Vietnam War Memoir
The flight comes into view. Nine machines, enough to lift the whole company. Purple smoke marks the landing zone as the helicopters wheel over the jungle perimeter and ease themselves fussily onto the ground. The soldiers emerge from the nearby trees and clamber aboard, section by section, awkward with their heavy packs and weapons. Together with others of the company headquarters group, the captain is assigned to the lead helicopter. The flight is airborne again within five minutes. Aloft, the deafening clatter of the rotors allows no opportunity for conversation. He uses the time as he usually does, either poring over maps of a new operational area if the company is being repositioned, or dreamily contemplating a shower and that first beer if the flight is inbound to Nui Dat.
I hear a helicopter landing on the Channel 7 roof nearby and am instantly back in Vietnam. Like Proust and his madeleines, the ‘thoc-thoc-thoc-thoc’ sound of rotor blades brings a whole set of sensations flooding back; less intense these days, but still almost tangible. The heat: hot like only the tropics can be, whether it be muggy summer when you were almost always wet, or dusty winter when you were almost always parched. The smells: rank stink of jungle greens that have been sweated in for 24 hours a day for anything up to a fortnight, and the aroma of the peasant east—the curiously-not-unpleasant reek of human waste used ubiquitously as fertiliser, the wood smoke and cooking smells from the villages. The fatigue: the sheer exhaustion at the end of a day’s slog through scrubby jungle, when you still have to help to dig a weapon pit and to plot, code and transmit a defensive fire plan; and the back-from-the-dead effort of rousing yourself in the early hours of the morning to attend to a request over the command net.
Curious that it is sounds like these that have the greatest power to remind me of what it was like to be a foot soldier in Vietnam. Certain songs from the era will do it too—for example, ‘Magic Carpet Ride’ by Steppenwolf. I hardly hear it these days but when I do I am instantly back in Fire Support Base ‘Helen’, in the sapping heat of the dry season, when Armed Forces Radio played it almost every day. Movies and books wont do it for me. It’s not just that there are so few of both, and it’s not just that most of the movies are about Americans with perfect teeth winning effortlessly. A real Vietnam evocation needs to get into your guts and your soul; to capture the ache of sexual longing of young men recently separated from wives, lovers and girlfriends; to bring back the perpetual uneasy, queasy sensation in your stomach, the consequence of inevitable hygiene inadequacies on operations, the feeling that it was never quite safe to fart. And, above all, it would evoke that special kind of tedium: the tedium of a routine where, for long stretches of time—for days at a time—nothing really happened but in which you had to remain vigilant, because to switch off might have fatal consequences.
The other day I saw a picture of Australian soldiers in Vietnam. It’s one of those iconic photos that adorn the dust jackets of histories of the event. Soldiers wait beside a cleared area in the jungle, half-turned away from the dust kicked up by a light helicopter landing fifty metres away. Hatless, scraggy heads leaning slightly forward to balance the weight of their packs, jungle-greens stained with the sweat and grime of a long patrol. Young faces, grizzled faces—Aussie faces. Enough to make you shout for joy, to weep for the costly pointlessness of it all.
Another iconic photo. Four men are in the frame: one, in black pyjamas, sprawled and lifeless, the others instantly recognisable as Australian soldiers. A jungle track runs up the axis of the image, scrubby trees and undergrowth on each side. The trained eye reads the situation at a glance. Plainly there has just been a contact and probably the briefest of fire-fights. The rest of the section—perhaps no more than the section commander and the two-man machine gun group—are out of the picture, but you sense their presence. The man in the foreground is half-crouched, facing slightly towards the camera looking upwards, M16 rifle at the ready position. Early 20s, eyes wide, mouth half open. Little more than a boy, but the stance shows self-confidence and competence. You can almost see his deliberate movement: lower body tense, almost still; upper body slowly, carefully and consciously rotating; eyes searching for danger. He wears a light webbing belt, to which are attached three large water bottles and two small pouches; a machete in its sheath is just visible on his off-side; on his head the ubiquitous floppy cotton ‘giggle hat’. His pack and those of the others were probably shrugged off at the moment the contact began.
In a fire-fight, officers are usually so busy that they haven’t got time to be scared. Soldiers—the ‘diggers’—are usually not so lucky. Lying prone, hearing bullets over your head, praying that the boss will not be panicked into giving unwise orders— there’s a lot that can pass through a soldier’s head in just a few seconds. Anyone would be scared, but you can tell this soldier isn’t. And it’s not just adrenalin and the fight-rather-than-flight reaction to danger. That can take you just so far. Reliability in a tight situation depends mainly on training and the self-discipline coming from the feeling of being a member of a cohesive team. Australian soldiers in Vietnam had both factors in spades.
