13
Once upon a Medic

Phillip Campman, Medic, RAAMC

1st Australian Field Hospital, June 1969–June 1970

Wayne Brown, Medic, 4 RAR

Nui Dat, June 1968–March 1969

Phillip Campman and Wayne Brown’s lives have always been quite different. Phillip grew up in the bush, Wayne in the city. Phillip left school at thirteen and went to work as a ringer on a cattle station. Wayne trained as a psychiatric nurse. Phillip has never touched a drop of alcohol, nor a cigarette. At one time or another, Wayne has enjoyed both. Phillip has stayed married to the same country girl he fell in love with when he was about seventeen. Wayne’s been married three times. Phillip still lives on his farm in Central Queensland and loves a good bull sale. Wayne still lives in the city, albeit a different one, and regularly travels to South-East Asia. Phillip has rarely spoken of his army experience. Wayne wrote a book about his.

The only thing they really have in common is their respective deployments to Vietnam, where they nursed Australian soldiers injured or ill in a war neither of them chose to go to and neither of them ever really understood. Nearly fifty years on, their memories of Vietnam still have the power to stalk their dreams.

At the end of his scholarship year (Grade 8), Phillip Campman left school in his hometown of Calen, about 50 kilometres north of Mackay on the coast of Central Queensland, and applied for a job on a cattle station halfway between Mackay and Rockhampton. His new bosses, Norm and Wilma Kemp, took the thirteen-year-old under their wing and very much considered him a member of the family. His teenage life revolved around the cattle station and a visit home to Calen every six to eight weeks.

Slightly built with fair hair and hazel eyes, Phillip was blushingly shy and very reserved, especially around girls. Even so, on one of those visits home, when he was about seventeen, Phillip met a young lass called Elma at the local dance. Elma’s sweet smile instantly attracted Phillip, but she was still at school, in the same year as his younger brother, and her father wouldn’t let her go out with any boy until she was seven­teen. Phillip wasn’t much of a dancer, but he knew the only way he was going to get up close and even remotely personal with Elma was by hitting the hops, so he asked her to waltz. Twirling around the dance floor surrounded by a couple of hundred chaperones, the pair struck up a friendship and by the end of the night looked forward to seeing each other at the Calen Memorial Hall the next time Phillip came home.

Back on the station, Phillip was learning everything he could about stock work. Although it was quite isolated and there were few people around him, certainly none his age, he was never lonely. He loved the life and felt completely at home in the Brigalow country. He was aware of but not particularly interested in anything other than horses, cattle and the next dance night in Calen.

By the time he reached his late teens, Phillip’s ambition was to own his own block of land where he’d breed cattle and horses. His dream was to share it with Elma.

Fate, however, seemed to have other ideas.

One day in the autumn of 1968 Phillip and Norm Kemp rode in from mustering and found Mrs Kemp waiting for them at the saddle shed. With tears streaming down her face, she told Phillip he’d been called up for national service and he might have to go to Vietnam. With a brief shrug, he explains, ‘By then, they were like my mum and dad.’ Having lived the whole of his life between Calen and the station, Phillip didn’t even know for sure where Vietnam was. He had, however, registered his name, as required by law, at the beginning of the half-year block that contained his twentieth birthday, never imagining that his birthdate would come up in the ballot. With a wry, hindsighted chuckle, he adds, ‘It’s the only time I’ve ever won anything in my life.’ He was nineteen.

Wayne Brown’s path to Vietnam was, like practically everything in the two men’s lives, very different. When he finished school at fifteen in his hometown of Adelaide, Wayne went into boatbuilding; by age seventeen he was looking for something different and decided to join the navy. He did an aptitude test at the local employment office, resulting in a recommendation that he become a sick berth attendant. He then walked into the recruiting office, where he was asked to take his glasses off and read a chart. He managed to read half of it before he was rejected. Wayne went back to the employment office and they suggested psychiatric nursing. The course included anatomy and physiology and some basic nursing training as well as psych-nurse modules. He took to it like the proverbial duck to water and topped the state in his first-year exams.

