I left Australia aboard the Army Vessel (A.V.) “Vernon Sturdee” on April, 11, 1966, arriving in Vietnam on May 05, 1966. I was just two weeks past my nineteenth birthday (March 27, 1947), being a last minute replacement for a crew member who had been discovered to be eighteen years of age. I had received no formal training as a seaman aboard an Army vessel.
It must be stated from the outset I had joined the Army as a volunteer at seventeen years of age—that I was not a conscript—and I likewise volunteered to go to Vietnam. I believed firmly in the correct-ness of stopping the advance of Communism south (which it was undoubtedly doing) and was determined to do my duty for my country. In short I believed strongly in “God, Queen and Country”.
On our first night “in-country” we were at anchor in the estuary at the mouth of the Saigon River and a fire-fight was in progress on land some scant kilometers to the east. From this distance it had the appearance of a fireworks night; tracer bullets arcing through the air and bombs exploding in brief glows of light low on the loom. It served as a grim reminder that I was now in a War Zone. The whole affair had a dream-like quality to it. A fellow shipmate played the last few plaintive notes on his harmonica, tapped it dry, and remarked somewhat sagely for a twenty-year-old, “Sure looks like we are in for it, now, lads”, and sloped off to bed.
I can clearly remember our first duty day in Vietnam—with crystal clarity that is—as three days later we sailed up the river towards Saigon. Both banks of the river had been defoliated with Agent Orange, and, as they were declared a Free-Fire Zone, this meant we could shoot at anything that moved. The entire crew was at “Action Stations” for the duration of the trip; what one member of the Veterans’ Review Board (V.R.B.) described as being on “Red Alert”.
I was at my position with helmet on and a loaded rifle in my hands. It all still had a dream-like quality to it. Some time later I suddenly realised that there could very well be the enemy anywhere along the banks of the river and that I could be the target. It must be stressed that all on board, from the Captain down, were expecting “big trouble”.
The Veterans’ Review Board (V.R.B) report, however, manages to convey the impression that we were never in danger. They describe it in these terms:
• “The then captain of the vessel, Captain Bonnett, is recorded to have said that ‘they expected big trouble and were prepared for it’. However, the vessel was never fired upon—not a single shot was fired at the vessel. It would seem that all the voyages were relatively uneventful”. [single quotation marks added].
By omitting—deliberately omitting—what Captain Bonnett actually said the impression is conveyed he spoke the entirety of the quotation. Due to having access to the original tape the sneaky deceit is revealed. The members of the Veterans’ Review Board (V.R.B)—namely Mr. R. J. Miller, Senior Member; Mr. J. W. Muir, Services Member; and Mr. F. W. Bell, Member, January, 1985—are not above trickery to achieve their nefarious ends.
Anyway, whosoever the loquitur may be—Messrs Miller, Muir, and Bell, no doubt—whatever the unknowable loquitur is saying it is said with the benefit of hindsight; I did not know whether we would be a target, or not, at the time. I advance a photocopy of an extract from a book written some four trips later, by a journalist who travelled with us and who accurately described the tension and stress at the time. It is unreasonable to say, sitting comfortably in an office some twenty nine years later, with the benefit of hindsight, that I couldn’t possibly have a severe and psychotic mental disorder because nothing eventful happened.
Standing there, on the deck of the ship at Action Stations, I suddenly realised that I could be a target. I was gripped with a terror the likes of which I had never experienced before. I felt that my entire body was trembling violently and panic raced through me. I looked around at other members of the crew and they all appeared normal. I could draw no other conclusion than that I was a coward.
The terror was intense and permeated my body, my whole being. The dream-like atmosphere had become a nightmare. This was war. Some days later—maybe even two weeks later—we were transporting some Australian infantry men and their equipment south to Vung Tau. Before this voyage commenced, another crew member had been talking with the infantry men and he pointed out to me one particular soldier who had, he said, had two confirmed kills just a few nights previously. I stood there, digesting this information, looking at the man pointed out to me.
He was with a group of friends, smoking, laughing and joking, sitting atop an (APC), and I thought, “How could you be so at ease after having actually killed two human beings?” He was a beefy sort of chap; brilliant red hair trimmed short, and of a stout demeanour; a normal sort of infantry chappie, in short. With mounting sickness I realised that this was what I was here for:
To kill or be killed.
