12 Alarums and Excursions

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that war is not so bad;
I learned about the great ones we have had;
We fought in Germany and in France
And someday I might get my chance.
Pete Seeger.

In my first few years when I was a student at Armidale , I enlisted in the New England Company of Sydney University Regiment. This was part of the army reserve.

I had been encouraged to join by Alan Treloar, Master of Wright College, who was in command of the Company. The Colonel was also a distinguished soldier and had published military papers. Soldiery ran in the family. He got it from his father John, who had been at Gallipoli. This facet of his life instilled in him a deep interest in the arts of soldiery, and he developed a blow by blow knowledge of it’s history, as well as a wealth of stories of his own military experiences.

After I expressed an interest in  the role of the Company he invited me to his office to outline it.

‘You seem to be adjusting well to college life, Allan. How are things going with your classwork? You’re getting all you hoped for from your courses? You’re socialising enough? Can I be of any help there?’

‘Everything is fine, Mr. Treloar.’

After such preliminary pleasantries he declared ‘Nunc est bibendum, Now we must drink, ’ offering me some tea and biscuits.

‘Anzacs’, I said, My favourites’, I said, ‘crispy and crunchy’.

‘As my father said, there’s nothing worse than a limp biscuit. Army provisions were a very important topic in the diary he kept. The Anzacs he chipped away at were hard tack. ’

‘My grandfather said that ‘In the army, the biscuits are mighty fine, one rolled off the table, and killed a friend of mine. ’

‘Like other wives, mothers and girlfriends of the Australian soldiers my mother was concerned for the nutritional value of the victuals being supplied to her man, ’ he said, resting his arms at the back of his head.

‘An army marches on its stomach,’ I said, bringing up the old adage.

‘Here was a problem. Any food they sent to the fighting men had to be carried in the ships of the Merchant Navy. Most of these were lucky to maintain a speed of ten knots. Most had no refrigerated facilities, so any food sent had to be able to remain edible after periods in excess of two months. It was the women who came up with the order of the day – a biscuit with all the nutritional value possible using rolled oats. ’

‘What happened to him?’ I asked. He must have been a huge influence on you. ’

‘He went on to become the first director of the Australian War Memorial . It was only natural I would want to to follow in his tracks. I was capped  as an army barmy student, joining Melbourne University Regiment.  It’s motto is a phrase from Horace: ‘Postera crescam laude‘ -I grow in the esteem of future generations. And so my father did for me. After serving in the war, I’ve always maintained my activity in university regiments while teaching. ’

‘Whereabouts?’ I asked.

‘In Nottingham and Glasgow. ’

‘Hunting down Arthur Seaton?’ I joked, alluding to the squaddies who set on the fictional Arthur in Nottingham for cuckolding.

‘He was making a total pig’s ear of somethings, wasn’t he? He seriously needed to be straightened out, grow up and have all that fight in him properly channeled. Throwing grenades at targets, not stones at buildings. Shooting bullets in army ranges, not air pellets at old nosy-parking crones. What do you know about our regiment here in New England?’

‘Not a lot’, I answered. What is it’s role?’

It’s purpose is to train officers for the Army Reserve in order to develop military capability. It provides military training for select undergraduates. It’s basic aim is to develop leadership. What is that quality you might ask? Using Field Marshal Montgomery’s great definition, it’s the capacity and the will to rally men to a common purpose and the character that will inspire confidence. That leadership must be based on a moral authority and it must be based on the truth. ’

‘What’s involved?’ I asked, warming to the idea.

‘First you do a  recruit training course. Training weekends are conducted once a month to improve the basic soldier and command skills. Ergo those who qualify may be  selected to be officers. You could be in their ranks, but you’ll be expected to learn twice as much.. Do you have it in you?’

‘Why not. ’I replied, pressing the tips of my fingers together to form a steeple. ‘I applied to get into Duntroon but missed out. ’

‘That doesn’t rule you out in the scheme of things. It’s what you demonstrate rather than where. What do you see as the qualities of a leader?’

‘I would have to say, and it’s easier said than done, that a leader is brave and always the first one into the fray. When the going gets tough some men run and some stay. But a spearhead faces the fire. He who dares wins. To follow his instincts and to inspire his men by his example, he has to  lead from the front and be with them in the thick of things.’

‘Do you have anyone in mind who possessed this quality?’

‘I’d have to say Leonard Cheshire.’

‘A man apart. Courage personified. I’m also a great admirer of him too, Allan. Cheshire was a legend as a great leader of men. This remarkable man had an almost mystical air about him. It was as if he somehow inhabited a different planet from those about him, but without affectation or pretension. Tell me more of what you know about him.’

‘Cheshire was approachable, and made it a point to know the name of every man on his RAF base. He took the time to speak with them and contrived various methods to reach out to them. Technical questions about his aircraft were an easy point of conversation. He talked to his men over his personal concerns. He wanted each man to have a sense that he knew them and liked them.

Cheshire believed this was critical to the effectiveness of his squadron. He invoked great loyalty in his men, as it was clear he was devoted to their needs and was willing to take practical steps to improve the safety and success of their missions.’

‘At the same time he was, let me add, resolute when dealing with any of his crew who showed signs of internal tensions meaning that he could no longer go on. Though a brilliant and sympathetic leader, he admitted to being ruthless in this respect. ‘I had to be,’ he famously said. ‘We were airmen, not psychiatrists.’ Of course we had concern for any individual who couldn’t go on but there was a worry that one really frightened man could affect others around him.’ Cheshire would take a crew member with confidence problems aboard his own aircraft till they sorted things out, but pilots he transferred out immediately. He made a personal example of what was required from his crew.

‘This dreadnought relied on his own example, and the crews’ determination not to let him down, to lead them through some of the war’s most difficult raids.’

‘He demonstrated that a real fighter has to be selfless: ”Non sibi….or ‘not for oneself.’ That’s my watchword. And as point person he has to be fearless, without regard for his own life. Someone you can count on  in a tight spot.’

‘Harold Macmillan’s Corps Commander wasn’t anything like that. In the offensive at Loos in 1915. Macmillan remembers being addressed by the Commander. He  assured them, “Behind you, gentlemen, in your companies and battalions, will be your Brigadier; behind him your Divisional Commander, and behind you all – I shall be there.” At that point Macmillan heard a fellow officer comment in a loud stage whisper, “Yes, and a long way behind too!’ That attitude explains why so many men were lost. If a man is an officer his men will respect his rank. But they won’t respect the man unless he earns it. As a captain in the Grenadier Guards during World  War 2 Macmillan earned it the hard way. He was wounded on three occasions. During the Battle of the Somme, he spent an entire day wounded and lying in a slit trench with a bullet in his pelvis. Interestingly for me he spent it reading the classical Greek playwright Aeschylus in his original language. Anyway whoever is giving the orders there has to be respect and trust between them  and those carrying out the orders. Why would men follow an officer into battle if he’s openly disdainful of them?’

‘In fact why would they do anything he said at all?’

‘Beyond the title this respect and moral ascendancy sums up his pledge to lead.’

‘The loyalty of men is always hard-earned.’

’‘An excellent summing up. Might I add, a leader must always be cool and calm. And oblivious to the horrors of the battle field. He has to have a strong stomach to ignore explosions, heat, sweat and dust and sadly the screams of the wounded.’

‘Are there any other military leaders who have impressed you  one way or another?’

‘During the Syrian Campaign my unit and I met with Moshe Dayan at a little  settlement in northern Palestine called Hanita.  His men played a vital role in our mission, Operation Exporter,  to occupy Syria and Lebanon to prevent the establishment of a German presence there.

You realise why, don’t you.’’

‘That could have  threatened Britain’s bases in Palestine and its broader strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean.’

‘Exactly. Our task, was to advance north from Palestine, along the Lebanese coast, with Beirut as our objective.’

‘Most people would find it rather strange for us to be going to war against the French who are considered our natural allies.’

‘That is true. We were sons of Anzacs who had fought to defend France in the trenches of the western Front.

However the glory of France had been ground underfoot by Hitler’s blitzkrieg and the collaboration of Petain.’

‘I can never forget the famous photo showing the sadness on the face of the Frenchman in the street. He was shedding tears of patriotic grief as the flags of his country’s last regiments were exiled for preservation’.

‘Like most of his compatriots, he  took this very hard.’

‘So Petain fought to save Syria for France while he sought to save France for Germany.’

‘Where did Dayan fit into this offensive to take the French territories?’

 ‘As you’re probably aware Dayan became well known for the piratical patch over his eye.  He owed this to his experience with us. On the night before our invasion began, Dayan was with a forward unit  on the roof of a captured Vichy French  building using binoculars to scan French positions. Suddenly his binoculars were struck by a French rifle bullet fired by a sniper from several hundred yards away, propelling metal and glass fragments into his left eye which made an awful mess of his skull. He was bleeding pretty badly and bandaged up and sent back for medical attention during our move forward.’

‘What was Dayan’s position at that time?’

 ‘He was a member of the Haganah, a jewish militia working with the British. He was assigned to our task force as an interpreter. We were at a pre-invasion briefing with him where we discussed strategy for sending the raiding party towards Syria.

Firstly we had to  protect the road leading there from being sabotaged by our enemy, the French Vichy forces.

Dayan pointed out to us that according to his intelligence, the French had something like seventy tanks. They were much heavier than the light tanks that our cavalry regiment was equipped with. In our common view they posed quite a threat which we had to stop.

Once we had crossed the Litani River, our attack started before dawn. We had had the ill-informed hope that the Vichy French would offer only token resistance.’

‘Based on the stereotype that the French were cowardly?’ I put forward.

‘Of course not. They didn’t conquer much of Europe as pacifists. French soldiers have a long and proud history of valour and bravery in battles and wars around the world, from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I and II including the Resistance. More to the point they experienced immense horrors first hand in the Great War and loss of life on a huge scale and dreaded a repeat. Any reluctance on their part to undertake aggressive  action against us  was not to be. We had been ordered to go in to Syria not with steel helmets but with our Australian hats. We had been told the French would kiss us on both cheeks, which we didn’t look forward to We were told they would welcome us with open arms and throw down their rifles and join us.’

‘Is that what they did?’

‘Instead they put up a fierce fight, resisting stoutly and skilfully. One of our first casualties was a sergeant who was shot in the head, so we  got back apace to donning steel helmets and getting on with the fight. In the ensuing Battle of the Litani River our allied forces came under heavy enemy fire and suffered grievously.

My unit didn’t get going very far because the French tanks came on the scene.

They left our chaps in an untenable position. We had no anti-tank support. Although the anti-tank regiment had part of its compliment somewhere in the vicinity, they didn’t seem to feature in the brigade orders for the attack. it was some time before our artillery support could register on the enemy position. Also they were certainly not anxious to shell an area where our chaps were trying to keep out of the machine gun fire from the tanks. Eventually we received reinforcements who moved into the nearest high ground, the obvious place where there was some cover from enemy fire. This enabled our chaps to consolidate their positions and in due course take a number of prisoners.’

‘These were captured troops from the Armée du Levant -the Army of the Levant. I take it.’

 Precisely. And they didn’t have sunburnt armpits, rear vision mirrors on the sides of their tanks and more than one reverse gear. They didn’t bear flags featuring  a white cross emblazoned on a white background. None of that nonsense. While I began to identify those from their large incoming column as members of the French Foreign Legion, thanks to my knowledge of French, a number of Vichy planes came from out of the blue.

Because there were French on both sides around and showed the same colours, we didn’t think immediately this was an attack on us. We thought it was  Free French allies coming to our rescue until they started firing and strafing our positions.’

‘You were sitting ducks.’