Wayne was about to get married, had two mortgages and no desire to go anywhere when his birthdate came up in the very first national service ballot. Horrified, and with every intention of getting out of it any way he could, he was able to defer to finish his studies. However, when the deferment period was up – by which time he also had a baby – he was called in for a medical. He tried to fail it by pretending he couldn’t hear, but as a trained nurse he was clearly useful to the army: Wayne ended up a national serviceman at age twenty-two.

After ten weeks’ training at Puckapunyal he was given the usual three choices and wrote down medical, catering and infantry. He chuckles as he says he was made a medic in the infantry and had to cater for himself. Several more weeks of very basic training followed at Healesville. Wayne was by now keen to get a posting that assured him of a step up the pay ladder. He was getting paid 30 per cent less in the army and he still had the two mortgages, so money was very tight. He applied for Keswick in Adelaide, about a mile from his home, but was sent instead to Wacol in Queensland. He did, however, get promoted to corporal, which boosted his pay packet. From Wacol, Wayne and his fellow medics were farmed out to different units around Brisbane to do relief work while they waited to go to the 1st Australian Field Hospital at Vung Tau.

Then, out of the blue, just as Phillip Campman was trying to get his head around his call-up, Wayne was transferred to the 4th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, and sent, in June 1968, to Nui Dat as a field medic instead. As well as his medical kit, he carried an Armalite rifle and was expected to use it.

In Queensland, only a few weeks after his number came up, Phillip had already had a medical in Mackay and was on his way to Enoggera Barracks in Brisbane. He had another medical there before being sent straight on to Singleton for several weeks of recruitment training. It was tough for a kid from the bush who’d had little to do with other people and even less to do with hard and fast rules for everything. ‘We did a lot of marching, which didn’t worry me a lot, but you couldn’t do or say anything without permission.’ Most of his intake were pretty wild. ‘I found it very difficult because they all had a different attitude to me. I didn’t drink or smoke and I found if you didn’t drink in the army, the others didn’t want to know you.’

Phillip’s memories of his first twelve months in the army aren’t happy ones and he recalls a lot of abuse within the ranks. He particularly remembers one young lad who’d never been away from home or his parents before. He’d never shaved in his life, but recruits were required to shave every day. Phillip remembers this kid coming out on parade one morning with wispy fluff still softening his face. ‘They ordered him to go and get his army-issue razor, then scraped it up and down on the cement to blunt it before making him shave with it. His face was all bleeding. They gave him such a hard time, at the end of six weeks he was discharged from the army. It was cruel, but no one seemed to care.’

Having nominated the infantry, artillery or engineers as his unit of choice, Phillip was told he’d be joining the medical corps (RAAMC). The irony of someone who could already shoot straight being appointed a medic was not lost on him. However, he decided to get on, get the job done and get home.

From Singleton he was posted to Healesville School of Army Health in Victoria for medical training. It did nothing to raise his opinion of the army. He went through the course with a lot of Papua New Guineans who didn’t speak much English and weren’t going where he was going anyway. Added to that, they were living in tents in the snow – absolutely no preparation for the hot, wet, steamy jungles of Vietnam. He learnt as much as he could but it was all theory, not practice, which wasn’t much use to Phillip because he’d left school at such a young age. Although he could read and write quite well, he remembers, ‘There were words I still couldn’t pronounce even today. I didn’t have any idea what they meant.’

At the end of the course, Phillip was sent to Wacol, on the outskirts of Brisbane, for about six months. He expected they’d practise soldiering and go to the rifle range regularly. Instead, he says, ‘We spent most of our time mowing lawns and cleaning up.’ He was relieved when they were finally told they were going to Canungra Army Base prior to shipping out to Vietnam. There, in the rainforests of the Gold Coast hinterland they did a three-week refresher course on basic soldiering.

