Leaving school
Mum and Dad were divorced, and we moved up from Melbourne. We were foundation settlers in Melbourne from Box Hill, Surrey Hills area, and so we moved up. I moved up to Sydney with my mother and went to school at Paddington, and we used to have a little, small room. We went from a big house in Surrey Hills where we had everything, to a little, small house that we shared with another couple of families for 12 months. My sister, she was only seven, I was 14, and I saw they were running, they were chasing Brumbies and chasing horses in western Queensland and trucking them down to Homebush, to the abattoirs and I said to Mum, "Look, I wouldn't mind being a stockman, I'd love to be." I come from a horse background. So, my mother wrote away to the cattle station and on, I think it was about the 22nd of November, we did our last exam at school, and if I can just tell you about the last day at school, here we were, Paddington Tech, there was only the year three and after that it was going to be a primary school. So, we were taken down to the Capital Theatre in Haymarket in Sydney, and they had a movie called The Wind Jammers. Now I'm going back to 1962, November 1962, so in the afternoon, just after lunch, we were told, "Watch the movie, and at the time the movie finishes, you can leave and you’re finished with school." So, we watched the movie, and I’ll always remember, we walked out the front of the school, out in front of the Capital Theatre, and it was broad daylight and a lovely, sunny day, end of school, and on the way home, back to mum in Paddington, it was so much of an empty time because there was no more school and there was just work from now on at 14 years of age, and we all felt the same, and I can never ever forget that day, when I left school, and where I was at that time.
Becoming a stockman
I went to the Commonwealth Employment Service, and I was sent to a dairy farm on the central coast called Tllba Tilba, and my first boss was actually a member of parliament called Jeff Bate. Now Jeff Bate, later he, at the time he was married to a lady called Kirkby from the Moree area, and later on, he married Dame Zara Holt but Jeff Bate was my boss, and I worked down there as a dairy hand, dairy farmer for roughly six to eight weeks, and then the letter came through from the cattle station and so what I did, I left that job, and I had to be out there by the 22nd, 23rd of March, in a place 120 kilometres south of Thargomindah, which is roughly 1200 kilometres west of Brisbane. So, I managed to get a cheese truck from the dairy farm at Tilba Tilba up to Sydney. I caught a train from Sydney to Brisbane, and the Westlander train from Brisbane to Cunnamulla stayed in Cunnamulla for the night, and the next day there was a 200-kilometre trip. So, on the mail truck, which was nearly all dirt road from Cunnamulla, and keep in mind, I'm only just turned 15. Cunnamulla, down to the cattle station, or down to Thargomindah, and while he did the mail run, he was carrying diesel and all sorts of things. We popped into a few stations, he dropped the mail off, I sat in the front seat, and the other passengers were all up on the back of the mail truck, hanging onto the back of the mail truck. Mind you, it wouldn't happen today, but that's the way it was in those days. So, I got to Thargomindah. When I arrived there, I was told that the floods had stopped everyone from going down there, and I'd have to stay in town for a few days. So, it wasn't long after that, I was lost. Being 15, I didn't know what I was going to do, a message come across that the manager, Jack O'Shea, was going to fly out and pick me up in an aeroplane. So, he flew out in the aeroplane, he and the pilot and I got on the aeroplane, and as we're going down, we're dropping a mail off to the people who were stranded in the floods, mainly the workers, and years later, they always recall a little 15-year-old boy in the back seat of a little Cessna with a white face with big, purple pimples, and who was terrified because here they are flying very, very low and I had never been in an aeroplane before, let alone a little Cessna, and as a big, big time of my life, I can always remember that one. So, I arrived at the cattle station. We had had a cup of tea, and I got my swag, and the swag is just a bedroll with a bit of calico and three or four blankets and a little bag, and they took me out some 28 miles out to the mustering camp, and the mustering camp consisted of a cook, a head stockman, a horse tailer, who would look after the horses, and six stockmen and the majority of the fellows were all Aboriginal fellows, and a lot of them were all complete full bloods from South Australia or up in Arnhem Land, and I learned a lot from these guys, because they could track. A lot of them were off different missions, and the majority could all read and write and do it very well too, and one of the fellows I did work with, and he taught me a lot, he was a Cunnamulla fellow, his name was Jim Hagan. Now,, Jim Hagan, his son, Jim put his sons all through university, and Jim Hagan was the fellow, his son Stephen was the fellow who took on through the courts, he ended up being a big barrister of Coon cheese and also different stadiums were named after Aboriginals in derogatory terms, but Jim Hagan took me under his wing, and he taught me how to do the horse tailing job, which consisted of, in the morning, we always had about 40 horses, there were no horse paddocks other than the big spell paddocks, but we had the horses hobbled out one in four in a horse bell, you'd have to go out in the morning, at 4 a.m. say, and get the horses. He always had a night horse or two night horses tied up, one for you and one in case the cattle rushed that night or stampeded, they call it in American terms. So, we’d go out and bring, unhobble the horses, put the hobbles on the neck, neck straps, and bring them into the camp. Then you'd catch the horses for the stockman, they'd ride away, then we'd have breakfast. Then you pack camp and move on, probably six miles to 10 miles to the next camp and as you got there, the stockmen would have mustered the cattle to that next bore or dam, put them in the yard, then we had the bronco brand. There was no such thing as races and big branding boxes we know of today, it was all open fire branding and bronco horses. We had to lasso the calves and bring them up to the bronco ramp. Then we'd have to draft, and you'd draft the fat cattle out, then you go back to your horses, water your horses, and then tuck in for the night, just on dark, and this was just every day of the week like that. Well, I did that for, say, four and a half years, at one stage, several times, I was a head stockman, and in the finish, I was virtually the leading hand on the station. Was called Kidman and Reid cattle station, or Kidman and Reid Cattle Company, and they owned three big stations. Bullloo Downs was one of them, and Bulloo Downs was four and a half thousand square mile, or roughly two and a half million acres. So, it was a big place, and once you went out the house gates, that was it, she was roughly about 30 miles to the boundary, big place, and keep in mind, I was just a little boy, and I was always called the boy. So, and because later on I could read and write, they called me the Doctor, because doctors could always read and write. So, I got the name Doctor. I don't know where, because I can never understand the doctor's writing. So, but somehow I got the name Doctor, so everyone out back knows me as Doc. I still go back there and the present owners, Gibson partnership, or Gibson Cattle Company, and I'm accepted back there, and I go back, I've actually gone back and caretaked the place for a couple of weeks and just, I don't have to leave the front veranda, I'm too old for doing any of the work, but just to supervise and keep an eye on the young fellows, make sure they're doing the right thing. Another thing, too, we had, the camp was made up of an old Massey Ferguson tractor, an old red diesel tractor, and we had a trailer on the back of that but we also had four to eight pack saddles, and the pack saddles would carry us through the wet times, or if we got caught through the mud and the tractor couldn't go in, and with that, we'd have the swag on the back of the pack saddle, and the pack bags would be full of our provisions, cooking implements and our food, which would normally last four to seven days. So, we had to kill a beast out in the open every three to five days. We didn't have electricity. We didn't have generators. This is only back in 1963, up to 67, no generators in the mustering camp, no refrigeration and any meat we had had to be put in meat bags for the day and put out on gum leaves through the night to cool off, so it wasn't easy, trust me … it prepared me, unknowingly, prepared me, unknowing for what was to come. I learned to track, Jimmy Hagan taught me how to track horses, how to track cattle, dogs, looking for signs. These days, a stockman will get on a motorbike and put a helmet on, and he won't hear anything but riding around on a horse, you're in the middle of it. You know where the birds are. You know if a bird takes flight, or a horse pricks his ears, or a cow pricks his ears, looks in a particular direction, you know there's something out there, because the animals, the horses and the animals and dingoes, they'll be looking at something before you will even hear it or see it. So, I learned a lot with nature that four and a half years brought me and bear in mind, keeping in mind there was no television out there of a nighttime, just the open mustering camp, and you learnt to live and listen to what was happening around you, and I think what happens today, people sort of, they’ve got too much happening around them, too much noise, but in my time, it was on the horse, just you and the horse, an isolated life, but you could hear everything was happening around you, and looking for track, learning how to tell the difference with a snake track and a goanna track, it definitely prepared me for what I was going to go through in the next few years.
