Eyewitness (32 page)

World War II might still be officially dragging on were it not for those inspired little arrows of General Sutherland’s, realigning Cosgrove with Canada, Leclerc with France, Issit with New Zealand, and Helfrich with the Netherlands.

Pat Burgess

Pat Burgess wrote (in
Warco
, 1986):

I have my own theory about what made a man a great war correspondent. I believe a certain type of reporter sooner or later tires of pushing another man’s barrow. The reporter does not himself climb Mt Everest. He does not himself become prime minister. He doesn’t rob a bank or survive a fire. He talks to the men or women who did. Finally he has done this many times, He has seen the mountaineer and the politician and the bank robber and the fire survivor at close quarters. He knows how ordinary he is. Then there comes a war. The reporter finds that, at last, he is independent. He is not sent out on an assignment each day. He is responsible for his own arrangements and for getting his own copy, for competing with the opposition newspapers. If he is a front-line reporter he does not just interview the soldier when he comes out of the line. He is with him in the line. He feels the same fear and the same elation. He understands because he was there beside the soldier, or beside the reargunner, or on the bridge of the destroyer when the shells fell, raising spray soft as smoke. It is, at last, very much his own barrow that he pushes.

That was the kind of reporter he was, attaching himself to a platoon of the first Australian regular forces into Vietnam in 1965 for the Sydney
Sun.
Journalists probably had more freedom to hitch a ride and find a story in Vietnam than they have had in any war before or since. In the beginning with the Australians, they could only do patrols close to base (and bring their own water and rations). Later it was a matter of hopping on an American helicopter and finding the action. And in 1968 after Tet, fighting in the streets of Saigon.

In May 1968 Burgess was still in Saigon, but turned down a request from a mate John Cantwell to come with other reporters for a look round Cholon, the Chinese area of Saigon, in a Mini Moke – an open-topped car offering zero protection. Five got in and four – Cantwell, Michael Birch, Ron Laramy and Bruce Pigott – did not come back. Frank Palmos survived an ambush. As did Burgess because he was going to another incident in Saigon.

That was what the war was about then, the fighting in the streets, the fighting among the citizens of Saigon and Cholon. The Viet Cong were saying that they were rising up, joining their brothers. Were they? Not the citizens of Cholon that I had seen. Not the residents of Confucius Street where … the Cholon Four were killed.

Burgess survived Vietnam, and other dangerous places such as Laos and Cambodia. He won two Walkley Awards for his journalism, one for reporting the PNG–Irian Jaya border, and the other for a documentary made in North Vietnam. Burgess was serving on the Australian Press Council in 1989 when he died, aged 61.

*

War Zone D, Vietnam, May 26th, 1965.
When you tug the insides from another man’s pack you feel each object as though it was your own, though you pull fast, one-handed, for the fire.

You remember later, probably forever, that the deep blue scarf of the Phu Loi Battalion was not only clean but ironed, that the soldier’s initials were hand-stitched in red and yellow in the corner and the date when he joined the Front embroidered in another; that his spare ammunition was new American Colt .45 in a clean fawn pocket with a thin elastic band of tyre rubber around it; that the loose rounds were copper-jacketed, red-gold catching the flames, that they knocked together like children’s marbles in the hand.

You remember the soldier’s spare shirt was the dark, tested green of old rubber trees, that it smelled of strong soap and was machine patched, an oblong sewn over and over with white cotton above the corner of the pocket; that he had cut off the end of his toothbrush and rounded the stump of the handle; that his comb was white bone, with a metal strip down the back like a girl’s, that he carried it in a homemade cotton sheath.

His notebook had a brown cover bound in heavy plastic like a student’s exercise book. Inside the plastic in the front was his accreditation to the Phu Loi Battalion of the Long Nai Regiment, and inside the back the certificate they gave him when he qualified as a ‘baksi’, a medic. You glimpse his name, Nguyen Van Hai, and note that beside the word ‘TUOI’ – ‘old’ – is the number 19.

All this you see and remember afterwards as the insides of the pack are jerked out, some of them spilling and dropping on the ground and the rest – the shirt with the patch, the spare inner-tube thongs for tyre sandals, the ironed battalion scarf – twist and shrivel in the flames, then flare up under the black smoke like that from an oil fire. Peter Sibree, the second lieutenant, says: ‘It’ll probably draw the crabs. But it can’t be helped.’

