Sir Robert Menzies.

Brigadier Ted Serong. (Who led the first Advisers to Vietnam.)

Ho Chi Minh.

Again when one looks at the papers tendered in relation to adverse health effects of Malathion, for example exhibits 1613 and 1636, (available in the report) given the enormous exposure to Malathion alleged by many veterans it is difficult to understand why such information was ignored.

Comments can go on and on, page by page. Ultimately it comes down to the simple fact that veterans were not believed about their exposures in Vietnam, reports such as the National Academy of Science (Herb Tapes) have, together with much other evidence, been used selectively and at times bizarre methods are used in assessing evidence. eg. Bamford and Daniels. (In the report)

I did two tours of duty in Vietnam. The first was with A Company, the Sixth Battalion in 1966/67, and being part of a large combat unit gave a feeling of security. We were like family and supported each other in every way. We came home together on HMAS Sydney, and in hindsight that was the best way to come home from Vietnam. We had time to relax and wind down from operational service. Our nerves had time to settle and our minds had time to adjust, and switch off from the constant state of combat readiness we had been in for twelve months. Even so, family and friends said that I had changed dramatically. After a couple of weeks I realised that some of them were scared of me.

My mother was devastated in the change. She said that I had gone away young and carefree, always laughing, and had come home from Vietnam emotionless and cold, a nervous and jumpy wreck. I honestly didn’t notice at first, but after a few weeks I couldn’t stand being around any of my old civilian friends. They were like children. All of them were completely ignorant of the war in Vietnam, they complained about the weather, or the traffic, or their football team losing. I felt that my country had sent me and thousands of others to fight a war in Vietnam and no-one back home gave a shit.

Most of the anti-Vietnam protesters that I met were completely ignorant of the facts and were involved because it was trendy. Others were simply short on guts and had to justify that somehow.

My second tour was with the 1st Australian Reinforcement Unit, (1ARU) in 1970/71. Coming home after that year was bad news, I couldn’t adjust. I was patrolling in Vietnam one day and home in Sydney the next. Too quick.....on a plane, off a plane. Jumpy, animal instincts still working. Angry.....we flew into Sydney at about one in the morning so as to avoid demonstrators. A few Australians returning home from a year at war, and Americans coming to Australia for R & R. Even at 1am though, the demonstrators were there. I remember thinking to myself, "Hell, they’re supposed to be greeting us not calling us names and spitting on us." I remember thinking about the men that didn’t make it home and wondering about how they would feel, the ones that had been shot, blown apart, mined, booby trapped, poisoned with chemicals.

I will never understand why those uninformed bastards were directing their anger at us. No-one wanted the war stopped more than we did. Why did they blame us for the war? Why weren’t they down in Canberra, tearing Parliament House down brick by brick, instead of attacking war weary men.

Anyway, I was home alive, but I felt like a criminal trying to sneak in the back door early in the morning. That is one of the huge differences between Vietnam veterans and veterans of all other wars. Most of the veterans of World War 2, and Korea, travelled with their units and spent weeks or months returning on ships. During these long trips home they had the closeness and emotional support of each other and were able to talk about the horror and trauma that they had experienced together. The epitaph for a lot of Vietnam veterans was a solitary plane ride home with complete strangers and a head full of grief, conflict, and confusion.

It is obvious that the vast majority of Vietnam veterans have had a much more problematic readjustment to civilian life than did their World War 2 and Korean counterparts. When we first arrived home the joy of being alive, of surviving, made us happy and carried us along as we tried to fit back in to society. However, after a couple of years, sometimes less, a lot of us started to notice changes. Those that applied to the Department of Veterans Affairs found that the department didn’t recognise their problems as being service related and in most cases ruled out compensation and treatment. Veterans began to suffer depression, we became cynical and angry, and trusted no-one.

When I started to talk to other veterans about my problems I quickly realised that most of them were the same. We all experienced sleep problems, temper outbursts, depression, intrusive thoughts.....couldn’t get Vietnam out of our minds. When we did get to sleep, nightmares were a problem. Feelings of Isolation, Rage, Alienation, Anxiety reactions, Survival guilt, headaches. All of these symptoms were, and still are common amongst a lot of Vietnam veterans and in the early days following the war there was very little help available. Most veterans with these symptoms were labelled as being crazy.....mad. Many started to believe that they were crazy, and tried to hide out, isolate themselves from society.

