Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  And I found I had chosen the easy way. I was viewing the war through a sniper’s sight. It didn’t allow me to see the complexity of the war at all. Worst of all, as a correspondent, I had fallen into my own tender trap.

  Back in Saigon I went straight to the Third Field Hospital at Tan Son Nhut. Dave was already in theatre. The wounded were queued up. Some still coming in were being put in beds where the sheets were still bloodied. The American nursing sister was calm, doing what had to be done, from bed to bed, from new intake to new intake. She was like the side-gunner on the chopper, automatically gliding, spaced out from the tiredness and constant bombardment of wounded arriving.

  She said, ‘Sure, stay as long as you want. You want to fill in time you can talk to that boy over there.’ The boy over there could have come from an American billboard. He had close-cropped fair hair, blue eyes and a heavyweight’s chest, deep through. He didn’t seem wounded at all so I just sat and talked, like the battalion S.M.O. Mike Naughten and the Sick-Berth petty officers on the Sydney, said, ‘Treat for shock, that’s the most important after you stop the bleeding.’ The sheet was pulled back above the waist and there wasn’t a mark on him. But he was in some pain. Once he gripped my hand. He was still holding it when the sister came back. She smiled and nodded. I stayed with him until the painkillers took over and he closed his eyes.

  I still had my field gear with me and I pitched a low ‘hutchie’, the half-tent shelter, over near the wire. There was a bar in the side street beside the hospital. I went there the next morning and ate pho, the breakfast soup, with the bar girls. None of them hustled or asked for drinks.

  I did the same months later when Mangano was hit. One leg was off and most of the other. The same sister said he had more than 60 different small wounds, comparatively small wounds. But what hurt him most were the bruises and strained muscles in his shoulders and neck. When I kneaded these for him the sister said he used to purr like a cat.

  The sister said my people had arranged for Dave to be flown to Singapore. Mike Naughten had been pulling strings. The R.A.A.F. was to fly Dave to Butterworth where British surgeons, unhurried, could operate.

  ‘Your other buddy,’ she said, ‘is gone. He died during the night, not long after you left. Just woke up and died.’ The American with the heavyweight’s deep chest had been tail-end Charlie in a company moving through a small village. They were almost through when a shotgun poked up out of a ‘spider-hole’, a fire position concealed among tree roots. Most of the blast missed him. But it scooped a slice out of the inside thigh and took his balls.

  The sister explained what they had done to Dave and said, ‘When he comes round you can tell him. They’ll make a decision on the arm in Singapore. Here, we can’t take any risks because of infection. Here there isn’t any decision.’

  When Dave gained consciousness he already knew his leg was gone but that he was hanging on to the arm. He mainly wanted to know about Errol Wetherell and Loftus and Sibree and Mangano and the rest of the platoon and whether they’d taken his leg off below or above the knee. He was also trustee for some of 6 Platoon’s savings. The money was in an ammo tin under his bunk, I was to tell Loftus.

  Munday still has his arm though sometimes it tends to ‘leak’. When I did get back to the battalion to tell Loftus about the money they had the Phu Loi Battalion scarf, and the rice bag ready for me, and my bush-hat that I’d left in the shell hole and the water bottles I’d remembered to kick out of the chopper at the last minute. The bottles had been scrubbed up and the hat and scarf and rice bag were spotless and neatly folded. But Mangano and Sibree and Loftus were severe that I had given the Russian 7.62 with the swivel bayonet over to the battalion. ‘It was yours,’ they said, ‘now you’ll never see it again. It’ll end up on the wall of some reserve officers’ mess back in Australia, you idiot. What would Dasher say!’

  But worst of all I had become stuck in my own honey pot. I felt as much of 6 Platoon as any Digger in it. But I wasn’t a Digger and soldiering was not my function.

  Almost exactly 100 years earlier an Irish correspondent called Billy Russell had managed quite well to tell the British people that the charge of the Light Brigade had not been all ‘glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war’. Later he had written that ‘at thirty-five minutes past eleven not a British soldier, except the dead and the dying, was left in front of the Muscovite guns’.