During the months Phillip had been away from home, he and Elma had written to each other every week and Elma, having finally turned seventeen, flew down to see him in Brisbane before he departed. Parting with the promise of continued correspondence and a future together, Elma went back to her family and Phillip left for Sydney and embarkation.

Phillip was understandably shocked, then, to learn at his deployment medical test that he was colourblind and couldn’t go. Technically, it should have been discovered at his first medical and he should have been excluded right at the start, but he says the check-ups were very, very basic. He told the medical officer, ‘If I can’t go to Vietnam, then I want an immediate discharge. If I can’t do my job there, then I can’t do it here.’ The army didn’t have a protocol for such a situation, but the doctor found a loophole and Phillip flew out a week later.

While Phillip had been coming to terms with life in the army back in Australia, Wayne’s tour was well underway. For the first few weeks he stayed at battalion headquarters in Nui Dat and went into the field with the regimental medical officer (doctor). He was on duty one night in the regimental aid post at Nui Dat when a major from B Company came in with a scorpion sting on the end of one of his fingers. He was in excruciating pain and begging for relief. As it happened, another case of scorpion sting had come in the day before and Wayne had watched the doctor inject local anaesthetic into the webbing on either side of the affected finger. He said, ‘Take a seat, sir,’ and drew up the appropriate dose of whatever anaesthetic he had to hand and injected it as the doctor had done. Grateful for the instant cure, the major offered Wayne a smoke and drummed him about his background before he left the aid post.

Being based at Nui Dat was relatively safe, and though Wayne saw his first gunshot wound early in the piece, he mostly treated minor lacerations and the odd viper bite. Everything changed on 23 July, when he was out in the field with the battalion and volunteered to go with a handful of New Zealanders, including their medic, to help evacuate a Kiwi who’d been hit by friendly artillery fire close to the Viet Cong bunkers; the VC were still in there. Moving stealthily through the jungle, Wayne and the grim-looking Kiwis were suddenly confronted with a blast of machine gun and automatic weapons fire. Crashing to the ground, they desperately sought cover on the jungle floor. Remembering his terror, Wayne says, ‘As things quietened down, I eased out my smokes and lit up. It was either that or shit myself.’

He has no idea how long they waited, but next thing two of the Kiwis dragged their mate into the hollow where the rest of the group was waiting. The wounded man had fist-sized entry and exit wounds in each thigh with muscle and tendon oozing out of his minced-up flesh. Wayne helped the Kiwi medic bind both his legs with army-issue shell dressings left over from World War II. Although pale and in shock, the soldier was conscious and in good spirits as they carried him back to company headquarters, where the doctor quickly dosed him with morphine, then cannulated him to get some fluids flowing into his veins while they waited for the dustoff chopper to come.

Because of the thick vegetation, the Iroquois couldn’t land and hovered instead just above the trees. The chopper crew wanted to lower the jungle penetrator, a big steel anchor on which wounded men would sit to be winched up to the helicopter. Knowing the soldier couldn’t sit, the doctor vetoed that but agreed to using a dead man’s harness to winch him out. Wayne was leaning over the patient, putting pressure on the IV bag, when they dropped the harness out the door. It hit Wayne on the back of the neck and knocked him over, making him black out for a second. Despite the ensuing confusion, they managed to winch the patient up and get him away. Wayne remembers that day with every twinge in his seventy-year-old neck.

Early in September, Wayne got a call: ‘Pack up your gear, you’re going out into the field with B Company.’ A little Bell two-seater chopper picked him up and whizzed him a few kilo­metres away to another clearing where he was to replace the company medic, who’d suffered heat exhaustion. Thanks to the scorpion sting, Wayne already knew the B Coy major and arrived to find his reputation somewhat preceded him.

Six days later, they pulled up for the afternoon after patrolling through their allotted area, dug their sleeping pits (shallow pits just long enough to lie in) and set up a temporary base camp. Next morning the platoon patrols and ambush parties were sent out to reconnoitre ahead, returning throughout the day with varying reports. Late in the afternoon they could hear gunshots and heard that Charlie Company was copping it about 500 metres away. B Coy got a call for help and for their medic to give Charlie Coy a hand. An eighteen-man platoon had hit a bunker system and come under heavy fire. They’d returned fire but had several men down, including their medic.