‘Standing ducks more like it. I copped an aircraft bullet right through the thigh and groin at a range of forty feet and started losing lots of blood. So  quite early in the action I was wounded and spent  three and a half months as a cot case in a hospital in southern Palestine recovering and receiving skin grafts. That was, you know, quite a setback as far as I was concerned. It was certainly a very unlikely sort of thing to happen to anyone but you see we had no air force cover for our troops. The French air force had roamed the desert at will and it wasn’t until later that our allied air forces arrived to support us successfully. Eventually the tide would turn in our favour and the campaign would achieve victory.’

‘Thank you for sharing your fascinating account of that little known operation with me, Mr. Treloar. I’m glad you made it through to head your section of the regiment here. How is it run, if I might ask?’

‘It is organised as an infantry battalion with the addition of a training Company. Our commanding officers who run it see directing military operations as akin to a conductor directing a symphony. They see it as an orchestra, so to speak.’

A trilling introduction is supplied by the woodwinds of intelligence gatherers. The battle moves in to the exposition of shaping operations by adding the percussions and strings of deep supporting fire and special forces. In the development, the armoured brigade adds the full weight of strings, brass and percussion before the battle crescendos towards the execution of an exquisitely synchronized combined arms breach. As the enemy is beaten, the recapitulation of the pursuit reverts to simpler, yet effective themes, before the force consolidates its success during the coda. What do you think  is the necessary element here, Allan?’

‘Of course each instrument must come in  at the proper place and at the proper time. The use of firepower in battle must be coordinated. It’s essential for a mission’s success and the combatants’ survival. You can’t have anyone in a unit doing their own thing without reference to others. That’s an  interesting metaphor. Who formulated it, Mr. Treloar?’

‘This precise co-ordination was was stressed by General George Patton. He said, ‘There is still a tendency in each separate unit to be a one- handed puncher. By that I mean that the rifleman wants to shoot, the tanker to charge, the artilleryman to fire. That is not the way to win battles. If the band played a piece first with the piccolo, then with the brass horn, then with the clarinet, and then with the trumpet, there would be a hell of a lot of noise but no music. To get the harmony in music each instrument must support the others. Team play wins.’

‘So what is the purpose of the training Company?’

 ‘This is where members undergo instructional courses aimed at promotion. Of course we expect in return nothing less than the very best.’

‘You don’t accept substitutes.’

‘Our standard sets the standard. A commission with us sells itself. Are you built from the right material?’ Are you in fighting trim and ready for action? Do you have what it takes?

‘ Why not, ’ I replied, looking him straight in the eye, ‘ I’m up to it. I can hold my own as good as the next man. ’

‘We’re not interested in the next man. We’re looking for standouts from the herd. Is that you?  We’re looking for fuglemen who’ll push themselves to their limits. Officers and gentlemen. Centurions for the modern age. There’s no telling where this could take you. A long way most likely. Let’s say for the sake of argument, you’re interested in becoming a  leader in the offing or shaping the future leaders of New South Wales and Australia, then our regiment is the place for you. A ladder of opportunity. ’

‘Do you think that’s possible’, I replied, keen to win my spurs and epaulets, yet thinking this sounded a bit too good to be true.

‘To every man there comes in his lifetime that special moment when he is tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to be someone special. A look at our history will show you that for our members this is no idle boast.’

‘Fortune favours the bold.’

 ‘Audentes Fortuna iuvat. From the Antarctic explorer Mawson, High Court Judge Sir Victor Windeyer, as well as Sir Roden Cutler awarded the Victoria Cross during the Second World War, to name but a very few, former members of the Regiment have acted and continue to wield power and influence. Not to forget Robert Madgwick, our Vice Chancellor who managed a wartime adult education scheme for our Regiment. He  went on to become Colonel Commandant of the Royal Australian Education Corps, After you’ve earned your stripes you may prove worthy of their example.

‘I hope I could but I hope I won’t have to. ’

‘I hope so too. Today, soldiering is a choice, a profession – albeit one in which dying or losing a piece of yourself is a ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ part of the contract.

‘We owe it to those who didn’t survive to carry on the good fight.’

‘Carpe diem,’Mr. Treloar said in conclusion, “Seize the day. Enjoy it while you may. Put as little trust as possible in the future. We must be forearmed, never let our guard down. When none dares draw the bow, soon the bowspring is weak. Weakness will rust a people. We never know when the next war will happen’.

The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!

It would not be long before the ‘imaginary’ enemy we were readying to combat was materializing. In August 1964 The Colonel told me, ‘ The bough has broken. Things will start happening now. The North Vietnamese have attacked the USS Turner Joy and Maddox on the high seas. They’ve done their dash. This means war. The Americans have publicly ordered retaliatory measures . They’ll ratchet up that on the ground  and we’ll be with them . Watch this space. ’

At the time of this incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, Secretary of State Rusk was questioned on NBC television. This was relayed to A. B. C. television:

REPORTER: What explanation, then, can you come up with for this unprovoked attack?

RUSK: Well, I haven’t been able, quite frankly, to come to a fully satisfactory explanation. There is a great gulf of understanding, between that world and our world, ideological in character. They see what we think of as the real world in wholly different terms. Their very processes of logic are different. So that it’s very difficult to enter into each other’s minds across that great ideological gulf. ’

Soon after I gave the Colonel my decision tersely: ‘I’m in. Lead me to the dotted line.  ’

‘Spoken like a true patriot, ’he replied. ‘You won’t regret it. ’

Thereupon I signed up with the Company on the nail and started intensive training on fieldcraft, drill and army procedure .

By jingo I was young, full of patriotic fervour, spit and polish. On the double to fend off trouble we were dressed up to win. It’s a safe bet we Company boys decked out in our slouch hat with it’s upswept brim, with our SLRs and greens , uniformly starched, creased sharply , would catch the girls. Run for your lives, ladies, the regiment’s around! When they heard ‘Fall in!’ they’d fall in our arms.

The drums beat and the trumpets sounded left, right, left, right, in the government boots, on the feet of raw figure happy recruits. Tromping up and down the streets swinging my rifle fro and to, humming do wah diddy, diddy dum diddy do.  Good training for me in terms of discipline.

‘Colonel Treloar asked me, ‘How are you going, Allan?’

‘One foot after the other. ’

 ‘How did you rate basic training? Are you getting somewhere?  Is it working?’

I told this lover of verse, ‘It’s effects are well rooted now that it’s done. Since starting our training, I’ve gone and saluted a policeman, the milkman, a nun. ’

‘Unfortunately we only  had a  short time to train you and your fellow recruits. Our goal was to get you to think, to act, to be one, to make you depend on each other and make you a fighting  unit. Did you encounter any problems?’

‘I lost my slouch hut in transit and ripped the trousers I was issued. Can these be replaced?’

‘I’m afraid military personnel are personally responsible for replacing and repairing items issued to them.If a soldier loses a hat he must pay for it.If a driver writes off a truck he must pay for it.’

‘Now I know why a naval captain goes down with his ship,’I said, ‘So what about the trousers?’ I said, holding them up for him to see.

‘Euripides, Eumenides. Now are you good and ready to proceed to the next stage?’

‘As ready as I’ll ever be. ’

‘Keep it that way . Stick a pin in it. We’ll discuss it later.’

During my vacation time and weekends I passed muster, licked into good nick crawling and sneaking through thick bush fighting the imaginary enemy: ‘Easy, boys, easy. You’ve got to glide through the jungle, not clomp’. Such manoeuvres were aimed at confronting guerilla forces hidden in an unfamiliar jungle terrain.

Colonel Treloar recommended I study the ideas of General Abdul Haris Nasution who wrote a definitive work on this subject.

Nasution, Commander of the Indonesian National Armed Forces, developed and wrote about the theory of territorial warfare.

This would become the defence doctrine of the Indonesian Army in the future. In accordance with this thinking soldiers  trained to live off the land, use hit-and-run tactics and carry out surprise attacks. His treatise became one of the most studied books on guerrilla warfare along with Mao Zedong’s works on the same subject matter.

While overlords of the East Indies, due to manpower shortages, the Japanese co-opted the Indonesians into their administration, particularly in the early stages. This gave them opportunities that had been denied them under the Dutch. In October 1943 the Japanese created a volunteer defence force composed of and officered by Indonesians trained by the Japanese.

After the defeat of the Japanese there was then no regular Indonesian army; such fighting units as existed were formed of indigenous people using weapons seized from the defeated Japanese.

Nasution developed and organised the scattered units into the coherent force which eventually became the Indonesian National Army. He built the volunteer defence force into the core military force of the Indonesian revolution.

‘So he played a leading role in Indonesia’s struggle for independence.’

‘He was one of the masterminds of the strategy used by the then fledgling Indonesian army fighting the Dutch colonial army in the 40s.

Their goal was to wrest back from the Dutch  what they considered their East Indies jewel.

After having abandoned their colonies to the Japanese, the former  powers insisted they return to rule.

The new refused to allow this and successfully fought off the British acting on behalf of the Dutch at the Battle of Surabaya.

Nasution had studied the tactics of General Wingate who had practised guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. As Indonesia emerged as a nation he served as army chief, supreme military commander and national security minister.

During the political unrest which erupted in central Sumatra and the northern Celebes in 1958, Nasution organised the highly effective military operation in which paratroops suppressed the secessionist rebellion and swiftly reoccupied rebel held areas. Nasution attempted to win over rebels by visiting their wounded in hospital.

His importance was reflected by the fact he represented his country at JFK’s funeral.

‘He was certainly seen as an important figure by the Australian government wasn’t he, judged by the red carpet treatment he was treated to a few years ago.’

‘He’s seen here as a moderating balance to the extreme political currents sweeping the Indonesian archipelago. Consequently he was given special attention and feted as a trustworthy upcoming leader of our nearest neighbour. He and his wife visited the Australian War Memorial and placed a wreath at the Commemorative Stone. They were given a welcome that would have done my father proud.’

‘Does his interest in the military extend beyond the army?’ I asked.

‘He has a guiding hand in all branches of the Indonesian Armed Forces including  the navy.

While he was here he stressed our countries’ mutual interest in maintaining the security of our sea lanes and coastlines.

His navy minister was invited on his behalf to inspect our naval establishments and college. Nasution is very interested in training and education having earlier set out to be a teacher.’

‘Was he able to visit the Royal Military College?’

 ‘Nasution visited Duntroon and  was very impressed with the display of parade ground  formation. He said this reflected strict discipline in the ranks and competency among the officers. He puts great store on foot drill and emphasises it’s role in instilling pride and discipline among his own personnel.

He was introduced to many dignitaries and foot soldiers on this visit. He made it his business to win them over just as he does with his troops back home.’

I told the General that Indonesia’s national defence against external threats was vital and that it  contributed to that of Australia’s.

He spoke of the role I could play in helping solve the problems faced by our two countries.

As for my own training, this started at the undulating tract of natural bushland of Scheyville (pronounced like ‘Sky-ville’) outside Sydney It was a tough, yet adventurous regime. My fellow rookies and I were subjected to a severe set of training methods designed to impart knowledge, test resolve and teach military skills.

From the day we weekend warriors arrived at boot camp we were moulded as part of a team: ‘Listen here, gentlemen, now you’ve been given over to our tender care we’re going to teach you all about soldiering, the world’s oldest profession. This will separate you real men from the boys. You don’t learn that at uni.’

Now first things first.We will teach you about leadership. We will never ask you to do anything we wouldn’t do ourselves.’

They were true to their word.

‘When you’re in the army,’we were told, ‘no matter in what capacity, you have to leave your normal self-centred thinking behind. All our units are co-dependent upon the other. Every individual, every small unit ranging to larger formations is co-dependent. Needless to say one weak link will cause the machine to malfunction. Then we all conk out. So if any of you step out of line, then we set you straight, our way. ’

This message was driven home every reveille. Our bones, muscles and brains were shaken by angry shrieks and officer urgencies. At five a. m. sharp as the first post sounded, the leather lunged sergeants roused us from our beds: ‘Cock-a doodle do! Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, you lot, Australia needs you. Got the sleeping sickness, have you? That’s enough stretching. Rub the sleep from your eyes and shake yourselves. Hands off cocks and pull on socks! Greet the new day. All hands on deck! Stand by your beds!

