by Max Hastings
Australian higher commanders were often considered – by their own countrymen as well as by Americans – much less impressive than the junior leaders and ‘diggers’. Brigadier Stuart Weir, who ran the 1969–70 Australian task force, was a notoriously harsh and aggressive figure whose explosions of temper – in the words of his country’s historian – ‘led senior officers to question his fitness’. Anzac operations continued to be dogged by a grievous blunder made by one of Weir’s predecessors. In January 1967 the little-loved Brigadier Stuart Graham shifted emphasis from cautious cordon-and-searches to aggressive search-and-destroys, which caused casualties to rise sharply. The communists had little trouble sidestepping S&D sweeps, as they did the July 1967 Operation Paddington, an attempt by nine battalions of Americans, Australians and South Vietnamese to trap a VC regiment. The following spring, another big operation, Pinnaroo, was successful in destroying bunker systems and capturing weapons, but the Australians suffered severely from booby traps. Their contingent lacked sufficient mass to clear the so-called Minh Dam Secret Zone in the Long Hai hills, which remained a communist sanctuary until the war’s end.
An Australian described an operation in words any American would have found familiar: ‘It was always the same dreary and exhausting patrolling, humping great loads along thorny tracks, dropping your hat for the fiftieth time, losing count of paces, never having enough time to brew up, continually searching what the gods of Infantry considered to be “interesting” areas, and being sodden with stream- and swamp-wading for twenty-four hours a day.’
Brig. Graham’s fateful answer to his shortage of troops was to exploit technology to separate the enemy from the people and their rice: a barrier, eight miles long, stretching from the hills down to the coast. In a hundred-yard interval between two parallel barbed-wire fences, his engineers laid 22,600 mines. Graham ordained that Australians should patrol one side, while Vietnamese troops handled the other. For a few months this proved effective: some communist units, cut off from food sources, were reduced to eating jungle roots and leaves. But then they observed that the minefield was carelessly monitored. The guerrillas moved in, and with their accustomed ingenuity lifted thousands of mines, which they relaid elsewhere. Through the years that followed, the Anzacs suffered a stream of losses – one in ten of all fatalities – from this source. A single battalion was involved in sixty-four mine incidents, forty-eight of them caused by their own ordnance in enemy hands. They encountered further problems when they acknowledged the minefield’s failure, and attempted to clear it: tanks and engineers suffered so severely that they had to quit. This creeping disaster was headlined as a scandal by media back home. Opposition politicians denounced it as ‘a tragic example of the waste and futility of Australian participation in the war’.
‘Funny place, Vietnam,’ mused Lt. Rob Franklin, a truck-driver’s son from Brisbane. ‘In World War I, you went over the top and you knew the enemy was there. But in the bush you never knew where he was. You might go weeks without hearing a shot fired. It was very hard to keep your vigilance at the same high pitch. Then suddenly, all hell breaks loose.’ On almost Franklin’s first day, a fire mission went wrong in a fashion that could have been disastrous: 82mm mortars for which he was responsible plastered the ground within fifteen yards of his battalion’s attached New Zealand rifle company. The lieutenant felt that he aged ten years as a result of his agonised awareness of his own blunder. He thought: ‘I don’t think I can cope with this.’ After a troubled night, his knees knocked when he was ordered to report to the Kiwi company commander: ‘But he was fantastic, said: “Just be careful.”’ And so, thereafter, Franklin was.
Though his battalion had prepared intensively before leaving its home base at Townsville, in the bush they changed tactics. ‘In training, if you came under fire the machine-gunner broke right, the riflemen left. But after a few contacts we did it all completely differently: got the guys to deploy on as wide a front as possible, with all three platoon machine-guns putting out a hundred rounds each as quick as they could – suppressive fire. You learned to bivouac in the thickest bit of bush you could find. You got smarter and tougher.’ There were some enthusiasts: one of Franklin’s mortarmen chose transfer to a rifle platoon because he wanted more action. He was swiftly killed in a firefight, leaving behind a pregnant girlfriend.