And Dave Munday, the quiet corporal, says: ‘Who cares if it does?’ You know that Nguyen Van Hai, who cuts off the end of his toothbrush to make it fit better in the base pack just as you do, has left his pack just as the Australians of 6 Platoon often do, so that unencumbered, with only rifle and grenades, he can stalk you and try to kill you.

We, 6 Platoon, are in War Zone D, what the French called Marquis D, for the second time.

Where we are, 32 kilometres west of the Dong Nai River, they said no troops had ever been, except the Viet Cong and before them the Viet Minh. And before the Viet Minh only bandits. Much of Marquis D had always been a jungle fastness where no government reached.

But there are wheel ruts there on the tracks and overgrown orchards and that dawn a rooster crowed. And there are graves – old ones with borders and headstones of red stone pitted by the weather like rusting iron. And new ones, just mounds – years or only months, or days old.

Where we are is tangled jungle, but here and there secondary growth has blanketed clearings. There are new shell and bomb holes and patches of tortured bush with the foliage thrashed about and trunks and limbs hacked down and left still bleeding with shredded ends. And in the clearings there are some rusting shards of shrapnel from years before.

None of 6 Platoon has ever seen a Viet Cong. They have seen very few Vietnamese close up, and none to talk to. Except for a corporal and a sergeant who served in the Malayan Emergency, none of 6 Platoon has ever seen an enemy soldier. Most have never seen a dead man or a man badly hurt.

The Battalion has been mortared in War Zone D and a few men have been hit by sniper rounds. But that is the impersonal perimeter of war, not the hot breath.

It is seven weeks since we sailed from Australia in the converted carrier, HMAS
Sydney
. None of it so far has been what we expected.

It is now ten weeks since I stood at the end of the editor’s desk and told him what I wanted to do. The editor, Lindsay Clinch, wore a grey suit that matched his close-cropped grey hair. He had his tie pulled down and his feet on the edge of the desk.

I told him, ‘They’re all writing about the big battles, and corruption, and Thieu and politics. What I want to do is go out to the barracks at Holdsworthy and pick myself a platoon, and stick with them for the thirteen months they’re in Vietnam. What I want to do is show the war through the eyes of that thirty-two men, to chronicle one platoon, everything that happens to them, how they feel, for thirteen months.’

‘Sure,’ Clinch said. ‘Anything you want. It’s your war. Just keep the copy coming.’ He’d always been like that, when I had gone to Timor and the many times to Indonesia and Australian New Guinea and Dutch New Guinea when the Indonesians were landing. When you were in the field he never interfered, he made no special requests as other editors did, sent no impractical cables; he trusted you completely.

All afternoon 6 Platoon has been moving forward in arrow formation, butting into the scrub on a compass bearing. From Ross Mangano, the forward scout, the signal came back from man to man, the hands together, fingers touching – a hut or a house. Sibree, the platoon commander, spoke to the section commanders with his hands. No word was spoken. The sections moved slowly, as though they had time to waste. Sibree and I crawled up to Mangano.

It was no more than a roof of thatch over log supports in a tight hole completely spanned by the jungle canopy.

With the other sections in position around the clearing we moved up. The hardwood timber box was like a huge coffin. A knot in a toggle line caught easily on the rim of the lid. A steady pull on the end of the rope and the lid lifted and slid. There was no blast, only the clatter of the lid against the bush timber supports and a gentle rustling as the rice lapped over the edge and spilled onto the ground. The six packs, each a French-style haversack, rested on the supports under the box, clear of the ground. Under one eve-like ornament there were six American M26 grenades and four Chinese stick grenades. A 1919 Springfield rifle, good for a sniper’s single round, lay well-oiled along the other. Sibree said: ‘Move.’

The roof came down and a bayonet split the end of the coffin-like box so the rice cascaded out in a cloud of fine dust. From the packs a letter was taken here, a diary there, here a bundle of papers. The rest, the training notebooks with careful handwriting like students’, were thrown on the thatch. It caught immediately. On went the rest of the pack contents, the phials of medicines, the syringes, the field dressings, the packs themselves.

