Soldiers returned to roars of protest

John Henderson, Bill Samson and Patrick Duggan at the end of Operation Valcluse, 1966. Photo / Supplied

Of course, we knew a little ahead of everyone else: the jungle drums in the Army beat pretty loudly. There were around 30 or 40 of us in the room, and even though we were more or less forewarned, there was still a lurch of excitement. No one knew at that stage who was going and who was staying behind. There was only the knowledge that our unit - and that meant us - was going to war.

Many of us had close relatives - dad, granddads and uncles - who had fought in WW1 or WW2, and we had grown up with their war stories. Now we were going to write some stories of our own. Most significantly, we were young and full of testosterone. Every young man grows up spoiling for a bit of an adventure. And as for the rights and the wrongs: well, worrying about that just wasn't our pay scale. Many of us (including yours truly) didn't even know where Vietnam was.

New Zealand's 161 Battery had been assigned to support the Australian Task Force, which in turn had been attached to the American 173rd Airborne Brigade - "the Herd", as they were and still are known.

Bien Hoa was the Herd's stamping ground. Approximately 20,000 personnel lived there, in a sprawling township on all sides of the airstrip. The airstrip itself was cluttered with aircraft of every description - from WW2-vintage, single-engined fighters belonging to the South Vietnamese Air Force to state-of-the-art American helicopters, jet fighters and bombers.

According to a story I heard while at Bien Hoa, there was an old gent who lived in a house close to the end of the runway who would occasionally emerge and fire his rifle at aircraft taking off or coming in to land. He might have been Viet Cong, or perhaps he was just tired of all the aircraft noise. His eyesight was poor, by all accounts, and his fire all but harmless, so he was regarded with something like affection by Bien Hoa aircrews: his targets would waggle their wings to acknowledge that they had been shot at. Until one day a helicopter gunship commander who hadn't been briefed on local protocol fired back and killed him.

Soon enough, we were involved in a contact in the Courtenay Plantation. Our armoured personnel carrier was chasing a VC through the rubber plantation and we were all shooting at the guy, me included. It all happened so fast. There was a shout and someone opened up on the fellow, who bolted, turning occasionally to return fire with his AK47. The rubber, of course, didn't afford him much cover.

I got a few shots away before my FO told me to get my bloody head down and to get back in the bloody APC, almost certainly so that he could get a better shot at the poor bugger. The chase ended with our APC commander putting a .50 calibre bullet right through the guy's chest. There he was lying face down with a big hole in his back. The bullet had gone in through his chest and taken most of his back with it when it left him. It was usual practice to search the corpse for any information that might have been of interest to Intelligence. One of the Company HQ signallers and I drew the short straw.

Your feelings are complicated when you're doing a job like this.

There was enough information in his pockets to confirm he was Viet Cong. He had a small map with little of any significance marked on it, a wallet containing about 2000 Piastres (US$20) and several photographs, one of which was of his family. I would say he was about the same age as me: a lad of 20.

The second part of our detail was to bury the poor bugger.

I think it was on Operation Hardihood that another incident occurred that was one of my personal lows. I was out on patrol with a Forward Observer's party, comprising three signallers - Tuk Akarana, John Deazley and myself - and Mike Dakin as FO. Tuk, John and I had worked out a pretty effective roster for carrying the clunky radio. I drew first shift, so I spent the day bashing through the undergrowth with my progress halted every few steps by vines that snarled the radio or the harness. It was pretty hard work in that heat. It gave me great pleasure to hand over the radio to Tuk as we harboured up that evening.

The trouble was, we had neglected to tell Mike about our roster, and the following day he asked me what was going on. I told him.

"No bloody way," he said. "You're the sig on this op, so pick up that radio and get on with it."

You bastard, I thought, although I bit my tongue and struggled into the harness, trying to ignore Tuk's big grin.

As we resumed patrolling and the going was no easier, my mood darkened.

With every vine that snagged me, it darkened further, and Dakin's stocks grew dangerously low. After a couple of dozen entanglements, I pulled out my sheath knife and began hacking at the vines in frustration.

"Cut that out and put the knife away," Dakin snapped.

I snapped too.

I carefully put the knife back in its sheath, unslung my rifle, cocked it and pointed it at the spot right in the middle of Mike Dakin's back. I stood there, breathing heavily, wondering what I was about to do.

Everyone in Vietnam knew the stories about violence done upon officers by their men - what the Yanks called "fragging", after the practice of lobbing a fragmentation grenade under your officer's bunk.

Who knows what I would have done, but at that moment, I heard quiet, Maori laughter.

"Go on, you useless bastard," Tuk Akarana chuckled. "You haven't got the guts."

I looked at him, and started laughing myself.

The jungle grew at a staggering rate. Some of the areas we were moving through, however, were devastated - brown and utterly dead, with hardly a living thing to be seen.

Agent Orange is the most famous defoliant, but there were plenty of rumours about all kinds of top secret initiatives which were being tried out in the field as well. No one warned us that drinking water drawn from streams or rivers in defoliated areas might be harmful.

After one operation late in 1966, one that had forced us to spend a fair bit of our time sloshing around up to our waists in swampland, we came back to camp and I didn't really feel the best.

I dragged my aching and very tired carcass along to the Regimental Aid Post and the doctor examined me. He told me that I'd picked up some sort of a virus, but exactly what it was had them all completely stumped. They put me to bed in a small field hospital and that was the last I remember.

When I came around, sore all over and utterly drained of energy, I was in a different bed in a different room with a different doctor leaning over me. "Welcome back," he told me. "You're lucky to be alive."

I'd been in a coma for two days and running a high fever, he said.