Within days of their 1969 arrival, nineteen-year-old West Australian Neil Smith and three other newcomers were taken on a getting-to-know-you patrol by the outgoing battalion. When the group found itself in a brief contact, the lieutenant embarrassed himself by becoming the only man to prostrate himself in the paddy. On a night ambush, Smith and his three fellow-novices were deployed in the rear as a ‘cut-off party’, lacking communication with the veterans facing front. In the heart of the darkness the petrified young lieutenant glimpsed a file of eight enemy soldiers. He realised that he had set his Claymores so close that they themselves would be devastated by back-blast if he detonated them. Instead he lay motionless while the enemy passed, praying that his sleeping mates would not snore. Through the rest of a long army career he was troubled by the memory of his confusion that night, common as was such an experience to thousands of young men on both sides.
Smith was fascinated by the exotic night sights of Vietnam: distant flares and gunflashes, ubiquitous fireflies. When they lay down to sleep he was bemused by the range of creatures that emerged from the surrounding earth. Once as he was digging, shirtless, he mopped his chest, then howled as a scorpion on his sweatrag bit his left nipple. At that moment a firefight broke out, causing impatient medics ‘politely to urge me to suck it in’ – Australian parlance for quieten down – as he ran around screaming in agony. He wrote to his parents on 31 December 1969, describing the New Year ceasefire as ‘a load of crap, doesn’t make any difference to us. Only gives the Nogs a free hand to reorganize themselves … I feel rather lonely and sad at the moment. This is a bitch of a way to fight a war. Nothing happens for days, yet you know no one is really safe.’ He described how the stench of gangrene enabled his unit to locate a group of VC: ‘One poor sod had half his face shot away and was being eaten by maggots.’
Although there is a traditional tension between big, brassy Australia and modest New Zealand across the sea, in the field the two nations’ soldiers made common cause, as they always have. The enemy were alleged to be especially fearful of the Kiwis’ Maori soldiers, whom they believed to be cannibals. Australian units contained many officers and NCOs who had served in World War II, Korea or Malaya. There were also some foreigners – Neil Smith recoiled from one sergeant-major, a veteran of the Hitler Youth, who welcomed opportunities to kill Vietnamese of any complexion: ‘He was really evil.’ But the RAAF’s squadrons appreciated a contingent of British pilots, while the Australian SAS included a former member of the Italian Alpini and some British Army veterans, among them Andrew Freemantle. After completing a jungle-warfare course, Freemantle was impatient to see some action, not then on offer with his own service anywhere more exotic than Northern Ireland: ‘I wrote to the South African, Rhodesian and Australian special forces, saying “I’m a trained killer, have you got a job for me?”’ All three responded positively, but the Australians clinched the deal by offering a first-class air ticket. Freemantle spent three years with their SAS, one of them in Vietnam, and loved it – ‘a really exciting environment for a professional’. Although his comrades gave him as hard a time as their nation gives every Brit, he worked well with them in the jungle. An enormous NCO nicknamed ‘Oddjob’ told him reassuringly, ‘We know you’ll stick yer head up first and take the blame when there’s a fuck-up.’
Neil Smith saw no significant distinction between the performance of volunteers and draftees, partly because few of the latter went unwillingly to Vietnam: ‘If a bloke really didn’t want to do it, you’d be a fool to take him.’ A core of veterans provided steel reinforcing-rods, men like 8RAR’s CSM Hepplewaite, who was caught defecating when a contact started. Smith said admir
ingly: ‘Even before he pulled up his trousers he stood there directing fire – so cool, a picture of total dignity.’ The Australians were passionately committed to patrolling, and thus bemused that from 1969 onwards some US units declined to venture outside their own wire. Patrol numbers varied: the Australian SAS usually worked in fives, on the principle that if one man was hit, two would be needed to carry him, two more to cover them. It was common practice to take Vietnamese who provided information – either a chieu hoi defector or a local man – on a mission to exploit it: ‘If they gave it to us wrong, they got drilled first.’ Another veteran said: ‘Patience was the byword.’ Yet the Australians suffered as much as every contingent from the paucity of local intelligence: peasants, wrote an officer resignedly, felt unable to put their trust in foreigners who would soon be gone.
Andrew Freemantle immensely respected the enemy, especially after stumbling on one of their tunnel systems: ‘We’d sat down to listen, always a good thing to do on patrol, and we spotted this pipe sticking up. We dropped a smoke grenade down it, put a hat on top, and a minute or so later saw puffs coming out of a bush yards away.’ He and a mate descended and explored: fortunately the system was untenanted, but the tunnels ran five hundred yards. Freemantle thought: ‘My gosh, anybody who can do this has got something.’ Two tons of C4 explosive were required to destroy the complex. While conducting surveillance on a VC camp, the SAS watched fascinated as enemy soldiers steamed explosive out of unexploded bombs, to make grenades and booby traps. Freemantle noted how well-maintained were arms and equipment found on dead NVA. As the former British soldier watched through binoculars an enemy unit advancing, their officer with his wireless-operator, lead squad in arrowhead formation, ‘I thought – these could be our guys on Salisbury Plain.’
