Book Review - Captain Bullen’s War: The Vietnam War diary of Captain John Bullen

Captain Bullen’s War: The Vietnam War Diary of Captain John Bullen 

Written by: Paul Ham (ed), 

Harper Collins, Pymble, 2009.

ISBN: 9780732288433, 474pp.


Reviewed by: Bob Hall

Captain John Bullen was posted to Vietnam as the OC of the 1st Topographical Survey Troop, part of the 1st Australian Task Force at Nui Dat. To brief his successor on developments, and to inform his family of his activities there, he kept a diary. The diaries were edited by Paul Ham into a lively account of Bullen’s Vietnam tour. Ham’s editorial hand was light. Bullen displays a keen writer’s eye for an illuminating detail, a wry observation or a description of the underlying tension of combat operations.

Bullen’s diaries begin on 17 January 1968 when he boards HMAS SYDNEY bound for Vietnam. He arrives at Vung Tau on 3 February 1968 just days after the Tet Offensive erupted, with provincial cities, towns and military bases under heavy attack by the Viet Cong and the People’s Army of Vietnam. Together with 350 other Army personnel—a mixed bag of all corps—Bullen disembarks on a shingle beach somewhere in Vietnam. No one is there to meet them. They have one rifle between them—but no ammunition. A US Army jeep screeches to a halt and a US Military Policeman tells Bullen and his fellow Australians, ‘There’s VC coming this way! Take cover and prepare to defend yourselves!’¹ So begins Captain Bullen’s War.

It ends thirteen and a half months later with Bullen, exhausted after an ‘often desperately demanding’ year, boarding HMAS SYDNEY for the return cruise to Australia. Between these dates Bullen treats us to an often wittily observed picture of the day-to-day workings of an Australian Task Force at war.

In addition to his job as OC of the Survey Troop, as a ‘spare’ captain within the Task Force Headquarters, Bullen does regular stints as duty officer in the Task Force command post, dealing with a host of tactical problems such as casualty evacuations, enemy probes of the defensive perimeter, and granting clearances to fire artillery and contacts. He also acts as a board member or defending officer in a number of courts martial. He records in his diary the details of production of maps, the conduct ofsurvey and the administration and leadership of his small unit. But interspersed within this story are the highlights of Task Force operations through one of the most hectic periods of the war and Bullen’s wry observations of the Army disciplinary system going inexorably about its business. Bullen’s job also takes him regularly to Saigon, Baria, Vung Tau and the US Army base at Long Binh. He records an acutely observed wartime travelogue of the bases, bars, beaches and brothels he encounters. Punctuating the story are Bullen’s sharply observed snapshots of the sometimes hilarious, sometimes dramatic, incidents that war brings forth.

A wonderful cast of characters pass through the spotlight of Bullen’s attention. There are the men of his unit, particularly Grant Small who emerges as competent, energetic and a natural leader, but is denied his opportunity for promotion by the powers that be. There are the various Task Force and US Army officers Bullen meets in the course of his work. There is the laundry proprietor, the Vietnamese Major and the shoeshine boy, along with a bevy of finely observed bar girls, prostitutes and madams.

I enjoyed the story of ‘Gazza’, the Task Force Officers’ Mess steward with a larrikin streak who tipped a bowl of soup over an unpopular officer and was charged and fined $10 for the offence. It later emerges that the offence was premeditated. Gazza picks up $25 in bets, making his soup spilling offence a tidy earner. Gazza, presumably seeking further supplementation to his Army pay, later invites Bullen and others to nominate targets for similar treatment.

In another Python-esqueinterlude, Bullen, who speaks fluent French and German, is on duty in the Task Force command post. Two visiting American Colonels are ushered in by another German-speaking Australian officer. For the benefit of their American audience the two Australians begin an argument. The German-speaking Australian demands to know if this is the Australian Task Force command post, to which Bullen replies in fluent French that it is not; it is, he says, the last French Resistance command post operating against the Viet Minh.

But more serious episodes are never far away. Mine incidents, friendly fire episodes, contacts, air strikes and other combat events pepper the diary.

Bullen acknowledges that his diary records only what he saw or heard at the time, and the field of view for junior officers and soldiers in war is severely limited. Thus, there is no sense here of the broader impact of the Tet Offensive or the ‘mini-Tet’ Offensive of May 1968, the beginning of the Paris peace talks, or world events having an impact upon the Vietnam War, such as the 1968 US Presidential election campaign bringing Richard Nixon, who promised the phased withdrawal of US forces, to the Presidency in January 1969. The book, in other words, is impressionistic. And some of Bullen’s impressions of 1ATF operations need to be treated cautiously. For example, he asserts that ‘outside major battles ... SAS patrols... kill more [enemy] than the rest of the ... Task Force put together’.² This is incorrect. 

Excluding major battles, during calendar year 1968 the SAS killed 175 of the enemy, whereas Infantry killed 646.³ He also overstates the effectiveness of helicopter gunship support. But many of the details of combat operations he records in his diary are accurate and add depth to the colourless accounts to be found in official Task Force Headquarters war diaries.

This is an easy and enjoyable read. It shows Bullen to be a man sensitive to the violence and suffering of the war, caring of his men and the units doing battle with the enemy, but equally alert to the ironies, human foibles and the comic always present in war. The soldiers of the 1st Topographical Survey Troop could have done much worse than to have Bullen as their commander. Captain Bullen’s War gives a vivid impression of the Australian Task Force in wartime Vietnam.

Endnotes

1     Paul Ham (ed), Captain Bullen’s War: The Vietnam War Diary of Captain John Bullen, Harper Collins, Pymble, 2009, p. 23.

2     Ibid., p. 199.

3     Analysis of the Vietnam Combat Database created by Dr AT Ross. But SAS loss ratio was far better than that of Infantry (1:19.8 for SAS compared with 1:3.8 for infantry). However, Infantry loss ratio improves substantially relative to SAS loss ratio when Infantry performance in major battles (of which there were several in 1968) is included.