Emotions were only just in check at times at Windsor Golf Club on Wednesday night, November 16 when six Vietnam War veterans shared their stories.
Organised by Barry Kennedy of Windsor Rotary, himself a Vietnam vet, the evening entitled ‘Old Wounds – personal battle stories from the Vietnam War’ attracted a full house of more than 100 attendees including several schoolchildren.
The assembled veterans represented a range of experiences, from those who went there to train the Vietnamese in how to fight the Viet Cong, an anaesthetist from a field hospital, the difficulties of providing logistical support, as well as the real experiences of privates just following orders.
Between them they painted a picture of life as an Australian soldier at the time, from fighting in the jungles, to being wounded by a mine, to recreational activities in the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool at Vung Tau.
Ray Oliver of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) was introduced as “military royalty when it comes to Vietnam” by Mr Kennedy. The AATTV started with a unit of 30 specialist military advisers to teach the South Vietnamese how to fight. At their peak they had 227 in the unit, and ended up as the most highly decorated unit in the Army (at least before Afghanistan). Four Victoria Crosses were awarded to the unit.
“Vietnam is 60 per cent jungle,” Mr Oliver said, adding they had to be able to do four things to be in the unit. “Speak some Vietnamese, have experience bringing artillery fire at close support, be able to operate aircraft in positions of fire, and be able to teach Vietnamese how to fight a war.”
The AATTV were there for 10 years – first ones there, last to leave, with only 22 killed of the total of 971 sent there over the decade.
“It took us six months just to get the Vietnamese to go out at night to set up ambushes,” he said, as they had been taught by the French to only fight in the day.
Graeme Bolitho of 1RAR was 20 and expecting his first baby with his wife when he was sent there. “In May 1965 we boarded the Sydney,” he said. “We used to put balloons in the water to use as target practice on the way over, and we’d drink beer on the deck.”
He said anyone following the Sydney would have thought it was a cruise ship, seeing all the beer cans and balloons left behind.
His second mission was the most terrifying of his whole time there. “We had to go on ambush patrol with the [American unit] 173rd Airborne. Their tactics really weren’t meant for jungle warfare. They’d say ‘we march up the hill till we get ambushed then we kick the hell out of them [[the Viet Cong]’.
“If you lasted your whole year there you were 300 days of it in the bush. You’re in the jungle, dripping wet, your hairs up on the back of your neck. After six months there, many were so nervous the slightest crack of a twig would have them turning around.
“You didn’t know what was going to happen from one moment to the next. The tension never stopped from the moment you got out of the helicopter and went into the bush.”
Despite the psychological and physical pressures, he said their casualty rate was so small next to their kill ratio, an officer was sent to investigate how they did it.
“And when you see your friend all broken up, it puts pressure on the individual,” he said. He described a story which clearly still affected him of a young girl and her little brother who came up and offered them peanuts. He suspected the kids had no parents left, and he heard a month later the whole village had been massacred. “It’s a sad thing for an 18-20-year-old to see these things happening daily.”
He described camping and hearing voices at one point – it turned out they were right over the infamous Cu Chi tunnels which housed 3000 Viet Cong.
Terry Ryan, who has featured in the Gazette previously on his experiences in the battle of Long Tan gave a tense and gripping description of the day of the famous battle, beginning with their resentment of not being able to stay for that day’s concert with Little Pattie.
After his speech he said it was only the second time he’d ever spoken publicly of his experience, and that he had nothing but admiration for the Vietnamese. He got a laugh at the end when he said “it took the Australian government 45 years to acknowledge us with a medal and when I went to pin it on, the bloody thing broke – it was made in China!”
Dr Daryl Salmon was an anaesthetist with the 1st Australian Field Hospital at Vung Tau. He described the shocking injuries a jumping jack mine would inflict on a leg, and passed around an actual photo of a man with a bone sticking out and people working on him frantically. He said the mines would send bits of boot and clothing up into the wound as well which would cause massive infection.
“The VC dug up our ordnance and used it against us to create a logistical burden,” he said. “It caused a pervading loss of morale and anxiety.”
He said huge transfusions were not uncommon after these mines, which often required 20 units of blood. “There was a very high mortality just from the transfusion, with problems with clotting, lung and renal function.” He showed a picture of a very young man with a tube in his throat and wounds in his neck where a bullet had passed in and then out.
He said so many were lost in the chain of evacuation to the place of treatment in World War II that they improved this in the Vietnam War, with most arriving at an operating theatre in less than an hour from the injury, though those who survived often did so with “hideous injuries”. He said the concept of triage was perfected at Vietnam, and at the sounding of a siren at the hospital, everyone would drop everything to prepare to receive new casualties.
He finished saying the way they were all treated on their return from the war was a “well-documented national disgrace”.
Bill Roberts, a platoon medic who also featured recently in the Gazette, said he remembers “standing on the deck of the Sydney [on the way over] and wondering ‘how many of these blokes won’t come back’.
He said his “gung ho” attitude changed when there. “I cried when I saw civilians killed. I thought ‘this is real’.”
He described a situation where a girl about 12 was killed but it wasn’t their fault. He saw the funeral. “This lady was looking at me with dark eyes, like she was saying ‘you killed my daughter’. I can see it to this day.” He describes how it affected his relationship later with his own daughter.
“We forget about the civilians. We do care about others though. I have a cry every now and then and get it out of my system.”
The evening ended with an extraordinary onomatopoeiac poem by Graeme Bolitho, penned after contact with VC where a mate of his died, which was so visual in its descriptions as well, it was like watching a movie in your head. It brought shivers up this reporter’s spine and brought home the fear and the anguish.
