Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Famously, a Liberal state premier, Bob Askin of New South Wales, would give the opponents of the war a stick to beat Holt with when, in Sydney, demonstrators lay down in numbers in front of Johnson’s motorcade, and Askin cried to the driver, ‘Run the bastards over!’

  IN THE HANDS OF THESE CLOWNS

  The early involvement of Australian personnel in Vietnam, with the bulk of the Australian population behind them and the war not yet tainted in the public mind, created an atmosphere fit for heroes, the equivalent of the Bluey Truscotts and Paddy Finucanes of early World War II. There were some extraordinary if earthbound men amongst the group called the counterinsurgency experts, including two in particular whose adventures could be called alternatively Ned Kelly-esque, swashbuckling, or in the finest traditions of freebooting. The ultimate failure and disrepute of the war would sweep away a great deal of the potential legends which in a justified war might have attached to both men.

  One of these men was Colonel Francis ‘Ted’ Serong, a sturdy little nugget of a fellow of Melbourne Irish working-class origins. He had attended the same school, St Kevin’s Christian Brothers, as had produced B.A. Santamaria, and Santamaria was helpful in opening doors for Serong through his friend, the dictator Diem, in Serong’s early career in Vietnam, from 1962 onwards.

  Serong’s arrival and, later in the year, that of his Australian Training Team Vietnam, was the beginning of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, from which the last Australian soldier would not be withdrawn until June 1973, when the platoon guarding the Australian Embassy in Saigon was brought home. The war whose Australian phase Serong, in an inimitable way, initiated when he landed in Saigon would create in Australia the biggest wave of dissent since the conscription referenda of World War I.

  Serong had had to beat the door down at Duntroon to get in, in an age prior to World War II when the army tended still to belong to the Anglo Saxons and the reliable Scots. He had to do the first-year course work while serving in the citizen military force and then apply in the second year. He had been a staff officer in Divisional Headquarters in New Guinea during the Kokoda campaign, and some years after the war became commandant of the Jungle Training Centre at Canungra in Queensland, said to be the world’s most testing jungle course. But he had ambitions that transcended the merely national. He came to consider himself a military advisor to governments in peril and a world expert on counterinsurgency warfare. He already had contacts with the CIA, which had approached him in 1960 when he was advising the Burmese government on counter-revolutionary warfare. A delighted Serong received the approval of the Australian general staff to work with the Americans. When US Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the ANZUS meeting in Canberra in May 1962 that American forces knew little about jungle warfare, the then Minister for External Affairs, Garfield Barwick, agreed. Serong, said Barwick, was the only Australian officer to be considered for the job. Hence, the first Australian to serve in the war was party to a covert CIA operation.

  Serong became at once a senior advisor to the commander of the US Military Assistance Command, serving first under General Paul Harkins and then under an officer whose name would become forever associated with the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland. At a meeting of the US Special Counter Insurgency Group in Washington on 23 May 1963, that included W. Averell Harriman, Robert Kennedy, William Bundy and other senior John Kennedy incumbency figures, Colonel Serong cast doubt on the idea of the Strategic Hamlet Program, the bringing of peasants into enclosed communities where they were theoretically locked up against intrusion by the Viet Cong. Serong left the meeting, he would say, thinking, ‘My God, does the fate of the world reside in the hands of these clowns?’ For the group rejected Serong’s advice, and the Viet Cong won in the hamlets, and ultimately everywhere else.

  Serong also drew up four rules on how to react to guerrilla events. Pursuit should follow every contact and should take precedence over every other consideration. No mobile encounter should be broken off by any component before at least one third of the strength of that unit were battle casualties; no defensive position or static post would be surrendered; and every static post would send out one third of its strength in continuous mobile patrols. These rules were aimed at the South Vietnamese forces, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), notorious for breaking off contact and shirking patrol, often leaving their foreign trainer behind to die in the field. Serong harried South Vietnamese commanders and became so legendary that he visited America several times for special sessions with President Johnson after Kennedy was killed. William Colby, the CIA chief in Saigon, also said that Serong brought a new quality to American operations, focusing on the importance of the political dimension as against raw military power. Serong thus proposed that the villages be empowered to defend themselves.