The civilian population of Australia was indifferent to the Vietnam war, to Vietnam veterans, and to their problems. This did a lot of damage to our emotional state, but most of the damage, most of the hurt, came from politicians. Politicians lied about Vietnam, about how we got involved, about how the war was going, and about the use of herbicides and pesticides in Vietnam. From about March 1979, when questions were first being asked about Australians using herbicides in Vietnam, politicians, the government, continually denied all knowledge of it.....they lied. It wasn’t until 1982 that the government admitted for the first time that herbicides were used in Vietnam. Why did they lie for so long?...... Every Vietnam veteran knew they were lying. We could still smell the stuff, taste it. It was in the air, in the water we drank, the food we ate, the bush we patrolled. In some cases it was sprayed directly on top of us, but even if it wasn’t, the spray drift spread it all over South Vietnam. No area was sprayed more heavily than Phuoc Tuy Province, the Australian area of responsibility.

Vietnam was a completely different war. All the things mentioned so far point out how it was different, and why it caused so many problems for a lot of Vietnam veterans. The sense of alienation that returning veterans felt, the public ignorance and the lack of public support in Australia hurt us a lot.

I am pointing out all these differences between the Vietnam war and other wars because these events had such a huge effect on us, the veterans who did the work. The blame for the confusion, the attitude of the civilian population to returning veterans, and the emotional trauma suffered by veterans because of it lay with politicians, not with the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force.

Politicians in Canberra, those who ran the nation used the Armed Forces of this country as a political tool to further their own ambitions. Veterans have suffered the consequences since then, and will for the rest of their lives.

Nothing however can detract from the Armed Forces undoubted quality or standard of performance. We were sent to Vietnam and asked to do a job without proper resources, without a comprehensive policy, and without adequate financial support.....and we did it well.

The professionalism and valour of the Australian Army, Navy and Air Force who fought in Vietnam for over 10 years impressed every military person in the world. The nine Infantry battalions engaged the enemy at every opportunity, fought brilliantly and never lost a battle. The Australian Army Training Team, (AATTV) have gone down in history as one of the most outstanding units ever to leave Australia. All other units and branches of the services performed with distinction: logistic troops, Airmen, Sailors, Nurses whatever part of ‘Australian Forces Vietnam,’ can be proud of the way they did a difficult job.

POLITICS

As mentioned earlier, Australia followed the United States into Vietnam, by the early sixties our alliance with America was a matter of fact and most Australians were comfortable with that.

In those days the thinking was that China was the big threat and with the British withdrawing all of its military forces in South East Asia, except for Hong Kong, and America taking a greater interest in the region, the Menzies government went out of its way to shore up, in any way necessary, the alliance with the United States. This was not surprising. No-one spoke with China, no diplomatic link with China had been pursued by Australia since the revolution of 1948. Consequently anti-China hysteria led to Australian politicians going to the USSR and meeting with Soviet leaders in an attempt to gain their support against China. The Moscow leaders must have looked on us as being extremely naive.

Australia accepted the American view that because Vietnam had been divided into north and south after the French were given a hiding at Dien bien Phu in 1954, that North Vietnam was friendly with China, despite huge differences known to exist between Hanoi and Peking.

The Australian government was not interested in the fact that there were centuries of animosity between the Vietnamese and Chinese races because that was in conflict with the Australian (ie American) view.

So, with a complete lack of the history of the region, of a proper analysis of the situation in South East Asia, the Menzies government blindly ran after the Americans encouraging them to have a greater military presence in the region.

The Americans were watching Vietnam, and by 1960 Saigon was under immense pressure from Vietcong units in the South Vietnamese countryside, and the Diem regime was unstable, there were many attempts from within Diem’s own administration to depose their leader.

Diem’s government was about as corrupt as you could get. The people appointed by Diem (usually Catholics) got richer by the day diverting American aid that should have been spent fighting the Viet Cong and helping the villagers.

When American advisers objected to Diem he would go off on one of his raving lectures, a monologue where he would rant on for ages. Diem thought he was an expert on everything, but when the real problems of Vietnam were raised he would dismiss them as rumours started by the Viet Cong. The man was obviously an idiot.

Diem was in control of his government, of course, he had appointed them all, but he did not control the people…he never did.

The villagers of Vietnam wanted nothing more than to own their own plot of land. Diem could have given this to them when he took control of plantations that were abandoned by the French. Instead of giving this land to the farmers, the people who had a moral right to it, Diem offered it for sale. Obviously most of it went to wealthy Vietnamese, alienating the villagers and increasing the gap between rich and poor.

Many Vietnamese farmers owned land given to them by the Viet Minh when they had controlled the south. Diem took back this land and gave it to Catholics who had moved from the North after the Geneva accords. Many of these people of course longed for the return of the Viet Minh, or indeed any group who would give them back their land.