Joining the police and the army
I went to the Northern Territory. The manager of the station, who was virtually a foster father, he and his wife. They suggested I should go to the Northern Territory to work and get some more experience up there. So, I went to the Northern Territory for about six months then I returned back to the cattle station on Bulloo, worked there for a short time, but drought had struck, and it wasn't good, it wasn't good times. There was only one stage. We'd gone down from two mustering camps of eight to 10 men down to just two station hands. The cattle were all virtually sent away. The horses, the main horses that we rode, they were all sent away down to South Australia to feed. They were pretty bleak times, very bleak. So, I went down to Redfern, saw my mother and father, and my father suggested I should join the Army Reserve, or the CMF. He, at the time, was a sergeant, then to be a warrant officer in the small ships at Chowder Bay and he suggested I should join the Army Reserve or the CMF as we know it, to fill in my time, and just have a look at a different lifestyle, which I did. So, I did my two weeks training out at Walllgrove Army Camp which turned out later on to be Australia's Wonderworld, and which today is the Light Horse interchange. So, I did my two weeks there, went back and I was in the two div, second division military police. So, I did roughly two and a half years in the military police. That's where I got my driver's licenses, military driver's licenses and I had a really good time. It was a great learning curve for me and there was a lot of police, New South Wales Police, in the military police, and they said, "You should join the police force, Rodney". At that time, I was working at St Vincent's Hospital as a window cleaner, as a wardsman. I did many, many tasks and jobs over the next six months and one day, I was staying at mum's house in Redfern and I'm a Redfern houso, by the way, and mum was a houso at that stage. She finally got a little housing commission house on the 11th floor of a 16th block of flats, which is one of three, the middle one of three, Wentworth, Gilmore and Lawson, and she was in the in the middle unit. So, I was just walking up the streets early one day, and I walked into the Police Academy, had the aroma of horse manure, and when I walked through the gates, somebody said, "What are you doing here, mate, would you like to join the mounted police?" Because I was still in my riding boots, because I still had the Western attire on, the cowboy hat and then the RM William boots. So, I said, "I wouldn't mind having a look at it." So, they said, "You better get yourself across there and go for your exams." So, I walked across the recruiting branch. It was early in the morning, and there was a simple arithmetic exam, which I passed, a simple dictation, a quick interview, we were sent away to get a chest X-Ray, and that came back safe and sound. The next thing you know, I get a letter two weeks later from the police department asked me to come down for a further interview, so I went down to police headquarters, did the interview. It was only a matter of all up about six weeks before I was marching around the parade ground, one of 150 as a trainee police officer. So, I did my six weeks training to be a police officer. In those days you had to do six weeks training. Then you came back for one day, every fortnight, every two weeks, then you had to do a final eight and a half weeks. Then you had another three months after that to finish your probation period. So, it was roughly 15 months all up. So, my first station was Darlinghurst, and I was there for a couple of days, probably two or three days. Then they sent me on to the Crest Hotel, which was King's Cross police station. In those days, there was no police station at King's Cross, and the first police station was at Kings Cross was under the Crest Hotel. Only a very small building, was a just a desk, a table and chairs, which was your desk through the daytime, and also your meal room at the same time, a set of cells and a little toilet in the sink. Wasn't very big at all. I think we only had two chairs, or might even be three chairs, and what we do, if, in the afternoons, mainly, we'd go up and direct traffic. and you can just imagine a little boy from outback Queensland at the top end of William Street and Victoria Road, where there was two people, two police had to do it, directing traffic. That was one of my first jobs. I'll never forget it. You put your hand up and, all of a sudden, 1000 tons of screeching metal and rubber all comes to a halt. Then you've got the pedestrian traffic on the pedestrian crossings at the same time, and you're just a little 19-year-old boy, and you've got all this control. And, of course, you start off with doing the proper hand signals, and about half an hour into it, it’s only a finger job, you know, fingers, thumbs, waving people through, talking to the pedestrians as they come through, probably getting abused by the motorists at the same time as they come through, but I had a great time. I was there for about three months. Then I went to the mounted police, and that was a new ball game while I was at, on the 18th of September. I passed out on the 15th of September, but had the Saturday, Sunday, and the 18th would have been the Monday, and that was the first day of the R and R, American R and R came across, rest and recuperation from Vietnam. So, Inspector Beith was a fellow, and he was at Darlinghurst, and he said, "Come on, you're a driver. I need you down here." So, I didn't know where we were going. So, we ended up going to the Sydney Hil.., King’s Cross Hilton. I can't remember the name of the street. It was down near the Navy depot. So, went to the Sydney Hilton. He said, "This is a demonstration." He said, "If they lay down, I want you to kick them up." And I said, "Well, this is a bit…", you know, I'm only 19 and three days in the police force." So, we arrived at this demonstration. There was probably a dozen people there with placards. Save our sons, save our virgin women was another one. Make love, not war, and I had to get out, and I was told what to say, and I got out and I said, "Look, you're allowed to demonstrate, but don't block the free flow of traffic, as long as you're walking up and down the street and you're not interrupting anybody, you're quite free to demonstrate." And they're quite on side, they're good, good people. So, here they are down the street, and we're waiting for the American bus to arrive, and we're just waiting to see what was going to happen there. There was a few scuffles. I mean, one of the soldiers turned around. There was a soldier off duty and in uniform, and he turned to one of the girls and said, "You've got no worries, love with that sign." And, of course, that started another little bit of a scuffle, you know, I think there was more Special Branch police there, from what there was in plain clothes than what there was, I was the only uniform man, and the inspector stayed in the car, and that was it. So, I was there for a good hour or so, and when I got home that night, my mother said, "I've just seen you on TV." Yeah. "I've just seen you on TV." and that was another little part of my life I'll never forget, Mum was all excited about her little boy Rodney, who was on television. So, anyway, I went in the mounted police. I was there, so all up, probably another two years and I was still in the Army Reserve. I just did the normal mounted police duties, which I loved. Thoroughly enjoyed the mounted police. They were really good times and Dad said to me, "Why don't you go away to Vietnam?" And I said, "What's in it for me?" He said, "Well, you might get a war service loan. It's just a new way of life." So, I took his advice, and I signed a form to say that I’d do five years in the Army Reserve or the CMF rather than do national service. So, all I had to do was sign that I didn't want to do the Army Reserve anymore or the CMF, and automatically I was, I'd volunteer for national service. So, I volunteered for national service, and that was a new ball game altogether. I'd gone from a blue uniform, you may as well say, and I was going to go on a journey for two years in a green uniform, complete one to the other, blue to green.
