it was a smaller version of a Hercules. They flew us out to Nui Dat. We landed on Luscombe Field at Nui Dat.
The battery position we were in was actually in the middle of Nui Dat. It wasn't out on the other batteries. Two batteries had positions on the perimeter. We were the one in the middle. … We set up, took over what was already there. That's what the advance party had been doing for the time they were there. They were making sure that everything was okay, making sure.
Each gun has a bit of paperwork associated with it because every time you fire a round, the barrel wears a bit and after lots of rounds the barrel's worn out and you have to make sure that all that paperwork is there, that the barrels are still usable. Those sorts of things have to be taken into account.
Nui Dat
We all lived in tents. Underneath the tent was a sandbag wall which had been built around and underneath the tent just in case the base was rocketed or mortared or something like that, I guess. We weren't in much danger of small arms fire or anything like that. We had a decent bed. We had a bed with a wire frame and a mattress. We didn't have stretchers.
The officers lived in a space of their own. Each section, then, had a group of tents with the detachments living in one or two tents. So, it was a ten-man detachment and so there was probably two tents per detachment. The officers and sergeants had a combined mess. The gunners had a mess. There was a central kitchen for both of those, and the only other building I think – they were all in buildings – was the battery headquarters-cum-Q store, for the battery. …
The guns weren't actually dug-in, but they might as well have been because they all had what we call "bunds" pushed up around them. Because this was a permanent place, this had gone to a fair degree of sophistication, so the inside of the bunds had all been rivetted with galvanised iron and the outside had all been sandbagged, and the gunners sat in the middle of this, on a platform of pierced aluminium planks.
That enabled us, if we had to turn it 360 degrees, you could just pick up the trowels and rotate it easily, without the wheels getting bogged or anything like that. Into the bund was built an ammunition shelter which contained the ready-use ammunition, and a separate ammunition bunker held the next line of ammunition.
Command post roster
I was on two rosters, basically. I was on a roster to be a section commander and on a roster to be a duty officer in the command post. Apart from that, if I wasn't on either of those, I was theoretically off duty. If you're the section commander, your job was to be on the gun line. When the orders for firing came out, your job was to make sure that those orders had been correctly applied to the guns – and you had to do that without inhibiting the speed of response.
So, you had a compass and normally that was okay because, normally, one gun would be used to adjust the fire before all the guns fired. So, you get behind that particular gun and you take a compass shot down the barrel, which would tell you that the bearing was okay, and then you'd quickly have a look at the sight and see that they'd set the right elevation on it.
After that, you could learn – when the bearing changed, the elevation changed – to actually watch the way they applied it, and you'd know that they were actually applying it correctly. You didn't have to do that every single time. So, then, by the time the final orders came in, you had to race to the other two guns and make sure they were okay.
And, on top of that, as a section commander, anyway, you are responsible for the administration of your soldiers. So, you'd deal with any of those sorts of issues: occasionally, you'd go around and check on weapons and things like that, make sure the sergeants were getting them to clean their weapons and things properly. So, that was one set of duties.
Usually, we did a morning, an afternoon, and a complete night. So, you'd be on, say, section commander in the morning; you might have the afternoon off; and then, for the whole night, you'd be the command post duty officer. And that meant, whenever something had to be fired, you were responsible for firing it.
Harassing and interdiction fire
They'd negotiate a truce at Christmas time, or they'd negotiate a truce at Easter, or on Ho Chi Minh's birthday or something like that. In theory, there'd be a truce. I think we actually fired through every truce that there was! But, apart from that, there wouldn't have been many days where we didn't fire something.
It wasn't so much when you were back in Nui Dat. It wasn't so much that you were firing in support of contact. But you had an extensive harassing and interdiction program – H&I. That would come down from taskforce headquarters. So, basically, throughout the night, you'd be firing at these grid references where they thought the enemy might be either transiting or camping or whatever.
Blast waves
There's seven propelling charges. The first propelling charge is noisy, but it's not very noisy. The seventh one, the last one, is very noisy, but it's really weird because after a while you get used to it. You don't hear it. You hear it – but your brain ignores it. The ones that used to cause the problem in the base were not ours.
We had a battery of American 155-millimetre howitzers, or occasionally some eight inchers in the base, and, when they fired, you had noise plus a blast wave. And, if you were in close proximity, it really gave you the willies. … I was running to get to my second or third gun that was firing, and I had to approach it sort of at a 45-degree angle, front on, and I came over the bund just as the thing fired.