In the later days of the war the Australian contingent suffered some of the same disciplinary problems as the Americans, though fomented by alcohol rather than drug abuse. Rob Franklin said: ‘We were into the grog, not the dope.’ Men were officially limited to two daily cans of canteen beer, but since this was cumulative, after a twenty-day operation they became eligible for forty cans. One of the relatively rare Australian courts-martial was that of a lieutenant who hit a private with his pistol during a beer-fuelled row. On Christmas Day 1970 a drunken private soldier emptied his rifle into the Nui Dat sergeants’ mess, killing two NCOs and seriously wounding a third. Earlier fatal fraggings had killed two officers. Almost immediately after Neil Smith’s arrival he was sleeping with a mate in a tent adjoining that of Lt. Bob Convery. A thunderous explosion caused the two newcomers to prostrate themselves, in the belief they were being mortared. When no further concussions followed, they rose to explore, and discovered that an aggrieved soldier had dropped a grenade on the cot of Convery, killing him instantly. Fragging was a much less serious Australian than American problem, but it happened.
Vung Tau was the Australians’ in-country Rest & Recuperation centre. They enjoyed a running joke that the enemy used the port for the same purpose, ‘that every second bloke you saw was a VC on R&R just like you. It certainly seemed to suit both sides to have no shooting down there.’ Officers gravitated to the Hotel Grand, owned by a welcoming half-French woman who made no secret of her belief that her guests’ side was losing the war, and kept bags packed in readiness for a departure to Europe. Meanwhile enlisted men bonded with girls and grog, staged some impressive fights. Throughout Vietnam it was notable how often, when a body flew through a bar window, either the thrower or the thrown proved to be Australian.
Back at home, the violence of anti-war passions rose in a crescendo. After one infantryman was killed, protesters telephoned his parents and said, ‘He got what he deserved.’ Late in 1970, Australian infantry found themselves withdrawn from an operation in the Long Hai mountains after suffering a stream of losses to mines, because domestic sensitivity was running so high. When a unit was about to return to Australia at the end of that year, its CO briefed his officers: ‘Get a grip on your blokes. I don’t want any of our diggers butt-stroking’ – in Australian language, beating the hell out of – civilians who mocked or criticised them. One of his audience said that when they reached home and beheld the rage of the anti-war lobby, ‘we were completely astonished. We couldn’t understand it. We thought we were right to have gone, right to have done what we did.’ By 1972, one of the key planks of Labor leader Gough Whitlam’s successful Australian election campaign was an end of the draft, extraction from Vietnam: the last Aussies and Kiwis were indeed out by the year’s end. In all, sixty thousand Australians served in Vietnam, of whom 521 died; thirty-seven of 3,890 New Zealand personnel also fell.
It is widely agreed among modern Antipodean historians that Robert Menzies’ original commitment was made with remarkable carelessness – a reflexive Cold War gesture which his successor prime ministers lamented their inability to retract. Nonetheless, Australian writer Peter Edwards puts the case for his nation’s 1965 government: ‘Vietnam was not an example of fighting “other people’s wars”; in the minds of Menzies and his principal advisers, it was a matter of getting the United States to fight a war for Australian security.’ He adds a corollary, that the strategic position of Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia vis-à-vis the communist threat was far stronger in 1975 than it had been a decade earlier. In the minds of some thoughtful people in all those countries, the allied war effort had contributed importantly to those stabler polities. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew often told Americans: ‘If you had not fought, we would have been gone.’
The Anzacs performed with distinction in Vietnam, but it would seem mistaken to suggest, as do some of their admirers, that the war’s outcome would have been different if everybody else had operated as they did. The enemy sustained as vigorous an armed presence in the Australian area of operations as everywhere else, even if he bled for the privilege. Moreover, it is among the themes of this book that the foremost challenge for the allies was not to win firefights, but instead to associate itself with a credible Vietnamese political and social order. Dr Norman Wyndham, a sixty-year-old Australian surgeon who led a volunteer medical team in a Vung Tau hospital, was a devout Christian who made himself a fluent Vietnamese-speaker. He wrote in 1967 of the local people: ‘Most want a united Vietnam, but not one controlled by the communists … [Yet] the feeling is growing … that anything would be better than life as it is today.’ Two years later, such sentiment had strengthened throughout the South.