Basic training
So roll on the clock now to the ninth of July, 1969 where I've gone down to the induction centre at Marrickville for my national service and I'm amongst fellows there, we had to go through the Save Our Sons and all the rest of them, and they're demonstrating, and they had their opinions and their views. I wanted to go. Other people didn't want to go, but I really wanted to go. So, we've walked in, we’ve done that now. A lot of the fellows I was with, out of the say the 38 to 40 in our platoon, they've never slept outside. I've just spent four and a half years on a swag in the outback, in all the environment, and here I am with fellows who'd never slept, never gone camping. I'm not going to mention any names, but we had, my roommate, he'd never left home. He was also a sole child, and his mother reared him same as me from, you know, from an early, from 14, a teenage life, but he'd never slept outside. He'd never gone anywhere. He didn't have to make his own bed, let alone iron his own clothes or wash his own clothes, and a lot of the fellows were like that, and some of them were crying the first night in the barracks, some of them were crying. We had to console a few of them. Another mate of mine, I’ll never forget, I got on the bus, this date again, the ninth of July 1969, day one in the green, and we got on the bus after doing all the induction and this fellow got beside me, and he said, "G'day, mate, my name's Rod. What's yours?" And I said, "Rod." And he said, straight out, he said, "Well, this is going to be a good two years, you know, sitting with you." and I said, "I'm a Rodney." and he said, "Well, I'm a Roderick." Well, it turned out his name was Roderick White, and we're lifelong friends, we're still lifelong friends. I spoke to him this morning, but he ended up being the boss of the RSL for New South Wales and also the Australian boss of the RSL, stationed here in Canberra. Rod White was also the best man of my wedding, and Godfather toor one of my children. So National Service meant a lot to me, and it stuck with us. So, we arrived in Canberra as we're leaving the induction centre, we're on the bus, and we had an officer on the front we're singing songs and all jovial and having a great time and abusing the officer politely, and we all had long hair. I didn't have long hair because I was in the army and police, but some of the fellows had real long hair and all scraggy with pimples, just babies, 20-year-old babies, that's all they were. So, we laughed and joked and scoffed and had a go at everybody on the way down. We arrived at Goulburn, and I think it was called the Paragon Cafe, and we're told to go and have something to eat, have a cup of tea, and get back on the bus. You've got a half an hour, or an hour, whatever it was, and we're, anyway, a lot of us thought about, we could always jump off the bus and keep going, you know, like anyway, so we went and had a big dinner and everything else, got back on the bus, and we're still singing. Well, by that time it was about four in the afternoon, and there we go down the old Hume highway. No, not a freeway as we know it today, old Hume highway down to Kapooka at Wagga. As we were approaching Wagga, there was no singing. Everything was just slight muffling. Some, a lot of the guys were asleep. There was no scoffing and having a good time with the officer on board. So, we pulled up at the front gate, and everyone sort of woke up and then we went up to our lines, two story brick buildings. So, we got there. Then we met our drill, all off the bus, we met our drill sergeant, Sergeant Lance Bobbins, who was very polite and said, right up, "I want you to go to a room, pick a room, and there's a plastic mug on the bed. Get that plastic mug and meet me out here in two seconds, and I'll take you down to the mess for a cup of tea." So, we all scarpered off to our room, threw our gear on the bed, not much talking then, I'll tell you, then straight back out to Sergeant Bobbins, who put us in a rough bit of a column, a blob, a line, and took us down to the mess. We had a cup of tea, sent back to the mess. Of course, the rumour in those days was that they put bromide, which is a sex drug that takes the sex out of your life while you're there and I can assure you, it didn't kick in till about two or three years ago, you know. So, it took about 55 years for the bromide to settle in, I can assure you, in old age. So anyway, that's the end of the bromide story. So that was our, that was the first day in the army, and the next day we're up. We’re into the ablution block, had breakfast, ablution blocks for haircuts. And I remember we had a fellow called Kosciuszko, a nickname Kosciuszko, because that's where he came from, Wayne Edge. And Wayne Edge’s big, flowing locks everywhere, and I can never forget when his locks went off. I'll never forget. They had the shearers there, and the barber just went zip from front to back and zigzagged across your head and the whole hair cut probably took 10 seconds, wasn't long, and any beards got removed. Short back and sides, well, there's no short back and sides, there was just straight, like being a big baseball or a bowling ball. Bang! Gone. All hair gone and then we were taken out for our uniforms and all the rest of it and it was a long process. And then that was a journey of, I think it was 12 weeks of recruit training, and we come out the other end, different fellows, completely different fellows. While we were down here in Wagga, July, August, September, we got out in late September. It's actually snowed in Wagga one night on Mount Pomingalarna, and I think we all got colds and flu, didn't miss it. Used to call it the Kapooka croup, and once somebody got a bug in the building, we all got the bug.
Vietnam: A big adventure
My reason for going to Vietnam, I think I just totally believed there was more I could do. It's not about being patriotic, I can assure you, it was about, because when it started off, it was really good, everybody wanted to go, and was very in favour, but 1969 things were starting to turn sour, and it wasn't a popular war anymore. I wanted to get away for a new life, a new adventure, and to be a soldier. Mainly, I wanted to be a real soldier. In the mounted police, you're a soldier, but you weren't a real soldier. You still did all the training things and all the rest of it. I'm not going to bag the military police, because I did have a good time, and I like those guys, and once again, that'll catch up to me later on in my story, but I wanted to be a soldier. That's the main thing. I had no idea what corps I was going to be or what work I was going to be doing, but I wanted to get away, do that time, do my 12 months overseas, do my two years in the Army, and thinking about the police force, pretty mundane, where you go to work at six in the morning and we collect what we call golden eggs in the straw, which is horse manure, and muck out the stables, in other words, clean out the stables. Then there was a traffic point along Central Railway, or Anzac Parade. Traffic point was virtually from half past seven to nine o'clock. Then you'd come back and have, ride back, have breakfast, half past nine till 10. Saddle up half past 10 to half past 11. Out of the park, at Centennial Park, doing horse drill, come back, wash your horse, do, saddle work and do mundane tasks around the academy. Well, I'd done that for two and a half years, and I think it was time I moved on, and Vietnam and the army looked like to be a real big adventure for me. And that's the reason, a big adventure.