  But already Serong believed that the Viet Cong were winning the war. One of the reasons was that the Northern insurgents were travelling down the Ho Chi Minh Trail at will. A second was that in the mountains the ill-treated and traditionally despised Montagnard tribes were turning their loyalty to the Viet Cong. And the third reason was the questionable condition of the ARVN forces. The South Vietnamese did not try to win the Montagnards over, which Serong considered a great mistake. He believed more Australian advisors were needed to help the Americans who, in his opinion, badly needed jungle training.

  People in Vietnam and in Canberra were now becoming impatient with Serong’s hubris and blatant self-belief. He recommended to the Americans the appointment of an American commander-in-chief in the South, and thus that America colonise the Republic of Vietnam. This happened in the end, with General Westmoreland as commander-in-chief. According to Serong, Menzies offered him the post of chief of the general staff of Australia as a means to neutralise him, but Serong refused it.

  He had deployed his team throughout the country but could see they were not numerous enough to have more than a leavening impact. At the height of the war, 277 Australian counterinsurgency specialists were in Vietnam amidst a US advisory force of sixteen thousand. Many of that 277 became overwhelmed and bewildered by the direction of the war.

  Of the Dirty Thirty, as Serong’s first team was called, Sergeant Bill Hacking was the first—and thus the first Australian in general—to be killed. On Christmas Day 1962, Hacking already knew this was going to be a terrible business. He declared that the Viet Cong were working overtime: ‘Christmas or not, they blew up a passenger train just down the line last night (my area) and murdered three civilians; I say murdered as opposed to killed because these were an old man, his daughter, and his daughter’s child, a little girl.’ The army claimed that when he died, on 1 June 1963, Hacking shot himself by accident. He had written to a woman he loved about moving through elephant grass over four metres high, with the possibility of Vietnamese everywhere, and the knowledge that if he fell, it would be Viet Cong who found him. There were suggestions that he had suicided, although his last letter was positive: ‘I see that the fires have been lit down on the drop zone, so the choppers must be somewhere near. Must rush.’

  Serong’s team won a Presidential Unit Citation from the United States and four Victoria Crosses. Serong would leave the army formally in 1968 with the rank of brigadier but stayed on in Vietnam pursuing various security and intelligence advisory roles. His ambition to make military sense of it all and to influence the outcome had not diminished, and now he pursued it free of army constraints. He would find it difficult to return to Melbourne and live a settled life when the war ended. In later years he would mix with right-wing nationalist causes. He would believe, like some American officers, that Vietnam was not lost but given away.

  Another startling individualist was young Australian Captain Barry Petersen. In the mountains of central Vietnam near Ban Me Thuot, he would come to command one thousand Montagnard fighters, including M’Nong tribesmen, from whom he recruited a communication section of sixteen men, and amongst whom he became an honorary chieftain and lived the life of a Monta
gnard warlord. Petersen travelled seemingly at will on the mountain roads, learned to speak the Rhade dialect, commandeered a large house and appointed an interpreter, driver, cook, housekeeper and personal secretary. The house expanded to incorporate a radio room, a classroom, an armoury and accommodation for Petersen’s eight-man security detail. He claims to have turned the local police force into a military unit, and to have been poisoned with a chicken drenched in cyanide by the deposed police chief. He reported that the tribes trusted neither Hanoi nor Saigon. He drank rice wine with tribal elders and one night ran retching into the mist to escape a Viet Cong patrol. In 1964, he was involved in training men in ambush, jungle movement, light machine guns and sniper work. Petersen knew that the way to attract the Montagnards to his side was to prove to them that a Communist victory would destroy their way of life, would mean their being drawn into a hard-edged Marxist state. In doing so he was torn between promising a Montagnard state, which his charges much desired, which his superiors abominated, and which he lacked the power to deliver, and recognising that his side of the war was opposed, in deference to the South Vietnamese, to any such eventuality.

