Prelude to … The Rest of the Journey
Dear Family, Friends, and Other Readers who have somehow stumbled onto my journey:
From this point, you will find many more poems, stories, songs, and fragments of other writing, because from here, I wrote lots more stuff. Vietnam-related work is mostly autobiographical, and, in parts, perhaps depressing. However, I hope you will also find other pieces that are utter nonsense (I hold affection for them still), works of pure imagination, and a few that I found inspiring to write.
There will also be extracts from the journals/diaries that I kept assiduously for a year or two, and much less assiduously for many other years. Not to mention bits of correspondence sent and received, and, last but certainly most importantly, poems and songs that I have written for Margaret, the Love of my life.
I have found my life became much harder, and certainly much more interesting from now on and certainly, from 1969, much more fulfilling.
With much warmth,
Norm
Chapter 12: Vietnam – Innocence Lost
Age: 21 – 22
Vietnam, for good or ill, changed my life forever. A part of me died, a part of me never returned home, and my physical, mental, spiritual and emotional selves somehow transformed into the foundation stones of who I am today. Or perhaps I was confronted with the reality of who I have always been, a reality I had never understood or sought to understand.
At one level I matured overnight, from a passive, order-following, unthinking Norm-boat, steered by others across the limited lake of my one-dimensional life, to a non-directed, more thoughtful, sometimes storm-tossed, sometimes becalmed, little Normie-dinghy on the huge, uncharted ocean of chance and choice.
*-*-*-*
This chapter will possibly be quite long, but I’m not going to write to much new stuff. I find it difficult, and painful, to forcibly dredge up my Vietnam experience, even now. I find it much more therapeutic to deal with my hidden memories, flashbacks, and nightmares as and when they arise, than to go digging for them. I have compensated for this by including various poems and autobiographical stories along the way, which should give a reasonably clear understanding of my time in the war zone.
Soldier, Coming Home (continued)
In that sometimes green and sodden,
sometimes dry and dusty land,
he learned that life was just
a road which ended at the graveside.
Along that part of his road,
the kid became a man, or partly so.
He learned to look at death, and laugh;
using that harsh and brutal humour which
covers over sadness and despair;
the callous crudities which soldiers use
when struggling to come to terms with their own mortality,
when striving to preserve their fragile sanity.
To overcome his inner panic,
and his growing sense of isolation, alienation;
his revulsion from this real/unreal battleground,
he forced himself to laugh -
that laughter which dulls and blunts that inner sense
of humanity which all men hold within;
the laughter which enables soldiers to continue on,
without thought, or question, or ... belief.
On his first operation, he voiced concern
at certain aspects of the work -
‘Was it necessary to burn this school, this shrine,
during the destruction of the village of Long Phuoc?’
The captain, or the sergeant, or the corporal
said that schools and churches were
the major spawning grounds of propaganda.
Burn it, wreck it, tear it down.
Destroy it, utterly.
He obeyed, as he was taught to do, except,
he saved a blank-paged workbook,
and a cheap certificate[1] presented to
some unknown student for unidentified achievement.
Something like tears touched his eyes,
as he watched the wooden Buddha, burning.
After all our jungle training, anti-dreaded disease inoculations, battle inoculations (this is where people shoot at you, using live ammunition, but, thankfully, above you, or to the sides, while you are on a simulated patrol through enemy territory), we were publicly farewelled with a march through the streets of Brisbane on 21 May 1966.
On the night of Monday, 6th June, buses took us to the R.A.A.F. (Royal Australian Air Force) base at Amberley, near Ipswich. Our QANTAS flight took off somewhere around midnight, so timed to arrive in Saigon the next morning or possibly early afternoon. Because we would need our weapons immediately on landing, we carried them with us in the cabin, which is possibly not done on too many civilian airline flights these days.
We stopped briefly in Manila for refuelling, and were allowed to stretch our legs in the terminal, where we pretended to enjoy a couple of San Miguel beers and a local cigar. I think this was about 6:00 a.m., (hence the pretending – I never had an early morning appetite for beer and cigarettes) and, whilst I can claim that I have visited Manila, I didn’t get much of a taste for the country, only some of the products of the alcohol and tobacco industries.
The descent into Saigon had its moments of terror, because we seemed to go down vertically, with the nose pointing straight at the tarmac. This, we were told, was to avoid the possibility of enemy anti-aircraft fire. We said goodbye to the world we knew when we were farewelled at the cabin door by the pilots and flight staff.
On the tarmac, we deployed loosely into platoon groups, with our weapons held nervously at the half-ready, and looking every which way in both curiosity and trepidation. I have never, before or since, seen so many aircraft in one location as at Tan Son Nhut Airport (I think that’s the correct spelling). There seemed to be thousands, but it was probably more like four or five hundred. Someone asked one of several very tall American servicemen if the airport ever came under attack, and he drawled, “All the time, man. All the time.”