19 CRE
I did my corps training at the School of Military Engineering. Well, first of all, at rookies, you don't know what corps you're going to go to, and I always wanted to be an armoured personnel carrier driver or be on the tanks. So, that was my first option. I didn't even put in for engineers and when the callings come out, there would have been out of the, say, 40 guys, there was roughly 30 of them went to Service Corps. One went to artillery, nobody to the military police. Infantry took about 10 and there was three or four engineers and I just happened to get engineers. I think my father might have had something to do with it, you know, or my background of being a stockman in a mustering camp, or, as they called it in those days, probably a farmer, a farmer stockman, and I could use all sorts of machineries, every type of machinery, and plus, I had my driver's license from the army. So, I went to engineers. We did our corps training at School of Military Engineering. Then I was based, they were, I was qualified as a fireman, they wanted me to be a fireman for some reason and then I went to, as a driver, I was the Colonel's driver at Victoria Barracks in a section called 19 CRE. I still don't know what the name of the CRE is, because bear in mind, I've gone from blue to green. So, I spent probably three to three to six months in 19 CRE, Colonel's driver, Victoria Barracks, and we're right out the back of Victoria Barracks, near Moore Park Barracks. I hadn't gone far. I'd gone from the military police in Moore Park, walk across Moore Park Road into the back gate, and there I was in 19 CRE and it consisted of a Land Rover, which was my vehicle, and we had the colonel, we, I think it was three captains, a draftsman. I can't tell you the work they used to do, because I'm still sworn under the Official Secrets Act, and we had a storeman and a carpenter, and we're making all sorts of boxes, and it was my job when I wasn't driving, to paint the boxes green and put the kangaroo and the battle sign on. Once again, I can't go into it. I still can't go into it today, about what we did, so I turned around to the colonel one day, and he said, "I don't like my ..." He turned around to me, and he said, "Sapper," he said, "I don't like my driver not having a stripe." He said, "I'm going to give you a stripe. You better go up to the Q store and get a stripe. So, you're promoted. Congratulations." And I said, "Sir, what I want to do, I want to go to Vietnam." He said, "Well, you've just lost your stripe." He said, "You can't have a stripe if I send you to Vietnam with a stripe." he said, "they'll give you a lot of responsibility, and you're better off just going here without." So I had the stripe for all of about 10 minutes. That was my promotion. So, he said, "No, I'll get you to Vietnam." So, it was only a matter of a couple of days, and next minute, I'm up at Canungra, the jungle training centre. I had to do three weeks in the jungle training centre, and I came back to, from there, they gave me a week pre-embarkation leave, and I was on the on the plane to Vietnam, and that was it. So, it all happened so quick. He was a good boss, Colonel Smith, a really, really, really good boss, and I missed him, because six months with the colonel, had to pick him up in the morning, dropping off that night and we did a lot of time. At that time, they were re doing the Rocks, and a lot of this colonel’s, engineer colonel mates were in that organization. So, I spent a lot of time with him, driving to different functions, plus OC’s driver, you'd be called out and get the staff car, and you'd go out and do the army parades. He, being the colonel, he needed to be addressing the parade. So, I had a good time. 19 CRE was a really good little unit for me.
Flight to Vietnam
I got on the plane, and it was whatever they were, 747, or whatever it was, and it left mid-afternoon. So, I got on the plane and sitting there waiting to go, and all of a sudden the military police arrived. I wondered, "What's going on here?" Looked out, the Land Rover. Anyway, this fellow walked up to me with a curly bar mo, and his name was John Head, and John Head was a Commonwealth boxer, and he had spent four or five years in the mounted police and resigned out of the police force, joined the army with the purpose of going to Vietnam, and he was on his way to Vietnam also, and he just happened to be on the same flight as me, and we knew each other very, extremely well. A matter of fact, when he resigned out of the police, I moved into his little unit, which is in Cleveland Street, close to the academy, I actually took over from him, so an exchange of bonds for the unit. So, I knew him very well. So, John got on board and keeping in mind, it's a non-drinking flight, and the first thing he did, he put a little backpack, and he had two cans of Reschs D.A. Oh, dear, Resch's D.A. I don't think they even sell it these days. It could have been, I wish it would have been Four X or something else, but, or VB. So, we had a can of beer each and celebrated our trip to Vietnam. So, I felt quite happy. So, we did the flight, came over, arrived in Vietnam. I always remember looking out the window and seeing all the bomb marks and all the bomb craters and all the rest of it as you fly in. I've never seen so many airplanes and helicopters and just so busy and things happening around you everywhere, everything was just busy, busy, busy, busy. So, we got on another flight, they used to call it a Wallaby flight, and we flew to Nui Dat. We got there. On the way across, too, we stopped in Singapore for refuelling, and we're in army uniform, but we had to take the top part of our shirts off and our hats, and put on the civilian shirt, and that was from the Singapore government, they didn't want us to go through as fully military. So, we did this. We had to bring our shirt across and change on the plane. We just had a short time there, then flew on to Vietnam, then on to Nui Dat. On arriving there, we’re met at the airport, taken back up, and once again, everything's happening. The Nui Dat base, vehicles going everywhere, and the soldiers everywhere. Everyone's carrying a rifle, same as in Saigon, everyone's got a rifle or a pistol.
2 Troop, 1 Field Squadron
So, next thing they had, you find where they're going to put you, what bed you're going to be in. So originally, I was in 1 troop, 1 Field Squadron, and the tent right behind the rec hut, and all my mates all went to 2 Troop. So, I had to, the next day, I volunteered, I wanted to go across to 2 Troop with all my mates, which I did. So, I went into 2 Troop, and it was only in that first week we had our first fatality. Was a fellow called Ian Scott from Charleville, and keeping in mind, Charleville, Cunnamulla, it was the outback country where I come from, so Scotty was on an armoured personnel carrier as an engineer that had run over a mine, and he was killed on that mine incident down on the beaches. So, he was going for swim. They, as 7 Battalion fellows, went past Charlie Company, 7 Battalion. They said, "Come on, Scotty, come for a swim." So, he jumped on. We were near the front gate as engineers, he jumped on the armoured personnel carrier and went down and just happened to get killed. So, they were my lines, and I was now in 2 Troop, 1 Field Squadron. There would have been 50 odd in the troop and what would happen, we'd go there on a one for one rotation basis, the purpose being, where battalions would go, battalion, battalion rotation. We were one for one, the purpose being, the experience. So, I was automatically put with a fella called Steve Wilson. He'd already done his six months, and he was ready, you know, on his way, more than that probably, on his way to go home on day one, week one and, of course, I've got to stay with him, or we’re classified as number ones and number twos. The number ones were the experienced guys, the number twos were the offsiders learning what to do. So, I went up with Steve, one of the first operations, we went away with what they call D and E platoon and their boss, I don't think he was there at the time, I can't remember, was Peter Cosgrove. He was in D and E platoon. So, it was a section of three other personnel carriers and the D and E platoon soldiers, diggers. And we went up route two to the back of the Binh Ba rubber, and we dropped the infantry off, and we did a fish harbour, three armoured personnel carriers in a fishtail harbour, and that was my first trip on an armoured personnel carrier. I'd never been on an armoured personnel carrier, and here I am as an engineer on the second or third armoured personnel carrier, looking out for mines and mine signs and, once again, reading the country. So, I'd never even experienced the lizards and the noises of a nighttime over there and I can never forget there was, in the trees of a nighttime, you get lizards calling out or owls calling out different types of sounds. And it's very unusual to hear these just different sounds and different noises and, of course, you're wide awake. It's your first night out on a on a big patrol. Anyway, so we got reacted. We, no, we had the first night out there, that’s right, nothing happened. The second night we got reacted in the dark, and we had to pick up the Infantry guys, and we went across, must have been early in the morning, and we had to go across the other side of the Binh Ba rubber and support one of the battalions, or part of the battalion, going through. There was a contact with a bunker system and I always remember when we're going in, there was a big, long armoured personnel carrier track taken off, had been taken off, and a big hole at the end of it where it hit a mine and I can never forget that one. Keep in mind, I’d only been in a country four or five days, so we had to do a sweep with the armoured personnel carriers and the infantry in between, through the bunker system and we just happened to be the ones on the left-hand side, so we had to look to the left and see what's happening. So, the fellas ahead, the infantry guys who were already in there, they already engaged in the contact. So, by the time we got there, it was all over and done with and we turned back out and went back and harboured up somewhere else that night. I can't remember where, but that was my first little bit of an introduction, and lucky Steve Wilson had been around for a long time, very capable fellow. Then I had quite a few number ones. Only took me about three months and all the fellows had gone home, and I was made up to number one.