3 GODS
In the eyes of history, and certainly those of Hollywood, the war was defined by the Huey helicopter. Sure, there were also Sea Knights and Jolly Green Giants, Chinooks, ‘Flying Bananas’, Tarhe heavy-lift carriers, CIA Jet Rangers and many more, but the Huey’s is the image that dominates. Here was one of the great flying-machines of all time, developed by Bell in the 1950s as the Iroquois, designated first the HU-1, then the UH-1. It became a symbol of the stupendous and apparently invincible might of the United States, then somehow also of its emasculation. The D, commonest of many successive variants, was a four-ton beast that first flew in Vietnam in 1963, propelled by its Lycoming engine at a maximum speed of 130mph. In its transport role as a ‘slick’, it carried nine fully-armed men; as a ‘dust-off’, six stretchers; as a gunship, many combinations of rockets, mini-guns and other automatic weapons. Sixteen thousand were finally built, and in the bad times a thousand a year were lost to enemy fire, mechanical failure or pilot excess. Even men who hated the war loved the Huey; the heavenly cold air that rushed past as they sat at the open doorway with boots on the skids and maybe a careless arm around a stanchion, looking at South-East Asia the best way anybody could – all those dull reds and browns and brilliant greens from a couple of thousand feet up, seldom with sissy seatstraps.
CORDS adviser Lt. Brian Walrath wrote: ‘Sitting on the hard floor of the chopper, we are overwhelmed by noise. The engine throbs behind us, the gearbox whines as it transfers power to the main and tail rotors, the rotors whop away and the wind
whistles past our ears. We are in the pilot’s hands, defenceless against any enemy who wants to take a shot at us in a thin aluminum shell. Below the crazy quilt of rice paddies and fields flashes by, soon to give way to denser foliage as we head west towards the mountains.’
Groundlings looked on the fliers as magicians, often as saviours. Lt. Mel Stephens of the US Navy never forgot the experience of a night evacuation from the riverine assault boat on which he had been wounded, his surge of wonder and gratitude towards the crew that got him out: ‘Those pilots seemed gods to us.’ This impression was heightened by their impersonality, features masked by helmet sun-visors. ‘I never saw a pilot’s eyes,’ said Brian Walrath, who knew fliers only from his cargo-compartment view of their upper backs, protruding above angular green armoured seats, their gloved hands flicking switches and shifting levers.
Most pilots were dashing, skilful, callous young men, apparently as careless about their own lives as other people’s. Australian Cpl. Roy Savage was once standing on the skids of an American Huey, having helped the last of his squad aboard, when it soared skywards. Momentarily terrified as the earth receded, he found his webbing seized by an enormous black door-gunner who heaved him into the cargo compartment. The pilot glanced over his shoulder and shouted cheerfully, ‘Nearly left you behind that time, boy!’ Correspondent Neil Sheehan sometimes begged his aerial chauffeurs to go a little easier on the palm trees with which they loved to flirt. Some who used the forty-eight-foot rotors to thrash a downward passage into triple-canopy jungle pushed their luck too far, though an amazing number got away with it.
One Huey pilot must here do duty for thousands. Dan Hickman first flew helicopters as a twenty-year-old in 1967, and loved them forever after. He hailed from a North Carolina tobacco farm ‘where my dad put me through ranger school’. On the first day at Fort Walters, Texas, the commanding colonel addressed two hundred cadets, saying: ‘Half of you will wash out. One will crash right here. The other ninety-nine will go to Vietnam.’ They spent five months at Walters, and clocked 120 hours apiece on little Hughes trainers before moving to Savannah and the 1,300-horsepower Huey. Hickman said: ‘It was big and strong, looked enormous after the Hughes – it was terrific. Learning to fly a helicopter is like learning to ride a bike: there’s a period of uncertainty, then suddenly it clicks.’ He grasped some hazards: ‘It was not as nimble as the LOH or OH-6. If you made a low-level turn downwind, you did not want then to turn left or you were liable to be in the ground. If you lost power, at five hundred feet you had eight seconds in which to save yourself.’ He spent four months at Savannah before taking the month-long tactical course which introduced him to the deadly array of helo armament.