We weren’t there long enough to test the truth of this. Within a very short time we were bundled into buses, which took us about 100 yards, then we boarded US aircraft (Caribou?), as if we were boarding a bus to the football – people boarded until there was no more room, and the rest moved onto the next plane. There was no mucking about with slow, safe ascents or descents in Vietnam – steep climbs and even steeper landings were the order of the war, so that aircraft were never low enough for enemy to attack them outside the safety perimeter of the landing fields.
The trip from Tan Son Nhut to Vung Tau took very little time (the distance was only about forty or fifty miles). At Vung Tau we clambered onto HUGE US army semi-trailers, (standing room only), and in almost no time we were dumped at the Back Beach. The trip was a jumble of visual images – small tin sheds/shanties/homes made of flattened-out soft drink and beer cans, straw and bits of timber; helicopters and small aeroplanes everywhere, on the ground and in the sky; lots of people beside and on tiny streets and lanes; and somewhere there was a glimpse of a vast array of ships (probably in the port part).
We spent a week in tents among the sandhills of the Back Beach, acclimatising ourselves to this strange land. Activities included long marches with full packs under a very warm sun; a little bit of weapons practice; swimming in the largest air-conditioned ocean in the world (I wrote that bit in one of my few letters home); drinking cans of American beer - Budweiser and Millers - which we bought for 10 cents a can; and some limited sight-seeing.
On one march we saw a parade of people in brightly-coloured outfits, accompanying an ornate float. We smiled, waved and called out until a sergeant, with much quiet cursing, ordered us to show more respect to the dead. That Buddhist funeral was my first glimpse into cultural differences. Sigh!
The locals all seemed friendly, all smiles and waves, telling us that “Uc Da Loi* Number ONE!” (* ‘Uc Da Loi’, we were told, meant “Soldier from the South”, although for all I knew, it may have meant “Foreign Scum!”). It seemed hard to believe that some of these happy, welcoming Vietnamese spent their nights trying to kill Americans and their allies.
On the main ‘road’ along the Back Beach was a facility, consisting of a long, low building with a ground level veranda running all along its front, set back some 50 yards from the road, and surrounded by a tall, razor-wire topped fence. The entrance was guarded at all times by two machine-wielding guards. This place was managed by soldiers from another Asian country allied with the United States.
It was designated a recuperative holding centre for badly wounded enemy troops or Viet Cong members who had been captured. The treatment program consisted (or so it seemed to me) of leaving the patients in wheelchairs on the veranda all day (and possibly all night), without food, water or attention. Every time I passed by, I heard the loud moans and screams of people in pain, and saw that no one came to assist them.
One day I ventured to the entry gate, and tried to communicate my concerns to the guards. They similarly pointed their machine guns in my direction, and told me, by angry words and arm movements, that is was none of my business, and to move along … pronto!
I raised this with my platoon sergeant, who agreed with my point of view, but then told me that, in a war zone, we held absolutely no control over what other allied forces were doing, no matter how brutal it might seem. In my nightmares I still hear those screams.
Vung Tau was, until the war, a holiday resort, with a strong French influence, lots of large villas (as well as the shanties crowded into areas outside the main town area), an imposing, colonial style Grand Hotel (I think that Frank Parker held the distinction of either climbing up to or down from the first floor balcony), which became a favourite social centre for American and Australian troops when we had a two day rest and recuperation leave.
There were few, if any, public toilets in Vung Tau, and locals often used the beach for their toileting needs, which made walking a little hazardous at times. People answering the unavoidable calls of nature in public places were wrapped in a cloak of social invisibility, because everyone was going to be caught short sometime.
On Tuesday 14 June we were flown to Nui Dat by US helicopters. We were told that the choppers would only stay on the ground for seven seconds, then start taking off, so there was a desperate scramble to get the heck out when we arrived. Over time, we reached a point where those closest to the doorways (there were neither doors nor seatbelts) jumped abut two or three feet before the chopper landed (making the jump about four or five feet), and the last ones out leaving just as the ascent began.
We tumbled out onto the green grass of Nui Dat (I understand there are several Nui Dats in Vietnam; the person who told me that also said that it means ‘Hill of Ground’). Within a very short time we were organised into our platoon formations, placed by our platoon commanders into our positions, among the rubber trees, and sentries posted, because there was now nothing between us and the unseen enemy but rubber trees.