  Petersen ran his operations astride the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which his little but burgeoning army frequently attacked, all financed from a CIA fund from which $50,000 was available at any one time. His overarching CIA mission was under the control of the surprisingly named Combined Studies Division. The study was to train Vietnamese guerrilla troops, and the Combined Studies Division and the CIA’s covert action branch operated out of a teak hunting lodge that had belonged to the last emperor, Bao Dai. Petersen’s mission was astoundingly difficult and dangerous, for as the Americans said, he was far out of most operatives’ depth in ‘tiger country’. But he was helped by having a sense of the place and its history. He was the most successful in fulfilling the aim of recruiting 63,000 Montagnards to operate against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, helped by experience he had had amongst the Negrito tribes in the Malayan jungles during the so-called Malayan Emergency in the 1950s.

  By September 1964, Petersen led several hundred intensely motivated Montagnard soldiers, who developed such a reputation that the Viet Cong called them ‘Tiger Men’. Not to lose a chance, Petersen asked the CIA to supply a uniform with a tiger’s head on it. The arrival of uniforms brought in more recruits still. But a Montagnard revolt brewed throughout 1964, as awareness struck the mountain people that they would not be given their own state. They were also upset at bad pay, poor conditions, and cruel treatment by South Vietnamese masters. They held no rancour against Petersen, except that he had perhaps toyed with the idea of guaranteeing their independence. The National Director of Police, Ong Binh, nonetheless held Petersen responsible for the Montagnards’ rebellious mood. Petersen was almost flattered that they thought him so influential. Eventually, in September 1964, three thousand Montagnards rebelled against the Americans and the South Vietnamese, descended on ARVN encampments at Ban Me Thuot and shot soldiers or slit their throats. They held American personnel hostage and kidnapped the Montagnard leader ordained by the South Vietnamese and thus by the Americans.

  Serong arrived on the scene to help negotiate a way through the crisis, and General Koh of the ARVN asked Petersen to contact rebel leaders and persuade them to come to broker a deal. He set out on the journey with them himself, through Viet Cong checkpoints and in pouring rain. At each checkpoint, Petersen and his interpreter took to the jungle and outflanked the barrier, rejoining the road and their vehicle further along.

  The list of Montagnard demands was listened to, including their right to own their land and fly their flag, elect a Montagnard representative in the National Assembly, and command their own military units. They wanted freedom too to distribute US aid sent their way. In the wake of the revolt, Petersen resumed his command and took up aggressive patrolling again, and was constantly re-equipped.

  An airstrip near his base had been cleared by elephants. Here various warrant officers arrived with instructions to help Petersen out, but felt lonely, for the Montagnards had time only for Petersen. His first full-time assistant was Warrant Officer Warren Stokes.

  The Viet Cong had now infiltrated the town and the surrounding mountains, and some nights they would place one of their flags outside Petersen’s house to show that he lived under their power. He responded ferociously, with his Tiger Men striking Viet Cong parties along the Ho Chi Minh Trail with a ruthlessness that matched the guerrillas’ own. Communist suspects were slaughtered by the Tiger Men, not always at Petersen’s asking. But he did write, ‘Fire must be fought with fire. Communist subversive tactics have proved all too successful during the past decade.’ He had nonetheless been shocked when a young mother dropped her child and cried out in terror on seeing him. The Viet Cong had told her that Americans ate babies.