  And later again, ‘it is with surprise and anger that the public will learn that no sufficient medical preparations have been made for the care of the wounded … that there are not sufficient surgeons … no dressers or nurses … not even linen to make bandages for the wounded.’

  Billy Russell, great as he was, probably watched the charge of the Light Brigade from a hill. If he had wanted to charge with the first troop he would not have been allowed and would probably not have been able. Just as well for the rest of us, just as well for those who came after the man who was said to be ‘the miserable parent of a luckless tribe’. If you watch from a hill you are at least spared the temptation to breach confidence, you are at least spared platoon loyalty. Vietnam was to change all that, was to be different.

  I should have known of the tender trap from Ronald Monson and Jack Percival and Osmar White and Jack Colless and the great Australian correspondents whom I had known, or from C.E.W. Bean or Damien Parer whom I had read.

  I was so close to 6 Platoon that I believed the man or woman who bought the Sydney Sun or the Melbourne Herald or the Brisbane Courier or the West Australian could not possibly understand as I understood. I felt that they were not yet ready for it, that it would serve no purpose just then because it simply was not possible to see things from a seat in Martin Place, Sydney, or under the trees in the Treasury Gardens, Melbourne, as they really were beside the shredded trees of Marquis D.

  I took it on myself to protect the gentle reader of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Sun-Pic. I didn’t write about the American with no balls. Nor that when darkness fell Terry Loftus had called out, ‘Stay there you slant-eyed cunts and when it’s dark we’re going to crawl out and get you.’ Nor how good they’d been, the other guys, that, well-drilled, they had assaulted 6 Platoon on the run firing from the hip on full automatic, that you could tell from tugging the insides from another man’s pack that he was a disciplined, sure soldier, what 6 Platoon would call a ‘good Digger’.

  I didn’t write that no matter how brave you were great pain forced from you a sharp cry, a loud moan, that aid stations were full of these cries, that in fact the wounded did cry.

  In the quiet moments lying in platoon harbour secure behind your own perimeter we – 6 Platoon and I – had always got back to why we were there. I couldn’t see why they had not dodged the draft, stayed back in Holdsworthy with their birds and surfboards, like other Australians their own age. And they could not understand why I would go out with an infantry platoon instead of at least sitting back with company or battalion headquarters. It had always been a stalemate. In a lull in the action Loftus had said to me, ‘Now, do you understand? We want a bit of what our fathers were …’

  I felt the reader had to be protected from a lot of that, that he simply would not understand, that it was ‘private and personal’.

  But the marbles were already being rattled and the gentle reader or the gentle reader’s son stood a good chance of coming to rest in a gully in War Zone D, or an aid station full of shrieks and moans.

  Were the British public really ‘surprised and angry’ by the suffering of the Crimean wounded? Did it make them uneasy in their drawing rooms, turn them away from their fish and chips? Perhaps I was right after all. The Crimean reader might have been no more ready than the reader in Martin Place or the Treasury Gardens.

  If his despatches for the Times did achieve what Billy Russell thought they would, then the anger and surprise were soon forgotten. The poet Siegfried Sassoon, lying wounded in a World War I hospital, thought like Billy Russell: ‘Whe
n they know the truth, the killing will stop.’ But the later battles of the Somme were as inhuman as the earlier. The gas hung thicker in the shell holes, more men hung on the wire. It was far worse than Balaclava, far worse even than Kokoda or any jungle clearing in War Zone D.

  Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, called Billy Russell ‘that miserable scribbler’. It has not been the fault of the miserable Australian scribblers who joined his ‘luckless tribe’, correspondents like C.E.W. Bean and Osmar White and Damien Parer, and Jack Percival, and John Pilger and John Cantwell in Vietnam and Tony Clifton in Lebanon that the reader does not know the truth. And still … I didn’t write that the great concern of 1 Battalion was ‘to get into it’. To explain all the ramifications of what that meant would have taken too long. And even then, it would certainly have been misunderstood. I didn’t write that, in the battalion’s terms they had finally ‘got into it’.