The projectile is sent out of the barrel by a gas that's caused by the propellant burning behind it. So, once it gets to the muzzle, the gas just expands into the air. 105s weren't too bad – but there's still, at close proximity, a blast wave to worry about. Later on, we were firing a different sort of gun, at a different time. It had what's called a muzzle brake on it. You see some guns with flanges on the front.
That's the muzzle brake – and that's the gas coming out, hitting those veins, and stopping the gun from recoiling. But it deflects the blast rearwards. I had my head outside the gun-shield when this happened and got a huge whack – I thought I'd ruptured an ear drum. I didn't, so I was lucky.
Fire support
It was hard to get a report unless they sent a patrol or a helicopter or something out. Occasionally, we got reports that they'd been out and looked at the grid references and, if we were firing in a contact, though, it was the forward observer's job to tell us the effectiveness of what we were doing. So, on those occasions we did, it was a bit hard for them, though, because, in any sort of close country, what they've done is – well, contacts was a bit different – but, for a standard mission, if they were just adjusting defensive fire task for future use, the first round had to be put a kilometre further away than they wanted it.
That was to take account of map reading issues with the observers and the infantry moving through the jungle. Sure, they were navigating by a compass bearing and pacing, but, just to make sure, instead of having that first round land 200 or 300 metres away, they would put it a kilometre away. Then the forward observer would listen to it land and then say, "Okay, that's on the right bearing."
Then he'd give a drop correction; we'd bring it back, say, 400 metres; listen to another one land; and then he'd bring it back again to where he wanted it. So, on those occasions, that sort of mission, the fact that the round is landed where they want it is a report you get. In a contact mission, they actually followed the same procedure, but they didn't need to put it a kilometre away.
They took the risk. But it would still be that they had to put the round down and then adjust it, fractionally, by fire, so that the fire's landing on the ground and you can just move it slowly back in … The contacts we had, we were used to provide what was called "cut-off" fire. So, the contact would occur, and you'd talk to the company commander.
He would say, "There's the obvious line of retreat for the enemy. So, I want you to put the fire down on that line of retreat." So, that's what we would do while they handled the close stuff. … You had yourself, a bombardier assistant (who was also an observer), and you had three signallers. So, normally the forward observer would travel with the company commander, and the assistant would travel with one of the platoons.
So, your job was to navigate, know where you were, and when the infantry got into trouble, your job was to bring down the fire where they wanted the fire and to provide advice to them on issues such as, "What is the line of fire between the guns and us?" If they were facing the line of fire, if the shells were coming straight towards them, then the splinter pattern of the shell goes forward. So, the danger distance was much greater.
You couldn't bring the projectiles in as close as you could if the line was going overhead. Overhead, the splinter pattern goes away from the infantry, and you could gradually bring the shells back in. There was: "Here's the trees around us. What is the angle that the round is falling on? Are the trees going to set it off? If they do set it off, where is the splinter pattern going to go? So, you had to be alive to all those sorts of issues and in fulfilling the request that was given to you by the infantry … T
he forward observers live with the infantry companies – not with the battery. So, they were up there. We called it "affiliation". You were basically affiliated with a company and the battery was affiliated with the battalion. It always worked with that battalion. So, we were with 5RAR on its second tour. So, the personalities got to know each other, got to know their strengths and weaknesses, and got to trust each other. And, in that sense, were able to provide the best support they could.
Multitasking
I actually saw my first computer in Vietnam and it was in the American Battery Command post. The thing that got me about it was that they were using it, but they were also using their manual system and they wouldn't fire just based on the computer. The computer took longer to get the firing data than we took to produce it manually.
But that we were firing pretty simple missions, to be honest. There were other missions that were quite complicated, where they'd want the guns, for example, spread out in a line, where you were going to fire smoke – which has a time fuse on it, so you'd have to calculate the fuse length and you'd have to calculate the displacement of each gun.
So, that could be quite time consuming. And you could see that, if you could put that into a computer, it would be fantastic. But they hadn't got to that point yet. But anyway, look: as gun batteries, we didn't have a lot of interface with them except if they were deployed in the same fire support base we were. Their fire was controlled by the Artillery Regiment's Headquarters. So, the Headquarters Artillerymen were giving them the orders about where they wanted them to fire. …
Some people spent their whole tours as forward observers, but the people on the gun line changed around during the tour. I think that was to relieve pressure and stress. I started off as a section commander. I went, and then I was allocated to become a forward observer. I was there for six weeks and then I was sent actually into the artillery headquarters, into what they called "Arti Tac", which was controlling the fire of the artillery in the province.