By the time Wayne and his B Coy platoon arrived, the firing had all but ceased. He could see all these fellows lying on the ground, looking stunned. Asking one of them where their wounded were, Wayne realised, from his vacant expression, that it was probably the first enemy contact for some of them. Without a word, the digger pointed across a small clearing. Wayne could see two soldiers tending a mate up against the buttress roots of a large tree. A digger lying in the foreground had a bullet hole in his forehead and there was another body further back.

As Wayne ran to the tree, AK-47s opened fire to one side of him and the firefight started up again. He dived in beside the three soldiers and checked out the casualty. He had bullet wounds in both arms and an entry wound in his chest, just under his right nipple. A piece of his shoulderblade and back muscle had been blown out of the exit wound in his back. He was conscious and in agony so, despite his training to the contrary, Wayne jammed a dose of morphine into his thigh. It did little to relieve the pain, but he couldn’t risk giving the digger more when his breathing was already so compromised. Fortunately the soldier lapsed into unconsciousness and his mates helped Wayne get him bandaged, all of them lying semi-prone to avoid the bullets flying around. The fighting continued for another fifteen minutes before the VC abruptly dissolved back into the jungle.

All together, Wayne counted two dead and another three seriously wounded; two with head and neck wounds and the other, the platoon commander, with leg, shoulder and buttock wounds. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the soldier with the chest wound needed help to breathe, so he yelled for someone who could ventilate him and for the remainder of the platoon to start building stretchers. A one-time surf lifesaver stepped up and started mouth-to-mouth. The remaining members of the platoon jury-rigged stretchers out of saplings cut from the foliage around them, bound together with the toggle rope they all carried, and using tent flies for the bed. Then, loaded up with everyone’s firearms and gear, they carefully manoeuvred the dead and injured back through the very dark mid-evening jungle to where B Coy was based. Wayne trotted back and forth along the line to check on his patients, using his voice and brief flashes of his torch as he walked beside them. The lifesaver, with a remarkable display of endurance, somehow managed to keep breathing for the unconscious man the whole way.

Back at base camp, they used a torch to guide the dustoff choppers in. Once again, because of the thick canopy, the pilots couldn’t land. The wounded men all had to be winched out. As he triaged the injured for the final time so as to send the worst out first, Wayne found another wounded soldier with shrapnel in his ankle who hadn’t wanted to be a bother out in the field. Later, in hospital, the same soldier developed festering lumps on his scalp that turned out to be grenade fragments.

After the last of the wounded had been winched out and flown to the 1 Fd Hosp at Vung Tau, another chopper collected the dead for transfer to the morgue. That black Friday, 13 September 1968, is engraved indelibly in Wayne’s memory. Standing in the pitch-dark silence after the last chopper left, covered in blood and body tissue that he’d wear for a few more days at least, he wondered how they’d all get on and if there was anything else he could have done for them.

Next morning the Charlie Coy officer commanding arrived to thank Wayne for his efforts, and told him that the digger with the chest and arm wounds had not survived. A few days later, back at the regimental aid post (RAP) at Nui Dat, Wayne heard that someone in triage at the 1 Fd Hosp had commented negatively on the bandaging that came in with that particular dustoff. Considering the difficult circumstances under which they’d been working, Wayne was pissed off, but naturally wondered again whether he might have done more, or better.

As full-time medic to a company of 120 men, he was on call 24/7. Out in the field he camped in his pit and carried his medical supplies and gear on his back, with his rifle at the ready, just like everyone else. He had platoon stretcher-­bearers to assist him, and provided first-response treatment to any and all medical alerts as B Coy patrolled their allocated territory. Sometimes they were out for weeks at a time, living on rations and with just 1 litre of water a day for washing, the compulsory shave and drinking. By the time they came back into headquarters at Nui Dat they were rotten and reeking. Infections from lack of hygiene were endemic and constipation from lack of hydration pretty normal. They all looked forward to hot showers, clean clothes and cold beers. Wayne had an extra advantage as medic. Back at HQ he had his own tent, the front half of which he used as a waiting and treatment room and the back, behind a wooden crate partition, as his separate sleeping quarters.

