Thank You!

thanks to those who have become followers (I will try to post more regularly from now on), and for those who have left positive comments.

Rob, thank you for your comments from someone who shared growing up (albeit separately) in the same era and location, Maryborough, Queensland. My brother Les passed on your email details, and I DID send you an email, so I hope you received it.
Desiree, I appreciate your comments, and even more so because it has given me the opportunity to read your informative, interesting, and entertaining blog, AND to see those incredibly wonderful photos.

Evan, (if you haven't given up on my blog by now), thank you, not only for your comments, but also for your friendship, which began way back in the early 1980s.

Kitty, I am glad you liked the poem. There will be more to come, some silly, some happy, some sad, and I hope, if you visit this blog again, you will find something else to enjoy.

With much warmth to you all, Norm

Chapter 11

Hello World! I apologise for such a prolonged absence, not only from here, but from the blogs I follow, but my health has been a tad less than satisfactory, and my procrastination has been super-effective too! Anyhow, here's Chapter 11.

Chapter 11: Preparing for Battle

Age: 20 – 21

I should have placed the following excerpt at the start of Chapter 10, but, I forgot.

        Soldier, Coming Home (unfinished)

After four quiet years of inching forward

to retirement, and superannuation,

he answered the call of the marble,

became a winning number in the first intake

of the newest National Service.

Eagerly, he laid down pen

and took up arms, because,

for all his life he had obeyed

the dictums of authority.

His stepfather disowned him;

the ardent pacifist would have much preferred

the boy to go to jail, instead of war.

His few acquaintances and fewer friends

Bade him goodbye, good luck, and then

forgot about him as their lives moved on.

On my arrival at Enoggera Army Barracks, I was allocated to D Company for my Corps Training, along with Ken Wallace and Bill Winterford, and the three of us became quite close mates.

We drank together a lot, and often finished leave nights with a hamburger at either the Night Owl or the Windmill Cafes in Petrie Terrace, both of which enjoyed the elite patronage of taxi drivers, slightly to fully inebriated revellers, and those Brisbane citizens who found themselves assailed by hunger late in the evening. Those were two of the very few city food outlets that stayed open past nine p.m. (This was long before the first McDonalds, KFC, Red Rooster or Hungry Jacks opened in Australia).  During day leave, we ate a lot at a fish shop near the Albion hotel which cooked wonderful well-grilled fish, hot, blackened, and yum-yum delicious. For extreme hunger, we chose the California Café, on a corner of Brunswick Street, where the cook’s challenge was the California mixed grill, which I never once managed to finish.

Hotels of choice included the British Empire in Queen Street, and the Victory in Charlotte Street.

I deliberately avoided people from my pre-Army life, because I felt even more insecure and less self-confident because I was a soldier, and saw myself as having fallen a fair bit further down the food chain from my civilian days. Once I went to a party in honour of the marriage of two Arts Theatre members, one of whom was the girl who introduced me to … um … adult themes and practices.

My only other foray into culture in my army life was a show at Her Majestys Theatre, featuring a one-man, one-woman entertainment: Barry Humphries and Edna Everage (before attaining damehood). I attended this with a very intelligent co-conscript, Barry Vasella, who, pre-army, was a professional golfer.  

The hardest (and probably the most stupid) decision I made was to limit my contact with Bunty, Peter and Wendy Hitchener, because I felt somehow I had let then down, and become unworthy of their friendship. This feeling possibly stemmed from the withdrawal of my mother and stepfather from my life – because they did not want to know me after I entered the army, I assumed that this would be the attitude of my closest friends too, although I never discussed it with the Hitcheners.

Peggy and Lesley, my tennis-playing friends, sent me a wonderful letter of total support. I still have that letter, which reads as follows:

Dear Norm,

Sorry this letter did not reach you before you left Brisbane. However, the purpose of the letter is to convey to you our sincerest best wishes for your new life in the Army. Let’s hope that this new life will prove as interesting, exciting and fruitful as your past one has been.

Don’t forget! - there are many compensations for the lack of other pleasures which of course the Army cannot provide for. In such a service not all tastes can be taken into account. No doubt you are looking forward to the absence, for two years, of such trite, supercilious, superficialities as les femmes fatales. Of course your presence will be sadly missed by the clan. We are with you in spirit even though your physical form, complete with your euphonious voice, is one of our treasured memories.

However, as John F. Kennedy once said, the service of one’s country is perhaps the greatest, most supreme contribution one can make to his fellow beings. We are only few of the people who are eternally grateful to you for your sacrifice. Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum need. You, as many others before you, have not shrunk from this responsibility but have offered your service to help and maintain the gradually declining dominance of western society in the world.

Pardon my philosophising Norm, but it is only an expression of my sentiments. Once again, may you be guided through the next two years safely. Please remember in your hour of greatest need and always, you are continually in our prayers and thoughts. May God and His Mother bless and protect you now and always. Love,

Peggy and Lesley.