Alrighty, gentlemen-and I use the term loosely-listen to me now and listen to me good. We’ve got a big one ahead of us. Stand by your beds. Prepare for full hut and kit inspection!

For every action, there was an equal and opposite criticism. Our beds had to be perfectly neat, footgear aligned in neat rows, our kit laid out on top.

We had to take special care to line up in an orderly way at mess to collect our meals. Our queue  had to be restrained. We had to hold our water  or  risk missing out on our meal.

‘The longest way up, the shortest way down’ was our instruction for saluting. ‘Up one two, down two three’, ending with your thumb pointing down the seam of your trousers. ’

Everything had to be done a certain way and a certain way only. ‘Your blankets are all rucked up. This isn’t the Wentworth Hotel, Private’, bawled the sergeant finding fault with my bed’s immaculate arrangement. ‘There is no room service, the maid doesn’t come in here.. ’Then seeing my bemusement adding, ‘And wipe that smile off your face, or I’ll do it for you. ’

‘Oh brother! Are you really sure—‘I started to argue when he cut me out:

‘Who the devil do you think you are? I’m not your brother. You’ll speak when you’re told to and not before. ’

‘Why—-’

‘We’re giving orders, not explanations. Do I look like one of your lecturers?Now when I want to hear you talk, I’ll give you a direct question. You’ll answer ‘Yes, Sir’ or ‘No, Sir’. You’ll give no other unacceptable form of reply except the aforementioned. Is that clear?’

‘Copy that.’I would have replied, ‘Jawohl, mein Kommandant, ’but I wasn’t sure he’d have understood.

‘Your rank?’ he added, all gas and gaiters .

‘But not as much as you, ’I replied, misconstructing this as a statement rather than a question.

‘That’s enough from you.If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you. You don’t want to speak to me like that when I’m not my usual happy self. You’ll double, drill, do any damn thing I tell you. You’ll be lost, lost, unless I’m shouting an order at you. he said, ‘Do I look like I’m not serious?  Now carry on,’ he said, turning on his heel.

‘Will we be getting to rappel, I asked him. When do we undertake field training in basic markmanship?’

What do you think I am, an information booth? You’ll be informed about all activities in due course.’

One morning after I had made my bed perfectly, he ordered me, ‘Now I want you to undo it and start again. This time properly.’

I said, ‘I’ll have to think about it. ’

‘Think about it all you like-and then do it. ’

Then came the constant marching. ‘Get a move on. By the left, quick march, left right, swing those arms, shoulders out, left, right, stomach in, left right, shoulders out. Straight on the heels, gentlemen, arms shoulder height all the time. Close the fist, push down the thumb, lock out the elbow, necks in the back of the collar, heel. That’ll keep you in step. Keep those arms pinned into the side. Halt, all present and correct, Sir! Atten-shun! Stand straight while your superior officer talks to you, you boofheaded ponces. No scratching or shuffling. No fidgeting or farting.No slouching like a pregnant camel. I’ll jump on you from a great height if you so much as breathe. ’

‘You can’t talk to us like—-‘

‘Did I talk to you? How and why I discipline you is none of your business, Puss In Boots. Is that clear?’

‘Das ist klar, mein Führer, ’I said not. Instead ‘But I thought—’

‘It’s not up to you to think. ’

You’ve got a real chip on your shoulder, haven’t you. ’

‘There’s no chip on my shoulder. Just two pips. Now get on with it. ’

I learned how to hide my consciousness behind battle cries, pretended servility and bare, clench fisted obedience.

Each pacing movement was to be executed in a smart and soldierly manner with an audible clicking of the heels.

After learning how to march, salute, shoulder arms, present arms, how to stand at attention and fall out came the more interesting stuff. We got the feel of the steel. Our training included that in weapons system knowledge and  field exercises . We ran along obstacle courses and hand over hand down a rope strung at a forty five degree angle across a creek. We had to crawl along the rope, then hang upside like monkeys and crawl headfirst downwards, dangle our legs over the water before throwing our bodies back up again. At least that was the idea. We jumped into and out of the back of army trucks and went on long route marches.

These seemed to go on endlessly. Forward with one leg, plant the foot, lock the knee, arch the ankle, push the leg into the ground, stiffen the spine, then the other leg unfolding, swinging out, the foot touching the ground . Legs counted the hours. Arms moved about, taking up the rhythm.

An officer spotted some of us very footweary infantrymen resting after a hard trek. He said with a salty look: ‘Look alive, men. Stop scratching your loose change. Hands out of pockets. The shape you’re in, most of you wouldn’t last three rounds with a Boy Scout. When I was of doing my training I thought nothing of a ten-mile hike. ’

‘Well, I don’t think much of it either, Sir!’ replied one of my mates .

The officer, who had introduced us to map reading and navigation, explaining about latitude, longitude, degrees and minutes decided to test us on it. He asked, “Suppose I asked your sewing circle to meet me for lunch at 23 degrees, 4 minutes north latitude and 45 degrees, 15 minutes east longitude…?”

One of our troupe who had difficulty picking it up volunteered, “I guess you’d be eating alone.”

We learned to lob hand grenades and to take great care.‘Watch out, ’we were warned, ‘if you cough too hard, all that’ll be left of you is the gold in your teeth if that hasn’t melted. And never forget, the bursting radius of a hand grenade is always one foot greater than your jumping range. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not your friend. ’

Despite the bayonet being rarely used any more in one-to-one combat because of its limitations, our rifles retained a bayonet lug and the bayonet was still issued  as a weapon of last resort.

‘Mothers tell their nubile daughters the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,’ said our training officer,  ‘I find going through his ribcage a lot easier.’

We flew at dummies in a bayonet charge: ‘Chop chop you bashful virgins, up and at ’em, if yer wanna get some in, ’we were exhorted. ‘Stiffen those sinews and summon up your blood. Now I want to hear you screaming. ’

‘En garde, placing one foot forward in a boxing stance, my knees bent, allowing my centre of gravity to be lowered, more easily controlled, I pointed the cutlery at the ‘enemy’.

‘You there. ’

Was that remark addressed to me?’

‘ Don’t just stand there. Get to it. Stick the pointy end in, twist it, pull it out, ’came the shout. ‘Give it some grunt. That’s a bayonet you’ve got there, Fraidy Cat, not a bunch of flowers’, was a more personalized blandishment.

‘There’s no room for mistakes.’

‘Stick it in hard. Draw that blood.Watch it spurt out. One day that might be a real belly you’re giving it to. It takes a lot to knock off a squirming man. ’

They taught us to value our rifle as we value our lives. ‘Let me tell you  the vital importance of the L1A1-the Self Loading Rifle, our weapon of choice.’

What he didn’t mention was that our weapon was made by the lowest bidder.

This weapon will become part of you. Think of it as a prosthetic limb. If you can’t service it properly, you’ll turn yourself into a casualty. You’ll receive a Special Delivery. ’

‘The bullet with with my name on it’.

‘ It’s the one addressed ‘to whom it may concern’ you’ve got to think about.

However I wouldn’t be concerned if I were you.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘You’d be so misplaced on a battlefield I don’t think a bullet would recognise you as a target.’

We were shown how to hold the SLR. ‘This will be the easiest drill ever, ’I thought beforehand. After cradling it in our arms, we were introduced to the overhead hold. ‘Now put the rifle above your head and hold it. ’Even after a few minutes our muscles began to fatigue. ‘Now everyone, take your arms forward 90 degrees and straighten them out. Don’t move!’ This punishing isometric drill was designed to test our strength and make the weapon feel lighter during sustained use.

We mastered the art of taking the metal hardware apart, cleaning and lubricating it, and then re-assembling it like greased lightning. ‘Don’t dilly dally. You haven’t got all day, ’was our prod . ‘Wait til you do it blindfolded, standing on your head’.

“Breathe easy and watch the movement of your target. Try to feel it’s next one. Don’t shoot where it is,” we were told during target practice. “Shoot where it’s going to be.

‘And don’t be gun shy. Don’t pull the trigger, don’t jerk it . Squeeze it. Line up your target, don’t rush, don’t miss. It’s just like chasing a woman.’

We learned to blast in any conditions. I was hip wnen I’d shoot and I’d shoot from the hip without bringing it to the shoulder to zero in. In daylight, in darkness, to make the target look like swiss cheese. Around the campfire shooting the breeze. Pondering some of life’s little mysteries.

‘Do you realise,’ I pointed out to my mates, ‘Swiss cheese is the only cheese you can draw which people can identify.

You can draw Gouda cheese without the skin, but most will think it’s cheddar.’

‘That’s a no Gouda,’ said my mate Peter in an Italian English accent.

‘Swiss is the only cheese you can bite and miss. ‘Hey Allan, you might ask me, ’ does that sandwich have cheese on it?”

 ‘Every now and then, ’I said, taking out my Swiss Army knife. As for this other unusual Swiss product, it’s great for making holes in cheese but would you want to fight with it?

Not much of a weapon is it. Corkscrews. Bottle openers. ‘Come on, bring it on mate,’I said, brandishing it to an imaginary foe, ‘let’s go.Just try to get past me and you’ll feel the cold hard metal of my spoon. Back off, I’ve got  toe clippers right here to cut you down with.’

‘Did you know Kraft now market an individual laminated cheese slice for people too dense to figure out how to carve cheese.We could use it at a loose end  to do some cheese card shuffling tricks.’

‘Do you realise, ’I added, ‘how one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?’

‘And do you realise you believe someone when they say there are four billion stars out there, but check when they say the paint is wet?’

We put together a gun pit from sandbags, it’s interlocking walls providing support for the rifle, allowing for less movement during shooting. We raced neck and neck in teams filling and lugging the bags to construct these protective forts. ‘I’m the king of the castle, and you’re the dirty rascal, ’crowed our triumphant team leader.

The instructor’s lessons followed a standard format and began with: ‘ Now hear this, You will learn by the numbers. In this lesson you will be taught… The reason you are being taught this … and, ‘at the end of this lesson you will be able to …  etc.’

The lesson on the bayonet went something like this. ‘Now then, pay close attention. Follow my instructions. Nothing more, nothing less. My mother once pointed out to my aunt , ‘ The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his chest’. That’s where the bayonet comes in. It’s for close quarter battle. It can be thrusted into the enemy, O. K. First of all without being embedded into the bone. Also, situated here is the recess which is the blood channel. When you run it through the ribs, there’ll be no suction. When the metal meets the meat, you’ll be able to pull it out straightaway. Without it all the air wouldn’t escape. It would make it harder to pull it out . Are you with me? Say you’re in Vietnam, you set foot inside a hooch, you open the door and before you know it there’s a V. C. behind it. He won’t be there to say peekaboo. He’ll be aiming to slit your throat. Your life can be over all at once. It can happen when you least expect it so be ready for anything. You’ll have to ask yourself one question: ‘Is this my lucky day—or my last ?’ Just remember: death is certain-life is not. You have the bayonet there ready, just in case the rifle does not operate. Always keep in mind that no one ever won a war by dying for his country. You win it by making your adversary die for his country. ’

The conclusion of the lesson had a roundup and we students were asked questions just to check we were paying attention. Prior to moving on to the next phase of instruction, the instructor ensured that the fundamentals were understood. Otherwise we had to go through it again. Tests and more tests tracked us recruits through this ordeal. The aim of this style of instruction was to create concrete thinkers, black or white, but no shades of grey. ‘If you look in the Drill Manual’,we were reminded, ‘ you will find that the aim of ‘close order drill’ is to instil into the individual instinctive obedience. Always remember our gospel, which is—‘

‘Never question an order until after you carry it out’, we chanted.