Diem seemed to get more stupid by the day, his next brilliant step was to appoint new Village Chiefs…a policy that went against centuries of tradition. Even the French had allowed villagers to elect their own chiefs. The Vietnamese saying was that "The Emperor’s rule stops at the village gate" Of course the new chiefs were chosen only for their loyalty to Diem, and like the rest of Diem’s appointees, they became rich pocketing American money intended to help the villagers. The Americans wanted Diem out in the countryside, meeting the people and finding out what their concerns were. In 1957, while out meeting the people, Diem was shot by an angry villager….. Obviously they were not all stupid, and not all happy about the way Diem was running their country.

From then on Diem stayed within the Presidential palace. Everyone knew whenever he left, because his limousine would drive at high speed through the streets, surrounded by police cars with their sirens wailing. He was suspicious of everyone except his own relatives and he put his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in charge of a special police force that hunted down those opposed to his rule.

Of course the people were not going to put up with this sort of treatment, so those that were the Viet Minh, and had put away their weapons after the French defeat, now took those weapons out again.

Diem was now calling all his opponents Communists or "Viet Cong". Most Vietnamese peasants didn’t know what communism was, but they did know that the Viet Cong were opposed to Diem. Those that wanted their own plot of land to farm, or indeed their own land back, now began to think of themselves as Viet Cong.

Their numbers grew as those that used to be Viet Minh, and had gone north, began to move back into the south. Under orders from Ho Chi Minh they could not cross the 17^th parallel (the line that divided the country) because that line was a demilitarized zone, and no armed troops were allowed to enter. So, they left North Vietnam and began to walk down a network of trails through Laos. This route became known as the Ho Chi Minh trail.

In December 1960, under orders from Ho Chi Minh’s government in Hanoi, a group of Viet Cong met to set up the National Liberation Front (NLF) From then on the NLF was the political wing of the Viet Cong. They set policies that were transmitted to Viet Cong (VC) units in the south.

By now Kennedy was in the White House and Americans were inspired by their new, and young leader. Kennedy felt the United States could halt the spread of communism with a new military approach…counterinsurgency. Militarily, the insurgents could be beaten by arming and training the people at village level to defend their homes. He believed that American Aid programs would show that democracy had more to offer than communism.

Kennedy and his advisers, among them Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defence, and Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, set about sorting out what they saw as a fight between communism and democracy.

None of them understood what was really happening in Vietnam.

It was now 1963, and many of Kennedy’s advisers believed Diem was the big problem in South Vietnam. When the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, learned that some South Vietnamese army officers were planning a coup to overthrow Diem, he recommended that Washington support it.

Things then began to move rather quickly. Kennedy was at a meeting in Washington when news came that Diem and Nhu had been murdered in the back of an armoured car. Kennedy was shocked and said that Lodge had led him to believe that Diem would not be killed in the coup.

Three weeks later Kennedy himself was shot dead in Dallas. For a time the American people were dazed and mourning, and Vietnam was forgotten.

Lyndon B. Johnson was now President of the United States. Johnson was not particularly interested in foreign policy because he wanted to solve the problems Americans had at home.

The generals who had overthrown Diem were now fighting among themselves for power and through all of 1964 one military government after another rose and fell in South Vietnam. They were all playing right into the hands of the communists and the Viet Cong took full advantage of the situation and increased their hold on the countryside.

The American destroyer MADDOX entered the Gulf of Tonkin early on the morning of August 2^nd. 1964. That afternoon they were attacked by three North Vietnamese PT boats. Attacking at high speed the North Vietnamese fired torpedoes and machine guns at the MADDOX. The MADDOX returned fire and four jets from a US Aircraft carrier joined the fight. One of the North Vietnamese boats were sunk, the other two retreated. The damage to the MADDOX was a single bullet hole from the north Vietnamese machine guns. What happened after that remains a mystery even today, but it was the event that tipped the US into the Vietnam war.

Two nights later the MADDOX’S radar operator reported unidentified objects thirty six miles ahead. The USS TURNER JOY’S radar confirmed the sighting and when the target was 4000 yards away the TURNER JOY said they saw the wake of a torpedo pass by. Eight American jets flew over the spot, but could not detect any enemy vessels. Neither ship, nor any of the planes had been hit and the Americans finally turned south.

After disagreement amongst the Americans as to whether or not there had actually been an attack, (and the Captain of the MADDOX said that it was doubtful), Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, cabled Johnson that the North Vietnamese had defied the President’s warning.

Johnson struck back immediately. American jets took off from US aircraft carriers and bombed North Vietnam.

Only military targets were bombed, PT boat bases and an oil storage depot. Johnson declared that the raid was a success. The North Vietnamese anti-aircraft fire shot down two American jets. Flying one of them was Lieutenant Everett Alverez, so he became the first of many American pilots captured by the North Vietnamese. He would remain a prisoner for nine years.