I will refer again to Peggy and Lesley in the chapter dealing with my return from Vietnam.

 What did I learn in my Infantry Corps training? I learned to:

·        Swim several laps of the Army pool with full battle gear, stuffed with bricks (a skill which, alas, I never used in actual war).

·        Sharpen my physique by many, many 20 mile route marches (which also, according to the medical officers who adjudged me fit for conscription, helped unflatten my feet.

·        Confirm my lack of expertise with all forms of weaponry through repeated visits to the Greenbank Army firing range, where it was an offence, both civil and military, to remove live or dead ammunition from the range.

·        Code, send, receive and decode messages on a platoon radio, which then became my responsibility for the rest of my training and the first part of my war experience.

I also learned to pack for training exercises in a diversity of locations, for periods from a few days to a few weeks. We toured scenic areas (and some definitely non-scenic areas) of Queensland and Northern New South Wales in blazing heat, freezing cold, sauna-standard humidity and deluge-level rainstorms, always on feet that became sore, blistered, and, finally, battle-hardened.

(I forget if I mentioned the invaluable medical advice freely offered by one of our platoon corporals at Kapooka concerning the care and treatment of feet. “If you want to have healthy, fit, unblistered feet, you gotta piss on ’em every day” he counselled us.)[1]  Some of our adventures in the Australian bush took place in romantic and exotic locations, including Greenbank, Spring Mountain, Kenilworth State Forest, Tin Can Bay, (more than once), Lever’s Plateau, Wiangaree, Canungra Jungle Training Centre (twice), and Shoalwater Bay, near Rockhampton.  

In 1975 I wrote a little piece of doggerel that fondly recalled our visit to Lever’s Plateau, and, to break the monotony of all the prose, I thought I’d like to share it with you. (It also adds to my word count).In Memory of Lever’s Plateau

Do I know Lever’s Plateau, son? You’re lookin’ at a bloke

Who thought the place was gonna be a harmless sorta joke;

Until we climbed ten thousand feet to get right to the top,

In pouring rain, and slushy mud that made a hundred drop!

We never saw the sun, my lad, we never had it dry,

The trees’d do the raining when none came from the sky.

It was jungle, jungle, through and through, you had to force your way;

Impossible to move at night, and very hard by day.

We was walkin’, we was bitchin’, we was cold, and we was wet,

It was God’s forsaken country, and a land I’ll not forget!

Feet were achin’, hearts were achin’, we was hungry, we was cold;

But we was in the Army, lad, and did what we was told.                                                                      

1975

What happened on all these wonderful excursions and camping holidays? Well, at Greenbank and Tin Can Bay we did a lot of shooting at things (no, NOT at tin cans, no matter HOW fitting that might seem), we walked a LOT everywhere we went, and the weather seemed to vary between dying-of-thirst heat to dying-by-drowning drenchings. Lots of dry heat, lots of humid heat, and, occasionally, freezing-to-death cold.

The countryside varied from bare, dusty, scrubby landscapes to almost impenetrable jungle. I learned to camouflage myself so that no one could ever find me unless they were 200 metres or less near me. Did I mention that we walked a LOT? I think I probably walked enough to circumnavigate Australia three or four times, going ANTI-CLOCKWISE!

At the Jungle Training Camp at Canungra, I learned how to run, jump, climb, and crawl through obstacle courses very slowly, how to climb trees with my eyes half shut and without looking down, to shoot harmlessly at targets that jumped out in front of me on practice seek-and-destroy missions.

I learned to  to launch myself into space (with eyes closed) from a very tall tree, with both hands holding the flying fox bar above my head, and to open my eyes in time to let go and land in Canungra Creek, or river, before I hit the bottom of the flying fox on the other side. I learnt to shout ; “PUSH ME!” to the officer who stood atop the tower at the end of the obstacle course, some 160 metres [2] (or so it seemed at the time), above the river/creek, so that I wouldn’t have to think about such a looooong descent wearing full battle gear.

My 21^st birthday fell on Sunday, 3^rd April, 1966, a day when we returned, mid-afternoon, from Canungra. I celebrated with one or two beers in the almost deserted camp[3], and went to bed fairly early[4].

There weren’t many indelible memories from this part of my life. A few of the events I still recall with clarity are:

·        A likeable, bulky, hard-muscled mate named John had an incredible larrikin wit. He told me once that I could make a fortune as a cherry picker: “You could hang by your nose and pick with both hands!” No one, including me, ever got offended by John’s comments, because what he said was downright witty, and without any malice to anyone.

·        Ken Wallace, Bill Winterford and I went out one night, and I MAY have had a few more drinks than I had intended (more likely, it was a reaction to something I ate), and Sunday morning brought with it a splitting headache. For the first and last time (in Australia) I visited the Regimental Aid Post (RAP), and the corporal on duty provided a couple of strong tablets to ease the pain. This had unexpected consequences some years later.