‘ Don’t knock it. It has a logic. It ensures that personnel don’t think and their actions are instinctive. Be it a digger on an M60, a gunner on a 5 inch naval gun, or a flyboy in a Canberra bomber, you fire or drop your load when ordered to. You don’t think- its instinctive due the nature of your training. It’s ingrained into the individual to obey the order and never to question a superior. Ours is never to question but to carr out orders. ’

‘Their wish is our command. ’

‘That’s just it. Soldiers are not even allowed to die without a by-your-leave. They have simply to do what they’re told. If we say all you can do is breathe, that’s all you’re allowed to do.  From now on, you will not eat, sleep, blow your nose or scratch your bum until you’re told. While you’re with us you’re government property. We’ve got you. You belong to us. ’

 ’Tact in the warrant officers was often wanting and too often to get the recruit to hew to the line they used sarcasm or other dehumanising behaviours or comments. Teasing, threatening, humiliating. The slightest swerving from the rules or any hint of insubordination led to us being bawled out and dressed down:”Snap to it, you pigeon chested slowcoaches. Come along, come along, there . Jump to it. We haven’t got all day. Pick ’em up! Pick ’em up, there! You’re a bloody disgrace. Listen up. This is Sydney University Regiment- not a three-ring circus!’

One abominable sergeant major, one eyebrow raised nearly to his hairline, walked slowly along the ranks, looking down his nose at us, his nostrils twitching slightly as if his flesh crawled at having to inspect such carrion.There were beads of moisture on the hog-bristles of his little ginger  moustache.No nudge or wink or smile or talk escaped his notice.

I felt this was the beginning of a very close relationship. His furious face was never more than inches away from our eyes. His eyes drilled into ours, daring us to move them a fraction of an inch. If he blinked, I missed it. He aimed his index finger between my eyes and thundered, ‘You, yeah you sad sack. Tilt your head more towards me. Chin up more. Eyes front and centre! Belt, way too loose, buttons too dirty you excuse for a recruit. This one’s undone. And what do we have here. You’ve got dandruff on your uniform. Brush it off. I’ll make infanteers out of you toy soldiers if I have to break you in half. Sort yourself out quick or it’s pack-drill for you. ’

Hither and yon Dracula’s brother, smugly enthroned in his power to exact the trivial, would pause long enough to crack his knuckles or flick contemptuously with his little finger at an imaginary fragment of fluff on someone’s collar. Extra duties, pushups, squat-thrusts and side-saddle hops, or a quick sprint were just a few of the milder tools for conformity.

‘Show some backbone, Soldier!’

I felt so whacked out, like I was showing some  .

‘Get down, push up position down. Up, down, up, down. Just remember, I’m a very reasonable man. My mother told me so. Do you playmates disagree with me? he cried, stepping over our struggling bodies. ’

‘No, sir!’

‘Up, down, up, down, up down’ until mercifully at last ‘As you were. ’

‘Roger, wilco. Anything you say, sir. ’

‘That’s what I like to hear. ’

‘Beautiful day, Sergeant Major, ’I greeted him on one of our last days.

‘How do you know what kind of day it is? Are you studying to be a weatherman?’

Before we left, we wanted to give him a rousing farewell.

‘We asked to give him a 21 gun salute but were turned down. We had all been assessed crack marksmen. ’

Our next training camp was in thick bushland north of Sydney.‘As close as we can get to jungle conditions without going north to Queensland, ’we were told. ‘Definitely more rugged than any place in this state you’d care to mention. War in the jungle is the province of the infantry. This is the theatre we are preparing for. The dense vegetation and general lack of infrastructure means that tanks, aircraft, and even artillery are of little use. Reduced visibility and engagement ranges, make it extremely difficult to run to ground and close with the enemy forces. Consequently you have to live close to the ground and learn from your instructors. ’

Training us to move in formation, our first instructor was doing a major in poetry.‘My way of working is simple, ’he told us. We want maximum effort from each of you. We will expect you to spit thunder out front . We will expect you to fart lightning out behind . ’

I learned to choose very carefully whom to move in front of and whom to move behind.

If someone was spitting behind me, it meant I was in front.

We were shown how to dig foxholes :‘Keep shovelling, men. You’re not building sandcastles on Bondi Beach. ’We learned to bivouac in the scrub. ‘Mud and mosquitos are good for you, ’we were assured. Crawling along the ground, flat on our bellies, diving into ditches, getting up, brushing ourselves off and back along the line of march. Alert to ‘booby traps’, watching where we walked. Such ‘traps’ were marked and included the places that soldiers would would land with some force, where they would throw themselves to escape gunfire; behind logs, in gullies and in long grass. ‘Look before you leap,men.In in the real thing each step can mean your last one on two legs.’ As we reached our first night position our sergeant instructed us ‘The sooner we get to sleep, the sooner we get this day over with. ’

‘What’s the weather forecast for tonight?’ I asked him. ’Will it rain?’

‘We believe not. It will be dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning. ’

Before we bunked down, my mate looked up in the sky and said,  ‘Think about it. What are we?A couple of insignificant specks. What big heads we’ve got, thinking that what we do is going to matter all that much. ’‘Always remember that what you are is absolutely unique, ’I said. ‘ Just like everyone else.’‘Twinkle,twinkle,little star,how I wonder what you are.,’said my mate,looking upwards.’‘For your information,the answer’s in the first line.’‘Our time here means nothing to those stars. It’s a split second we’ve been here, the whole lot of us. How small a part of this grand design. I can’t help but think if anything we do makes a difference. We don’t count at all. When you look up at the stars and moon, what do you think of, Allan?’

‘ Don’t look through the wrong end of the telescope. Everything in this vast universe has a purpose. We earthlings might merely a whit, but a unique one. The only life in it we know of so far. Maybe there is intelligent life on other planets also. ’

‘I don’t think so. Why should other planets be any different from this one?’

‘I think so. I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the   universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

‘Well at least we are conscious creatures who are expanding our knowledge of it in quantum leaps, soon to travel to an extra-terrestrial satellite . What do you think of?’ I asked the sergeant inspecting our progress.

‘I think of the sandman. It’s you blokes rigged up your tent. It’s not going to put itself up. ’No sooner did we start dropping off  than we learned the first law governing canvas shelter.It always rains on tents. Rain will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.

And the  second law you ask ? Your whole body  never fits inside.

We action men learned how to camouflage our faces for night combat and crawl through the undergrowth and wade through creeks: ‘Never test the depth of the water with both feet’ was the rule.

‘Why is teamwork so essential?’ we were asked.

One bright spark answered, ‘It gives the enemy other people to shoot at. ’

‘Take notes, Gentlemen. A unit is no better than it’s weakest member, the one most prone to make a hash of things. When you actually have rounds unloaded at you, when it really matters you won’t be able to make mistakes. You could come down with a terminal case of lead poisoning. If you make the mistakes now you can learn from them and not make them again. You have to protect the guy next to you. otherwise he gets it. You have to be each other’s ears, eyes and fingers.. Now what are the three things we’ve been drumming into your heads?

‘Speed, communication and controlled aggression. ’

‘Precisely. Now upsy daisy, pack up your troubles, onward Christian soldiers. Don’t wait for a written invitation.’

‘Lay on, Macduff,’ I cried, ‘and damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’

‘Thank you for those encouraging words, Private Davis. Now  remember keep your heads on a swivel, men. Keep them down and your wits about you. You don’t want to end up clay pigeons. If the enemy is in range, so are you. If you can see him, he probably has an excellent sightline on you. Remember, ‘If it flies high, it dies;if it’s low and slow, it’ll go. ’

After breaking camp we’d march like anything over fairly long distances. The worse the weather, the more we were required to be out in it. For some strange reason no matter which way we had to march, it was always uphill. Travelling in file formation, we learned to shun tracks and clearings, instead to ‘scrub bash’, picking our way carefully and quietly through the thickets and tangled foliage to take maximum advantage of concealment and cover.

 ‘Spread out, don’t bunch up. Don’t walk there, too soft!’ whispered our instructors, motioning to us how and where to go. Step there and there, not there. Careful, watch!’And then ‘Green ahead!’

We trained to track by ear an enemy in waiting, one who was also intently listening for us. It was a tiring experience. Our patrol took hours to sweep a mile of terrain. We padded forward a few steps at a time, stopping, listening, eyes rolling in our sockets, then making with our feet again. All the time being heads-up, raking the tree lines for ‘hides’, listening, watching and waiting.

After our first bash up a steep, muddy path through shrubs and bushes, across creeks, the adversary finally emerged albeit somewhat lower down. After crawling under rocks, they’d been hiding, hoping for us to come by. Sensing the disturbances we made in the shallow water with their tiny eyes, they picked up on the passing shadows that the waves made. They jumped us silently one by one, impossible to shake off. They had us for breakfast.

Upon removing our boots and socks , we discovered we’d been attacked by the local leeches. Wet and windswept, none of us had seen any, but the welts and blisters on our legs and feet were proof of their importunate presence and testament to their cunning. After some days of this we got got used to them. For their part, they became very attached to us. The reward after all this blood, sweat and dirt being to fly off into that special technological high, the helicopter flight. Thrumming up above, swirling the air. Chop chop chop.

What were the most important lessons you learned?’ Colonel Treloar asked on debriefing me. ‘First things first.’

‘I learned that ours is not to reason why.

That the quartermaster has only two sizes: too large and too small.

That certain things are strictly forbidden. To respond to a lawful order with ‘Why?’ To argue that command decisions need to be ratified by a two thirds majority.

                                                                     

To report to my Commander by ‘You can’t prove a thing!’ rather than ‘Private Davis, reporting as ordered, Sir’. To respond to a briefing with ‘That’s what you think’. All these things were forbidden-unless they were compulsory. ’

‘How did you reservists find this stage of your training ?’

Noticing my hesitance, he added, ‘Don’t be shy. Jump right in. This is a free fire zone. ’

‘They put us through more than our paces. They put us through the works. It seems like they tried to break our will. But honestly do you really believe spotlessness will really be a vital factor in winning the war?’

‘We have to go extra hard on you at this early strengthening stage. To keep you off balance. To show you you can push your body further than you thought possible. At that stage you feel like you cannot do anything right. That’s the point. There’s more to our approach than meets the eye. There’s a logic to all those seeming torrents of grumbling abuse you copped for every minor infraction. As Seneca, the Roman philosopher, put it, A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.’  We want you to lift up the hood. To show us what makes you run. We want to know what you’re really made of. If you’ve got it in you. In doing so we’ll make a man out of you.’

‘But I’m already a man.’

‘There’s always room for improvement. And you’re not yet eighteen, the legal age of manhood. More reason  why we have to drive you hard, wait ’til you get in a tight situation , then watch your reaction. This is what we do. The rewards validate the effort. We have to whittle you down, strip you to your core, expose your weaknesses. If you don’t have that in the beginning, you’ll never know the benchmark of your discipline. Otherwise you won’t last five minutes in the military.’

‘What gets me is all the repetitive drill, all  the practising and rehearsing  prescribed movements.’

‘Practice makes perfect. It stops you from going rusty. Drill consolidates soldiers into the required formations and familiarises them with their weapons. Psychologically, it develops a sense of teamwork, discipline and self-control; it promotes automatic performance of duties under disturbing circumstances. It prepares you for an instinctive response to the orders of leaders.’

‘It can get you very stressed.’

‘By putting such pressure on you, we get to know what you’re worth. If you think this is abuse, how will you be able to take the abuse you find in a real combat situation?’ That’s the way it works – Adisca alt disceda. Learn or leave.

The Soldier in Greasepaint’.

