Chapter 2
THE 5 RAR TOUR GROUP

The 5th Battalion, RAR, replaced 1 RAR in Viet Nam in mid-1966 after being formed at Holsworthy outside Sydney a year before. They were the first infantry battalion to deploy overseas with conscripted National Servicemen. The 5th Battalion prepared for war by conducting platoon, then company and finally battalion exercises, and attended a battle efficiency course at the Jungle Training Centre in Canungra, Queensland, where they undertook the prescribed and predictable two weeks of scrub bashing. They were then engaged in, as former company commander, Major (later colonel) Paul Greenhalgh, described it, ‘a wonderful training exercise at Gospers [north of Sydney] and conducted live firing exercises as well’.¹

The battalion deployed primarily by air (via Manila), while one rifle company went by sea on the HMAS Sydney.² It was a unit of ‘firsts’, being the first infantry battalion to operate around Vung Tau on acclimatisation training, the first unit to move over the ground and secure the future Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat during Operation Hardihood, the first unit to occupy Nui Dat hill itself, and also suffered the first National Serviceman killed in action. Later, they would be the first unit to occupy The Horseshoe, south-west of Nui Dat.

The 5th Battalion was a very busy unit, with companies deploying on at least 26 operations during their tour of duty, meaning that of the 353 days in-country they spent 71 per cent of it on operations. On top of this heavy patrolling requirement, they also had to clear, secure and establish the Australian Task Force base from scratch. That meant days of digging, sandbagging, wiring and just clearing the bush in and around the disused rubber plantation. For the bulk of their tour they lived under hoochies and didn’t have the luxury of the electricity, reticulated water and other facilities that later units enjoyed.

The modus operandi for 5 RAR and then 6 RAR in 1966–67 was to deploy to an area of operations and then patrol primarily on foot. Their aim was to search for and destroy the enemy who were operating in what was then called Phuoc Tuy Province. There was also a need to establish the Australian presence, which they achieved by conducting cordon and search operations that left the local populace in no doubt that there were new players in town.

The 5th Battalion has a very strong unit association. At a five-yearly reunion in Canberra in September 2005 it was estimated that some 900 former members attended. The idea of a pilgrimage for former officers was born some time between the laying up of the battalion’s colours in April 2004 and the funeral of a former battalion chaplain in September 2004. It took about six months for Association President Roger Wainwright to sign up enough men to make the trip viable. He planned to return in October 2005 and by June of that year he had his group assembled.

These are the men who made up the 5 RAR tour group that returned to Viet Nam in 2005. Their ranks are given as they were in 1966.

Major Paul Greenhalgh, Officer Commanding Delta Company, 5 RAR

Paul was a Melbourne lad who decided to attend the Royal Military College (RMC) Duntroon in 1954. He graduated into the Infantry Corps as a lieutenant after four years. After an initial posting with a National Service battalion at Puckapunyal, he attended a parachute course and was then posted to 1 RAR, which was about to embark for service in Malaya in 1959. He served with 1 RAR as a rifle platoon commander with 7 Platoon, C Company, chasing Communist terrorists. As Paul commented, ‘Without a doubt the greatest learning experience of anything was being a platoon commander in the jungles of Malaya, and believing you were going to catch Chin Peng.’³ Paul then served with the SAS Company as a platoon commander, then as adjutant at RMC. He believed Malaya was a ‘good training ground’ for what he encountered in South Viet Nam in 1966, when he was posted on promotion to command Delta Company, 5 RAR.

Before deploying to Viet Nam, Paul arrived at Holsworthy, ‘at the same time as about 70 per cent or 80 per cent of the company’ and undertook an intense amount of training:

The structure of NCOs [non-commissioned officers] was there; the Regulars from the 1 RAR days and 5 RAR had only had about five or six months on its own anyhow. So it was an incredibly hectic time of training, which was planned very brilliantly by the CO [Commanding Officer] John Warr, by the senior staff at the battalion, and we just went hell for leather for five months before going away in May. It was just staggering what was done.⁴

Delta Company had a mixed bag of platoon commanders: Dennis Rainer (later to win a Military Cross), a Portsea graduate; Greg Negus, a full-time Citizen Military Forces (CMF) officer;⁵ and Finnie Rowe, a senior graduate from the Officer Training Unit at Scheyville in the first intake of National Service.⁶ Half of the soldiers were Regular Army; the remainder were National Servicemen serving out their two-year conscription—but they were all infantrymen trained under the same system. As Paul remarked, ‘Obviously the older ones were Regulars but . . . there was no separation of class or anything at all, they were just all there together.’⁷ By the time Major Greenhalgh deployed he had a good understanding of what the war in South Viet Nam was all about, adding that the unit they were to replace, 1 RAR, were preparing 5 RAR with training notes: ‘We were definitely being fed the “dos and don’ts” and lessons learnt.’⁸