If I thought that the terror I had experienced was terrible to endure, the horror I now was now experiencing was well-nigh unbearable.
I just knew that I could not do what this man had done. I was obviously a pacifist as well as a coward. What was I doing here in a war, dressed in army green and carrying a loaded rifle? From that day on my life became a living nightmare. I had to bluff my way through my duties, for we had all be told, by our trainers, not to give way to fear as fear is contagious.
I was trapped in an unreal world. In order to escape from the reality of my situation, my mind somehow created a new reality, built out of extreme fear, which I call ‘unreality’.
Dr. Wright, specialist psychiatrist, has informed me that this is known medically as ‘derealisation’ and ‘depersonalisation’.
Two or three weeks prior to returning to Australia I managed to get some shore leave whilst docked at Saigon. It was early evening as another crew member and I walked in toward the main area of Saigon whereupon we came across a riot in the streets. There was a large crowd, police whistles were blowing and tear-gas was being used. This is firmly embedded in my memory as it was my first experience of tear-gas—once experienced it is never forgotten.
We were several hundred metres from the centre of the crowd activity and I saw flame. Another soldier in the crowd informed me that it was a Buddhist demonstration—that a monk was self-immolating. I was aghast—that a monk, a man of God, was committing suicide in such a ghastly manner, was more than my sensibilities could handle.
He was demonstrating against me and my fellow soldiers.
We had previously heard that Buddhist monks were doing this in other parts of the country, so I had no hesitation in believing this to be true. We ran away from the scene—literally ran away—back to the ship, as we did not wish to become involved in a Vietnamese riot.
To this day I am convinced that what I had walked into was a Buddhist “non-violent” demonstration which included ritual suicide.
The Veterans’ Review Board (V.R.B.) informed me that no record exists of any monk self-immolating in Saigon during my stay there. If the reporting of that period is accurate, then it means that for the last twenty nine years I have believed I saw something which did not happen.
This information caused me great distress, for it means I could not rely upon my memory. However, a psychologist has informed me that it is not unusual for some one to superimpose something seen on film later over an actual event (known as confounding).
Whichever is the case, it is the effect it had upon me which counts. The next day I did a bizarre thing; I shaved all the hair off my head.
All my values had been turned upside down and I reacted out of defiance to the insanity of what was going on around me. The captain of the “Vernon Sturdee” confined me to ship (a.k.a. ‘confined to barracks’) for the remainder of our stay in South Vietnam—a condition I was willing to comply with as I was counting the days to the finish of our tour of duty. I didn’t wish to go ashore ever again. To this day I still have a picture in my head of a Buddhist monk killing himself in protest to what my countrymen and I were doing in his country.
When we left Vietnam, and on the long voyage home, I gradually reverted to being normal; the nightmare was over. I successfully put my personal experience of war behind me as being an aberration, the result of an over-active imagination, for we had indeed not been fired upon, nor had I had to shoot anyone in cold blood. I put it behind me so successfully that ten years later when applying to enlist as a trainee officer in the Citizen Military Force (C.M.F.) I was able to truthfully state that I had never had any nervous trouble or mental breakdown.
I had completely buried the war-time experience, so much so that it came as quite a shock to me when my whole war-time army experience came back to me during the first weekend of training.
During that trial weekend I realised what a mistake it was to consider re-enlisting. Apart from this experience I considered myself to be perfectly normal in the period from late 1966 through to March 1981, with the brief experience in a two week period over a family reunion at Christmas in 1979, wherein various strange and eerie things were occurring in my brain.
I experienced shifts in personality, a racing mind and my realities shifting. I put it down to excessive drinking over the Christmas period and got on with my job of providing a living for myself, my wife and my four children.
It was not until March 1981 that I had my first nervous breakdown. In March, 1981, my mind began to slip. The sensation is something like an automatic gear on a car changing gear slightly late. My mind would “rev-up” and change events into, another reality.
I was no longer in charge of myself—I couldn’t control what was happening. One has a degree of control over emotions, for example, but this was different. All kinds of strange and bizarre thoughts would race through me, building to a crescendo which resulted in me lapsing into a catatonic state by the end of March.