Then I went back to the battery as the gun position officer, in the end. … I think that was just done to stop people getting stale. The FOs, they were the ones facing the physical danger. They came back after a couple of days to the gun line as section commanders and duty officers.
Fire support bases
Every time the battalion went on operations, we went out on a fire support base. The only exception was that, when we first arrived, the battalion was operating in the taskforce bases area of operations and we didn't need to go out. But for every other battalion operation we went out and, as the tour went on, as the threat in the province declined, quite often they would take three guns and send them off to their own little fire support base, maybe with an APC troop or something like that.
The fire support base is just like a task force, but a battalion-based, basically, in miniature. The battalion headquarters is there. Probably one of the platoons is there as protection. The mortar platoon was probably there, the gun battery was there. Each of them had a slice of the perimeter, just a big circle, and each of them had a slice of the perimeter to look after. …
By the time you were there a few days, they flew in little bulldozers and all sorts of things. And so, by the time the bulldozers pushed up all the gun bunds and a bund around the exterior of this thing, and you'd put out wire, it didn't take long for the whole thing to be cleared.
Vung Tau
We all got R&R, and after about six months, I think, there was a minimum time. Then you got a week's R&R, and then occasionally you got a couple of days R&C, which was rest and convalescence. So, you'd take off down to the logistics base at Vung Tau. It was called "Vungers", yes. There was an Australian facility there, with a swimming pool and a surf beach, but most of the guys went into town and went into the bars and stuff like that, in town. …
The complication was that there was a couple of hotels in town you could actually stay in, so you didn't have to stay on the base. There was a hotel called The Grand, which I remember. You could book a room in the Grand, and so you could stay in town there. …
In the sense of being a shared area, it probably was. The Vietcong were everywhere that that we weren't, basically. Even the local town of Ba Ria, nearby, or Ha Long, the village just outside the base, there were Viet Cong, or Viet Cong sympathisers, in all those places. So, they would have been in Vung Tau. But there seemed to be an unwritten rule that, within certain parameters, that nothing would happen.
Even so, I never felt particularly safe wandering around there at night. Why, I don't know, because several people did. I just didn't feel safe. I had a friend posted to the Logistic Base down there and, when I went down there, he would grab a Land Rover and we'd take off. But we never went outside the limits of Vung Tau.
Counting down the days
"Days to go" was a constant thing. It's not well understood that we had those national servicemen I spoke about before, who went home in June. This was halfway through our tour! Then there was another tranche that went home in September-October, and another tranche went home in November. So, the battery that went over was not the battery that went home. It was entirely different, except for a cadre of personnel who stayed the whole way.
So, within the battery, there'd be guys who were going home soon. They'd be up every morning saying, "Ten and a wakey," pointing their fingers and saying, "You've got two hundred to go, and I've only got ten to go." That sort of business. So, there was that sort of humour about it. But you didn't worry about it too much. Even when it got close, even when you knew you were going out on your last operation, you were pleased, in a sense, because a year is a long time to be away.
I've never thought that the danger we were in was all that great, but talking to some of the chaps who were in the battery – for them it was different. So, you can see the stress that was building up in people throughout the year, and then the relief as they saw that plane came, and they got on it, and you're on your way home.
Last shots
I think if I was an infantryman, out in the jungle, looking for trouble – or had trouble looking for me! – then I'd feel it. As a gunner on a fire support base, even though in our last month we had one of those fire support bases and we were out in the middle of nowhere by ourselves. Even though we had one of those, I didn't feel that sort of trepidation. …
During our time, the threat level in the province went down. So, they took a few more risks that they wouldn't have taken previously. Our last operation was up in the north-west of the province. We went into a main fire support base, and then the company started to operate further and further away. I took a section of guns up into a cleared area just neared the Mây Tào mountains.
There was only us and two or three APCs, and we built ourselves a little fire support base. We knew that we were on a VC transit route, or supply route. We knew we were on that. We were within range of the other three guns, so we wired ourselves up and had our machine guns and all that sort of stuff. And we had defensive fire tasks around, adjusted by the other guns.
So, that was the fire support base. We had a couple of incidents. One night, we'd just finished firing some H&Is when, all of a sudden, there was a scream which I really cannot describe. We wondered what had happened. We doused the lights, and stood to. It turned out one of the gunners was having a nightmare. But everyone's blood pressure went up that night!