Discovering a bunker system
Where we were was nearly all, was all dirt roads, might be a little bit of ditch in here and there, or out in the bush when you're walking with the infantry, the Viet Cong generally wouldn't lay a mine unless they put a sign somewhere. It might be a couple of sticks in the tree. It could be three sticks tied together at the point, like, made up, like a pyramid or the road would be disturbed, they'd lay them overnight time, and then the ground would be disturbed and you had to look for that sort of stuff, looking for that sign, looking for something that wasn't there the day before because, keep in mind, they had their fellows walking along the same roads, oxen on the same roads, the population, you wouldn't know who was Viet Cong and the population, he probably had an ox and a cart, and he’d just pull off to one side, lay a mine and keep going. Leave a sign so his mate behind him wouldn't run the ox cart over the top of the mine. So that was mine sign in the bush. They might have just broken a branch or put or cut off a bit of a stick and put a stick nearby, keeping in mind, a lot of fellows wouldn't know what this meant, you know, wouldn't know, would not know, but you had to look for mine signs all the time. Was just one of those, they wouldn't put a big sign up saying, mine 200 metres, it'd be a stick, and that would represent something. Could be an old tin. You wouldn't know, just anything was unusual, you had to bring it. Later that paid off, too, because later on in the tour, I won't even talk about that now, I was going through, I think it was, I think it was, doesn't matter, I'm pretty sure it was D Company, 7 Battalion, where, through, and Lieutenant Woods was the lewie at the time. It was just two engineers attached, we're going through and I was in the light green near the beach. Anyway, I leaned against a stick and a bit of dirt fell on my hand. I went, "What?" So, head high. So, I pulled the stick over, and it was cut off, and the dirt was put on the top of it. Well, straight away, that's an indication that you're in a bunker system and what they used to do, they'd cut the shrubs, and they'd make their own furniture out of it. They could get certain saplings and with bark on them, ordinary, shiny bark, and cut them in strips, and that'd be their string or to tie up. They could make furniture, tables, chairs, out of these tops of these trees. Well, the tops of the trees would be used as camouflage around the bunkers. The sticks would be used to support the furniture that they'd use, or the bigger poles would be used to put on top of the bunkers where they'd dig the hole and put the dirt back on top of the bunker. So, we downed our pack straight away, formed up and we walked in. Was a cold bunker, what we call a cold bunker. In other words, they'd left, and I think it was eight or nine bunkers. I can't remember really well, but they left a booby trap, hanging up in a tree, which is a rocket. One of their rockets was hanging up there, ready to fall to the ground if we tripped on it and, luckily, that was spotted, that, and that was diffused, and that was it. So, the day was saved. The bunkers, we didn't blow them up. I don't think we used to blow the, I can't remember what happened. I think we got pulled out. We went on. Someone else came into the bunker system, and we just kept on walking.
Bunker system design
They were just anywhere, anywhere at all and they all had a fire zone, or a fire alley, where they'd be pointing somewhere and anyone came across it, they’d dig a trench, may as well say as big as a grave, with an entry one end and an entry at the other end, not at the end, just before he got to the end. Then they put logs on top of that, then dirt on top of that. Then they’d camouflage it with leaves and bushes. So, one fellow could be firing out one side of the bunker and the other fellow could be firing out the other and they could come down to the bunker and meet each other in the middle. They even had steps in and out. They were just fire pits you might as well call them. Very, very intelligent, I’m told, miles ahead of us. And once again, their fellows who were born and bred on paddy fields in the jungle, and they knew the routine. The bunker systems were generally sort of eight or 10 small groups. In my time, in 1970/71 we didn't have huge amounts of Viet Cong or North Vietnamese, not like in the early days, although we had the battle of Overlord, and that was a huge bunker system outside our province, but in our province, in Phouc Tuoy you wouldn't have the huge bunker systems that they originally had. But then again, when you look at the battle of Overlord, that was a huge, I think it was 150 bunkers in that one, but that was a whole battalion, a whole regiment of North Vietnamese regular soldiers. With the bunker systems, we'd normally blow them, explosives on the top and explosives on either side of their entry, so switch it and blow it down at the same time. Wouldn't take along to build another one. So, whenever, if you blew one up, it'd be just, wouldn't be hard to redo it or rebuild it, but you just had to take that house or take that area away from them and in the jungle, there was also lots of, they dropped CS gas, CS crystal gas in big canisters and the Americans had, when it dropped, it put that whole area out of action with gas for months. So, we're walking along there one time, and one fellow saw a big canister. It was always grey with a red stripe, and he jumped on it, it was big, and all of a sudden, all the CS gas come up out of the ground from the canister. It didn't take us long to get out of that area, I can tell you. We’d been walking along with the infantry, and a big mob of pigs came through once, wild pigs come galloping down the track. I've seen a big thing like a moose. He come galloping down the track once, and we all got out of the road for him, you know, little things happen, and we’d all laugh and giggle, you know, we all sort of, the odd ways of doing it and it was, there was, we were always serious and switched on, but there was always a little bit of time for a bit of humour.