Normally, the field medics had no way of knowing the long-term outcomes for the various casualties they treated and sent in on the dustoff choppers; however, Wayne had a really good mate, John Hector, who was a medic based at 1 Fd Hosp. Whenever he had the chance, Wayne would send a note to John, asking him about the current status of each patient, and John would send him back a note every five days with the rations chopper, giving him an update. Wayne would share the information with his B Coy major, he of the scorpion sting, and the major would share the info with any particular mates of each patient who needed to know.

Wayne’s deployment was grinding towards its end and B Coy had been out in the field for fifty-three days when he examined a man who appeared to have appendicitis. Wayne called a chopper in and sent him back to 1 Fd Hosp. Next day, he himself was rolling around with agonising belly cramps. The 4 RAR doctor wasn’t far away so he was taken to him for examination. For some reason that still escapes Wayne, the doc gave him a shot of morphine and sent him off in a dustoff chopper. By the time they landed on Vampire, the 1 Fd Hosp helipad, Wayne was on cloud nine and walked off the chopper carrying all his gear. ‘Where’s the appendix?’ he was asked. Sheepishly he replied, ‘That would be me.’

Stripped of his dirty, rotten clothes, he enjoyed a long hot shower before a medic shaved him from nipple to knee in preparation for an appendectomy. At the last minute, the doctors decided to sit on him for a night and see what happened. He had a light meal and slept. After further examination, it was decided he had mesenteric adenitis, an inflammation of the abdominal lymph glands. He spent a couple more days sitting around the hospital chatting with the other patients before he was told to pack up, go back to Nui Dat, clean out all his gear, say hooray to his mates and prepare to go home.

Just a few days later, Wayne was back in Australia. He had a cursory medical, nodded when the doctor asked, ‘Feel okay, soldier, no problems?’ and was discharged . . . only to discover that his wife had moved interstate with their two-year-old son.

Having sent 85 per cent of his wage home to his wife, Wayne now had little money, no car, no family and no job. He returned to psych nursing at his old hospital in Adelaide. His colleagues had heard various stories about his absence, but not, as it happened, the real one. Although they welcomed him back, most of them weren’t particularly interested to know where he’d actually been.

About six months after his return, he looked out the window and saw an officer walking down his driveway. When he met him at the door, the officer told him he’d been awarded the Military Medal. Surprised, Wayne asked him, ‘What the hell is a military medal?’ Then he imagined it might be to do with that black Friday.

However, it turned out to be in recognition of his actions in mid-February 1969, a few weeks before he went home, when his patrol had been sent on a mission to clear out a small group of Viet Cong who were guarding an arms cache. It was expected to be an easy mission. It was dry season and the paddies were hot, waterless and dusty. The patrol walked 2–3 kilometres on the edge of a rubber plantation before they came across a scrubby area. One platoon went left, one went right and the company headquarters platoon, of which Wayne and his stretcher-bearer were normally a part, had gone straight in. Suddenly there was a mighty explosion followed by heavy machine gun fire from a regiment-sized bunker system. Wayne was back about 200 metres when heard the call ‘Medic up front!’

With the battle raging around him, he jog-trotted forward. He saw a dead Australian ahead of him and found another digger who’d been shot up with pellets. Wayne started patching up the wounded man, then he and the company sergeant major dragged him back to a safer position. As the digger lost consciousness, Wayne yelled out to get the 4 RAR doctor brought in with IV fluids. ‘A little chopper turned up with the doc and the fluids but we lost him. He was too badly shot up and we couldn’t save him.’