Towards the end of 1964 I read that Bob Hope was to make a Christmas tour of Vietnam. The wisecracking master of verbal wit was to perform before U. S. personnel.

 

He visited the sick and wounded.

Like most Americans, the troops in Vietnam were as likely to see themselves in Bob as had their predecessors in earlier international hot spots. He was brash, sophisticated, modern, an all-American wise guy, accessible to everyone and they appreciated his superficial, smiling average guy appeal. I got plenty of  laughs from the killer one liners he fired off.

In announcing his visit he said: ‘I’ve been offered a tour of Vietnam. It was too good to turn down. They offered to cover my costs plus funeral expenses.”

He made jokes about the new kind of guerrilla war that was already confounding U.S. military planners: “I asked Secretary McNamara if we could come here. He said, ‘Why not? We’ve tried everything else.’”

He referred sardonically to the dangers his entourage faced as they approached Saigon airport, ‘As we flew in, they gave us a 21-gun salute. Three of them were ours.’

Scotching inflated rumours of his personal wealth he declared, ‘If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t come to Vietnam, I’d send for it.’

Typically he joked about the very ailments G. I. is cursed with.

I performed a Hope type sketch for my fellow army reserve recruits’ entertainment. Dressed in shirtsleeves, my tie loosened, wearing a baseball cap, I Sauntered over the floor swinging a golf club  teeing off with a golfing gag: ‘‘Hello fellow holiday makers, I’m Major Mayhem.

Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft; today it’s called golf.

Ya wanna know why I beat it? I’ll tell ya, I’m getting a bit round around the middle. If I place the ball where I can hit it, I can’t see it. If I place the ball where I can see it, I can’t hit it. ’I’ll tell ya, I had an strange experience on the golf course last week stateside. I had a hole in nothing. I missed the brand new  ball and sank the divot like Rodin’s Golfer.

Then I took out another brand new ball and hit it in the water.I hit another brand new ball over the fence. Another brand new ball in the trees.

My partner said, ‘Why don’t you use old balls?’

I answered, ‘I’ve never had one,’

Yesterday I was playing here in Nam with General ‘Big’ Minh who usually plays tennis. You may may have heard of this strongman that love means nothing . While there’s nothing better he likes to do than volley missiles and tennis balls, he’d never hit a golf ball. I soon realised I wouldn’t have to to ask his score; just count the casualties.

Here we were just starting on the course when Minh  stood over the ball,turning round,changing his position  for what seemed like an eternity.

‘Finally I said,’What’s taking you so long? Hit the damn ball down the green!’

Minh said, ‘My rival Nguyễn Khánh is up there watching from the clubhouse, and I want to make this a perfect shot.’

‘I said,’Give me a break.There’s no way in the world you’re gonna hit him from here!’
So I showed him how to play properly.

When he hit off again, he asked me what was the procedure.

‘All you’ve got to do is put the ball down, draw back, keep your head down and strike the ball. ’

‘Where do you want me to strike it towards?’

‘Right in the direction of the flag. ’ Then, Bam! He hit the ball straight as a die onto the green where it stopped just an inch from the hole.

‘After we walked up to the hole he asked me ‘ What do I do now?’.

‘Just hit it in the hole. ’

‘Why didn’t you tell me  that  in the first place?’

I followed through with a sketch based on standard army medical techniques: ‘This morning I visited some sick soldiers. I went up to one private and asked:

‘What’s your problem, Soldier?’

‘Scabies, Sir. Those creepy, crawly, crusty crabs sure dug in. I picked them up in a damp foxhole. ’

‘They can be a mite hard to get rid of. How are you dislodging them?’

‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day. ’

‘And what’s your ambition, Soldier?’

‘To get to the front, Sir. ’

‘Good man. ’ I said.

I went to the next bed. ‘What’s your problem, Soldier?’

‘Chronic piles, Sir. I was assigned to clerical duties. ’

‘What treatment are you getting?’

‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day. ’

‘What’s your ambition, Soldier?’

‘To get back to my desk, Sir. ’

‘Good man’.

I went to the next bed. ‘What’s your problem, Soldier?’

‘Chronic gum disease, Sir. From being out in the jungle. ’

‘What treatment are you getting?’

‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day. ’

‘What’s your ambition, Soldier?’

‘To get the wire brush before the other two, Sir. ’

‘I believe you have a Private Bates here in this ward’, I asked the care nurse. I’m told he was admitted last week after being brought in from the jungle. Could you tell me where he is right now?’I said, seeing there was no one else in the other beds.

‘I’ll tell you what happened to him, ’said the official. ‘Private Bates was in poor shape. His unruly hair was found to be infested with lice. He had  severe caries and testicular torsion. He had trench foot, ringworm and the incredible crud. After our thorough examination he was gradually issued the usual requisites.

On his first morning here, the hospital issued him a comb. That afternoon the orderly sheared off all his hair.

On his second morning, they issued Bates a toothbrush. That afternoon the Army dentist extracted four of his teeth.

On the third morning, he was issued an athletic support. ’

On the third day at noon he went AWOL. ’

Another sketch I performed was based on Bob’s having spent nearly forty years playing the coward’s coward. I organised a competition to find who in my audience was the best at the act of surrendering. There was no dispute as to who was  the clear cut winner. He won hands down.

I wished Bob season’s salutations and reminded him to take care on his tour. ‘In Vietnam you will be confronted by many organisms in food, water, air, that are foreign to Western bodies. Avoid all water and ice because much is unsafe to drink. You could contract amoebic dysentery. Don’t forget the insect repellent. The mozzies are so big, they need their own landing strips. Stay away from all milk products, and heads up for any little man in a red suit and sandals slipping into your hotel room. Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. Charlie can be in and he can be  out, all right? He can be there the whole time. Stay away from windows in restaurants and in rooms, keep your drapes closed, keep a wet hanky handy for the hundred degree heat, a steel umbrella for the driving rain- and a final caution, ‘Drop to the floor if you hear an explosion and if ‘it’ hits the fan, put your head between your legs and kiss your sweet arse good bye. Otherwise enjoy yourself and have yourself a merry little Christmas.’

The comedian thanked me with the lyrics of his signature tune.

As it turned out, all his Christmases appeared to have come at once. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1964, two Vietcong agents put a bomb in the basement carpark of the Brinks Hotel.  The hotel attracted off-duty personnel with its rooftop seating areas, movie screenings and highly regarded food and drink.

The Vietcong duo had been observing their target over the past month, mixing with the crowds in the busy street outside. Noting that South Vietnamese officers mingled freely with Americans, they wangled ARVN uniforms from Saigon’s black market, enabling them to get closer. One of them, Xuan disguised himself as a military chauffeur, while his partner dressed as a South Vietnamese major. They mingled with the real officers so that they could duplicate their mannerisms, speaking style and even their way of smoking. The pair then procured the two cars and explosives needed for the operation. Having reconnoitered the target meticulously, they managed to park a car containing the stashed explosives without being observed or suspected.

The number of American officers at the Brinks Hotel had swelled on Christmas Eve because they were using the building to coordinate their celebrations, therefore the attack would therefore cause more casualties than on a normal day. The bombers had set a timing device to trigger the bomb at 17:45, during the ‘happy hour’ in the officers’ watering hole. Knowing from their intelligence that a certain American colonel had returned to the US, the “Major” inveigled their way into into the hotel’s grounds, claiming he had an appointment with the Colonel. He then parked his vehicle in the car park beneath the hotel, before ordering his chauffeur to cut out and fetch the American with the other vehicle. He then left the hotel grounds, asking the guard to tell the American colonel to wait for him. The “Major” claimed that he had not eaten all day and was going to a nearby café.

At 5:45 P. M., while the Americans were eating dinner and planning the Christmas Eve party for later that evening, the bomb exploded while the “Major” nonchalantly observed from a restaurant across the street. The bomb flattened the Brinks

Sending shards of glass and other debris across the street towards the hotel where Bob and his troupe were staying and shaking it. Plus the glass from the hotel windows  blew into the visitors’ beds. So before they could get in bed, they had to turn the beds over to get the glass out.

Two soldiers in the Brinks bought it, no one in the troupe was injured, but the explosion left all the hotels without water or electricity.

The Brinks Hotel bombing was important for several reasons. It demonstrated the ability of the NLF to operate anywhere in South Vietnam, even in the capital of its enemy. Even our Vietnamese allies had difficulty in distinguishing friend from foe.

It also demonstrated the inability of the ARVN to protect its citizens and allies, a crucial prerequisite to successful asymmetric or insurgency warfare. It came soon after the American bombing of North Vietnam following the Tonkin Gulf incident.

Johnson administration insiders talked of victory as a type of time-shifting.  Nations that chose to confront the United States or to pursue revolution instead of development could be wound back or forward like clocks.

The bombing demonstrated the form of escalation or response that any further bombing of North Vietnam would take. Lastly, it presented the policymakers in Washington with a basic question that would characterize the war throughout its history: would bombing the North reduce enemy hostilities in the South?

The attack epitomized the situation for Americans in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. No place was completely safe from any Vietcong terrorist act and the result was  apprehension for the allied forces. They didn’t know whether they were coming or going. Many were going feet first. Who was going to win was anybody’s guess. The boldness of the Vietcong attack contributed to the escalation of the war during a clutch period in the Beltway policy-making.

True to form, Hope stitched this incident into his act at Tan Son Nhut the next day: “I want to thank General Westmoreland for that wonderful welcome yesterday. We opened with a bang!’ He had had talks with Westmoreland about the war, what was happening at home and what it all meant. The general assured him and the world an attack of this nature was a one-off and would never happen again.

Their talks touched on the instability in South Vietnam. There were repeated coups by military men. This gave rise to Bob declaring: ‘Vietnam is a very democratic country. Everyone gets to be president. ’

I would have declared my variant of this and passed it on onto Bob when George Bush Junior came to the presidency : ‘The US is a very democratic country. Anyone can get to be president. That’s the problem. Anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn’t grow up can be president. ’

At a small outpost in the Mekong Delta, Bob joked: “A funny thing happened to me when I was driving through downtown Saigon to my hotel last night. We met a hotel going the other way.”

Bob cracked. “If there are any Cong in the audience, remember: I already got my shots.”

Two of his female guest stars appeared onstage  for some banter at the star’s expense: “How’d he get you to go on this trip?”

“He asked me to go on a walk in the moonlight.”

“He threatened me, too.”

In spite of all this, the show went on. Thousands of GI’s enjoyed seeing America’s favourite funnyman sauntering across the stage wagging his putter.

Many were transported to the show from the hospital wards in just their blue hospital gowns, some in beds attached to IV’s. and were escorted to the front of the theatre for up front seats. Visiting others in the hospital wards, Bob was extremely cut up by what he saw, trying hard to be glib with men whose guts were sticking out.

It took a well humoured wounded medic to restore Bob’s sense of offhand ease. The medic told him , ‘After I got shot I was stretchered away and operated on in a field hospital. I woke up just as another medic I knew to be just out of training was about to finish operating on me.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked groggily?

‘Take it easy. I’m about to close,’ said this medic.

I grabbed his hand and said, “I’m not going to let you do that. I’ll close my own incision. ’

He handed me the needle and thread and said, ‘Suture self. ’

A startling footnote to the trip came two years later. In March 1967, U.S. troops captured a cache of secret Viet Cong documents, which revealed that the Brinks Hotel blast had, in fact, been directed at Bob and his group, but had detonated 10 minutes too early.

Hands Across The Sea.

      A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on   its shoes.

Jonathan Swift

All forms of our instruction and training had varying undertones of patriotism, glory and honour. The Colonel stressed to Company members that the US, our loyal sentry guard, was of vital import in securing the perimeters of our country:

‘Gentlemen, we’re living in a very dangerous neighbourhood. The Americans have their hands full with their own backyard and in Europe. It’s vital that we boost their continued presence in this area and orient it to our interests. If our alliance with the U.S. were to change, then the pressure points in the region could indeed become very painful. What are these points you might ask?’ he said, pointing to a map of East Asia.