My wife at the time, Mrs Heather [redacted], the mother of my four children, called the nearest hospital (which was Timboon, Vic; a small country town of about one thousand residents). The Doctor came, and I was carried off to hospital in order to keep me under close observation. He was nonplussed as to what was happening to me. After about four hours I came out of the catatonic state and the Doctor allowed me to return home.
{By way of an explanation, my first wife had panicked due to a bizarre set of circumstances immediately prior. I had been walking from the pottery studio to the house in the bright early morning sunshine. In this brilliant light, an African Paspalum was glowing as if lit from the centre. The similarity of the Burning Bush of Moses was undeniable. The message was prophetic—you have to die to get to heaven. The perfect peace that passeth understanding lies beyond the mortal ken. Hence my wife’s panic-stricken call to the doctor as her husband, the father of her children, the provider of food, clothing and shelter, was in the process of dying.} [curly-bracketed insert added].
The doctor could only put it down to overwork and high blood pressure (I was working about fourteen hours a day, seven days a week in order to be able to run my own business a self-employed potter).
After this experience I had bouts of terror, horror and dread. As I started to experience extreme fear physically my strange mind-states prevented me from being able to continue working especially the stress of running my own business. By the end of 1981 my business had collapsed and my marriage was starting to disintegrate.
In desperation I turned first to religion {as explicated in the insert further above} and later to Eastern spirituality in order to make sense of what was happening to me, as not only did I fear I was going spiritually crazy {my mother called me “god-crazed”}, I had an even stronger fear of going to see a Registered Psychiatrist, for my under-standing at that time was that I would end up locked away in a mental institution. [curly-bracketed inserts added].
It wasn’t until 1993 that I couldn’t hack it on my own any more; the symptoms had become so intense that I no longer had a choice. I had also come to understand that it is Government policy to return mental patients, on medication, back into the community and not lock them away.
I had to say that I had become suicidal in January 1993 in order to receive treatment and so I admitted myself to the Mullumbimby hospital, whereupon they tried me first on thioridazine (Melleril) and diazepam (Valium), then on fluphemazine (Modecate) and diazepam (Valium).
The fluphemazine (Modecate) was in the form of a slow release injection which lasted for about six weeks. The side effects were worse than the symptoms, so I was put on trifluorperazine (Stelazine
), diazepam (Valium) and benztropine (Cogentin).Dr. Wright has tried me on clonazepan (Rivortril) and a reduced dosage of trifluorperazine (Stelazine), but the side effects of the clonazepan (Rivortril)—(I felt like a walking Zombie)—have proved too much so I am currently taking an increased dose of trifluorperazine (Stelazine) (15 mg.) and diazepam (Valium) (10 mg.) and benztropine (Cogentin) (4 mg.).
The medication makes life barely tolerable, it does not take the symptoms away, it only reduces their severity.
To this day I feel like an alien in a strange and eerie world. I suffer from Depersonalisation and Derealisation—I experience everything as being unreal—and I have nightmares of being back in the Army again and back in Vietnam (strangely enough the nightmares have expanded to include all of South-Eastern Asia). I find anxiety to be too mild a word as I experience life in a state of abject fear.
I have no social life nor friends. My wife (Mrs. Irene [redacted]; pron. ee-ray-nuh) is my only companion. She used to be a registered nursing Sister and is well equipped to be with me in my distress.
Even so, this puts an immense strain upon her and we have split up four times during our nine years of being together—all because of my condition. Now that I am seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist regularly she has someone to share her burden with.
I have four adult children from my previous marriage and they all will have nothing to do with me, for the last eight years, because of my disorder.
I have also been alienated from my mother and father, my brother and my two sisters for the last ten years I have no family life at all. Dr. Wright is of the opinion that I will have this disorder for the rest of my life—a bleak future which, quite frankly, appals me.
I cannot generate an interest in pursuing a career, nor do I wish to start a family with my wife, for whom this meant a painful decision as she has no children of her own. (I have had a vasectomy).
I have frequent panic attacks and cannot bear to be in a crowd. When amongst a small group of people I get easily startled as I experience their assertiveness as aggression and this triggers off an attack in me. My mind jams up as if three television stations are all trying to broadcast on the one channel. My wife is my connection with what I used to know as reality. I rely heavily upon her to make sense of the world. My wife escorts me virtually everywhere.