The two dead soldiers, Bluey McGuire and Vic Petersen, were both national servicemen who’d been brought in to company headquarters for safety because they were due to go home within a couple of weeks. Wayne knew them both, which was always just that much tougher than when he didn’t. He was awarded the Military Medal because he’d run forward from a position of relative safety to one of danger, under fire. While he appreciated the recognition, Wayne declares he’d had no choice. It was his job.

When Wayne received the Military Medal, Phillip was still in the first few months of his tour. He had finally arrived at the 1st Australian Field Hospital in July 1969 via Singapore and Saigon. The trip had been a culture shock after the wide-open spaces of his previous life. In the brief time he was in Saigon, Phillip thought it seemed a dirty, noisy, busy place – but it was the heat that shocked him most. He thought he was used to heat, but the humidity of South Vietnam knocked him for six and he still remembers the lather of dripping sweat that drenched him. Getting into the Hercules to fly to Vung Tau was even worse as there was no air-conditioning; he thought he might just die there and then.

The first two weeks in Vietnam were the worst. Apart from the heat, which he did get used to fairly quickly, he felt unprepared for the challenges ahead and unsure of his capacity to fill the role he’d been allotted. On his first day, Phillip was posted straight into the surgical ward, surrounded by post-op patients with stitched-up wounds and missing limbs. It was frightening, but he was determined to learn and do the best job he could. Although he’d had basic training prior to deployment, like most of the medics, he learnt on the run. He took some satisfaction from a badly injured Kiwi soldier, who asked Phillip when he was going to give him the needle he was dreading. Phillip said, ‘I’ve already given it to you.’ The Kiwi asked him to please come back and give him any others he had to have.

It was a well-timed boost for the unworldly, naïve kid from the Queensland bush, just when he most needed some kind of justification for the turn his life had taken. Phillip was gen­uinely surprised to find that he liked working as a medic and liked helping people. On the days he worked in the RAP, Phillip and the other duty medics attended to any personnel working for the Australian Logistic Support Group, of which the 1 Fd Hosp was just one unit, as well as anyone coming in from the field with a minor medical problem. On the wards, supervised by whichever sister was on duty in each location, the medics’ tasks included all the basic care that underpins medical attention: holding the vomit bowl, noting pulses, blood pressures and respirations, physical comfort, ensuring bathing and personal hygiene.

Although Phillip found all of the nursing officers approachable, he also found most of them weren’t inclined to teach him how to do things unless he specifically asked. Sister Patricia Yorke proved the exception. She had very high expectations of everyone, including herself, but she recognised in Phillip a genuine interest and desire to learn. Sister Yorke became his go-to person when he had any questions and she, in turn, was happy to teach him, knowing that she only had to show him how to do something once and he could be relied upon to execute it.

In fact, Phillip often wondered if Sister Yorke had orchestrated some of his moves around the hospital. ‘Sometimes I worked over in the RAP but for the first eight months, while she was still there, I mostly seemed to work with Sister Yorke either in the surgical ward or intensive care.’ Trish has since admitted that she probably would have requested Phillip on her shift whenever possible because he was an excellent medic.

For his part, Phillip remembers Trish as a considerate boss. ‘On night duty, at 2 o’clock in the morning after you’d done everything, Sister Yorke would want the patients to have a good three hours’ undisturbed rest before we got them up to change their dressings and that. She’d always tell me to pull up a bed in intensive care and have a rest. I thought it was great of her and it helped me get through it all.’

Trish encouraged and supported Phillip to assume more responsible roles as time went by, and Phillip was very pleased to return from leave in January 1970 and be told by the commanding officer that he had been promoted to corporal.

On several occasions he was sent off on a dustoff chopper to retrieve casualties. Carrying basic dressings and morphine, his job was to control patients’ bleeding and shock on the flight back to 1 Fd Hosp. Apart from the jet plane over to Vietnam, he’d never been higher off the ground than horseback, so his first helicopter ride scared the bejesus out of him. Phillip reckons his fingerprints and nail marks would still be on the handholds of some of the choppers he flew in, so terrified was he every time he boarded one. Hanging on for grim death, it was all he could do to look out the open door.

