Australian veterans experienced diverse homecomings, ranging from public parades to social hostility and feelings of rejection. The 1987 Welcome Home Parade started to foster national reconciliation for Vietnam veterans and their fellow Australians. Veterans’ reflections emphasise the extreme physical hardships, psychological trauma and profound loss of innocence endured during their war service.
Anecdotal evidence holds that most men returned from Vietnam in the dead of night, hidden from the public. In fact, large numbers returned aboard HMAS Sydney to a welcome by dignitaries and a parade. The manner of their homecoming affected how veterans recovered from the war.
Those who arrived late at night, with no fanfare and the seeming indifference of the military, had more trouble adjusting to life at home than those whose return was more public and who had had the benefit of a couple of weeks unwinding on board Sydney before reaching Australia.
But the return home was only the beginning of a long period of readjustment.
For a long time after the war, large numbers of Vietnam veterans felt that many in Australia blamed them, rather than politicians, for the war and the way it had been conducted.
Images of the war, of children burned by napalm, of the dead of My Lai, of a South Vietnamese general summarily executing a member of the Vietcong in the streets of Saigon, had an effect on public opinion and public understanding. The fact that these images were more closely related to the US–Vietnamese experience in South Vietnam was less remarked upon. People associated the role of Australians in the war with that of the Americans in a way that failed to recognise the 2 countries' different approaches to fighting in South Vietnam.
Some veterans recall being abused as baby killers, rapists and murderers on their return. For men who regarded themselves as generally having fought with more humanity and professionalism than their US counterparts, this was a bitter blow.
Australia's Vietnam veterans who had lost friends in combat, who had seen death and who had killed, as is the lot of soldiers in war, were appalled at the way in which their having done the job asked of them by their government was, in some cases, used against them.
Even the RSL, an organisation for ex-service personnel, proved less than welcoming.
Remarks by returned soldiers from earlier conflicts suggesting that Vietnam was not a real war hurt men seeking the comradeship and understanding of fellow veterans. This experience was not universal – rural RSL clubs in particular did welcome men returned from Vietnam – but it happened often enough for some veterans to harbour a life-long resentment of an organisation from which they expected much more.
In 1980, some veterans formed the Vietnam Veterans' Action Association, which later became the Vietnam Veterans' Association of Australia (VVAA). Established partly as a crisis counselling service and as a vehicle through which to prosecute a case for veterans claiming to suffer from the effects of herbicides and defoliants used in South Vietnam, the VVAA has played an important role in the lives of some veterans. Its membership has been cited as somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 among some 60,000 Australians who served in South Vietnam.
By 1987, attitudes to the war had changed.
Vietnam veterans held a Welcome Home Parade in Sydney. Some 25,000 veterans marched to the cheers of several hundred thousand onlookers. Then they raised funds for a national memorial for Vietnam War veterans, which was unveiled on Canberra's Anzac Parade in 1992. These gestures meant a great deal to Vietnam veterans, and they signalled an acceptance that some who returned from that war had not felt before.
In the early 1990s, veterans began making pilgrimages to Vietnam. For many, it was a time to pay respects to friends who had been killed in the war. For others, it was a chance to meet the former enemy and make their peace, or simply to make gestures of friendship with Vietnamese people who shared a common experience and for whom there was no ill will.
The many stories of disturbed veterans, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and continuing to suffer from their time in South Vietnam suggest that this was almost a universal experience. It wasn't. Many Vietnam veterans simply returned to Australia and settled back into the routines and habits of civilian life. Many who served in South Vietnam have gone on to achieve success in the military, politics, business or charitable work.
No one story is typical, but the widespread perception of veterans being abused and ostracised, while true for some, was not the case for all.
Veterans' reflections on the war
… it's just the smell of Vietnam and the smell stays with you for the whole time that you're there, until the time you leave.
[Gunner John Kinsela, 4RAR, Australians at War Film Archive, interview no 2454.]
I lost all me skin off my feet, from what's it's name? Well we'd been in the rain for a fortnight and it hadn't stopped raining and we were out there and I said 'Oh I'm that itchy'. Took my shoes off and when I got back inside base, to my company headquarters outside in the bush, took my boots off, then pulled my socks off and all my skin came off right down, just come off both of them, my feet just peeled straight off, so I had to get heli, medevaced out back to Nui Dat so I could get around for a fortnight without any shoes and that on and get the skin back on.