  By June 1965, Petersen enjoyed autonomy and commanded nearly twelve hundred men, receiving unlimited CIA funds, weapons and ammunition. Montagnard villagers would visit him to ask that he send their Tiger Men to protect them. His CIA controller called him ‘Lawrence of the Highlands’. But moves to curb his adventure and his independence were made when he visited Melbourne in March 1965 and was taken by senior officers for a lunch at the Melbourne Club, whose urbanity he much suspected. The reason for the meeting was that the South Vietnamese president had warned Canberra that Petersen should be removed. Surviving for now, he returned to his highland base where he was visited by the new American ambassador, General Maxwell Taylor, who applauded the Tiger Men and then wondered aloud why an American couldn’t do the job. Petersen was replaced and promoted to major, and went to command an Australian company in Phuoc Tuy province.

  THE GOLDEN BOY

  Harold Holt had always been a Robert Menzies protégé and had held a number of portfolios in Liberal governments, including Immigration and Treasury. When he came to the prime ministership in 1966, the conservatives were in power in four out of six states, and he held a comfortable majority in Canberra with the DLP holding the balance of power in the Senate and so ensuring Coalition control. Labor was still led by Arthur Calwell, a man increasingly cranky and unpredictable. Calwell had lost two elections to Menzies since coming to the leadership. His deputy, the polished forty-eight-year-old Gough Whitlam, had managed to get White Australia removed from the party’s platform in 1965, a move Calwell opposed. Whitlam expressed the opinion that he did not look forward to being deputy to a seventy-year-old prime minister—Calwell was born in 1896—or of being led into an election by one. Whitlam nonetheless had an affectionate relationship with Calwell, for all the latter’s flaws and his espousal of old ideas.

  Holt, delighted that he had come to lead the country without stepping over a single dead body, had no reason not to expect a long prime ministership. He won the 1966 election with a record majority despite the protests that had blocked the way of LBJ’s motorcades. In the 1966 half-Senate election, however, the primary vote shrank to forty-three senators compared to Labor’s forty-five.

  In his second year of government, Vietnam was losing its popularity as a cause. There was a scandal over the excessive use of VIP aircraft by Holt’s friend Peter Howson, the details of which Holt foolishly but loyally attempted to suppress. And now Whitlam replaced Calwell.

  It was the weekend before Christmas 1967, and while Zara stayed at the Lodge, Holt went to the family holiday home at Portsea on the Mornington Peninsula. On 17 December, the Sunday, he took his next-door neighbour and mistress, Marjorie Gillespie, and her daughter and some friends and his two bodyguards to see a solo yachtsman, Alec Rose, pass through the outer heads into Melbourne. Then the party went back along the coast to an unspoilt but treacherous beach named Cheviot. Holt stripped to his trunks to swim. His party advised him it was too rough, but he insisted. He ran and dived in. His head was seen amidst rolling surf and then the height and roughness of the sea obscured him. They did not see him again. The search for the body would not be called off until 5 January in the new year.

 
The tragic end of an individual and the civic loss of a prime minister, who flailed and struggled for breath beneath the surface, then succumbed to the Southern Ocean, his body swept away, never to be given back, stood almost as a time division between the Australia that accepted Vietnam and the Australia that did not. His death represented a division between the certainty of the Menzies age and the approach by degrees towards that different definition of Australia which Holt himself had helped make, not least with the 1967 referendum and the new immigration laws. It brought to the prime ministership for twenty-nine days the Country Party leader Black Jack McEwen, with whom Holt had quarrelled, who had wanted the Australian dollar devalued for the sake of farmers, but whom Holt had successfully opposed. After that interlude would come the ascent of the fascinating John Grey Gorton, a former fighter pilot who would lead a conservative rearguard while himself being philosophically ready to yield some of the principles Menzies held sacred. Even in the Liberal Party, which in the imaginations of Laborites and the discontented and the young seemed stuck in glue, the times, they were changing.

  War artist Will Dyson achieves prophecy in May 1919, following the signing of the Versaille Peace Treaty, with a cartoon in which the child who will mature in 1940 weeps for his destiny, drawing bemused attention from Clemenceau of France, President Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George. (Mary Evans Picture Library/AAP Image)