Sometimes it was dangerous, and even downright scary, especially with the American pilots, who were mostly, he says, ‘pretty gung-ho’. Phillip went out one day to pick up a forward scout who’d been shot. They collected him safely but the chopper was shot up as they took off again and they flew back with fuel leaking out of the tanks. After they’d landed and the patient had been escorted into triage, Phillip suggested the pilot park the chopper to one side and they’d go in and get the commanding officer to send for someone to pick him up. The pilot drawled, ‘No, I don’t do that,’ and took off. Phillip heard shortly after that he had to put the chopper down in the streets of Vung Tau when he ran out of fuel halfway back to the airstrip.

Meanwhile, the patient they’d picked up was over the whole war thing. His gunshot wound to the chest initially appeared superficial and he’d walked onto and off the chopper, but Phillip had picked him up twice before, purely by chance, and knew this was his third gunshot injury. As they were flying back to Vampire, all the soldier could say was, ‘I’ve gotta get out of this, Doc. I can’t take it anymore.’

Next day, Phillip went to see him on the surgical ward to check how he was going. It transpired, when he was X-rayed, that he had an AK-47 bullet sitting at the top of his heart. Phillip felt slightly sick even though he realised he couldn’t have known how serious the wound actually was. The doctors wouldn’t operate on the soldier in Vung Tau, so he was sent home. Phillip has always remembered him but has never known whether he survived.

Another day, he flew out to pick up a casualty, gripping the handhold as usual, but there was nowhere to land so the patient had to be winched out. The medic on the ground loaded him into a wire basket ready for winching up. Clinging to the doorway, Phillip watched the cage rising. It was about halfway up when it was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade. All that was left was the steel rope swinging in the downdraft. It’s an image that still moves Phillip to tears. ‘He probably saved our lives. If it hadn’t hit him, it probably would have hit the chopper.’

He remembers a Korean marine who’d been on a patrol boat that was also hit by an RPG. Phillip flew out with the dustoff chopper to collect him. ‘We landed on the shore and brought him in but the top of his skull was blown off and his brains were falling out.’ Phillip’s never been able to shake that image. He can ignore it, but it lurks along with several others, waiting to broadside him in unwary moments. He particularly remembers nursing an Aboriginal soldier who lost both his legs when he stood on a mine. Phillip knows he came home to Queensland but no more, and has always wondered what happened to him.

Phillip finally left Vietnam in June 1970. He and a planeload of war-weary soldiers were delivered back to Sydney in the middle of a cold winter’s night. There was no one there to meet them and after they’d been through customs, the blokes who weren’t based in Sydney slept the rest of the night on the floor of the terminal.

Chomping at the bit to get home to the bush and to Elma, Phillip got himself back to Enoggera on a train and requested immediate discharge. He had six weeks’ leave owing, which the army wanted him to take before they released him. All the resentment and anger that had been brewing in him over the last two years bubbled to the surface as he told them to stick their rules. ‘There is no way I’m coming back to this place. I don’t care what you do. You’ll have to send MPs [military police] to bring me back. I want my discharge papers now and then I’m going.’ Phillip wouldn’t back down. Being a cautious man, he’d read the fine print on the form they all had to sign when they were called up and so knew he could still be called back to active duty again any time in the next three years. He signed the discharge papers anyway and, in the end, they discharged him and let him go. He and Elma announced their engagement the day he got home to Calen.

Phillip went back to work for the Kemps, but they didn’t recognise the gentle soul they’d farewelled two years before and after twelve months he decided it was time to move on.

He and Elma married in 1971 and they lived and worked and raised their children on various farms until they eventually saved enough money to buy their own. Apart from Elma and two old friends who’d served in World War I, no one ever asked Phillip about Vietnam. The two old veterans watched out for him and he found it comforting that they cared, but he didn’t talk about his experience much, even with them.