·        Bill was a friendly man, not too tall, not well-educated, but with a fine sense of humour, and an appetite for fighting when he had a few too many beers. I should mention his sister, Margaret, with whom I had a good friendship, and, under different circumstances, we may well have become more than friends. She gave me a little disk on a neck chain, inscribed with the words “May God Keep You Safe’. I still have that.

·        Bill was sort of engaged to a fiery redhead named Josephine (I think), who lived at Hill End, near the Brisbane River. Bill also had an uncle who lived about 200 yards down the road from Josephine. This very nearly caused little Normie being bashed up.    One night, there was a party at Bill’s uncle’s house, which I attended.  When I arrived, I noticed that Josephine wasn’t there, and Bill told me that he had ordered her to stay at home, because he intended to get thoroughly pissed, and he didn’t want her nagging him all night. Because I’ve never been a big drinker, I thought that I’d wander along to say hello to Josephine, because we got on very well, but just as friends[5]. We chatted for a while over her front fence, then I went back to the party.

A little later, someone told Bill that I had been chatting up Josephine, and he looked at me across the room, and yelled out that I was a dirty rotten friend, (I have toned down the language a lot!) and he was going to kill me. His uncle, who had been drinking steadily all night, joined the barrage, and they set off for me. I ran, across the road, and into the narrow strip of parkland beside the river. Because I was fairly sober, I ran a little faster, but a quick look back showed that about a dozen pursuers were chasing, all with one intention, to batter little Normie senseless.

I put on a major spurt (thank you, thank you, army, for all that fitness training) and, when I was briefly hidden by trees, I climbed a very BIG, very LEAFY tree, as high as I could go, without any thought to my terror of heights.  The noisy pack of chasers came by, yelling, without stopping to look up. I stayed there for over an hour, until every one of them had returned to the party, thirsty again.

The next day in our barrack room, I tried to explain that I had only chatted with Jo, and would NEVER try to cheat on him with her. He looked at me with cold eyes and said “You better watch your back in Vietnam”.                            

·        Six weeks or so before we embarked for Vietnam, half of D Company, including myself, were transferred to C Company, which until that time had been manned by regular soldiers. Half of C Company were transferred into D Company (which had contained National Servicemen only).

·        My brother Bert gave me a going away party a couple of weeks before we left Australia (the embarkation date was a deep dark secret – we didn’t want to let the ENEMY know when or how we would travel. This began with a night at the Capalaba Pub, where Billy Weston was the entertainment (Billy was married to Jenny – nee Howard, who worked with Carmel, Bert’s wife, in Finneys Hat Department before they married).

Then we all went back to Bert and Carmel’s home and partied, and I had to cut a cake. Most of the people were friends of Bert and Carmel (although I knew them, too), but Bunty Hitchener attended (Peter was working, and Wendy was away at school).

·        A night or two before we embarked, my Platoon Commander, Lieutenant Michael Gillespie, wandered through the barracks, and found only me at home. He knew me fairly well, because I was his platoon signalman. Mick was a National Serviceman, but HE had passed the test that I failed, and been selected for Officer Training School at Scheyville.

He invited me to join him for a night on the town, and we finished up at D’Brazil Nightclub, downstairs in Albert Street, right near where Hungry Jacks now stands, on the Queen Street corner. It was the first (and last) time I ever ventured down those stairs – D’Brazil had a reputation as being a seedy sort of place, possibly because it was the only night club, in my recollection, in the city proper (Fortitude Valley, even in those days, seemed to have many exciting night spots that I never visited[6]).

I was a child of the 60s who never really LIVED like a child of the 60s. Anyhow, Mick and I got pleasantly tipsy together, and a day or two later, we boarded a bus that took us to our military aircraft to journey into the unknown.

---

[1] In the interests of maintaining military security, and to keep some pathetic pretence of mystery about myself, I will allow my readers to guess whether or not I followed that sage advice.

[2] Actually, way back then, pre-decimalisation, I think it was about 100 yards above the river/creek.

[3] When we returned from a one or two week tour of training areas we were given a few days leave.

[4] Birthdays (that is, MY birthdays) have never really held great significance for me, because it has always been about HOW I FEEL, rather than how OLD I am. For example, I turned 66 last Sunday (today is April 9^th), and I feel about 28. On Thursday night I think I was 117.

[5] Most of my friends in life have been women, and this has led to several misunderstandings with their partners/husbands/boyfriends across the years. I have never understood why so many people don’t believe that can be genuine friendships between men and women, without ulterior motives. I think these attitudes are changing, at least, but some people still don’t get it..

[6] At this age and stage of my life, I STILL had never had a ‘proper’ girlfriend, (not that I knew what ‘proper’ meant), and all of my boy/girl relationships were mainly platonic or, with Anne, definitely chaste. I was an absolute innocent when it came to ‘IN’ places to go, and I had never tried illicit drugs, or even licit ones, if any such existed. Even now, at age 66, I wouldn’t know how or where to go to buy drugs. NOTE: Please don’t advise me on this, I think at my age it’s a tad too late to start experimenting with mind alteration.