After securing the Nui Dat position through Operation Hardihood, it was six weeks before the Australian Task Force came in. As Paul stated, ‘In a sense we were on our own and extremely vulnerable all that time.’ When describing the nature of their operations he added:

The intensity was incredible and I don’t know how that compared later on in battalions, but I would say being the first in there we were in the front line and vulnerable the whole damned time. At no stage did you feel that you could let your guard down, maybe down at Vung Tau when you were sitting on R&C when you got away from the place. But you seemed to have a 360-degree personal perimeter the whole time.⁹

Delta Company was spared mine incidents, but lost four killed in action in two separate incidents. Paul recalled, ‘I remember having a service in the boozer on Nui Dat hill’. On discussing the enemy he faced, he thought their ‘ability to fight was unquestioned . . . But right at the beginning I wondered about the Allies’ ability to win this war.’¹⁰ Primarily 5 RAR was continually running into local Viet Cong, and usually from D 445 Provincial Mobile Force Battalion.

Paul looks back on his tour of duty ‘with incredible pride. My strongest legacy of the year in Viet Nam was the degree of professionalism that the soldiers attained, achieved—the National Servicemen particularly, because they were that youthful element.’¹¹ Paul missed out on a second tour of duty as a commanding officer but did command 5/7 RAR in December 1973. His reaction to the fall of South Viet Nam was one of ‘shock and horror’. He remarked, ‘I was at Canungra [instructing] on Tactics Wing and I remember about ten majors and myself listening to this announcement and saying, “Good God, all that effort has gone to waste.” ’¹²

Paul and his wife Wendy have been back to Viet Nam several times because their son has been living in Hanoi for eight years, running a motorbike touring company. When asked why he wanted to come on the 5 RAR pilgrimage, Paul replied:

It’s down memory lane to physically see the terrain of Viet Nam where we were. Maybe things have changed so much we won’t see any comparison to what we had before. I have got photos; my son has actually been there twice and has been to Long Tan and all over the place. It is just down memory lane for a few days and to go with a few friends and to relive that time. To see Vung Tau, Cap St Jacques as it was, and of course we will end up seeing my son up in Hanoi.¹³

Initially Paul was totally against returning to Viet Nam, but after a battalion reunion in Wagga, NSW, a few years ago, and after the funeral of battalion chaplain Father John Williams in Sydney, he was convinced by fellow officer and Association President Roger Wainwright to take the journey back with a group of the battalion’s first tour officers. He admitted he was ‘just never really interested to come back to Viet Nam. It never really meant so much.’ Even though Paul had been on many battle tours around the world, he said, ‘For some reason I saw no need to come back here. But thank God I did.’¹⁴

Wife Wendy was delighted that Paul agreed to return with the 5 RAR group and was keen to accompany him because she wanted to see the country where he had fought. She had no expectations before the tour, adding, ‘I wanted to see where he’d been to sort of fill in a jigsaw puzzle that wasn’t quite complete.’¹⁵

Today Paul and Wendy live in busy retirement in Canberra, where Paul fills in his time as a top-notch picture framer.

Captain Ted Heffernan, RAAMC,
Medical Officer, Nui Dat

Ted Heffernan is a large, stocky man with an infectious sense of humour. He became a doctor in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps (RAAMC) after he had graduated from medical school via the Army’s undergraduate program in 1964.¹⁶ He served for five years in the Regular Army and in 1966 was posted to South Viet Nam as a regimental medical officer (RMO) in a field ambulance and in an artillery field regiment. He survived ambush and the other dangers of service in a war zone and returned to Australia after being decorated by the Government of South Viet Nam. Today, Dr Heffernan, FRACS, FRCS (England), FACS, is a general surgeon, and has a practice in Geelong, Victoria, where he lives with his wife Joy.

Ted wanted to return to Viet Nam to renew acquaintances, visit places where he deployed on Medcaps (medical civil aid programs) and share memories with his fellow officers:

It was probably the only chance I was going to get to get back to Viet Nam and see any of the spots I’ve served in with people of the same era, which is significant. And it probably wasn’t a bad time in life. As you get older you haven’t got much chance to do these things now.¹⁷

Ted’s wife of 43 years wanted to return with him because ‘it was a good time to come back with Ted and experience a number of places he’s talked about for the last 40 years’. On reflection Joy added, ‘I wanted to support him, and also to see the areas that Ted actually visited while he was in the Army here in 1966. And for myself to have some peace of mind.’¹⁸

Dr Heffernan treated Allies and enemy alike, and saw the physical and emotional damage that war can inflict on the human body and spirit. When he left South Viet Nam in 1967 he was ‘pleased to leave unharmed’. He was dismayed at the result of the conflict, which carried a terrible loss of life on all sides, and deplored the withdrawal of the Allies in 1972, saying ‘a core of loyal South Vietnamese were just left to their fate’.