[Lance Corporal Norman Cameron, 7RAR, in Australians at War Film Archive, interview no 1710.]
The creeping mank. It's just a skin rash we used to get in the bush from being wet all the time. It was just one of those tortuous things, like prickly heat and you used to get prickly heat too. But not taking your boots off for twelve to fourteen days your feet totally wet all the time that they get all shrivelled up and then you get manky and you get all sorts of reinfestations of tinea and God's knows what else. So a patrol really couldn't go any longer than that. On the grounds of body maintenance and your crutch was the same, you can imagine. If you didn't take your clothes off for fourteen days and you used to stink like a pole cat… the VC couldn't smell you…. They smelt worse than us. 'Cause they never took their clothes off sort of thing. But you know that was the way it was.
[SAS trooper, Mick Malone, in Australians at War Film Archive, interview no 1710.].
I said to the helicopter, "Can't you land?" He said, "No." He said, "I'm not sure what's underneath," so I had to jump out of the helicopter into the rice paddy and so actually when I got to the area where the contact had been, I was soaking wet and covered in faeces from the water buffalo and I felt most ill-prepared to do anything but I just went ahead and did it. There are other times where it was much more dangerous where I had to be winched in and I was actually quite frightened in those situations… There was one night winch-in where I was winched in at night through a tree canopy and I kept on hitting the trees and they'd have to pull the winch back up and then let me down again and the contact was still going on, some distance away, and that was quite worrying. Also I've got a fear of heights as well so that didn't help.
[Dr Anthony Williams, Royal Australian Army Medical Corps, 7RAR, Australians at War Film Archive, , interview no 2454.]
To be a national servicemen you're a 'reo' [reinforcement], what a lot of people don't realise is that you get units that train in Australia, they might do one, two, three years training together as a unit, they do all the jungle training, they do everything together, they work as a team… A reinforcement is somebody that comes in like a reserve that comes in that nobody knows and that was a bit of a culture shock too. Landing in Vietnam and then being taken out to the Horseshoe and put with all these strange guys that I'd never even met before.
[Gunner John Kinsela, 4RAR, Australians at War Film Archive, interview no 2454.]
You patrol for a while, you stop, have breakfast, patrol, patrol, patrol, have lunch. Patrol, patrol, walk, walk, walk, ah evening meals. Beautiful. Then you all head towards a night defensive position… the next morning up we get again, stand-to, pack up 'the house', patrol, patrol, patrol, simple. And we do the same shit all over again. Unless of course the shit hits the fan somewhere in between. Then things get a little bit different. Priorities are somewhat different then… And then when that shit's all over, saddle up, move out, patrol, patrol, patrol. All over again and that's the way it was, mate. It was just never-ending.
[Anthony Hughes, quoted in Michael Caulfield, The Vietnam Years, Hachette Australia, 2007 pp 12-13, drawing on interview no 2093 in the Australians at War Film Archive.]
We put some new windmills in and the colonel of our unit, he was very proud of this. There was a well dug and a Southern Cross windmill put up and the next day there was a big opening and back he came. There was a bit of wind blowing and they released the hold on the windmill and around went the wheel and up and down went the rods and out came the water. He put his mug under and drank a mug full of water to show them how great it was. That afternoon he was in hospital with the worst stomach bug you've ever seen. They found that some somebody overnight had emptied the toilet bucket down the well.
[Edward Schunemann, 1ACAU quoted in Michael Caulfield, The Vietnam Years, Hachette Australia, 2007 p 346, drawing on interview no 1399 in the Australians at War Film Archive.]
You get to Vietnam. You're in the middle of a war zone. This absolute rush the whole time. The absolute pinnacle of life. When you come off that peak, everything's downhill, you'll never get back there. It's there, you've done it, but for the rest of your life you're trying to find it again. And I was told that the reason I first went back to Vietnam was that I was going back to try and rediscover what I'd lost there. I believe that. No. I left part of me in Vietnam, I left my youth, I left my innocence.
[Tony Ey, CDT3, drawing on an interview by the author and quoted in Michael Caulfield, The Vietnam Years, Hachette Australia, 2007 p 468.]