I hope that this statement goes, someway toward refuting the impression given by The Veterans’ Review Board (V.R.B.) report which has, using other words, accused me of what amounts to being a liar and a fake. The unreasonableness of their conclusion causes me great distress.
Written and signed by Richard K. [redacted] on the 20th. Feb. 1995: (R. [redacted]).
*
I have enclosed herein a photocopy of an extract from a book written some four trips later, by a journalist who travelled with us and who accurately described the tension and stress at the time.
“Australians In Viet Nam” by Ian Mackay; Published by Rigby, Ltd Aust, 1968.
p.122: “... before, and then by truck to their first home in South Vietnam a broad sea-front staging camp in the sandhills on the seaward side of the Cap St Jacques, only a few hundred yards from the old French swimming pavilions. Australian engineers had arrived at the site some two weeks before to find that their designated camp area was a tangle of sand dunes, low scrub, snakes, and Vietcong snipers. “It was a hell of a bloody mess”, said Maj. D. J. Binney, the Task Force Engineer, “and we hardly knew where to start”. but with twelve bulldozers and men of the 1st Field Squadron and the 17th Construction Squadron, Maj. Binney had almost completed levelling the several square miles of sand dunes and preparing camp sites by the time the H.M.A.S “Sydney” arrived. They had also sunk twelve wells for water, and installed a water purification plant which processed 3,000 gallons an hour every bit of it needed to supply an amount of 15 gallons per man per day.
As the different groups comprising the Task Force arrived they were spread out to their separate camps. Maj. Binney’s the whole bulldozers had not just pushed the dunes flat area had rather a landscaped look about it with the main body of 5RAR camped on a flat overlooked by a sand peak from which the “Tiger” pennant flew, and on which bugler Pte. Ken Edwards, a National Serviceman from Grafton, New South Wales, played reveille and taps. The engineers themselves lived on a high ridge almost out of sight of the main camp, and with a magnificent view of the sea “They engineered that very nicely”, one of the “ground floor” Diggers said.
Other outfits were spread all around. Apart from the 5th and 6th Battalions there was the Task Force Headquarters Group, the 1st Field Regiment, and the 131st Divisional Locating Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery, the 30th Terminal Squadron, Royal Australian Engineers, the 103rd and 130th Signals Squadrons, and the 3rd Special Air Services Squadron, the commando-type élite force which had been stationed in Swanbourne, Western Australia. Connected to the Royal Australian Army Service Corps (Logistics Support) were the 176th Air Despatch Company, the 2nd Field Ambulance, the 33rd Dental Unit, the 2nd Composite Ordnance Depot, and the 101st Field Workshop (electrical and mechanical engineers). As well as all these there were detachments like the cash office, Military Police, postal and ground liaison units, and the 161st Army Independent Reconnaissance Flight and the 1st Armoured Personnel Carrier. Troops which were already in Vietnam and had seen action with IRAR.
↓Photocopy Extract For Richard Starts Here↓:
Another interesting group about which most people knew very little was the 32nd Small Ships Squadron of the Royal Australian Engineers, a force of four LSMS (landing ship, medium) and the “John Monash”, a 1,200-ton cargo vessel which had accompanied the “Sydney” on the voyage from Australia with a load of bulldozers and other equipment.
One of these LSMS was the “Vernon Sturdee”, which was busily running up and down the Saigon river between Vung Tau and the capital ferrying trucks and other equipment which had been used by IRAR at Bien Hoa.
The “Vernon Sturdee” normally carried three officers and thirty-five men, but also on board for these initial shipments was Maj. J. Wilson, MBE, Commanding Officer of the 32 Small Ship Company. The 32 Small Ship Squadron commander, and basically its founder as it had been formed in 1959-60 when the LSMS were picked up in Japan where they had been part of the U.S. Navy mothball fleet, and sailed by Maj. Wilson back to Australia. Although a military man he was also a master mariner.
And so was Captain John Bonnett, who had been in the Merchant Navy before being appointed Captain of the “Vernon Sturdee”.