Two photos, both evoking the young Australian soldiers with whom I served, and their quiet presence, their understated competence. Half were national-servicemen, but no less professional. In fact, the only way you could tell the difference between them and the regulars was that the national-servicemen were generally better soldiers. Brighter, sharper—hard to put your finger on, but you felt it. Two young gunners with whom I worked went on to distinguished careers in statistics; one as a professor of mathematics, the other as a Tax Office executive. But the three I got to know best were just ordinary blokes and, wherever they may be now, chances are they still are. Brian, Gubby and Peter.
Memory of Brian:
Afire-fight: the leading section is in contact; cacophony of shouting, rifles and machine guns. The captain runs forward, half crouched, to find a spot from which to direct artillery fire from the battery that is over seven kilometres to the rear. A swift glance backwards confirms that Brian is close behind, pack with radio aerial poking out bouncing around the back of his neck, freckled face sweating. They go to ground. ‘Fire Mission Battery!’ he yells back over his shoulder. Brian conveys the order and all those that follow over the radio net. Brian is all business, despite the dangers not fifty metres away, recording the time and the gist of each message, as procedures dictate all signallers must, but on the magazine of his rifle with a chinagraph pencil rather than on the more usual notebook. Brian will transcribe it later, when he can find a calmer and drier situation. He is 22 years old, a national-servicemen, country boy, and headed back there on RTA—the epitome of military professionalism in the interim.
Memory of Gubby:
Early morning at the Nui Dat helipad: the company is about to depart for a seven-day patrol. Morale is high; the day’s main heat has yet to bite and the company, now four months into its tour, is pleased with its performance so far. Gubby fits into this up-beat environment perfectly. If Brian is an introvert, Gubby is an out-there-in-your-face extrovert. He seems to have decided that, if he has to play the role of soldier for two years, then he might as well do it with style. He has acquired a macho swagger and an outrageous Pancho Villa moustache. But the style is matched by the substance. Stooped forward under the weight of a huge pack, he carries not only four water bottles, rations, light bedding, toilet gear and a handful of personal effects, but also a radio set and two spare batteries. As a signaller, his routine load is the heaviest in the company. Brian and Peter are similarly affected, but Gubby has gone one further. In order to—as he puts it—’pull my weight with the grunts’, he totes a rifle with a long magazine in lieu of the more conventional shorter and lighter version, together with an extra 100 rounds of ammunition. This adds several kilos to a load that is already considerable—in fact, as revealed by some scales on the helipad, his pack weighs as much as he does—but he’d rather sweat than lose face with his infantry counterparts.
Memory of Peter:
It is minutes before the company is due to assault a bunker system. For the last two hours, through Peter on the radio, the captain has directed a bombardment with every artillery battery at the task force’s disposal: all three Australian field batteries and an American medium battery. By rights the bunkers and everything in them should be pulverised, but he is not optimistic. The soldiers are tense as they wait for the order to go in. Amid this, Peter is having a snack. He smears one half of a hard tack biscuit with jam from a tube and then tries to break it off; the biscuit shatters and jammy bits fall to the ground. ‘Bugger!’ ‘Peter, why not try this? Bite a piece off your biscuit then squeeze some jam straight into your mouth.’ Crackle of small arms fire in the background. ‘Oh yeah’. He tries it, and his boyish, grubby, sweaty face creases in a grin. ‘Good one, boss’. The captain cannot begrudge the familiarity; they are about to go forward together into heaven-knows-what.
I never saw better soldiers, and we, their officers, did our best not to let them down. We trained them and we trained ourselves. We were diligent in the minutiae of our duties, we attended to their needs.
And like generations of officers in Australian units before us, we practiced ‘the professionalism of small things’. If you wanted a patrol program to dominate the local jungle, if you wanted to lay ambushes to deny the VC easy access to the villages, we were your men.
We were good, but not, as I later realised, as good as we thought ourselves. Strategically and politically we were naive to the point of being inept.
Take one incident. A minor event, but it sums up a lot:
June 1968, the peak of the Viet Cong Tet Offensive. It is late afternoon. The company has just been dropped off by a swarm of helicopters; they have come from one operation to this one. They are tired and somewhat disoriented, they need time to regroup and rethink, and in any case last light is little more than an hour off. There is a small knoll near the drop zone, and nearby a Vietnamese village; the company commander decides they will harbour on the knoll for the night. The company shakes out, trudging in extended formation towards the knoll. The villagers in the sodden paddies scarcely give them a glance as they go by. The soldiers are edgy; this is a new area. The fighting in the region in the last few days has been intense. American artillery is active a few kilometres away. Something big is on, and the villagers’ sympathies are unknown. The company reaches the knoll, deploys, and the men shed their packs and begin to dig in. Then, a few metres from the company headquarters group, a soldier gives a low cry of surprise. He emerges from his embryonic weapon pit and presents to the company commander, on the blade of his portable spade, a bone. Somehow no-one needs to be told it’s human. Now some of the immediate features in the area are making sense: the low, bare, gravelly mounds and the orderly white rocks. ‘Faack! We’re in a graveyard’, exclaims the CSM, looking to the company commander. The question—’what now, sir?’—hardly needs to be expressed. ‘Bloody irrelevant!’ (it’s the end of a long day). ‘Bloody inconvenient, but irrelevant. We’re here, it’s too late to move again, and what the f**k anyway.’ We return to the preparation of our pits, more careful, apprehensive now. A few more bones, even a skull. The artillery continues to thump, remindingthem that these pits might be needed tonight. So, regardless of sensibilities, dig they must, and quickly, because it is almost time for stand-to.