Ted was unsure what he would see on his return to Viet Nam. ‘I thought I would recognise nothing in our battlefields, and I didn’t know how I’d feel about going to them.’ But as he discovered later, ‘there are certain landmarks that are still there. I think the best times for me on this trip were finding places like the RMO’s tent in the field regiment and returning to Xuyen Moc and Hoa Long.’ Joy also wasn’t sure what to expect, remarking, ‘I didn’t expect it to be as pretty a country as it is. For some unknown reason I didn’t expect it to be as green, quite as beautiful as I found it.’¹⁹

Ted is still practising surgery (to pay for Joy’s extravagances, he says), while Joy undertakes retail therapy with relish.

Captain Peter Isaacs, Adjutant, 5 RAR

I first met Peter Isaacs—a captain instructor at the Officer Training Unit, Scheyville—in mid-1968 when I was an officer cadet. Peter fell into the stereotypical mould of the British Army officer, who spoke correctly, dressed immaculately and was never fazed. He wore a ‘Herbie Johnson’ forage cap with a steep visor that meant that you could never see where he was looking and if he was watching you. He taught infantry minor tactics and several other subjects and was regarded by most cadets I served with as a ‘pretty good sort of bloke’. After serving as a platoon commander in the British Army in the United Kingdom, he joined the Australian Army on a five-year short-service commission and served with 5 RAR on its first tour of duty in 1966–67 as an intelligence officer and adjutant. For his service in South Viet Nam he was Mentioned in Despatches. After his time was up he returned to the United Kingdom and served with the Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces between 1975 and 1978 as a company commander and then battalion second-in-command on counter-insurgency operations in Dhofar Province. It was during this tour of duty in Oman that Peter was nearly killed in a landmine incident that took his right leg off at the hip, and severely chewed into his right arm and left leg. He also lost the sight in his left eye and was extremely lucky to survive.

Peter has been returning to Australia from the United Kingdom for decades to attend the five-year battalion reunions and events such as the Dedication of the Vietnam Memorial in Canberra in 1998. When asked why he travels halfway around the world to attend such events he simply replied, ‘It’s family. That’s why.’ Peter said he wanted to return to Viet Nam ‘as a sort of “pilgrimage” to remember those fine young men with whom it was my privilege to serve in 5 RAR, and who did not return’.²⁰ His reservations were similar to those of many veterans who are contemplating a return visit:

I had anticipated that much of the scenery would have changed—‘development’ in what used to be called the Third World usually means unplanned urban sprawl. I was not disappointed; travelling from Vung Tau to Ba Ria and Hoa Long is now a continual ribbon of buildings.²¹

This was to be Peter’s first trip back to Viet Nam since the war. He expressed his expectations as being mainly:

Comradeship—being among those men who I know better than any other group I have ever worked with—apart from another campaign I took part in, that is [Oman]. Thankfulness—to remember those fine fellows of our 5 RAR family who were killed in South Viet Nam.²²

Peter was always frustrated in South Viet Nam because he felt that the Australian effort should have ‘been more “belligerent” ’. He favoured a more aggressive operational approach. When the South finally fell in 1975, Peter was heavily involved in operations in Oman. He described how he felt when he heard the news:

I was involved in another war in ’75; had little contact with the outside world and loving it. When I eventually saw a film clip of the tank rolling into the Presidential Palace, I was sad for the people we had tried to help, and angry that public opinion in the US had brought about the situation. Even more so when Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart got the Nobel Peace Prize!²³

Peter (married in 1964 but now divorced) was not in favour of wives or partners being included in the trip, but added ruefully: ‘I realised it was inevitable (some would not have been allowed to make the trip alone!).’ It is testament to his grit and determination that he made the trip because Viet Nam is not a country that caters well to disabled people. However, he remarked that in his current job with the United Nations managing landmine clearance operations in Tajikistan he wasn’t too worried about a lack of facilities, and so he was sure he would manage ‘just fine’.²⁴

Peter resides in England when not lifting mines in farflung outposts around the globe.

Lieutenant Ben Morris, Platoon Commander,
5 RAR, 2 RAR and 1 ATF Civil Affairs Detachment

Ben Morris graduated from RMC Duntroon in 1965 and served initially with the 1st Battalion, Pacific Islands Regiment (1 PIR), before being sent to South Viet Nam as a reinforcement officer. He knew something of the war, having received lectures from the staff and from Colonel Ted Serong, who led the initial deployment of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV). Another visiting lecturer in 1964 was Captain Peter Young, who Ben recalled ‘giving us an extremely good briefing on Viet Nam’.²⁵

Deploying as a reinforcement—commonly, but not disparagingly, referred to as a ‘reo’—is probably the hardest and most demanding way to go to war. The reo often doesn’t know the people he is about to serve and fight with, and he hasn’t had the benefit of work-up training back in Australia where everyone becomes familiar with the standard operating procedures of the unit. Ben Morris described how he felt about his posting as a reinforcement officer:

I wasn’t happy about going to the Reinforcement Wing because I wanted to go and join a battalion . . . We were asked whether or not we wanted to go to Canungra and because I had been in the tropics for the last twelve months they were prepared to give us an exemption, which both Paul Mench and myself took, and I ended up arriving in country about 17 January 1967.²⁶

Ben described the training and preparation at the Reinforcement Wing in Ingleburn, Sydney, as ‘ad hoc’, adding, ‘There didn’t seem to be a real plan; there just seemed to be a lot of turmoil. So the training was fairly disjointed.’²⁷ However, he thought that he was reasonably well prepared for active service:

I was, due to the fact that I had just spent twelve months in Papua New Guinea, and I think there were also parts of the RMC syllabus that stood us in good stead. In Second Class we did a first aid course and I used that to save men in Viet Nam.²⁸

Ben’s first appointment after arriving in the 1st Australian Reinforcement Unit in Nui Dat was in the Civil Affairs Unit, which he discovered hadn’t had an administration officer since its inception. His duties revolved around providing assistance and liaison to the local ARVN posts where the Australian Task Force had regional advisers, and as Ben explained, ‘we helped them with their civil affairs’. Ben detailed some of the jobs he had:

If a cordon and search was on, Civil Affairs turned up with the Psyops equipment and ready to set up to supplement the doctors or had their own doctors; it was very much an ad hoc thing and if problems were identified during the Medcaps and Dentcaps [dental civil aid projects], part of our job was to follow up and get the people into Ba Ria for medical and dental treatment.²⁹

His job took him all over the old Phuoc Tuy Province, and most of the time he travelled alone with just a sidearm and a 7.62 mm SLR (self-loading rifle) for company. By February 1967, Ben was posted to 5 RAR as a reinforcement officer. He recalled what it was like joining the battalion as a reo:

Well the first thing is that you are going in alone and you feel that . . . They had been together in country for about seven or eight months. You are the new boy on the block. The other thing is because you are in Viet Nam on company-sized operations you don’t get to know the rest of the battalion officers. I met some of them Thursday week ago [February 2005] in Canberra! We were in the same battalion but we didn’t get to meet because they happened to be in C Company or D Company.³⁰

After another stint with the Civil Affairs unit, Ben found himself posted to 2 RAR, again as a reinforcement officer. This time the experience was far from pleasant:

The OC there treated me like one of those people who hadn’t won the war. ‘We are here to win the war, you are one of those losers who hadn’t won it up till now’ type of thing, and that is a pretty hard attitude to overcome. And in some ways if I had been someone with not as much experience as I had, I would have just buckled under just from that attitude.³¹

Ben described his time with 2 RAR as ‘tough’. He was involved in a bad mine incident when working with the unit in late November 1967, and the man who triggered the ‘Jumping Jack’ (M-16) mine was killed instantly. It is probably fair to say that Ben would not have undertaken a pilgrimage with people from 2 RAR because of the underlying emotions of his experience with that unit.

Ben enjoyed his time with 5 RAR, which he described as ‘happy. I enjoyed that platoon and I think they enjoyed me.’ He believed the battalion was ‘very professional; they knew what they were on about; they didn’t take silly risks’. Ben added, ‘They were there to stay alive but they were also there to win a war. They had a respect for men’s lives.’³²

When the Australians withdrew from South Viet Nam in 1972, Ben felt that ‘we [as an Army] had been let down. We had been let down by the politicians who had tied our hands behind our fucking backs and not let us get on with the war.’ The pain of that conflict was still highly evident as he continued, ‘I am still sure in my own mind that if we had been left to run the war the way it should have been, we would have won it. ’When the South inevitably fell in 1975 he felt ‘sad, because a lot of good people were going to get hurt’.³³

It is a fair assumption that Ben has post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but he works hard at managing it. He has not let it stop him from returning to Viet Nam—when he joined the 5 RAR tour group it was his fourth visit back since the war. ‘I want to come to peace with the country and I can’t do that by just doing one visit,’ he explained.³⁴ Ben’s other trips were privately organised tours in December 1997 and January 1998 with his partner, who is now his second wife. His reactions from the first trip were not easy to deal with, and he believed he needed to return a third time in July 1999 to where he served, ‘just to stand and reflect’.³⁵

Ben’s wife Jenny accompanied him on the trip in October 2005. He wanted to show her ‘the Army side of Viet Nam’ by being on a trip with Army colleagues, as Jenny has never been ‘an Army wife’, as Ben put it, and ‘didn’t understand a lot of Army things’.³⁶

Ben’s expectations on the October 2005 5 RAR tour were ‘not all that great . . . just to go back and come to some sort of peace with the whole place’.³⁷ I asked Ben if he had any apprehensions, and he said he thought that the group would experience ‘reactions’, based upon his own experiences on previous tours. As it happened, I don’t think this was the case, and veterans should be aware that everyone reacts differently to what they see, smell, hear and feel when they are back in Viet Nam. One cannot throw a blanket over a group and say that they will feel a certain way: we are too complex and have had too many life experiences to simplify an emotive reaction.