Everything was fine for the first couple of years, but then Phillip began withdrawing; he’d stop speaking for days at a time, sometimes even a week or two. ‘He’d clam up,’ Elma recalls, ‘and might not answer even the most basic question. As time went on, he started overreacting to things, getting much angrier with the boys than their actions might deserve.’ Elma knew something was wrong, but he was never physically violent and she didn’t know what to do about it anyway. She really started to worry, though, when he began to say, ‘Life’s not worth living . . .’

Concerned for her husband’s wellbeing, she talked to a nursing friend and between them they diagnosed depression, but Phillip wouldn’t go and see anyone about it. In fact, until a few years ago, he’d not been to a doctor since he returned from Vietnam. Aware of his apparent depression, it was someone in the RSL who finally convinced him to go and investigate his eligibility for assistance from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Phillip went to a GP, who referred him to a psychiatrist. In his early sixties, for the very first time, he shared some of the terrible images in his memory. The psychiatrist diagnosed his post-traumatic stress disorder and appropriate DVA assistance kicked in.

Phillip still doesn’t drink or smoke and never goes to the RSL, but he does march on Anzac Day with his grand­daughter, who very proudly wears his service medals. Looking back, Phillip says he hated the army but he’s not sorry he went to Vietnam. He liked that he was able to help people. If he’d had more confidence in his academic abilities he thinks he might have tried to join the Ambulance Service when he came home, but he didn’t think he’d be able to handle the theory.

A few years ago, his son was badly injured when a bull gored him, splitting a muscle in the calf of his leg. Phillip strapped his son’s leg and when he got him to the hospital, the doctor asked who’d treated the injury. Phillip admitted it was his work, and was very chuffed when the doctor told him there was nothing he could have done that would have been any better. Hearing that and believing that he had made a difference to many lives in Vietnam made it all worthwhile. The recent discovery that Sister Yorke thought so highly of his work was all icing . . .

In the first few years after his return, Wayne mentally relived his role in Vietnam many times, especially that black Friday in September 1968. Despite the warm thanks he’d received from Charlie Coy’s officer commanding, in his mind he kept going over his nursing responses in the field that day. He eventually came to realise that he, and the men who helped him, had done everything they could in the circumstances to ensure the best possible outcomes for all the casualties.

Meanwhile, life went on. Wayne married again and welcomed two more children into the family, moving between jobs and states before settling down to live in Queensland permanently. He’d been working at Nambour Hospital for quite a few years when o­ne of the doctors took him aside and talked to him about post-traumatic stress disorder. Although he knew he’d been drinking too much and snapping at trivial things and his wife had accused him of being unfeeling, Wayne resisted the diagnosis for as long as he could. However, when his wife finally left him after thirty-two years, he was forced to acknowledge the problem. He underwent all the appropriate medicals, accepted the diagnosis, which included PTSD, retired, took up woodwork and got stuck into writing the book he’d been playing with for several years. Medic tells his story and that of many of his mates and colleagues.

In 2000, Wayne acted as guide for a group of friends who wanted to go back and revisit Vietnam and, perhaps, put their own ghosts to rest. It was such a success he led a couple more trips and on one of them met his Vietnamese wife, Do Thu Hien, otherwise known as Lucine. They were married in 2005. They now orchestrate the tours together; Wayne plans the itinerary and Lucine manages the in-country details. Reconnecting with his mates from Vietnam and sharing the journey back with them and Lucine each year provides the magic in Wayne’s life.

It’s nearly fifty years since Phillip and Wayne went to Vietnam and both of them still have the scars etched on their souls to show for it. Although their tracks have never crossed in all those years because their journeys have been so different, they agree that there is actually another commonality in their lives. Neither of them regrets going and both of them are pleased to have done their bit to relieve the suffering of their fellow veterans as they negotiated their way through that horrific, unfathomable war.

Medic Wayne Brown in the Regimental Aide Post at Nui Dat, 1968. Courtesy Wayne Brown.

Phil Campman was working on an isolated cattle station when he was called up for national service in 1968. He was only nineteen. Courtesy Phillip Campman.