Since transferring to the Australian Army this dour little ship, painted khaki and with a broad blue and red band on its control tower, had had a busy time. It had been used to make a mapping survey up the Fly river in New Guinea, sailed to New Caledonia, and Singapore, and carried equipment and machinery to Borneo where detachments of the Royal Australian Engineers attached to 4RAR had been building roads and airstrips during the Indonesian “confrontation” of Malaysia.
Now it was engaged in its most dangerous job of all (take note of these words of wisdom, Messrs. Miller, Muir and Bell, take note), up down the Saigon river every couple of days with its loads of trucks, APCS, ammunition, medical supplies, and the endless impedimenta of an army in the field. The river was a main shipping route between the capital and the sea, and it was an extremely hazardous one.
For most of its serpentine 70-mile course it flowed through Vietcong-dominated territory, and number of larger ocean-going freighters and a legion of smaller craft from patrol boats down to sampans had been shot at, mined, or sent aground in the narrow channel.
Plenty of precautions had been taken. The banks on either side of the river had been defoliated—cleared of trees and other vegetation and powerful to keep cover for the guerillas at a minimum—patrol boats sped over its waters day and night, but it was virtually impossible to stop determined attacks with weapons like recoilless rifles which could have torn a hole through the “Vernon Sturdee” as easily as a child breaks bubbles.
’Tis noteworthy how Messrs. Miller, Muir and Bell ignore completely this on-the-spot info.
Water and waterways are an everyday fact of life in Vietnam, and the Vietcong is expert in their use. Supplies that come along the Ho Chi Minh trail from North Vietnam are funnelled into the south, particularly to the delta area, through the massive networks of canals and channels which cover the area. They are great boatmen, and they are great at blowing up other people’s boats as well.
There is plenty of evidence of this on the Bassac river at Can Tho, which is the headquarters of a squadron of the River Assault Group the ARVN Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Armoured LSMS which cruises up and down the broad reaches of the river mounting amphibious assaults against enemy concentrations or just keeping watch for clandestine shipping carrying guns and supplies to the Vietcong strongholds.
It has been in operation since the days of the French, and it has its headquarters in a building which the French used as their club nautique. But whether as a reminder or a memorial, the basin in front of the HQ contains the wreckage of several LSMS hit by guerilla mines.
Chief advisor of the group was a U.S. Navy lieutenant who had a healthy respect for these home-made mines.
“They use them very cleverly. They consist usually of a gas (petrol) drum filled with explosives which they connect to an electric detonator. The whole thing then is floated down the river and by a line connected to the other bank they can place it directly in mid-stream. The Vietcong then position it so that it lies directly in line with a tree or landmark on either bank. Then they wait. As soon as an LSM or some other kind of target comes along they wait for it to cross that line of sight they have between the two landmarks. They press the button and whoomp!! up she goes. Their accuracy is tremendous”.
The accuracy is tremendous, and so is the force of the explosion. In one blast the engine of the LSM landed on one side of the river and the bow portion of what was left on the other side. Only two men of the thirty-five on board were rescued. Another one of their classic river weapons is the lance bomb, which has a home-made high-explosive warhead made of scrap iron. Behind the head are four small fins, and trailing back behind is a tube that looks like a stove pipe. This tube contains a propellant charge which is detonated electrically. To fire the lance bomb the Vietcong uses a stake with a short yardarm shaped to fit snugly inside the end of the rocket tube. The stake is driven into the ground just before firing, with the yardarm and the bomb aimed at the target. The guerilla then runs his wire back to a safe distance and cranks his magneto. A lance bomb will demolish a brick watchtower or stop a light tank in much the same way as a recoilless rifle will. It will also pierce an armoured gunboat. Lance bombs are often mounted in trees overlooking canals, pre-aimed at just the place where the hull of a passing gunboat would meet the water. A Vietcong hundreds of feet away just waits for the boat to come, and as soon as it crosses his line of sight, he cranks his magneto. Many a landing craft and gunboat now lies rusting at the bottom of the delta rivers and canals because of the lance bomb.
These are the dangers that any ship faces in the Saigon river, and the crew of “Vernon Sturdee” was on constant alert against attack.
(Shame on you, Messrs. Miller, Muir and Bell, shame on you, to leave out such an important detail).