Today, Ben lives in Wollongong and is still serving with the Army Reserve in the RAAMC.

Captain Fred Pfitzner, Company Second-in-
Command, 5 RAR; Operations Officer, 1 ATF
Headquarters

Square-framed and muscular, Fred Pfitzner is a big bloke who stands a tad over 183 cm (6 feet). He was born in Adelaide into a large family of nine kids and moved to Canberra in 1959 to attend RMC Duntroon, where he graduated in 1962. He saw active service in Malaya and Borneo as a rifle platoon commander with 3 RAR, returning to Australia skilled in jungle warfare in 1965. While serving with the 28th Commonwealth Brigade in Singapore, along with many officers Fred did a two-week reconnaissance to South Viet Nam and was made familiar with the operational scenario in country. After posting to the 6 Task Force at Enoggera Barracks in Brisbane, he was initially told he was going as a reinforcement officer to serve as a captain in operations in the Task Force headquarters, but that was changed to a company second-in-command in 5 RAR once the ‘powers that be’ realised that the blokes working in the command post should have some idea of what was going on out ‘in the weeds’.

Arriving in the unit was not as daunting for him as it was for most other officer reinforcements because, as Fred recalled, he knew the man who met him at Nui Dat: ‘[Major] Blue Hodgkinson and I had spent nine of my first thirteen years in the Army together; he was my company commander in Malaya.’ His flight over was interesting: ‘I was the DCO [draft conducting officer] on a Qantas flight via Manila with a whole bunch of people I didn’t know, and only another one or two officers. Maintaining decorum in Manila was not easy.’ The 24-year-old Captain Pfitzner admitted to being ‘excited’ about entering another war zone—it was a feeling of ‘once more into the breach; that was what I was being paid for’.³⁸

Fred’s company commander was Major Bruce McQualter, who tragically died of wounds sustained in a mine incident in the Long Hai Hills on 22 February 1967, about seven months into the tour. Fred added, ‘We lost two officers in that one and about nine Diggers and 22 wounded, from memory.’ The loss of two officers from 5 RAR plus the forward observer gutted the rifle company: ‘Well, they were rooted; they were pulled back straight after it . . . They were literally a rump of a company and they were employed on minefield security while it was being built until they went home.’³⁹

Fred then saw out the remainder of his tour from May to December 1967 as an operations officer in the Task Force headquarters working on shift in the command post, and as the Task Force patrol master coordinating TAOR (tactical area of responsibility) patrols. Fred recalls wryly:

It wasn’t hard; it was 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were periods of intense activity and every now and then you could relax a bit, like in any bloody war. There were a few peaks like the first time we started operating east of Dat Do and things like that, which represented a significant change in the capability of the Task Force, being able to operate away from its own close protection.⁴⁰

The pilgrimage with 5 RAR was to be Fred’s first return to Viet Nam. He assumed ‘that the countryside will be as lovely as it ever was, the girls will look much the same’. Fred knew that 70 per cent of the population was born after the war, ‘so they aren’t going to be too interested in a fat-arsed bunch of old farts running around’. He was also hoping to see, even though the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam is a Communist country, ‘that entrepreneurial streak—especially in the South—that was always there’. He added with a smile, ‘They are like the Chinese; they are all basically capitalists.’⁴¹

Fred had few qualms about returning, but also knew much had changed in areas where he had served (his greatest apprehension was leaving his farm outside Canberra, with his Murray Grey breeders about to start calving). Fred was one of many who were disappointed about the withdrawal of Australians from the war in 1972, especially as he was then commanding a ready reaction force—called Fred Force (Alpha Company 9 RAR)—to deploy to South Viet Nam if things ‘got untidy’ with the remnants of the Australian force left in Saigon. On the fall of Saigon and the collapse of resistance to the National Liberation Front offensive in 1975, Fred stated he was ‘disappointed in the sense that we lost, and resigned in the sense that it was probably ever going to be so’.

Like many warriors who served in Phuoc Tuy Province and other areas in South Viet Nam, Fred is proud of his service. He didn’t think the war was a lost cause:

Not when we were there, no. In fact I think that the Australian Army can still to this day hold its head up about its conduct of operations in Phuoc Tuy, especially in the early days because they got on top of the problem and provided the firm base from which operations were able to be launched out of the province, and we didn’t ever have our hands on the back door, which could have happened.⁴²

Today retired brigadier Fred Pfitzner—who describes himself as a ‘prickle farmer’—and his wife Helen grow Murray Grey breeders on an acreage outside Canberra and keep a weather eye out for rain that may one day again fall on this parched nation.