Inexperience, training, and trust
When I first arrived in 2 Troop I had, I did have some mates, but we're all green, we're all very, very green and just, we had to pass what they call a mines room and we had a look at the mines room first up, but you had to know the mines room was mine booby traps and armaments that the Viet Cong had been using, or the North Vietnamese or the French and what went, and even the Japanese, there's a lot of ordnance there, and the British were there too for some time. So, we had to go through the mines room, and you had to pass everything that was in the mines room. You had to know everything that was in there. So, anytime you got a bit of time off, you go up to the mine room and have a look through and see what was there to familiarize yourself of what would happen out in the field. My workmates were all very, very experienced fellows, very experienced fellows. One fellow was a schoolteacher, and he volunteered for national service, no, he was in the regulars, but he was a schoolteacher. Other one, fellow was a plumber. Another fellow was a plant operator, bulldozer driver, but you had to learn of what was going on, you all, because you were number two, you'd pair off with your mate. Now, I had a system over there when I had one fellow, and I had to send him back because he was the best next person to useless. He just shouldn't have been there and actually made him the barman and put him back. There's always a job for you in the army, there's always a job. So, they made him the barman, but he was too nervy. He’s only a young fellow, too nervy, didn't want to be there, and he just wasn't up to the job and you've got to really rely on your number two, rely on your guidance from your number one, and just working together because you are, you live together, you sleep together, you share. One carries the mine detector. The other one carries the explosives. We used to carry seven to 10 days rations, sometimes only three, but mainly seven to 10 days rations and with inventory or with the armoured personnel carriers, you had to really know your work mate and know each other's capabilities.
The barrier minefield
There was Chinese communist mines, which is a big blob, like a big birthday cake, like a sponge. All depends where, they could have been a tilt switch, it could be just a hand grenade, two hand grenades tied up in a tree with a wire in between, and you walk past and it pulls the pin out, or it pulls the hand grenade out of a little tin and just falls out and boom, you don't even know you hit it because you’re walking through the jungle. The M16 mine that was put in, the Australians put in, against engineer advice, they put in a minefield that ran from the ocean to the Horseshoe, which is a big feature. I think it was about 13 miles and it was 100 yards wide. Some parts had mines in it, some parts didn't. There was a phoney minefield. They were all laid out different. I haven't got a chalkboard to show you how you lay out a minefield, but there is rules and regulations, how to lay it out. It had wires at the front, like dannert wire or barbed wire either side of the minefield. So, he had to go to the wire first. Signs everywhere, minefield, and the idea was that when the North Vietnamese or the Viet Cong came down from the north, they'd hit the minefield, that wo stop them, and they had to go around the other side of Nui Dat into what we call a killing area. Well, of course, that didn't happen. The Australians, we put down, I didn't, the fellows before me, engineers put in over 44,000 mines in this minefield, and plus, they mined the hamlets and some of the forts. Now, the Americans, they did their minelaying as well, and so did the South Vietnamese and the Koreans and the Thais. So, with the minefield, it was just a great big ordnance depot where they got, one in four had a anti-lift device, which was a hand grenade underneath and if you lifted the mine up, the mine would go off. Well, the hand grenade would go off and take the mine with it. It was just a huge ordnance depot for the Viet Cong to go in, lift a few mines, put a pin in it, lift the mine, take it back and put it where they want to put it. It was supposed to be under, you only have a minefield like the First World War, Second World War, if it's undercover. In other words, undercover of the gun, so you've got arcs of fire. No one can come in and pinch your mines. You can see your minefield and, of course, that didn't happen. It was supposed to be under guard, but it never happened. So, they could just come in and do what they wanted. They actually had people living in there, the Viet Cong were actually living in one part of the minefield. Cattle would go in, into the minefield. Of course, they’d get blown up. I've been to one of those incidents with a little boy, a couple of little boys on an oxen, and he'd gone into a relocated mine. The oxen had trod on the mine and blew up, and a little boy, one of the little boys, lost his leg, that was in the village. The minefields were, as I say, I've said, one big ordnance depot for the Viet Cong to do what they wanted to do and relay the mines.
Mine clearing bulldozers
We had a mine clearing bulldozer, and it was 4/8 Bravo and 4/8 Alpha. I think it was 4/8 Bravo, was a big mine clearing bulldozer, but had all the armaments on it, and it'd go in and do a big trench, two blades’ widths wide, and across the minefield. Then you'd take the top lot of soil and push it into the minefield. Then, in the meantime, we'd go in on our armoured personnel carrier. There was two. There was HMS George, and I'm pretty sure George was the one that had the back on it, the steel plate, and they used to have tyres on the side that would explode mines, but it only got the surface mines and on the back of that, it was called Bookoo boom boom. In other words, a lot of explosions, bang, bang, boom, boom, boom, and you'd go in, and the other one was George. The other one was Steel. We had George, Boom Boom, and Steel, had the back you could go down on the back of the hatch on the armoured personnel carrier. Our team supplies to one bulldozer, two armoured personnel carriers and a land rover along with seven men in the team. There'd be an officer, three bulldozer drivers and three field engineers, and I was one of the field engineers. With these mines, keeping in mind, different, the lay of the land, and it's not rocket science to know if you put a mine on the sand, the sand will blow away on the beach. It'll be exposed. You'll see it. If not, it'll be covered over, and you can't see it. If you put it on red soil, it'll probably stay there like clay. It'll stay in situ, and it won't move. If you put it on black soil and it rains, it'll sink and some of these mines within a couple of years, two years, had gone down a metre into the ground and sunk down and turned sideways and everything. It's just a lay of the land. If you put a house brick on black soil or swampy soil, it's going to sink into the ground and this is what happens. So, some of these mines were completely useless, completely useless, they'd gone sideways. The sandy ones were sticking up out of the ground or couldn't be seen. Actually you don't want a mine to be seen anyway, but you wouldn't know where it was. So, when we went to clear the minefield, they're everywhere. They were sticking up out of the ground. They were below the ground. They could have been a metre under the ground. I remember I went with a bulldozer driver once, and he showed me, had the trench dug probably two metres deep, and about a metre down this mine, you can see where it’d been and it was on the side and just with the lay of the land, so, and some of the mines we had, that was the M16 mine. We also had the M14, and that was a little plastic one, was only the size of a small, Snappy Tom cat tin, and only a little piece of metal in it, which would break when you trod on it, and they were everywhere. They were almost impossible to pick up with a mine detector.
Accommodation at Nui Dat
As engineers, and keeping in mind, we'd already set up the Task Force base, we had two to a hut, sometimes it was three to a hut, and we had these tents, probably four metre by four metre, five metre by four metre tents with actual floors, timber floors. We were pretty well off. We always had running water, and also hot water. We had a chuffa, which was a diesel drip into a flame and that would keep water hot. We lived pretty well as engineers, infantry and some of the other fellows weren't so well off. We had a bed, a mattress, a spring bed, a mattress. We even had sheets, and we had mosquito nets. We each had a locker, and I remember, always we had a table virtually in the centre room with two or three chairs. Walk outside, was always surrounded by sandbags. Walk outside, we did a lot of concreting in my time, and so we had concrete paths to go from one hut to the other or down to the Rec hut. We had a big Rec hut where we could play darts. You could play volleyball inside, it was quite big, and so our conditions weren't too bad. We had the wet season, where you could guarantee it was going to rain every day, about three or four in the afternoon and you're always wet. You always had perspiration with you, even in a dry time, and you just get, you just live with it. That's it. If you went out of bush or even working in the Dat, your clothes always had red. It didn't take long to get smelly. Two or three days in the bush, you didn't shower or wash. I can't even remember shaving in the bush with some of the battalions. Some, you had to shave. Others, all depends where you were.
