Story 2 - Reflections
Some Pain Still
Remains
By George "Pills" Parker, 110
Sig Sqn, South Vietnam
(3 Dec 1968 - 10 Dec 1969
Sgt George Parker, 110 Sig Sqn, South
Vietnam 1969
Those 365 days, plus 2 in Vietnam was a
time to remember, a land of two seasons and two weathers; wet and
dry, mud and dust; humid and hot that was evenly split from wet to
dry. The wet and mud I could hack, but the dry and dust were a
pain in the eyes, the nose, and the throat while operating areas of
nothing else but that.
The stars shone brightly above during
the wet season, and when the dry came there was nothing but a haze
that covered the heavens at night, but during the day the smell and
the haze of death lingered long.
During the wet, you were wet, wet all
the time through sweat, and tears, and rain. During the dry
the dust got into everything between your crutch and the cheeks of
your arse; and it covered everything from top to bottom, in-between,
and all around. It was in everything.
They pumped us full of pills, that
they claimed were going to save our lives, but those so-called safe
anti-malaria pills did more damage than good; then some of the
blokes (Wayne and Bill) got dysentery, how great was that, as
another pill bigger that a bicycle wheel was added to our list, and
to make things even worse we were confined to our hill for another
28 days.
Those toilet runs were many and that
kept us empty. We kept taking those pills for diseases we did
not have and possibly weren’t there. They pushed us hard,
making sure that we all had taken our drugs, and even they knew that
the “Dapsone” was doing more harm than good. Yep, we were
nothing more than guinea pig and with a short-fused “use-by-date for
some whose health deteriorated.
Then payday came, and you would all
line up and collect any extra drug and your monopoly pay called MPC,
which had a very good exchange rate in town.
Then the bloody plastic sandbags that
replaced the hessian ones appeared on the scene. I always wonder
how many of those bastards did I fill with our diggers of our troop.
Thousands I guess, and John Healey held the record.
Those sandbags were our friends, and they had a purpose to protect,
but our diggers complained continually to Terry and me.
Those good old hessian sandbags were
of a good quality, but those plastic ones slipped all the time while
trying to stack them in an even line, unstable and bloody nuisance
as they continue to fall in all directions.
Yes in those days, when things just
happen, a helicopter falls out of the sky at the airfield amongst
the ground crew on the ground, flames explode all around, and so far
away but still vivid in the memory of that day.
Then a Caribous, full of star pickets,
begins its take-off from the airfield and begins its normal ascent
heading toward our hill and over our unit. As it heads toward
us, the LH motor fails and it begins to lose altitude, heading
directly towards us and our unit area. The brave pilot turns
his disabled aircraft into the dead motor, and it falls out of the
air before your very eyes and disappears below the clear water of
the swamp. The pilot survives, but sadly his co-pilot didn’t.
Yes, life was so simple and so quick that even a blink of an eye can
record such things with a memory hard to forget.
The memories of seeing a 250lb bomb
exploding in the Long Hais, and not seeing an American fighter
bomber in sight, and then you hear the dust off siren in the
distance, and the dust off chopper coming in. So sad, when the
smoke clear, 3 killed, and 13 wounded from a remote bomb ambush.
The day I heard that Mick was killed
in May of 69 was a sad day, but I celebrated Ray’s VC in October in
Saigon, as Ray was awarded the VC for trying to save Mick.
Then I became concerned of Sig Moore’s health and noticed the
swelling of his fingers and sent him to the RAP to get checked out,
he was medevaced quickly and a few months later he died from cancer.
Then to make matters worse, the
Postmen went on strike and refused to handle our mail, I didn’t
receive a letter from my wife for nearly two months, so I was glad
to “Punch a postie on R and R!” Then the waterside workers
went on strike and refused to load the Jeparit, the navy stepped in
and manned the ship. That was great, because our unit cook had
a friend on the Jeparit and he would give us some good old Aussie
snags and boxes of four-and-twenty pies, but we did miss the good
old Aussie milk shake.
When we returned home in the dead of
night, midnight in my case, hidden from the public view and
moratoriums and the Save Our Sons Organisation, we milled around the
airport foyer to receive our pay. We slept in the chairs at
Mascot airport for the rest of the early hours of the morning
waiting for our airplane home at 7:30AM. Yep, we even had to
pay for our airfare in preference to an all day wait in Sydney and
then the snail train to Melbourne. I can assure you all that I
wanted to do was to get home as quick as I could, and willingly paid
the difference between the airfare and train fare to Melbourne, to
see my family once again, and to begin to rebuild my life.
As I waited in the foyer, all the
civilians began to arrive and milled all around us. I smelt
under my armpits, because I couldn’t understand why there was a
circle all around us. Such pains when they wouldn’t look us in
the eye; wouldn’t talk to us or say: “Welcome home digger”; they
ignored us as if we were the “untouchables”; those cowardly baby
killers, rapists, and murderers that all knew so well on the TV.
Then the readjustment to living a
normal life began, driving down the wrong side of the road,
flinching when you hear a car bag fire, having fingers pointing at
us, and blaming us for all what was going on. We were told not
to wear our uniforms and if we did wear our uniforms we weren’t to
wear our war ribbons.
I visited the Frankston RSL to make an
application to join handed the secretary my ASB, but he didn’t want
to know me or accept me as a returned veteran, but he relented by
throwing an application form at me and said: “What makes you think
you are a returned veteran?”
Those other images of the war I have
not explained, many still familiar of the smell of death, as you
hear the news a friend was killed, and of another brave bloke who
raced out into the open field of withering fire to save him, but
only to die in his arms. Yes that bloke received a VC, but who
cared at home about this incident, all they wanted to hear was about
the My Lai massacre, and the execution of a VC officer in Saigon TET
Offensive in 1968, which made the public opinion and understanding
of their young fighting soldiers, NSMs and Regulars, a crying shame.
We were not looked on with respect or
recognised of the great job we did in our Province. The
Australian public didn’t know anything about our approach to the
war, which was totally different to the Americans; we treated the
people with respect that we could muster at a time of war. We
had to win their respect, and I believed we did.
The enemy respected the Australians,
because we buried their dead.
We were abused as baby killers,
rapists and murderers, some had blood and urine thrown over them.
They didn’t know that we fought with more humanity and
professionalism than our American counterparts.
Many had seen death, lost their mates
in combat, and the worst of all to kill another person, and we did
our job, but we let those Vietnamese people down in
Phuoc Tuy Province, and
we left them to the pain of torment, torture and death when
advancing NVA forces arrived. They loved us then, and they
still love us today.
Many other RSLs in the cities proved
less than welcoming to us, whose members were from earlier
conflicts, who labelled us as not being a veteran of war, even
though many of our mates were suffering PTSD, they just didn’t want
to share their comradeship and understanding of fellow veterans.
But, the rural community were more open and accepting to their
brothers of the bush who were returning home from war.
We did harbour much resentment of our
rejection by Australia, and in 1987 with all of our hurt, offence,
and rejection we passed it all over to our God, as we all marched
down the streets of Sydney, receiving that “Welcome Home”,
twenty-five years later, and twenty-five years too late for all
those who died on the battle field, from illnesses of war and had
taken their own lives. Then in 1992 we were given another
bonus, our own Vietnam War Memorial.
But, the pain and hurt is a thing that
we can forgive, but it’s the hardest to quell at times when our
wobbles set in as those burning hurts and memories of those times of
so many good men who died in vain, for nothing. We didn’t lose
a war; it was already lost it from day one.
George Parker
16 December
2011