  They were an infantry battalion; combat was what they had come to Vietnam for. In other operations whenever there was the rattle of gun-fire the companies and platoons and sections listened, perhaps someone had ‘got into it’. The word had gone from field radio to field radio, 6 Platoon were ‘into it’. There was probably a lot of apprehension there, too. Very few in the battalion had seen combat. And for those who had it was mainly minor skirmishing in Malaya or Borneo.

  The story I wrote was a very simple news piece. It had to be. I had been instructed not by the Sun editor, Clinch, who was my immediate boss, or Stuart Brown, the Melbourne Herald editor who was syndicating my coverage, but by the Fairfax Company executives not to cable, to send feature pieces only. It was explained that the cost of cabling from Saigon was prohibitive. Buying transmission rights through Reuter was also considered an extravagance. I was to aircargo my copy to Hong Kong where a former Sun reporter called Alfie Lee would pick it up and put it on the wire at the cheap Commonwealth rate.

  The Fairfax executives were probably not aware that this system meant travelling by taxi to the airport – a journey of at least an hour – and there clearing the package and copy with the Vietnamese Customs, sometimes waiting for an hour until the Customs Officer took time off to attend to you. Even when you strategically placed an American $10 note among the pages of the copy. Then you had to find a taxi and get back to the city.

  After War Zone D action I rebelled. Using my World Cable and Wireless pass I filed through the Post Office and to hell with the expense. I didn’t need a lot of words. Simply told, the story had to get a run everywhere. Other reporters would have interviewed members of 6 Platoon when they came back to Bien Boa, would have spoken to the wounded. But my story would have already been published.

  Several days later there was a cable from an editor in Melbourne asking for interviews with 6 Platoon. It had to be a mistake; he must just not have got the copy distributed through the Fairfax office in Sydney. By that time the agency copy and the copy from other reporters as well as the Australian Army official communiqués would have reached the papers. I wasn’t worried. I’d cabled at the expensive rate.

  A week later there was a gentle tapping on my door. A young Vietnamese stood there, crisp in white shirt and black pants. He was apologetic in slow English. I looked down and went cold. In his hand he held my copy, my story of the War Zone D action.

  ‘Has it been sent?’

  ‘Very sorry. Man in cable office make mistake. No, no, Sir, very sorry. Not possible. Everything OK, Number 1. But this form here, not signed. Please sign and cable will go tonight or early tomorrow, I promise.’

  A Lunar Surprise

  Hugh Lunn

  Hugh Lunn (born 1941) was sent to Vietnam for Reuters in 1967 and spent over a year there, including during the Tet offensive in 1968, where the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) staged simultaneous attacks all over South Vietnam including the American Embassy in Saigon and the Citadel in Hue. This was unsuccessful in the strict military sense, and resulted in the destruction of a substantial proportion of the local strength of the N.L.F. However, it was a political victory, demonstrating that the Americans, Australians and South Vietnamese did not control the country. It brought the North Vietnamese more strongly into the conflict.

  After Vietnam, Lunn worked in Singapore and Indonesia before joining the Australian in 1971. He wrote an unauthorised biography, Joh (1978). He has won three Walkley Awards and Vietnam: A Reporter’s War was the Age Book of the Year in 1985.

  *

  Each year in about late January the Vietnamese celebrate Tet, the Lunar New Year – exactly when depending on the cycle of the moon. For the 1968 celebrations, the Viet Cong were secretly preparing a very special surprise for their frustrated opponents. Hill 875 had impressed on me the difficulties the Americans faced out in the isolated mountains of Vietnam, but as 1968 began not even the most pessimistic reporter could have guessed how vulnerable the Americans were to be in the provincial cities – and even in Saigon itself.

  One of the things I found strangest about this bitter war was that every year near the end of January the fighting would stop while the Vietnamese celebrated their lunar festival. Tet to the Vietnamese was like Christmas, Easter, the Queen’s Birthday and Show Week all rolled into one and including, as well, much worshipping of ancestors.