Our first, most urgent task was to dig our weapon pits, using our little fold-up shovels (tools, entrenching, as they were classified) to gouge out the thick red earth beneath the green grass. We dug on through the late morning and through the afternoon, until the pits were deep enough to stand in up to nearly chest high, and long enough for two soldiers (three if crowded together) to stand in side by side. It then was time to pitch our little one-man hoochies(?), thin, green plastic tents, supposedly waterproof.
About that time, late on our first day among the rubber trees, the monsoon season arrived, not long before dark. Our weapons pits were filled within minutes, and so, at Stand To (from dusk until dark) we stood more than waist deep in water, trying to see out through the steady downpour, looking for the enemy. I did see some strange movement during this period – one enthusiastic digger had blown up his lilo (air mattress) on which to sleep, and it floated gently past me, towards the perimeter.
When darkness arrived, one of our rifle sections ventured out beyond the boundary, the first clearing patrol of our tour of duty. When they returned with a negative report (no enemy sighted), the Stand Down order was given, and then it was time for a little ration pack meal, and bed for those not on the first shift of sentry duty. As platoon signaller, my shift was on the radio for part of the night, in case urgent messages came through from Company Headquarters.
The monsoon rains came down consistently, persistently, and heavily for several weeks, in which time we couldn’t get dry; our jungle greens were stained by the red mud, so we were washing dirty wet clothes, then putting clean wet clothes on. Rain has never really bothered me since then, and the weather has no bearing on how my days will turn out, except for the occasional outdoor activity that may be dampened by storm and tempest. (I have also been most fortunate in never having been affected by flood damage in any of the houses I have lived in). The big, sturdy, truly waterproof army tents arrived at about the time the monsoons departed, in the true spirit of army timing.
The next major task was to erect barbed wire fences to guard the perimeter, which took a day or two. During that first week, our platoon went on a couple of patrols just outside the wire, but, on Tuesday 21 June, we set off on our first battalion operation, code-named Operation Enoggera. Our task was to search and destroy the village of Long Phuoc, because it was too close to our headquarters for comfort.
The villagers had been re-located to Hoa Long or Baria, which were not quite so close.(I think that our target village was nearly three kilometres from our Nui Dat home, and the village of Hoa Long was perhaps a further kilometre away, then about five more to Baria, the capital of the province).
My psychiatrist has told me several times that I made one huge mistake in Vietnam that stopped me from ever becoming a genuine soldier. He said that I saw the enemy as human beings, not as targets, and that was a massive failing for those who would be soldiers. At Vung Tau I had tried, with absolutely no success, to remonstrate with Korean soldiers about their treatment of wounded enemies.
At Long Phuoc I questioned the need to destroy every building in the village, including a school/Buddhist shrine. My platoon commander told me that the Viet Cong used schools and temples to prepare and distribute propaganda aimed at turning ‘good’ Vietnamese against the Americans, Australians and other allied forces. At Long Phuoc, our battalion discovered tunnels and caches of rice, clear indications that the Viet Cong controlled the village, and were very definitely not on our side.
Unfortunately, I asked myself how I would feel if I lived in a small town such as Tiaro (near Maryborough, Queensland), and if soldiers from another country came in to help one of the other Australian states that was at war with us. The foreign soldiers came, set up a base at Bauple (a small village near Tiaro), and everyone out of Tiaro, making them live at Gunalda (yes, ANOTHER small town near Tiaro and Bauple). If I owned a farm at Tiaro, I would be suddenly, and violently, deprived of my livelihood AND the environment in which I had lived all of my life. I think it would be safe to assume I would be very, very angry.
So, for me, the destruction of Long Phuoc engendered some feelings of sympathy towards the people of Long Phuoc. As a well-disciplined soldier, I did what I was told which, fortunately, mostly meant to send and receive radio messages to and from company headquarters.
After two weeks destroying Long Phuoc, we returned to our Nui Dat home.
In my first six weeks in Vietnam, I received two letters from Australia. One was a one page, ‘hope you are well’ letter from my mother, and the other was from the Commonwealth Bank, asking me if I had changed my address. I wrote to my mother monthly, and she replied about three times during my tour of duty. I replied to the Commonwealth Bank with my new address, but I also thanked the Bank for its letter, informing them that this was only the second latter I had received from home, and that I appreciated it very much.
In the next month, seven bank employees wrote to me, and a few of them sent me letters throughout my stay in Vietnam. I only met one of my pen friends after I came home. Her family owned a very nice hotel at South Brisbane, and she invited me for dinner. Although that was my last contact with the bank staff, I was, and am, appreciative of their kindness to me while I was away.
So ends the first part of my experiences in South Vietnam. The next chapter will deal with the rest of my sojourn in South East Asia. Just to keep you breathless with anticipation, I can tell you that my role and responsibilities changed significantly in the next phase of my army career. Until then, I hope that you all are well and wonderful, and that your dreams are all achievable.