Captain Ron Shambrook, Quartermaster,
Company Commander and Company
Second-in-Command, 5 RAR

When Cairns-born Ron Shambrook turned eighteen, he went straight into the CMF and shortly after that National Service (the first scheme in the 1950s). He was promoted to second lieutenant in 1953 and later became a company commander. Cairns then, like all other CMF units, changed when the Army adopted what was known as the Pentropic organisation.⁴³ Cairns lost its battalion and Townsville was the centre for the 2nd Battalion, Royal Queensland Regiment (2 RQR), which was one of three battalions that previously formed the 11th Brigade. When this reorganisation came to the Militia Army in 1963, Ron was basically out of a job in uniform. As he put it, ‘I had the opportunity to join the Regular Army, and I did.’⁴⁴ He was recommended for Regular Service and took the plunge after talking with his wife Elizabeth. Ron was posted to 1 RAR at Holsworthy and, as was the custom in those days, this substantive major had to drop a rank and was now a captain in the Australian Regular Army.

At this time 1 RAR were aware unofficially that they might be deploying to Viet Nam and Ron wanted to stay with 1 RAR. The 5th Battalion was about to be raised and Lieutenant Colonel John Warr, who was the battalion Executive Officer of 1 RAR and was about to be made CO of 5 RAR, said to Ron, ‘I want you to be my Quartermaster in 5 RAR.’⁴⁵ Despite 33-year-old Ron’s protestations and lack of quartermaster training, he was given the task of raising the indents to crank up 5 RAR from a stores perspective. It was a monumental task, and one that Ron found one of the most frustrating but also rewarding jobs in his career.

Ron had been to New Guinea but had never been to Asia. He said, ‘There was excitement, I wanted to be there.’ Ron’s tour diary in Viet Nam reads like a ‘Rent a Captain’ bouncing from one job to another. The CO kept his promise after the battalion was settled in and Ron went off to a rifle company as a company second-in-command, then acting company commander of Administration Company, followed by a stint in Task Force headquarters. After he was promoted to major he ended up commanding Charlie Company 5 RAR.

Like Fred Pfitzner, this was to be Ron’s first trip back. Unfortunately his wife Elizabeth fell ill just before departure and had to stay home, which was a great disappointment to both Ron and his wife. When asked why he wanted his wife to accompany him, Ron explained the catalysts for his decision to return:

I wanted to take Elizabeth back and show her some of the areas. Up until last year I had no intention of going back at all. We were sitting in Wagga at the RSL after having laid up the colours of 5 RAR the night before. Half a dozen of us suddenly brought up this suggestion of going back as a pilgrimage rather than as a tourist and it snowballed from there. And now I am excited to be going back. I don’t particularly want to go and see the American War in Viet Nam, I would rather go and see what we did, and remember those colleagues; we had 25 dead and about 100 casualties.⁴⁶

Ron expected the country to have changed significantly, but was still looking forward to visiting places like Nui Dat. Asked if he had any apprehensions, he said:

I am certain it will pull a few emotional chords at certain places. I have done a lot of touring in recent years and there will be some of that. I am looking forward to North Viet Nam and the northern part of [South] Viet Nam, which we didn’t see because we didn’t win. [Chuckles.]⁴⁷

Ron was sad at the outcome of the war, and not just from a military perspective; the loss of lives on both sides was dreadful and a cause for regret.

Today Ron and Elizabeth live in retirement in Brisbane.

Captain John Taske, RMO

John Taske served in South Viet Nam as an RMO with several units including 5 RAR, 6 RAR, 1 Field Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery (RAA) and 8 Field Ambulance.

John is an adventurous man who made the military his career after medical training, retiring with the rank of colonel. He was accompanied for most of the trip to Viet Nam in 2005 by his second wife Tina, who had to leave the tour before it finished to attend a conference elsewhere overseas.

This was John’s first trip back to Viet Nam. His main reasons for joining the pilgrimage were:

To have a holiday, renew old friendships, see those parts of Vietnam that I saw on my tour of duty, and see what changes time and peace have brought. I also want to see parts of the country that I haven’t seen before.⁴⁸

While John had no apprehensions about his return visit, he had another major reason for having his wife Tina on the trip: ‘Because Tina wasn’t with me when I was in the Army, she has no idea of the Army, or the blokes, or what I did.’⁴⁹

As an RMO, John had seen the harsher side of the conflict—what is often described as the debris of war. He said that when his time was up, he was ‘glad to be going home after having done my bit’. When the Australians withdrew in 1972, he felt:

. . . deep anger with the politicians who had ordered Australian troops up there to help the South Vietnamese repel Communism and give them a chance to attain democracy; but then when those troops had, at great mental and physical cost, achieved everything that had been asked of them, pulled the rug out from under their feet and made all their efforts—the lives and limbs lost; the fears, nightmares, psychological damage to so many—worthless.⁵⁰

John doesn’t mince words and he wrote that his chief concern when the South fell in 1975 was that the South Vietnamese people had ‘been used—betrayed in the worst possible way, by the politicians of the US and Australia, the media of both countries, the Jane Fondas and other ignorant, bleeding-heart do-gooders’.⁵¹ Tina said she came on the trip ‘to support my husband, who has been talking about Viet Nam since I met him, and I had no understanding—absolutely no understanding—of what Viet Nam was and what it meant to him’.⁵²

Today John resides and works as a consultant anaesthetist in Brisbane.