  Both sides were, usually, more than happy to honour the truce. But this year things began to take a slightly different form. The truce traditionally lasted a full week, and that was what the Viet Cong wanted this time, starting on Saturday, the 27th of January. However, because of the worsening military situation the Americans and the South Vietnamese didn’t think it prudent to give the Viet Cong so long a time to regroup and reorganise: they offered a truce of 48 hours and, in the end, only 36 hours – from 6 p.m. on Monday the 29th of January until 6 a.m. the following Wednesday. And the truce was abandoned altogether in the five northernmost provinces. The Americans believed two North Vietnamese divisions had entered the area and were planning to swamp their isolated base of Khe Sanh. So they also refused to acknowledge the truce for 175 kilometres above the DMZ to allow the bombing of North Vietnam to continue.

  It didn’t seem much of a truce to me.

  Even so, as the Lunar New Year festivities began there was certainly a holiday atmosphere in Saigon. Nguyen Hue Street, the street of flowers, was a mass of blooms down the centre and a market of canvas awnings had been set up. On Sunday the 28th of January, my girlfriend from the British Embassy and I wandered lazily through the flowers wondering where they all came from in a country that seemed bereft of everything except bomb craters, rice paddies and jungle. It was a very pleasant afternoon mixing with people who were all obviously and unusually happy. Tet meant double wages for all workers for the month (by tradition wages were paid monthly), and everyone bought themselves new clothes for the celebration. I was happy too because I had survived my time in Vietnam: with a week’s owed leave up my sleeve I had just one week to go. My replacement, 29-yearold English reporter Ron Laramy had already arrived in Singapore from London. I just had to sit in Saigon for a week and I was out. And as that was a traditional truce week anyway, I knew I had made it through.

  The fact that there was a big war going on now seemed to make Tet even more of a celebration than ever, since depth of sadness equals height of happiness. Tet itself is a four-day affair and, although this year’s truce was only for 36 hours, it was obvious that everyone was expecting to celebrate the full four days. There was a relaxed feeling about Saigon – even among the Follies briefers.

  However, one little incident disturbed me and I could not get it out of my mind as the celebrations began. Since I had been in Saigon I had always found the Vietnamese very friendly. But on the Monday morning I was walking along Tu Do Street with my girlfriend and Jim Pringle, towards the Majestic Hotel down near the river. We weren’t going anywhere in particular, just wandering the streets enjoying the carnival atmosphere. I was busy talking to Jim and didn’t notice that I was on a collision course with a Vietnamese in his mid
-20s. I swerved too late to miss him and, as he didn’t deviate from his path, we bumped into each other quite forcefully. I turned to apologise and smile but he turned and gave me the blackest look of hatred I had ever seen. It was such a look that I could see it still that night, exactly, truly, already: hard eyes staring, eyes tight, lips turned and slightly open. Who was this bloke who hated me, or what I represented, so much, I wondered. Who was this Vietnamese who wasn’t celebrating his Tet? It made me regard as sinister complaints over the Viet Cong radio that 36 hours wasn’t long enough for a truce.

  But I didn’t have too much time to dwell on it all because, while it was an easy time for everyone else, a truce was a very busy time for the press. The first accusation of one side breaking the cease-fire was the big traditional Tet story every year – and every newsagency journalist sweated on this because the media love news they recognise and know. Someone had to remain in the office almost all the time: as soon as anyone was shot or a rocket went off the Americans would announce the Viet Cong had broken the truce, or vice versa. This year there had also been threats to end the truce, and the various changes announced by the Americans.

  Things outside were quiet that Monday – unusually so, even for a truce. In fact the lack of action was the only story I could write as I sat in the office with little to do. But I was hardly bored or disappointed. Not with just four days and a wake-up to go before I was out of Vietnam on my way to Australia. I was sitting back with my feet up thanking fortune that I’d managed to stay alive. It was a nice feeling thinking I’d never have to go out into the field again, where, I now knew well, it was ‘very quick and easy to be killed’.