From one pack Mangano held up a small cotton brassiere yellowed from wear. ‘Geez,’ he said, ‘a junior cup.’ He lunged forward and pulled a new green shirt from the fire before it was singed. With the stock of his weapon under the armpit he held the shirt by both shoulders and then pushed it down the neck of his shirt.

Ross Mangano weighed only eight stone. A year later, without his legs, he would barely weigh five stone. He was all knotted sinews and small tight muscle under dark Italian skin. His family came to Australia when he was ten. Now, the Army is his Bible. Without its vernacular he can’t communicate. The Army encompassed Mangano like faith. It is a comfort and a yardstick like religion. Ross Mangano is to lose one leg and half the other, but not for another six months.

He moves off now straight into the tangle of vine and trees on a compass bearing, his head down and the shapeless bush hat taking the wear and tear of thorn and twig. There are no tracks leading to the shelter over the coffin of rice. But there are winding avenues through the scrub. To walk one of them would be an unnecessary risk.

Mangano is the eyes and ears of the platoon. There is status in being a forward scout. Whatever is ahead he will reach first; his job, to look for signs of the enemy – or the enemy himself. It is the scout who will draw the first fire. Everybody knows the forward scout has less chance of going home than anyone else. There is a cocky swing to Mangano’s shoulders as he moves off. Behind us the burning hut smells like the New South Wales Blue Mountains in the bushfire season.

The compass bearing brings us to the edge of a clearing about 60 metres wide. Mangano with one section moves off to the right to skirt it and another section to the left. The clearing is studded with low stumps charred black. Fallen timber sprawls around the clearing like bleaching driftwood. The rest of the platoon begins to settle down in the leaf mould in the lee of fallen trees and facing across the clearing.

The shots come from the line of felled trees on the clearing’s far rim. They aren’t the hit-run sniper rounds of the last two days but are regular and low. Only the stomach-lifting sound of a weapon not our own seems hostile. The bullets themselves cut air with a soft ‘hut’ and lose themselves harmlessly in the late afternoon sunlight. Then jungle silence, no bird, no insect, like the quiet of a cathedral.

The figures in black and green run headlong into us along the path we ourselves have made in the undergrowth. As though drilled to it they fire on automatic then wheel and throw themselves into the undergrowth.

Dave Munday, the corporal, goes down first. He fires as he falls and lies with his face in the mud. You can see one leg is all but severed and an arm lies spouting and slack at his side. Then he is up again on one knee cocking his weapon by holding the stock between his thighs. One-handed he fires and pitches forward again, his face in the mud.

In front of him one of the figures in black, stocky with a brown, muscled calf showing where the black uniform has been torn away, lies on his side, faceless now.

Dave Munday is the quiet corporal, the one the Diggers talk to when they think there might be something wrong at home, when the company commander is picking on them, when the crutch rot, already purple from squatting in a dixie of Conde’s, looks like not clearing up at all. Like Sibree and Loftus and Rossy Mangano and some of the others, he has been a close gentle friend from the time I joined the platoon.

On the Sydney it was Dave who quietly made corrections during weapons training, who made sure the bayonet was in the scabbard, until you got used to the movement, during unarmed combat. It was Dave who tried to issue you a weapon before the first Australian operation. Now you wish you had taken it. Because the others are firing and shouting and there is nothing for you to do.

Your camera went in the first flurry and it is not the time to take notes. We don’t have any morphine, that’s gone too.

Errol Wetherell is not one of the soldiers in the platoon you’ve been really close to. Now a single round has broken his jaw, cut through his throat, passed through his shoulder and out the back of his pack.

Dave Munday is unconscious or dead. But Wetherell is fully conscious. He is moaning, his legs contract and shoot out in spasms, from the pain. You go to him and lie down beside him and take his head on your shoulder and lie with him like a lover while you try to stop the bleeding.

You think back to the training on HMAS
Sydney
. You’d be able easily to use the needle, if you had one. Now, what you have to do is stop the gushing, cover the wound, treat for shock. While you try to stop the bleeding you talk to Wetherell, ask him about home. He has a sister in central Australia, he wants to see her again, desperately. He is thirsty. It’s OK, you can give him water. It’s not a belly wound, it’s only belly wounds that you can’t give water to. He wants the water but it dribbles out the side of the wound in this throat.