‘There are three security issues of concern to the region. First, there is the Korean Peninsula. The uneasy peace on the Korean Peninsula has remained in place because the solid commitment of the United States – its deterrent against any resort to force – has remained unwavering. America has persistently held to a military deployment in South Korea which has stopped cold Communist advances.

Secondly, there is the tension between Peking and Taipei in the Taiwan Strait.

Had the United States not played the role it has played over the past years, it is hard to believe conflict would have been avoided.

Thirdly, there is South-East Asia where the Communists are a major threat, ’he said, pointing to the map with his cane as officers elsewhere were doing.

‘We’re worried that Communist North Vietnam will take over the democratic south. More immediately we fear Indonesia will become communist-aligned and a threat to western interests.’

‘Because of Konfrontasi?’

‘That’s correct. That’s why we’re bolstering the Western resistance to this takeover by stealth. As we speak our troops are taking part in patrols, ambushes and raids to destabilise Indonesian forces and protect the Malaysian border.’

‘We need to employ delicate diplomacy and  act as peacemaker. We should be careful not to antagonize Indonesia. The conflict could escalate further and destabilise the region.’

 ‘Unfortunately  a graduated response of combat has been made inevitable. That’s why we’re sending ground troops to what began as  a largely British conflict.’

‘Couldn’t one say that this fear from the north has been laid on a bit thick?’

‘This is no mirage, no illusion. The Communist aligned force is a knife levelled at our throat.  Unfortunately they are recalcitrant and reject negotiations. We resile at the notion of standing on the sidelines as they take over.’

‘Where will this all end?’ I asked.

‘Let me answer with a Roman saying: “Finis origine pendet.”  Simply put this translates simply as “The end depends upon the beginning.” We have to begin our defence now. We have to be prepared to project our interests beyond our borders. Forward defence means stopping the enemy cold before he gets close. We can’t just sit back and watch the Chinese set up a bridgehead on our side. Such provocation has it’s limits. We can’t just tell them ‘Come and get it. ’We can’t just turn on our backs and play dead. They won’t leave politely. we have to convince them to fall back. ’

Both our political parties encourage the Alliance. Their interests are co-incident. You can’t put a cigarette paper between them. It’s above and apart from party politics. We all wish to maintain the freedoms that make life in this great country the envy of half the world. When you join my command, you take on a debt of gratitude to those who come before us. You have to take responsibility as defenders of our country to consolidate the Alliance. We don’t have the luxury of playing it safe. Too many lives are in the balance. We can stand by like overfed ducks, faffing about, asking for divine guidance, frothing at the mouth or we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in making a stand. Just what Dean Rusk is asking us. ’

‘ The Secretary of State? I queried. ‘He with the inscrutable Buddha-like face and half-smile?

‘That’s him-to the life. ’ The Colonel confirmed. ‘ Tall and sturdy, standing sentinel for the U. S. over an uneasy globe. ‘A quiet, thoughtful man. ’

Rather like Colonel Treloar himself, I thought. Not surprisingly he had a high estimate of this public face of U. S. diplomacy.

‘He’s done a great job since President  Kennedy appointed him. Ever the good soldier, he sees his role as to serve the Chief Executive. He acts on his behalf when dealing with foreign leaders.

Kennedy never made final decisions on vital security issues until he heard his view. If The President is the captain of the ship, the Secretary is the pilot, at his side on the bridge charting the drifts, shoals and channels that guide the captain’s course. This one’s got guts. You’ll be interested to know he rose to the rank of colonel, serving from 1943 to 1945 in the China-Burma-India theatre, where he began a lifelong interest in Asian affairs. ’

‘What’s his approach to international matters?’I asked.

‘He takes a cautious approach. He stresses the importance of America’s relationship with its allies and feels that unilateral action by the United States is not a good choice. He came out of the Second World War thinking that collective security was the key to the prevention of World War III. He carries on the policy of not challenging the Communists where they are already established, but doing everything possible to see to it that their sphere does not enlarge itself at the expense of free nations.

‘How does he put this into practice?’I asked.

‘He advocates a “dignified diplomacy” emphasizing civility and communication between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Rusk’s diplomatic orientation and his ability to evaluate and judge competing points of view contributed toward the successful negotiation of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August 1963. Before that he defused tensions during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

In the wake of it Rusk cautioned the press and the President not to gloat or claim victory. He rightly worried about undermining Khrushchev’s position of power. If the Soviets felt as if they lost too much in the crisis, hardliners could have ousted Khrushchev. Then the careful agreement reached by both sides could have collapsed and the crisis situation resumed. ’

‘The Republicans would presumably see him as soft on Vietnamese Communism.

Is he?’

‘He’s against repeating the ‘Munich mistake”. At the same time he’s understandably wary of escalating the war to a point where the Chinese might feel compelled to intervene, as they had during the war in Korea. While he favours a gradualist approach to U. S. involvement in Vietnam—in order to maintain the U. S. obligation to Vietnam under SEATO-he takes a tough line on  Communists pursuing `wars of national liberation.’ He derides this term as upside-down language. He embraces the principle that the aggression they export should be contained and that force should be met with force.

‘Otherwise?’ I asked.

‘Otherwise, he says, the United States would be perceived as toothless, and would invite further Communist aggression, which could touch off nuclear wars. He believes if the Communist world finds out we are not pursuing our commitments, he doesn’t know where they will stay their hand. He compares his position to that of a soldier in a foxhole, defending his country against the Communist forces. The foxhole represents the democratic ideals we cherish together and fight for. ’

This sounded reasonable enough to me.

It was about a quarter to nine in the morning some time later when the black Cadillac arrived at the basement entry of the shapeless hulk of the State Department Building in Washington. Depositing the Secretary underground before the private lift that opened to his key. After stepping in, the doors closed and the lift automatically shot up, with no other stops, to the seventh floor. There it opened within the glass-walled green-planted inner sanctum where he kept his office.

His tasks were waiting at his desk. Sorting out the message traffic flowing from departmental outposts around the world, the flood of words from all sources that arrived overnight for his consideration . Hush hush reports of the intelligence agencies CIA, Army and others, summarized for his first briefing. Messages from various parties to national conflicts trying to elicit understanding and support of things as they saw it. By instinct, philosophy and experience he found his way through it. More than any other individual, he was deputized to develop from all this information a picture clear enough for the President to act and the people to respond. Some dispatches making him pause, others he could dismiss to others. Some eyes-only, signalling alarm, he of course being in the popular imagination the bearer of ill tidings. Such as those from Saigon delivering the  daily tally of killing and intrigue from the jungle war. With news of impending defeat the inertial force of habit and of bureaucracy overpowered the evidence at hand. This would have required too much of a counter-effort. Personal plans would have to be altered; holidays and leave cancelled; daily habits of comfort and convenience abandoned.

It was easier to accept the other dispatches flashing opportunity and hope. As usual General Westmoreland’s ever-optimistic line about how things were going. He had said it would be a ‘cakewalk’- no more than a ‘brush-fire war’. The North Vietnamese or the Vietcong were incapable of dry-gulching his troops;they only ever came across them playing it by ear, in unexpected encounters. The NLF were unable to replace their huge losses. The U. S. was reaching the cross over point, when the enemy’s losses would exceed their ability to replace them through either infiltration from the north or recruitment in the south. They were being worn down and their will broken. The end of the war was in sight, in fact just around the corner. Rusk sharply drew in breath as Westmoreland added if only, as he repeatedly requested, the number of troops on the case could be bumped up. Hundreds of thousands over and above the half million that were already there. It seemed that losses could only be justified by risking even more.

And then crossing his desk was a letter of assurance like mine, urging Rusk that U. S. foreign policy in South East Asia continue to provide emerging nations with technical and humanitarian assistance to speed them along the path toward modernity and democracy. That we had to wheedle and needle the South Vietnamese officials to mend their  ways and broaden the base of a creaky government, to modernize their whole society. They should provide greater security for their allied forces against any act of terrorism. 

Any military involvement was to be to protect the population from guerrilla attacks and those carrying such relief. In nation building, we had to help the South Vietnamese help themselves. Ultimately they had to sink or swim on their own. This was what Arthur Calwell had called for. How simple it all sounded.

 Rusk’s support for the mass murders in Indonesia were not publicly known yet. He had affirmed U.S. support for the “elimination of the PKI.

Action Stations.

‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war. ’

Shakespeare ‘Julius Caesar’

In early 1965 the Colonel had told members of our Company in a briefing:

‘Word has it we’re sending combat troops to Vietnam. A battalion. Our instructors have been preparing the way. ’

‘What’s the go with conscription ?’he was asked.

‘Our military need supplementary personnel’, said the Colonel. ‘We have to build the Australian Army to a size where enough infantry battalions are available to rotate into the war and then return home for retraining and equipping.

We face a serious threat from our north. The Soviet Union and China have regional designs. China, so large, looms over our neighbours’ frontiers. The fall of the South Vietnamese government would lead to other allied governments going bung. You have a row of ‘dominos’ set up. You knock over the first one and the last one will certainly go over. The takeover of this country would be a direct military threat to Australia and all the countries of South and South-East Asia’, he intoned .  Totalitarianism would follow suit below the seventeenth parallel, replacing Western oriented governments.

It must be seen as part of a thrust by Red China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. President Kennedy says it is part of a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that if it achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”

This won’t be anything like the siege of the Boxers at Peking that Mao praises so highly. This will last more than 55 days if we just fold our arms and yield to them. It’s our duty to support our American brothers in arms to bolt the gates. This is our first order of business. To keep Australia safe and inviolable. We have to take the fight to them. We must fight them over there so that we do not have to fight them here.’

‘A fail-safe strategy,’ I suggested.

‘Just in case something goes wrong. For the moment Westmoreland’s the one holding the line, ’ he said holding up a cover of Time’ magazine.

‘The thin red line as it were. Mark my words, his fighting phalanx standing at the ready is all that stands between battalions of Chinese on the move, thrusting downwards towards us at will.  We don’t want to end up in the claws of the dragon. His men are what enable us to sleep safely at night. His men are a tripwire, our first line of defence. The tip of the spear. They will prove once again a match  for the invaders as they did in Korea.’

‘ A Roland for their Oliver.’

Westmoreland certainly looked the part of such a commander: a textbook version of how a general should look: ramrod straight, well over 6ft tall, with a purposeful jut-jawline and always confident of victory.

‘What’s his military background?’ I asked.

‘‘He saw action in North Africa, Sicily and Europe during World War II. He attained the rank of colonel by the time he was 30. As commander of the 34th Field Artillery Battalion fighting German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, he earned the loyalty and respect of his troops for joining in the thick of battle rather than remaining behind the lines at a command post. He later led troops in conflicts in France, Germany, and Belgium.

Like Monty, Westy  played a vital role in shutting out  entry of more Nazis at the gate.

 At this conjuncture U.S. forces were converging with those of the Soviets, their tanks  closing in on and crushing   both flanks of  the German formations.’

‘Pincering the panzers, ’I said , ‘enabling the allied armies to link up.’

‘Wiping out any remaining pockets of resistance. They had to contend with those who had gone along with the enemy.’

‘You would have heard a lot about Westmoreland, wouldn’t you, Colonel’, I said.

‘His reputation preceded me when I was stationed on the Rhine after the War. Westmoreland had been at the wrong end of an enemy tank, field gun, and attack plane—and was now at the right end of our own, He had faced particularly brutal times when his division was able to capture and hold the last standing bridge on the Rhine River, the bridge at Remagen.