Setting up an ambush in the Long Hai mountains
We did a lot of ambushes as engineers when I worked with 7 Battalion. We'd go in, I remember one night, we left the fire support base, Bridget, which is down on the sand and we went along the beach in dark, on the beach in dark with just the lights of the armoured personnel carriers and they dropped us off, turned around, and the APCs left, and we're right on the base of the Long mountains, Hai mountains, right at the base of these mountains, and they'd gone and there we are. We felt like we're on D Day, one fellow said, we’ve got the surf coming in, we're up against the beach wall, and we're just waiting to go over the top. The message, come along. We went over the top. We didn't go far. There's a road that ran across us, so we stopped on the road, and we set up a bit of a ambush for a few hours, just waiting for time to pass and four Viet Cong came past and, of course, our fellows opened up and, as usual, we missed them. They got away. You know, they took off and that was another contact. So then we got our, marshalled ourselves together, and that's when I, for the first time, I heard illumination rounds. So, from Bridget they fired illumination, must have been mortars coming in, and I'd never heard of that sound, that woof, woof, woof, woof, with the canister and lighting up the place like you wouldn't believe. So, we continued on, but as engineers, my mate, he was, we were both number ones. Actually, at that time, he detected ahead where I would lay out a tape behind me, and infantry fellows would be all one behind the other, and one of the back would pick the tape up, mine tape. So, then we'd swap over every 10 or 15 minutes because the readings and the sounds were too loud and against you. After a while, and you got to try and judge, "Is that a mine or is it just a bit of shrapnel?" Long Hais were pretty well bombed out. Anyway, so we went through, and we went pretty well all night to go to this ambush spot and I remember just on daylight, it was my turn on the mine detector, and I got a reading, and I just happened to lift it away, lift the plate away. I looked down and there's a snake, a little bamboo krait, and he was all wound up in a little circle, all nice and comfortable. So, I signalled ahead and the corporal from the platoon, he came ahead, put his bayonet on and stabbed the snake with his bayonet and took it down the line. Now how lucky was I that I didn't put my hand down, but what it was, it was an old, like a coffee packet out of rations, it was a ration there that gave me the metallic sign of the reading and so that's what saved the day. So, we ended up, we went into the ambush site, and as I said, we stayed there for five days or seven days. We had to be taken out because the other section wasn't too far from us, and they come under contact, and another section around the corner, they had a big contact at the same time. So, it all broke loose about four or five days into the ambush. Then we got out as quickly as we could, using the armoured personnel, using the mine detectors to get us out, because it was a pretty deadly sort of place there for mines at the base of the Long Hai mountains.
The pressure of mine detection
At Bridget's fire support base, every morning before we left the base, before anyone went out the gate, and the other patrols were ambushing all night, came in or out, we had to always walk from the gate to the main road which, it was formed up, but I think it was a bitumen road down there. I can't remember, but we had to go from the base. It was only, say, two or 300 metres, but we had to go and search that road every day in case there was some sort of mine. It would have been a perfect place to set up a mine on that sandy road. So, once again, walk along, have a look at the sign. Have the last vehicles to come in? Had it been disturbed? Are there any, the grounds always disturbed and you can be, you've always got that bit of a misty dew first thing in the morning, and you can pick up what's going on. So, we'd be in a track each, and just walk along those tracks, to the road, clear it, then come back and we swap over in case we miss something, come back to the base. It's an important job saving a lot of people's lives. Our job, I had my captain, Captain John Tick, he reminded me that when we were over there, when he was in charge that we didn't have a high mortality rate. Was engineers, field engineers, was about one in three were either killed or wounded, but when I was there, and he put it down to the experience of the fellows he had as number ones staying out of trouble, or just the experience of those fellows. I'm lucky. My section leader, who we didn't get to see all that often, a fellow called Paddy Healy, and he'd been in the British Army, in the British Marines, and he'd been in Port Said. He'd been all through the Middle East as an engineer. He actually had a bravery medal of some description, I think was an M.I.D., and a lovely fellow, very easy and easy to learn from and he was our, actually our section corporal, keeping in mind, we'd never ever get to work with the section corporal because we’re always in pairs, and we're always out somewhere else, you know. There used to be roughly two engineers to every rifle company and sometimes it was two engineers to every section, some places, all depends on how big the operation was and where we were.
Entertainment and a toilet prank
We had Lorraine Desmond, and loved her show and there's quite a few others. I can't remember who they were, but it was always good to go to Luscombe Bowl and just take your chair down and a soft drink or whatever and sit there in the sun and have a bit of entertainment. Only happened a couple of times. We had another one that came actually into 1 Field Squadron, to our lines, and there was a live show there and actually, what happened, they actually made a special toilet for the OC, for the boss and for the entertainers to use, only going to use it once, and that night, one of the engineers, he got locked up for it, he went to jail for it. He actually got some explosives and put it down the toilet and blew up the toilet, the OC’s toilet in 1 Field Squadron lines, and he come running past. He was a 2 trooper. He come running past us, and it wasn't long before our fellows grabbed him, and he was carted off with the military police and I figured he got three months jail, I think, for that, for blowing up the entertainers’ toilet. It's terrible to mention. I shouldn't even tell you about it, anyway, he did. He got to, he got, he done his time. I'm not going to tell you who it was, but he was not a bad bloke, actually but i, I think, more of a joking thing that just turned serious, too serious.
Return to Australia
I came back on a return from Australia flight, RTA flight, got back in at half past 10 at night, but the plane was delayed. I got through the, after 11 o'clock. My mother and my two cousins picked me up at the airport, took me back to Redfern and all the other fellows I was with, and keep in mind, I'd been on operations with a lot of these fellows and I went back to mum in the 11th floor of a 16 block of units in Redfern, sat there with mum, had a quick talk, and I said, "I'm out of here." So, I quickly got changed, and I went up to King’s Cross, came across the guys. I don't know how I found them up there, because keep in mind, no mobile phones, no contact, all the rest of it. We had our pay book and all our money. So, I ran into the fellows, and they were in D and E platoon and I'd actually been in rookies with these guys. They went to D and E and they were on that first operation I mentioned before. So, up to King's Cross, I had at least, I think it was about four days before I got out of the Cross. Then we all got a flat together in the King's Cross. Yes, and I was, I went back into the police force not long after that and I was living in the police force for the first few weeks, and here we are, I think it was three or four, and we had a great big room, and we're all bedded together and we’d just spent at least 12 months, or say, two years anyway, but 12 months close, in close contact with all your mates, and mateship was the big thing. So, there we are in Kings Cross, having a great time, plenty of alcohol and having a good time, having a ball.