There were reports of people moving around the base. The APCs had some night vision gear. One night, they came and said, "There's some people out there." So, we pushed one of our guns up against the outer bund and loaded it up with a round called Splintex, which is like a great big shotgun cartiridge. I sent one of the command post crew to wake up the other detachments and get them to stand-to without making a noise.
But they didn't get to the last gun before we fired the particular gun. So, the last gun's rude awakening was us letting go with the Splintex and the APCs letting go with the machine guns. The sergeant in the charge of that gun was most annoyed. You don't poke lieutenants in the chest, but he came poking lieutenants in the chest!
Return to Australia
A 707 came up with a group of people and we got on it and went home. There was some discussion about where we would land. The battery had come out of Brisbane and they wanted to land in Brisbane. But the powers that be said, "No, you got to land in Sydney." So, we landed in Sydney, which was fine for me because my fiancé lived in Canberra. We were all going straight on leave.
We weren't reporting for duty or anything. So, in that sense, we had no welcome home parade, and indeed the national servicemen who had left in the year had nothing either. For me, it wasn't so bad. I was in the Army and we went on leave and I got married and I went back to the School of Artillery and did another course and life went on.
I didn't actually realise, until they had the Welcome Home parade, in 1987, and I was marching along with some of the gunners. One fellow from Western Australia was crying the whole time. I asked him about that. He said, "When I came home, just with one of those little national service groups, we just got off the plane and we were sent home."
So, he was sent home to a wheat farm in Western Australia and no one there knew what he had done. There was no one there he could talk to. All this was bottled up inside him until he got to 1987 – and then, out it came. We didn't realise the importance of recognising what these people had been through. … It was the national servicemen, I think – and some of the blokes in the battery did another six months and then were discharged – who were the ones who went out into the community with no anchor. So, they're the ones who probably suffered the most.
The importance of commemoration
I stayed on in the Army. When I came back from Vietnam, I was sent to the UK to train as a gunnery instructor. Then I had some subsequent postings to the School of Artillery, including being the commanding officer, and then I finished my career as the Chief of Personnel for the Army in 1997. When I left that, I was appointed to the Repatriation Commission, here in Veterans' Affairs.
When I went to the department, it was just after a significant anniversary. 1995 would have been fifty years since the end of the Second World War. There had been a big "Australia Remembers" program which actually kicked off commemorations within the Department of Veterans' Affairs. When I arrived, the commemorations staff was about six. In my time, it grew to be a whole branch and that was good. Anzac Day? I've always commemorated Anzac Day.
Not so much Remembrance Day. I don't know why that is, really. Only in the sense think that, for Australia, Anzac Day trumps Remembrance Day. I haven't always marched, but most years I've marched and most years I still do. I think it does get stronger as you get older. As a result of that Welcome Home march, for example, the battery that I went to Vietnam with decided to form an association of veterans.
It did, and that's been running for thirty years or so. But no one was interested in doing that immediately upon discharge or while serving. It was only later on in life that they wanted to renew that comradeship. They've done that, and the difficulty now is that everyone's getting so old, and everyone's spread around Australia, how do you maintain that comradeship? But Anzac Day has been a key part of that.
The need for veterans' stories
The only thing that struck me, when I was working in Veterans' Affairs and talking to people, is that people about Vietnam veterans. But there is actually no such thing. There are Vietnam veterans, obviously, but every one of them is different. I'm a gunner officer lieutenant. He's an infantry section commander. He's a transport driver. He's an ordinance Q-Store man. Everyone's experience is different. Sometimes we lump it all together and it's not right. Everyone's got a story to tell.
That was the other thing that came out of my experience in Veterans' Affairs: getting people to tell their story. I was lucky enough to go back with veterans of the Second World War, even of the First World War, to their battlefields. You'd talk to them, and they'd tell you stories, and you'd say to them, "Have you ever told your family this?" "Oh, no." "Why not?" "It's not my job to burden them with what happened to me." Or: "They wouldn't want to know." Or, "It's not interesting."
But it is interesting! It's interesting to their family, even if the War Memorial doesn't see it as one of their prime stories. And the other point, that my wife often makes, is that unless individuals tell their story, that very common level of history will disappear. That very common level of history is of interest. She says, "What did the people who built the pyramids eat for lunch?" Nobody knows – because nobody's written it down.