He and his men had to defend it from enemy troops for two weeks; this gave the Allies time to build their own bridge. Their actions helped end World War II in Europe. Kennedy picked him for Vietnam when he was superintendent of West Point. ’

‘He must inspire confidence’.

‘At the sharp end of this war, he’s a force to be reckoned with A man of his word.

We need to come through for him. To be on the front foot. To stand fast. Think of it as a down payment for US help if Australia were ever attacked’, continued the Colonel.

‘ An insurance policy’, I suggested.

‘You could put it that way’, he said. ‘War is one of those possible unfortunate events for which we have to pay a premium to protect ourselves against. ’

‘How do you remember the world war yourself?’ I said, still having in mind the gleaming white battleship  in front of which Eleanor Powell, backed by an extravagantly costumed chorus, sings and dances “Swingin’ the jinx away’, culminating in a patriotic salute, and finally a blast of cannon fire.

I still had in mind a vision splendid of the land of liberty.

‘As an amateur theatre production. Unrehearsed and over long. We must never leave our defences down again. Never be caught napping. Never let the enemy draw first blood. We must get any combat over and done with swiftly and decisively. ’

Under such influence and those of my provenance, I went along with the war in it’s initial phase, an ever so brief dalliance. I started out with generally conventional views formed by global containment and the sense that the flow of refugees was east to west. However I started in on the U. S. government’s tactical failures, the ridiculously disproportional bombing campaign, but not its gambit. ‘Can we get away with it?’ was my commonly asked question. American forces often went into these battles in helicopters, beating a hasty retreat the way they had come but leaving many to wonder why ground won with such difficulty could be surrendered with such ease. I took it as read the war could be won if only the right tactics were used. I was wary of any large conventional combat commitment. There was little discussion of right or wrong. We were training to be steely eyed dealers of death, disfigurement and dismemberment.

Concealment and Deception.

At a lecture given at one of our basic training classes, a senior officer explained the nature of the war we were entering:

‘A word of warning to all you would be warriors. This conflict and those our fathers fought are chalk and cheese. In those both sides had huge citizens armies, men in uniform who volunteered for the duration of the war. The boundaries were clearly drawn, there were rules and codes of conduct for both soldiers and civilians. The enemy was clearly distinguishable and there were clear procedures to follow if you were either captured or wounded. Today we have a relatively small professional standing army . We are up against a well equipped, elusive human enemy, the NVA.

They have supplies filtering through from China and Russia as well as the NLF, the “Viet Cong” who blend invisibly with the local population until they choose to fight. The enemy has no size, no shape and no rules. They’re peasants from small villages. And they shoot at us from hooches and from paddy fields. Some of them are women, some of them are children. Nailing them is like trying to pin jelly to a wall. Like an apparition, they appear and disappear at will. ’

‘What is the overall strategy for their successes?’

‘Look at their strategy through their eyes. Consider how they adjust to an unfavourable balance of forces. In guerilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths. ’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, if they’re big and you’re small, then you’re mobile and they’re slow.

You grow stronger as they grow weaker. You’re hidden and they’re exposed.

’‘So the VC is everywhere and nowhere. ’

‘ They do have a base of course. They use the population as a source of recruits, food, taxes and intelligence on enemy movements .

They own the country at night, hiding in the shadows, picking at ARVN scabs til they bleed. They can penetrate perimeter U.S. defences. ’

‘How do you counter such an elusive enemy?’ I asked. ‘How do we shoot if we don’t know where they’re going to be?’

‘As hunters we have to flush these cunning foxes out of their coverts into open ground.’

‘How do we know who’s down there in them?’

‘We eventually find out. We find their weak spots and hit them where it hurts most. They’re not fireproof. So we fumigate. Smoke them out of their hidey-holes. Fire in the hole! We entice them into showing their hand. The coughing gives them away. We deny them food and access to the people.’

‘That sounds like a tall order to fill.’

‘We mount intensive ambuscades and patrol around populated areas. Eventually, the insurgents are forced to come out and fight to maintain access to the population. At that point we can hit them with all we’ve got. We deliver the deathblow. They don’t know what’s hit them. ’

‘Surprise is a big element for us too. How can they counter this? ’I asked. ‘

‘They have an ace in the hole. You never knew who is the enemy and who is the foe. They all look alike. They all wear the same garb. You never know if they’re going to help you or shoot you in the back. They lead double lives. One you see, and one you don’t. Trust me. They’ll smile at you one moment and knife you the next  given half a chance.’

‘Who decides who is Charlie and who is not, ”I asked. ‘From pictures I have seen of him, I wouldn’t know him from Adam.

Or from Madam. ’

‘It’s up to the individual soldier to decide’, he replied. ‘They have to show great restraint. I know what you’re thinking. Innocent civilians get rubbed out in this game of hide and seek. Of course sometimes we have to use a little gentle persuasion.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘What do you think I mean. Work it out. We have ourselves a friendly conversation in the language the VC understands only too well. After all they’re outlaws and renegades.’

‘What if they have families who depend on them. What info do you have on them?’ ‘We have to operate on a need-to know basis. It’s up to the VC to stop using civilians and relatives to hide behind. They’ve got extensive staging areas and infiltration routes. These are impervious to permanent denial by our air or ground forces. The V.C. are generally indistinguishable from the village population we are meant to protect. They don’t wear uniforms and blend into the people and the countryside. ’

‘You don’t know where you stand, ’I commented.

‘Or what you’re standing on. The enemy includes women and children who might be implicated in setting lethal ambushes, landmines as well as maiming booby traps, containing both snakes and stakes, sharpened bamboo spears. ’

‘No shit!’ exclaimed one of my incredulous fellow trainees.

‘On the contrary. They smear it on the needle like tips to ensure infection. Simple but effective. They are fierce, skilled, well organised fighters and don’t stand and fight on conventional terms, offering targets. They don’t stick around and generally they fight on ground of their own choosing.’

Their credo is—-anyone?’

‘Don’t fight unless you’re sure you can win. ’

‘Correct. They know the land like the back of their hand.  They pass this knowledge on in their jungle training camps.

 As illiteracy and lack of education are often a problem for the people, they take steps to correct this, focussing on the history and culture of Vietnam.

Their military approach is one of constant movement and fluid shifting strategy. They choose their own battle. Some volunteer as bait, acting as decoys to draw us in. They feint, use quick hit-and-run tactics, and, when fighting pitched battles, only engage us at close quarters to make it hard for us to use our air superiority.

‘They test us then they best us. ’

‘You can put it like that. Often after combat the only trace of the enemy is a blood spoor. The Viet Cong are known to lift mines we have planted and used them as a source of supply in their own operations. When these phantoms of the jungle find we aren’t using the tracks but fanning out through the jungle, they re-position these toe poppers and bouncing betties so we will trigger them ourselves. The easy way is always mined as are helicopter landing zones, narrow passages, paddy fields,

tree and fence lines, trail junctions, and other commonly travelled routes. Meanwhile the VC use the jungle trails like highways, because they know the tracks are free . You’ve got to imagine the whole country like this. One complete area of operations. No front line. The next turn can be the wrong turn. Things just jump out at you. Death can come from anywhere, at any time. ’

‘Luck must play a big part in how you avoid  it, ’I said.

‘Luck doesn’t live out in the jungle. It lives where you get hit by a car or not.It lives where someone breaks into your home or someone else’s. That’s luck, that’s winning or losing.

In the jungle you survive or you surrender. That’s determined by your strength and bare spirit. Guerillas don’t kill the unlucky regular. They kill the weak ones.’

‘How would you distinguish how soldiers experience this kind of warfare on a daily basis from that of our fathers?’

‘In past wars the soldier endured major campaigns and battles with periods of respite. Today he’ll endure a shorter tour of duty with constant irregular sequences of skirmishes with little or no respite. Sleep comes in irregular and ill-timed little chunks to those on operations. It’s a combination of intense stress, fear and endless boredom. Much of his time comprises pumped up, enervating patrols, clad in clothes and boots that are dabby for days on end, with constant threats from foul water, unsafe local food, composite rations, skin eruptions, intestinal disorders, and malarial infection . His campaign comprises an irregular sequence of skirmishes in which apparent successes are measured by ground half-secured and counts of enemy dead, which might again be innocent villagers. On top of all this is blue on blue. Friendly fire.’

‘No guesses from where’, I remarked. ‘There’s an World War II saying, “When the British shoot, the Germans duck, when the Germans shoot, the British duck, when the Americans shoot, everybody ducks…..”

‘They create a lot of collateral damage. They operate on the strategy that because they have such overwhelming firepower, they can let loose and statistically be bound to hit something they want to.’

‘They obviously calculate the  mistakes they make will fade away in people’s memory while that the greatness of their prizes remains.’

‘Then there’s the vexed matter of their discipline. We hear stories of American patrol units moving carelessly, noisily through the jungle smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio. Is this for real?’I asked, ‘in light of our national servicemen being able to be sent to Vietnam for secondment to American forces. ‘Australians fight a different war to the Americans, ’was the reply. ‘Less thunder and lighting- but better . We fight fire with fire. With mundane search and destroy missions, ambush patrols, the constant stress of slow movement through the bush, taking hours at a snail’s pace to cover a few kilometres, grid square by grid square, constant stopping, listening for enemy activity and then moving on again.

Our huckleberry friends, on the other hand, often mount large scale actions supported by immense artillery and air support, are highly mobile and use different tactical doctrine. At the same time they have exposed themselves to mortal ambushes that have claimed so many dead. When our patrols give chase to the guerrillas often covering the same ground and running into similar enemy emplacements our response is different. The Americans use a hammer. We prefer a scalpel. And we take pains to bury the bodies of our slain adversaries. The Americans would do well to follow our example’.

‘How do they learn this?’ I asked.

‘They’ll never know unless we tell them, ’came back the reply.

I would pass on my critical support to Westmoreland.

He came on like his feet were firmly planted on the ground. I had heard this old warhorse in a rarely mentioned radio interview in November 1965 when he showed a sense of reality about what he faced in Vietnam: “When the American people read the headlines about victories, there may be a tendency for them to magnify the magnitude of these actions. I do believe that there is a certain danger that we will be overwhelmed by a feeling of optimism and may lose sight of what I consider a true appraisal of the situation … It involves a long conflict and we must be prepared to accept this. ’

I reminded him of the rules of engagement and against violating the established strategic injunction. Never to commit Western military power to an extended large-scale land war on the mainland of Asia. Our naval and air power’s effectiveness would be diluted, and any adversaries could exploit their great preponderance of manpower and pin us down for an uncertain duration.

The Night Of The Long Knives.

As it turned out there was said to be an even more most immediate threat. The Communists were said to be on our doorstep. Indonesia, the Cold War’s coveted prize, had a populist President who had an alliance with the PKI or Indonesian Communist Party.It’s members routinely expressed their demands openly such as in this street demonstration on September 9, 1965.

To demonstrate their numbers 100,000 members and sympathizers of the Communist Party, the third largest in the world, had gathered in the Russian built sports stadium in Jakarta to celebrate the party’s 45th anniversary. The party symbol of a soldier, a labourer and a farmer stood below a portrait of President Sukarno.

Behind the policies that led us to Vietnam, ‘the other side of the hill’, lay a preoccupation with Indonesia’s real or supposed ambitions. The U.S. government believed that Sukarno and the PKI were threatening to make Indonesia the “next China,” endangering U.S. strategic and commercial interests.

It feared that Mao’s Little Red Book urging the weak to overcome the strong, a sentiment so potent for anti-colonial audiences worldwide, was pumping out a dangerous message.

From  the perspective of the  British and Australian governments there was a fear that Indonesia might cause trouble across the border between the western half of New Guinea which came under control in 1962, and the eastern half, administered by Australia.

Australia and Britain also wanted to end ‘Konfrontasi’ or Confrontation, the low-level military and political campaign launched by Sukarno  against the Malaysian Federation.