Lieutenant Roger Wainwright, Platoon
Commander, Bravo Company, 5 RAR

Roger Wainwright was another RMC Duntroon graduate in 1965 who eventually made the Army his career. He had served in school cadets and when he saw Steve Gower—now the Director of the Australian War Memorial and a retired major general, who was a close family friend and was at school with his brother—coming back from RMC on leave where he was the senior under officer and had won the Sword of Honour and the Queens Medal, he thought, ‘Well if he can do it, so can I.’ Roger adds with a laugh, ‘But it didn’t happen that way.’⁵³ Roger is an infantryman through and through, and he and John Hartley (also later to retire as a major general) were the first graduates from RMC to be posted to the newly formed 5 RAR. He described his knowledge of the war in South Viet Nam while a cadet as ‘very sparse’, adding, ‘And even though 1 RAR had deployed there in April/May 1965 there was very little interest [by the cadets].’⁵⁴ However, his knowledge of it rapidly grew as his unit prepared for the war:

The training that we did was very much getting into counter-revolutionary warfare and obviously taking lessons from the Malaya campaign and Confrontation and those sorts of things. We were out in the close training around Holsworthy pretty soon; I can remember doing platoon attacks; they had us in fairly thick areas around the Holsworthy Range. We did the training up at Canungra and I think we were the first battalion to go up there and do that. The good thing I remember about it was the CO had put a lot of emphasis on section and platoon-level stuff so we got to know our own people pretty well, and the last two or three days on the exercise at Gospers Plateau was as a company and in the company environment.⁵⁵

Roger recalls their deployment to South Viet Nam as one of ‘firsts’. His platoon was the first one to fly out of Richmond, and the first infantry platoon of the Task Force (not counting 1 RAR, who were never in 1 ATF) on the ground in Viet Nam. He recalled the ‘tension, excitement and expectation’ among his soldiers on the plane flying into Saigon, stating, ‘I think everyone realised that we were going into the unknown.’⁵⁶ Roger’s platoon saw a fair amount of action in South Viet Nam, and most of his men survived the fifteen or so contacts they had with the enemy. He was saddened by the loss of one man killed and fourteen wounded in action, of whom four had to be returned to Australia.

I asked Roger if it was a good experience for him, going to the war, and he replied: ‘Yes. As a professional soldier, you did what you had to; you proved things to yourself.’ He added, ‘I mean how you handled yourself under pressure; how you lead people; if you kill people on the other side, how you react. And how you react when your own people are killed or badly wounded, and your relationships.’⁵⁷

As President of the 5 RAR Battalion Association, Roger was the driving force behind the 2005 pilgrimage. It was his first trip back and one thing he really wanted to do was return to where his company headquarters was decimated by a landmine incident that killed his company commander, the company second-in-command, the forward observer, and wounded many more in company headquarters outside a small village called An Nhut. In a paradoxical way he also wanted to find out if going back was what he really wanted to do. As he explained, ‘If it turns out that I end up saying, “Gee, I wish I hadn’t done this trip”, then at least I will know.’⁵⁸

Roger’s wife of 36 years, Tina, accompanied Roger on the pilgrimage. When asked why, she replied: I think curiosity more than anything else. I’ve also had a connection with my sister having lived in Saigon during the war, so I was interested to have a look at Saigon now. But mostly having heard all of Roger’s stories—names of places, names of battles, names of things that happened to him—I was interested to be here and that’s something I can share with him.⁵⁹

Tina Wainwright was also not sure how Roger’s emotions would hold up when he went back to places like An Nhut that she knew would be emotionally challenging. Looking at Roger during their post-tour interview she stated simply, ‘I wanted to be here to support him . . . if he needed it.’⁶⁰

Today Roger lives in Canberra and works as a consultant to the Department of Defence.

Captain Tony White, RMO, 5 RAR

Tony White was the third doctor in the 5 RAR pilgrimage tour. He was accompanied by his wife, Doffy, and 32-year-old son, Rupert. Tony’s family has a history of military service and two of his male relatives (John and Peter White) gained honour and recognition serving with the AATTV and the RAR respectively. Tony and Doffy had been to Viet Nam in 2002 attending a medical conference in Hanoi, and then did the ‘obligatory tourist circuit—Ha Long Bay, Da Nang, Hué, Hoi An and home via Saigon’. This would be his first return to the area where he served as the RMO in 5 RAR. When asked why he had decided to come on the trip he replied:

This—39 years on—is a long overdue pilgrimage to the scene of the single most important and vivid year of my life. The size and make-up of the party is ideal—brother officers and spouses plus a historical backbone [the author] to keep us honest. I expect that we’ll have plenty of time, over the odd Bier 333, to rake over what the hell it was all about. I’m particularly proud that my son, Rupert, is accompanying us to deepen his knowledge of this slice of our family’s history.⁶¹

Tony was pragmatic about what the countryside would be like when he returned to what was once called Phuoc Tuy Province, remarking, ‘I don’t expect much to be recognisable at either Nui Dat or Vung Tau, but know that certain things—the heat and humidity, the smell of tropical decay, rice paddies, the silhouette of the Warburtons—will be quite unchanged.’⁶² Asked whether he had any apprehensions, Tony replied: ‘No, I have no worries. I feel that I’ve fully digested the events of my year of active service, and would be surprised by the emergence of any ghosts—but who knows until you get there?’⁶³

Tony was looking forward to ‘the companionship of this small, wonderful group. I relish learning other people’s perspectives on common experiences and expect to hear some great stories.’ He added:

This was a very convenient moment because here was a group of fellow officers in the same unit, which I think is much more important than having just a bunch of mixed veterans. And Doffy agreed to come and I was very, very happy that Rupert also agreed to come. So it was a wonderful opportunity and not one to pass over.⁶⁴

He was also keen to see what the locals are now making of their lives in the villages, and added sombrely, ‘I look forward to a minute’s silence among the columns and rows of a rubber plantation.’⁶⁵

Like many who spent a year on active service and witnessed the brutality and horrors of war, Captain White was elated on his last day on active service as he choppered out of Luscombe Field airstrip onto the deck of HMAS Sydney. He recalled that he was ‘mentally exhausted by the end of the tour and, like everyone else, at the end of my tether’. When the South fell in 1975, Tony was:

Deeply saddened by the finality and the futility of all those lost or damaged lives; all the solid duty put in by so many in the belief that they were on the ‘right’ side and all now brought to zilch by this crushing defeat.⁶⁶

Tony had heard a lot from other veterans who’d done trips back to Viet Nam. In hindsight he reflected, ‘I was expecting a rather limited and more threadbare experience than what it has been.’⁶⁷

Doffy White ‘came with a very open mind’, but admitted, ‘I was very nervous about being with the group and I thought really that I could be an extraneous person and I felt nervous about coming as a spouse.’⁶⁸ She added that Tony had been asked to write a paper about a mine incident, and this was something of a catalyst for the family coming to Viet Nam together:

I just felt that I had heard so many stories from so many other people, not a lot from Tony until the last few years, until he’d written the story about the mine. And after that came out he started making contact with people that I hadn’t met or just met very briefly. And I just sort of felt that there was a surge of knowledge that I needed to sort of come and clarify as well. Just to see where all these things were, to put them in context, to smell it, to feel it, to understand.⁶⁹

Only occasionally do children accompany their veteran parents on tours to Viet Nam. Son Rupert was very keen, explaining:

Well, I had a thought; I always used to play with my old man’s Army gear. He just had a duffle bag and loads of 8-mm film. I’ve always seen that quite a bit and Dad’s been pretty good, detailing various things about his operational time. And when I got an invitation to this, I jumped at it.⁷⁰

However, Rupert was also a little anxious about slotting into the group. ‘I was actually a bit nervous about coming along. I thought I might disturb the group a little bit, as far as all the guys getting together. If they wanted to let stuff out maybe they wouldn’t.’⁷¹ As it turned out, Rupert’s fears were unfounded and he was made most welcome by the group.

Today Dr Tony White lives in Randwick, Sydney, and is a practising dermatologist.

Once the group had decided to do the pilgrimage, they then set about determining the style of tour they would have, their basic and then later detailed itinerary, and how they would incorporate all the participants’ individual requirements, as they all had various things they wanted to see and do. Roger Wainwright was primarily responsible for coordinating that aspect and making sure as many people as possible were satisfied.

The majority of the group would assemble in Sydney after flying or driving in from Canberra, New South Wales and Queensland. Others would join the group in Singapore and in Saigon. They would stay several days in Ho Chi Minh City, then take the hydrofoil down the Saigon River to Vung Tau and base themselves out of the resort town for several days while they visited the old Phuoc Tuy Province sites like Nui Dat, Long Tan, Binh Ba and the Long Hai Hills. They would then return by road to Saigon, fly to Da Nang and take some R&C in the beautiful seaside town of Hoi An after visiting Marble Mountain and Red Beach. Refreshed and relaxed they would then emplane a couple of days later for the national capital. In Hanoi they would finish their tour with an overnight trip out to Ha Long Bay and then return home.

Once the itinerary was sorted out Garry Adams and I briefed the group on what they could expect so that nobody had any false expectations. In October 2005, most of the group assembled in Sydney to fly out, and then met up with others (like Peter Isaacs, travelling from Europe) in Viet Nam.

They were off and running.