During the next three years Johnson would send more than 500,000 American troops into Vietnam and stage the largest bombing campaign in the history of warfare.

Australia was already involved. The Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, AATTV, had been in Vietnam since 1962.

Now, the governments of Australia, New Zealand and Britain were asked to take an active roll in the defence of Vietnam. This got Australian diplomats and politicians excited to say the least, and they almost tripped over each other in a rush to please the Americans.

Meanwhile Menzies was paving the way for the reintroduction of conscription to build the manpower of the Australian Army. The RSL, the National Civic Council, all sorts of public figures, were yelling support for the desperate need to form a new National Service scheme. All these people yelling for conscription were wittingly or unwittingly working on behalf of the government and Menzies orchestrated it all without actually being seen to be directly involved.

The Americans encouraged Australia and other members of SEATO to become involved in Vietnam and in 1964 the SEATO council agreed that it was prepared for any escalation of fighting that would contain communist aggression in Asia.

After visiting the United States in 1964, Menzies announced that the AATTV would be strengthened with another thirty advisers. They would be supported by the Royal Australian Air Force Transport Flight - Vietnam. Meanwhile Menzies and his cabinet kept up the lie that they did not intend to reintroduce conscription or to send Australian combat troops to Vietnam. Once America began sending large numbers of ground troops to Vietnam most people that were politically aware believed that it was only a matter of time before Australia was asked to follow suit. Menzies remained true to the deception, and remained uncommitted, but anyone with any knowledge knew that with nearly full employment and prosperity there was no rush of young volunteers for the armed forces, and there would have to be a huge build up of numbers if we were to commit forces to Vietnam.

So, having deceived the Australian people for more than a year that conscription was not under consideration, Menzies announced to the nation on 10^th December 1964 that compulsory National Service for all males aged twenty years would be introduced. He said the situation in Vietnam was the primary reason and made it clear that National Servicemen would serve in Vietnam or any other conflict that might arise during their service.

Right from the very start this scheme was a recipe for disaster, because of the ridiculous and unfair method of selecting who would go into the Army, and who would not. The scheme was a recipe for disaster and division.

The United States Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy flew to Australia with a request from the President for Australian support of the US position, and at the same time for a greater military involvement.

Conscription was up and running in 1965 and the Australian Army now re-thought its previous negative response to providing combat troops for Vietnam and set about building the army it would need for the job. They believed now that they had a steady supply of manpower they could reach the level required to support the USA with combat troops.

On 29^th April 1965 Menzies stood in the House of Representatives and announced that an Infantry battalion of the Australian Army, and a logistic support group, a force of about 800 men would be sent to Vietnam to fight alongside US and ARVN troops against the communists.

The agreement to send Australian troops to Vietnam was made between the Menzies government and the Johnson administration. It had nothing to do with the South Vietnamese, and so with more deception the Menzies government set about obtaining a request from the South Vietnamese government for a troop commitment from Australia, so as to give it an air of legitimacy. There was never any formal request from the South Vietnamese before that.

For the first time Australia was sending troops to war without the full support of the people at home.

Only five weeks elapsed between Menzies’ announcement and the troops being on their way to Vietnam. Ist Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR), one of Australia’s most experienced battalions was the unit chosen.

So the build up began. By the end of 1965 the Americans numbered 184,000 and Australia had 1RAR and their logistic support group. They were called Australian Forces - Vietnam (AFV), and consisted of 1RAR, 105 Field Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery (RAA), Armoured personnel carriers and 3 Field Troop of the Royal Australian Engineers (RAE), with elements of the Army Light Aircraft (ALA). By the time they were all on the ground in Vietnam, Australian numbers were almost 1500 men, substantially more than the 800 the government said they were sending.

That is how it started, as simply and as quickly as that. Without any public debate our armed forces were committed to what was to become this nations longest war.

The decision was then made to commit a Task Force and to allocate the Australians a province of their own where they could operate as an autonomous unit with their own field commander. Australian Forces - Vietnam was allocated Phuoc Tuy province in military region 3, just to the east of Saigon, and the 1^st Australian Task Force (1ATF) was formed.

The 1^st Australian Task Force started operations in mid 1966 at a time of great optimism and a belief that the tide had turned in the war and the communists were on the back pedal. Australia’s commitment went from 1500 men to 4,500.

Harold Holt was now Prime Minister and he warned that "a long period of fighting is the prospect we have to face." He was right because Australian military operations in Vietnam were to last 10 years.

In 1967 the Australian Government announced that Australian troop numbers would increase again …to 8000. By now we (Australians) were at war in our own right against the communists and all Australian units were engaged in active patrolling in Phuoc Tuy province.