Many years later, I had occasion to look at my Army medical records. These covered me right from my enlistment in 1962 through to my discharge in 1987. Try as I might, I couldn't find any record of this virus. Nor, for that matter, could I find any record of any other medical treatment I'd had in Vietnam.

The New Zealand Defence Force claims that my records have been lost, but this is hard to believe. If they were lost, how were they lost?

I was due to fly back to New Zealand on February 27, 1967 - my tour was all but over. Everyone in a combat role had their pet superstitions, designed to keep them safe when out on patrol. One inviolable rule was that those who were getting short [close to leaving] didn't volunteer for anything, and you went out on anything likely to put you in harm's way with your heart in your mouth.

On February 1, 1967, 161 Battery was deployed to Fire Support Base "Lance", to the north of Nui Dat in general support to D Company 1 RAR. It was a pretty routine affair for the first four or five days. All that changed with a vengeance on February 6, however.

That afternoon, I was in the Battery Command Post, an 11-by-11 foot tent set up over two parallel slit trenches. As the duty signaller, I was in one trench with all my equipment. My job was to maintain a radio watch and respond whenever a call for fire came through.

Suddenly, the radio came alive. It was an Australian signaller attached to D Company, calling for fire. We were first to respond, as we were assigned to D Company and I recognised his call-sign immediately.

I passed the accompanying information to the surveyor, Lance Bombardier Tony 'Bags' Carr, who swiftly plotted the target's position on the map. The numbers were relayed to the guns and they acknowledged them. Then, around 90 seconds after the first call for fire had been received, one of the guns began firing, a round at a time at first.

My old mate Woody Waddell wandered into the Command post to see what was going on. Being a nosey bugger, he picked up the spare radio and my copy of the Signallers' Operating Instructions. He tuned to the frequency D Company HQ was using for internal communications to get an idea of what was happening. I shudder to think what would have happened had he not done this.

Our guns fired the first rounds of fire for effect and straight away Woody heard a desperate scream on his radio from the Company Commander's signaller.

"Stop! Stop! For f***'s sake, stop!"

On a gun-line, the command "stop" really means stop. The effect was immediate. All guns stopped firing in that instant.

With a sick feeling in my stomach, I was trying to raise the FO on the radio. Little did I know that his signaller had been one of the first casualties. We were the only artillery firing, so it had to be us that had inflicted the damage.

Four Australians were killed and 13 wounded. Two days later, the Battery was withdrawn to Nui Dat.

It appears that the error was introduced to the information passed to the guns when the surveyor failed to notice a problem with a piece of equipment known as the Plotter FBA, a square instrument with a moveable bearing ring mounted on it that is laid on a grid to plot the direction of fire. The plotter was faulty: no one noticed the lock that was supposed to prevent the bearing ring from rotating had been bumped.

The Australian press, needless to say, had a field day with the news. The banner headline of one Sydney tabloid screamed: "Kiwis Kill Australians!"

Morale was at an all-time low.

After this, most of us were determined to do nothing more hazardous than shave. No doubt telling himself that superstition was irrational nonsense, Captain Peter Williams, a well respected young officer, volunteered to go on an operation just two weeks before he was due to go home. On February 14, he was tragically killed by a mine blast. Had he stayed on base, he would have flown home with us.

As it turned out, he came most of the way with us, anyway. His casket was aboard our flight as far as Singapore.

The wheels thudded onto the tarmac, and there was a murmur and a smattering of applause from the torpid soldiers in their webbing seats on either side of the plane. We were back on New Zealand soil.

Shortly after we touched down, we were herded into a briefing room in the Whenuapai Air Force base for a debrief. Shortly, we were told, we were to be released into New Zealand society again. We were advised not to wear our uniforms, and encouraged to keep our Vietnam service quiet.

We were not happy.

A war for hearts and minds was still raging on these shores, too, and the efforts of New Zealand soldiers jostled on the page with the activities of the protesters. My attitudes toward the anti-Vietnam movement had hardened. They were entitled, so far as I was concerned, to make their point to the government. But when they dared to speak out against us, the soldiers, my blood boiled. We hadn't asked for the fight. We were fighting for the same freedom that these long-haired hippies were using to abuse us and turn public opinion against us.

In all my years as Anzac Day Dawn Parade marshal, it has rained only once on my parade. That was the year my eldest grandson, Thomas, came to the service. Just before everything started, I took Thomas to one side and asked him if he would like to wear his great-grandfather's medals on the parade.

His eyes shone.

As I was engrossed in pinning them on his puffed-out little chest, a television cameraman leaned over my shoulder and filmed it all. He was still filming at the completion of the pinning-on, when Thomas put his arms around my neck and gave me a hug. I, too, was one very proud individual.

Anyone reading this will instantly think that I am glorifying war and that I think I gained more than I lost out of it. Well, my short and emphatic answer to that is: wrong. You can gain skills, you can gain confidence, you can gain respect, you can gain compassion, you can gain discipline, you can gain experience and memories, but all that goes out the door when you lose a mate.

Who knows whether the Vietnam war needed to be fought, and if it did, whether New Zealand needed to be involved. But our involvement represents a turning point in our history, both social and military. It ushered in a period of vigorous protest and in some ways set the pattern for the expression of all kinds of causes and grievances subsequently - women's rights, Maori land rights and so on.

War is an abomination, and while the Vietnam War is painted blacker than most, whether it was better or worse is largely beside the point. While there are governments to foment trouble in the world, and for as long as youth feels the itch for adventure, there will always be war and soldiers to fight it. When we reflect on the rights and wrongs of warfare, it pays to get it straight where the blame lies.

It is governments who start them. It is our young men and women who fight, suffer and die in them.

Extracted from What have they done to the rain? by Patrick Duggan (www.kukupapress.com, RRP $32)