The night passes without incident and at first light the company is on its way. Much happens that day, and on those that follow. But a week later, back in base, when he casually relates the event in the mess, the Intelligence Officer splutters his beer. ‘You drongos! The Vietnamese are ancestor worshippers. And you dingalings were digging up the local cemetery’. The 10 laughs. ‘Winning hearts and minds, eh?’ The feeling of professional shame is so profound that he can’t even call forth the traditional soldier’s expletive.
A former university colleague once remarked to me that men who had not been to war were subconsciously envious of those who had. Well, I don’t know about that, although he, as a veteran of sixty missions with RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War and with a long post-war career as an historian and philosopher, was well credentialed to say so. (He maintained—and in this I do believe him—that his experience was the most exciting of his life. ‘You cannot imagine the feeling you get when you’ve landed, all the engines are shut down, and you are back!. How exhilarating, how vital is that feeling. Never since have I felt as alive as in that time!’)
What I do know is that no man who has been to war is untouched by the experience. For some, of course, this is fundamentally negative; but for many—maybe most—it is curiously fulfilling. Vietnam was tedious, it was uncomfortable and, as we ultimately learned, we were had. (The universal lot of the soldier.) But to have trained and served with an Australian military unit on operations is to have shared an experience rarely paralleled by anything else that you subsequently do in your life. I had very little in common with most of the soldiers in the company. I never knew, in any meaningful sense, those other than with whom I had daily dealings, and I never tried to follow them up once it was all over. But while we marched together we were bound together by mutual dependence and respect that was stronger than friendship and affection. Imagine the feeling of cohesion in a winning sports team, then double that, and then double again. Just as it is with brothers, you don’t have to like those with whom you live but you are compelled to mutually support each other, if only because to do otherwise risks your survival—even if ‘survival’ means just seeing it through. Feeling wanted—it’s a heady drug, especially for people who may not have had the experience in their life before.
The village graveyard incident described above was the first chink in the armour of my belief in Australia’s Vietnam mission. By the end of my tour, the breastplate was like a sieve. I doubt, however, that many of my comrades shared my misgivings. Australian soldiers, like their compatriots in general, are pragmatic to a fault and tend not to think of such things. And, at the soldiers’ level of the war, a strong sense of self and collective competence and teamwork sustained their belief in themselves and what they were doing. When you are doing what you are trained to do, and you are doing it well, and nothing is telling you otherwise, it’s inevitable to believe that you are ‘winning’. That’s what it was like for many—maybe most—of us in the Australian Army in the 1960s, and that’s why many found their return to be so traumatic.
Vietnam—whether we loved the experience, loathed it or just stuck it out, all of us who were there felt part of ‘a team’. We may have little in common other than that, but the memory of that intense shared experience stays in our souls for a long time afterwards.
Peter and the captain, together with the rest of the company, assaulted the bunker system that day. And, as he had feared, there were still many very-much-alive VC left in there. His bombardment had been pretty well useless, except as a morale booster to get the attack going. Nevertheless, within 15 minutes the lead platoons had subdued the opposition and it was all over. But at a price. When he came up with the company headquarters group, the platoon commander reported seven Australian wounded and one dead. The dead soldier lay nearby on his back. Head pillowed by his pack, his face covered by his camouflage scarf, he might have been taking a nap. Another soldier, sobbing like a little boy at kindergarten, knelt beside him. The platoon sergeant gently led him aside as company headquarters began the tasks of organising a MEDEVAC and then preparing to move on to whatever was next.
I sometimes reflect on the strange juxtaposition of my two most vivid memories of that eventful day: Peter and his snack, and the dead digger and the disconcerting peace of his pose—the essence of ordinary life and the aftermath of violent death. It’s those two images, especially the latter, that invariably occupy my thoughts at the minutes-silence moments on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day. But at the time I was scarcely moved. Although I had witnessed a human tragedy a short time earlier, there was now much to be done. The company needed to regroup, a route needed to be plotted to the next destination, and regimental headquarters needed a report on the bombardment so that it could piece together some lessons for general consumption. So I gave no thought to the dead digger for the next few hours, and neither on the next day nor on the successive weary days as they shaded into a general memory of the patrol. A day moves on and you have little choice but to move on with it. It wasn’t indifference or inhumanity or callousness, and there was no reason to think that the others did not feel the same way. I suppose it must be a soldier’s protective mechanism: you put it away, no time to think about that now. You move on, and your life moves on. It’s only at unguarded moments that the memory draws you back.