A reflection on the difficulties of readjusting back into civilian life
You say goodbye to your friends in the morning and virtually that night, 12 hours later, you're back home in Australia, and that's where a lot of fellas come unstuck, because we didn't have that mateship. I went back into the police force not long after, and going back into the police force. I had a structured job, although I had a couple of weeks at King’s Cross holidaying you might as well say. It was time out but a lot of fellows didn't have jobs to come back to. They got called up and they'd left their employer. A lot of fellows went back to their same employer. A lot of fellows didn't, and the fellows that, the regular soldiers, they went back to a unit, and they were accepted with their mates altogether but a lot of them came back to nothing, come back to mum and dad or a wife or a sister, and there was nothing for them. There was nothing. There was just nothing. No mateship, no friendship, no one to have a bit of time with in the evening and that was very hard for them. Years later, going back now to 1977, I was a detective at Cobar, sole detective at Cobar, and there was one detective and about nine uniform guys and there was a Playboy magazine, I think it was November 77, and it was sitting around on the desk for ages, and I picked it up once, and it said, "I died in Vietnam." It's all about Agent Orange and this particular time I looked up and I read it, and it was, Lester Eugene Redlinger was in Darwin, and I said, "Lester, that's my work mate." And he was my work mate, the schoolteacher from Darwin and you couldn't believe it, but what had happened, the story was all there. I still have the magazine. I've kept it, but Les returned from Vietnam, got out of the Army, went back to school, teaching, married a Tiwi Islander girl, had two children. They were twins. One night, he just got on the grog, on the booze, got his rifle, shot her, and then suicided himself and that was it. The kids were away being babysitted, and that's it, and I didn't find out about Les doing that for years later and then what I started doing, this is how I got my Order of Australia, I went back through my diaries of the fellows and the addresses who I'd served with, and I found at that stage, out of the 50 I'd have been with, there was roughly about 10 that had suicided for different reasons. Some had car crashes. One fellow drank a bottle of scotch and drank and jumped in the hot bathtub and collapsed in the bath and died. Different reasons. Few suicides, then car crashes, number of firearm suicides but I couldn't believe it. Then I started ringing around, and we got all the fellows together and we all talk about it. One fellow had had a stroke, at a very young in age, he was, used to smoke a lot of marijuana and drink alcohol. He was a plumber, and he had his stroke, and he was paralyzed all down one side of his body, and he couldn't handle anymore, so he ended up suiciding. Lovely fellow. All he could say when he met me was, "Why me? Why me?" for the stroke, and I felt so sorry for him, but it was tragic what happened later on in life for these guys because I know two of them, particularly, two of them, three, that drank themselves to death. One fellow, a really good-looking guy. He had hair. That's something I haven't got, head hair, very clear skin. He was Dutch and he was just decent, but he, beautiful skin, and he said, "Don't worry, Rodney, I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing." And he was in a hospice at that time, and he wouldn't stop drinking, and didn't take long, and he's, they're, all their insides just fall to bits, but it was three of them I can name, just straight off the top of my head. Drank himself to death. There you go.
Prickly heat and acceptance of differences within the unit
I came back, and I was still suffering from a thing called prickly heat, and it's a tropical disease that you get. It's just like, if you could liken what it would be like to be hit with stinging nettles on your back, and it comes out on your back. It's where you're wearing your backpack and I had that for months and months and months, and also my lip, the side of my face used to swell up, right up, and my bottom lip used to swell up and come right down, like it was full of Botox, and would ache and pain and I don't know what that was, but I had that, and I, that's on my medical records, and the prickly heat was just unbearable. It slowly went. And deafness, I come back with a bit of deafness. I was lucky to actually get back into the police force and do another 25 years in the police force but the problems that guys had, and a lot of the problems are there, you can't see them, because they're in their brain and everyone purports, if you get into a contact or a mine incident or whatever, everyone sees it from a different angle. The way I saw it was one way, and yet, my colleague, he would see it in a different angle. It's funny, you sort of, I was aware of that when I was there, that we're all different. We're all made up different and different nationalities. We had Yugoslavs. We had Germans, Polish, Greek, Maltese, a Dutch, you know, we had so many different, and different states. We had Tasmanians, West Australians, Northern Territory, Charleville in the outback, Brisbane, New South Wales, Victorians and you might think we all come from the same country, but we're all different and from different backgrounds and different dialects and then there comes race, comes into it. We had a Chinese fellow. He was with us. Great guy. He was with D and E platoon, really good guy, and we had a Thursday Islander, Terry. The makeup of guys was just so different, and yet we all bonded together, and over there, there was no such thing as race or picking on people, not like today in 2023. It was a different ball game altogether. We all loved each other and had to depend on each other. There was a big thing, dependence. Oh, we still had our arguments, you know, like, I've never been wrong in my life, you know, but it's been explained to me that I may have been a little bit wrong from time to time, you know, with the decision-making process.
The importance of the 50th anniversary commemoration
I've travelled down from Taree to here, so it means a lot to me. It wasn't so long ago, they gave us that medallion, and I was one of the 10 selected to be the initial part of that selection process and get that medallion and there's only, I haven't received mine in the mail, but I'm told it's in the mail. They've given us a citation. So, every Vietnam veteran, Australian veteran, has now got the Vietnamese citation for gallantry and palm and I should be wearing that tomorrow, but it's up in my mailbox and I can't get to it. Tomorrow is, I'm not going to say it's a closure day, but it's just being acknowledged, keeping in mind, we'll go back to 1972, one government sent us there, and the other government brought us home indisgrace, and leaving politics out of it, because I'm very non-political, what they did to us back in 1972, the public, was disgraceful in my opinion. People say we shouldn't have been there, but we were there. Now let's look after the fellows that are left and I think there's only about 22, 24,000 fellows, Vietnam veterans, out of the 60 odd that went there, that are left. That's unbelievable. 50 years later. So, tomorrow means a lot to me, and I can think about all my mates, not only the ones that got killed or suicided, but the ones that have passed away from different cancers and heart attacks since. Tomorrow is a big reflection day for me to sit back. I'll actually be glad when next Monday comes and I can forget about the whole thing again and just go back to looking after my cattle and my horses. I'm a cat man, by the way, I'm a little farmer who's got a cat, no dog. So, you wouldn't think a big, rough neck like me would be a cat man, but I am. I've got my little cat Crystal who is Siamese, would you believe, a Vietnamese cat or an Asian cat. But I, once again, tomorrow will be huge for me, totally huge, and I'm in the VIP tent, I managed to get in there, I don't know how, but I'm in the VIP tent, and I'll be sitting beside them, all the politicians and there's no animosity with me. It's all done. It's all over and done with and I'm just, feel so proud to be an Australian. I'm so proud to be a Vietnam veteran, because Vietnam is on my mind every day of the week. It wouldn't be a day go by that I don't think of Vietnam and all the good we did. I wasn't there putting the minefield in. I was there taking the minefield out with a group of heroes and there's a lot of people walking around today, especially Vietnamese, on their legs, that if we didn't rip up our minefield, they would be certainly be having mine incidences, keeping in mind, the Americans just packed up and left. They left theirs. The Australians took their minefields back home, or got rid of as much of the explosive ordnance that they could do. So good on us.