On one trip I made in the little khaki ship, its two guns were manned the entire time. Mounted on the foredeck over the landing ramp was a 40millimetre Bofors with a seven-man crew led by Warrant Officer Les Johnstone, of Sydney, then a veteran of twenty-seven years in the Army and a gunner from the second World War. “It’s a general purpose weapon”, said Les. “It can be used for anti-aircraft fire, but since the Noggies don’t have any aeroplanes we can swing it in a horizontal arc which could give a pretty good burst of fire”. Astern was a mounted .55-calibre Browning machine gun manned by Sapper D. M. Miller, of Port Augusta, South Australia. He hadn’t used the gun in the four river trips he had made, but he was keeping his eyes skinned.
Half an hour out of Saigon, five or six miles’ cruising along the green, smooth waters of the river, we heard the dull thump of an explosion and saw a pillar of flame and smoke rise out of the jungle perhaps two miles away. Tiny Huey helicopters were darting in and out of the smoke, and we could hear on the radio of the Vernon Sturdee that a Chinook, one of the large, twin rotor jet troop-carrying helicopters, had been hit by Vietcong fire and had crashed in flames. There didn’t seem to be too much hope for the American crew and the thirty Vietnamese soldiers aboard. We watched as fighter-bombers from Tan Son Nhut charged in to paste the area with high explosives and napalm which hit with a huge ball of flame and stood out like a distress flare in the quickly gathering tropical river night.
The “Vernon Sturdee” is no floating palace, and I tossed and turned most of that night on a narrow iron bunk slung just twelve inches below the top one occupied by cameraman Brian Taylor. He was a lot heavier than I was, and when his bunk sagged my twelve inches of space became about three inches. Right next door to the “bedroom” was a workshop where somebody was working with an electric grinder. “Vernon Sturdee’s” engines thumped and groaned. “Who’d be a sailor”, I kept thinking. “Who’d be a bloody sailor?”
↑Richard Photocopy Extract Ends Here↑
It was a relief when we were aroused at about four o’clock for the docking operation at Vung Tau.
The trip had been a little faster than expected or the tide a little later than expected, and we lay bobbing at anchor a few feet from the concrete landing ramp waiting for the water to drop sufficiently for the trucks and Land-Rovers to be driven straight out of the front of the landing craft on to dry ground. Morning that early on the South Vietnamese coast had to be felt to be believed. Cool, and fresh—which was a word one didn’t use very often there with the rich, half-musty tropical smell mixed slightly with the smell of the hardly moving early morning sea, and faint whiffs of fresh paint from a U.S. Navy “Swift” patrol boat bobbing at anchor a few feet away.
Soundings were being taken every few minutes at the end of the ramp and it was soon obvious that the tide charts were wrong we were already at low tide and there was still nearly four feet of water between “Vernon Sturdee” and the ramp. “She’ll be right we’ll take her at speed”, decided the loadmaster and with a roar the trucks crashed ashore through a shower of foam.
At the 5RAR camp, things were settling down quickly. Neat rows of tents were arranged around the headquarters block occupied by the Commanding Officer, Lt.-Col. J. Warr, and the battle commander, Maj. O. M. (Max) Carroll, and everybody was hard at work on a job that seemed as though it would never end filling sandbags. The sand on which the camp stood was too soft for slit trenches, so each tent was surrounded by a barrier of sandbags several feet high as protection-against mortar fragments. Hour after hour the new Diggers of 5RAR shovelled sand into the dark green bags.
With their Australian propensity for nicknames they were calling their strip of sandy camp “Wanda Beach” but although the sand was getting into everything and made full-gear route marches even more a labour than usual, there were compensations. Between five and six o’clock was swimming hour, and there was no better way of cooling off after a day of hard work than a swim from the gently shelving beach only fifty yards from the camp boundary. Rubber palliasses were used as surf boards as floats, since the South China Sea rolled ashore against the Cap St Jacques with a little less fury than shown by the Pacific at the surfing beaches back home.
“Back home” was an emotion most of these young men had not struck before. “It’s funny you know”, a young National Serviceman told me after recording a television interview (they always talked after the interviews, never during them!), “a bloke always dreams of getting overseas at some time or another, but it’s never much more than a dream. I didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t this. I’m the same bloke that left Australia. I’m not quite sure what I expected to change, but here I am.”