This undeclared war was in response to British plans to create an independent state of Malaysia out of its colonial possessions. It included military incursions over the border into East Malaysia. Sukarno, like many Indonesians, including the PKI, believed the creation of a Malaysian federation was unwarranted regional interference by the British to maintain their colonial dominance.

The US appeared to act as an impartial mediator in the dispute.

Subsequently British officials secretly deployed black propaganda to incite prominent Indonesians to “cut out” the “communist cancer”. The PKI were portrayed as intent on breaking up and dividing the country so as to rule.

In his “year of living dangerously” speech in August 1964 a phrase remembered in the West as just the title of a 1982 movie with Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, Sukarno spoke about the Indonesian ideal of national independence which he had  led to realisation.

He warned about how it was struggling to stay afloat in “an ocean of subversion and intervention from the imperialists and colonialists.”

He built strong relations with the two huge Communist states.

At the same time he aimed to maintain good relations with  the capitalist West .He met with Johnson and Rusk to discuss the situation regarding Konfrontasi.

However his involvement in the Non-Aligned Movement and anti-colonial politics made  him, like Castro a target of the United States.

His friendship with Nasser likewise didn’t exactly endear him to them.

in the early hours of 1 October 1965 truckloads of soldiers rumbled through Jakarta’s dimly lit streets. Leftist officers associated with ‘The September 30  Movement’, under the command of Lt-Col Untung of the presidential guard, supported by a handful of battalions, attempted a pre-emptive strike against the army’s high command. They were convinced, with some justification, that the largely anti-Communist army was planning to overthrow Sukarno and suppress the PKI. They hauled six army generals out of their homes, killing the three who put up a fight and executing the others back at a military camp .  Abdul Nasution escaped this fate when armed men entered his home and tried to arrest him, but his infant daughter was killed. He was grief stricken.

The stillborn military coup and the response convulsed Indonesia and was a turning point which eventually led to the replacement of the non-aligned President and a change in the direction of the country towards the capitalist West. During this time Indonesia became quite cut off from the world and one heard of serious numbers of of killings.

For my part it was a sad and sorry introduction to how some can cruelly carry out the like and get away with it.

With Studious Care.

As rumours trickled through that something big and heavy was going down in the north, David spoke to me about the frightening picture taking shape and it’s effects here.

“Our Indonesian friends feel a great sorrow. These events are very much to their detriment. We can expect that there will be an impact, both personal and academic, on anyone from there” David said. “Their families have all been affected. They must be worried sick about their safety in the wake of this turmoil. It’s hard for them to talk about it expansively as the situation back home is so muddied and perilous. The least we can do is to help them put their minds to rest about their studies while they get through this tragedy”.

We redoubled our efforts paying special attention to their needs. I enjoined Rick Lay to take a breather at my place in Gunnedah which he took me up on. He responded to my family’s warm hospitality with great gaiety, clearly enjoying the region’s peaceful calm.

Too calm deemed some, trumpeting with loud clangour. Lulled into a false sense of security, moves were afoot to roust us with a clarion call to arms.

The Gathering Storm.

What did you learn in school today,

Dear little boy of mine?

What did you learn in school today,

Dear little boy of mine?

I learned that policemen are my friends.

I learned that  justice never ends.

I learned that murderers die for their crimes

Even if we make a mistake sometimes.

Pete Seeger.

As the clouds of war gathered on the horizon and Vietnam went up in flames, Australia’s military involvement there gathered pace. The Indonesian confrontation had been part of a gradual expansion of Australia’s foreign policy into South-East Asia. The potential loss of Vietnam was seen  as great a threat as the fall of the Indonesia “domino” into the communist camp.  Military success during the Malay Emergency and against Indonesian forces  during Konfrontasi created a false impression. It created the misapprehension that what could be done at the strategic level against Indonesia could be replicated in Vietnam.

Tiny glimmerings of the massive human suffering in Vietnam under the bombardment came to the outside world.

This included the dropping of the hideous, jellied gas, napalm burning at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

 I read as extensively as I could about the struggle between Communism and the Western states, immersing myself in all the documents, books and articles I could find on the subject.

I aimed to come to a fully satisfactory explanation of Communism that Rusk found elusive. To bridge that great gulf of understanding between that world and our world, ideological in character. To enter into their minds across that great ideological gulf and find out if and in what ways their processes of logic were so different.

 I was particularly interested in how these applied to human rights.  Rusk constantly took the Soviets to task for not defending these .

 The Director.

The due administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good Government.

George Washington.

Culling ideas from far and wide, barely scratching the surface, I raised many of the pertinent questions piling up.  It had seemed to me unreasonable that our government would be willing to risk sort of our long-term faith in the institution of government for short-term political advantage. I was only nineteen, too young to vote, too young to drink. Green in judgement and in uniform, I thought long and hard, determined to listen to all sides. These informed my ideas even if I couldn’t agree with them less. Now those pushing for the War in Vietnam depicted it as a crucial struggle by the ‘Free World’ against a clear and present danger. This was the view I received from an unimpeachable source- the interminable Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ‘Speedy’, nicknamed for his rapidness of delivering groceries, got back to me quickly. J. Edgar Hoover was the complete master of the Bureau’s huge flow of paper work. From his fiefdom, throned  amid flags behind a raised, polished mahogany desk at the end of a 35-foot office, the dark curled head of the state security apparatus wrote encouraging me to read what he had written.

I found his comments on Communism of great interest. Mmm. This was a lot to take in.

I wanted to know more and discussed it with David over a meal of gristly lamb chops..

‘Russel Ward has his views about him. He’s been dining out on them for years. Let me ask him if he’s got a spare moment”.

David approached this dapper looking gentleman of my father’s vintage, eating breakfast by himself at the next table.

‘May I have a word, Russel. ’

Russel was only too happy to oblige.

‘ Go for your life. Be my guest. Let’s chew the fat together, ’he said in his pukka accent.
David said, ‘You shouldn’t be eating such blue ribbon lamb chops alone. ’

‘Oh, no, not alone. As you can see, I’ve got mashed spuds and peas’ he said,sucking the marrow out of his chops. ’

David brought up the matter of Hoover.

I asked Russel to discuss his ideas.

‘So what does he write about Communism?’asked Russel.

‘Feel free to read his speech, ‘Faith of Free Men’. Shall I pass it on to you?’

‘Thank you very little. I’ll waste no time reading it. ’

‘So you’re familiar with his books?’

I’ve looked at these works in libraries. Once you put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up. ’

‘Some call them page turners.’

‘That’s the minimum you’d expect from any book.’

‘Some say they are ghostwritten. ’

‘Too true, too true. You can see right through them. ’

‘Others say his writings are unadulterated rot.’

‘It’s not true. They’re highly adulterated.’

‘This top cop portrays the Communists as “Masters of Deceit”, preying on the innocent so as to deliver the ‘ Land of the Free’ into the hands of the Soviets. He decries other authorities as being too lenient on those they see as subversives. Holding the thin blue line, he will weed them out if given a free hand. He claims to have been primed in the works of Marx and Lenin, and Stalin. ’

‘He should know’, said Russel.‘ Stalin created a state of terror based upon fearmongering- in which an enemy is  ginned up ,its numbers exaggerated and targeted. While not on the same scale, Hoover did something outrageous in a country that prides itself in it’s democracy. He executed the ‘red raids’-the hysterical dragnet arrests of thousands of innocent aliens in 1919 and 1920.

He still  continues his Enemy Alien program investigating  those he suspects as being radical and subversive.’

‘That’s one monumental ego you’ve stroked. What on earth inspired you to make nice with such a person? ’he asked. ‘He’s famous for disarming criminals but not for his disarming charm, He’s not famous for his compassion-except for pooches. 

‘ In the first instance I thanked him for the F. B. I. seizing the slayers of Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo last year. They captured them only hours after the civil rights worker’s shotgun death near Selma .

I thanked him on behalf of his men who  foiled wartime attempts to carry out acts of sabotage along the New York waterfront. They bagged German saboteurs within days after their submarines landed them on the Atlantic Coast. ’

‘There are the awestruck who say he represents everything that is good and right about America’, said Russel, ‘that every word out of his mouth is some holy nugget. They say the sun shines out of his arse. ’

‘While he has steered clear of the Mafia, allowing it to operate nationally, his bureau did carry out some seemingly miraculous sweeps in the thirties when gangsterism ruled the land. It made the once epidemic crime of kidnapping a rarity. He has been touted like gangbusters by  Cardinal Spellman as the nation’s saviour’.

‘And he rested on the seventh day, ’said Russel.  ‘This is all to the good, but let’s skip the puffery and forget the op shots.  Let’s face facts- nabbing gangsters is what he’s supposed to do. Credit where credit’s due. And incidentally, most of it is due to his agents. The comic books you read showed him swinging a machine gun to make arrests. That’s pure fiction. Puff pieces.

‘What about his  military record in the First World War?’

‘He has never been willing to discuss how he himself  managed to avoid being drafted. Yet he supported  the imprisonment of opponents of America’s involvement in it despite the mass campaign to set them free.’

‘At least in the case of Mrs. Liuzzo, he has done the right thing.’

‘ I hate to break it to you. There’s another less appealing aspect to this man’s record. He’s better known for his antipathy to the civil rights movement. President Johnson made sure to focus on the positive work of the FBI agents’ solving of the murder of Viola Liuzzo.

 This was an attempt to divert scrutiny away from the fact that one of the KKK men in the car of killers, Gary Thomas Rowe, Jr., was an FBI informant and therefore  protected from prosecution. He had been planted in the KKK, his real identity hidden from them.

Now get this-the agency later leaked what were purported to be salacious details about this brave lady. It attempted to downplay the situation and discredit her by spreading rumours that she was a member of the Communist Party, was a heroin addict, a malignant busybody and a tramp. It engineered the smear that  to have sexual relationships with African-Americans involved in the Civil Rights Movement she  had abandoned her children.

None of these has been either proved or substantiated in any way.’

‘How long has he had this attitude ?’

‘Allan, Do you want to know the truth?’

‘I’ve been told it will set me free.’

‘He’s always had a problem with African Americans. He hounded Marcus Garvey out of the country in 1923.

 He  arranged for an article, titled “Paul Robeson – the Lost Shepherd”, to be printed and distributed in Africa in order to damage Robeson’s reputation and reduce his popularity and Communism’s popularity in colonial countries. When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that Southern blacks could not turn to their local F. B. I. offices with any assurance of sympathy or zeal for civil rights, Hoover called the reverend of peace “the most notorious liar in the country. Later, he had his staff invite newsmen to hear the taped record of F. B. I. bugs in Dr. King’s hotel rooms. He cited this as hard evidence that ‘moral degenerates were leading the movement. ’

                                                                 

‘ Who’s the traitor to the truth here. If this is true, Hoover has allowed himself to aid and abet the salacious claims of Southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements. ’

‘Hoover claims that there’s nothing ‘political’ about the F. B. I., that it’s tout court a ‘fact-finding agency’ that it ‘never makes recommendations or draws conclusions. Most revealingly he believes that justice is merely incidental to law and order.

Of course that’s how the bourgeois legal system operates. In it  justice has nothing to do with the truth. It’s a game, with ridiculous rules.’

‘And this man is  head of the Justice Department! So this image of him as a tough honest to God, incorruptible street fighting man is bunkum?’

‘It’s tough at the top, Allan,at the right hand of God. The daily restaurant dining, only the best hotel rooms, the lickspittle service, the sun that falls on the racecourse stands. It’s rumoured that when he loses, his losses are covered. ’

‘Everything on the house! So that’s what draws him there. ’

‘One for the money, two for the show. ’

‘Are there no regulations to prevent this? Are there no checks and balances?

‘There’s more than meets the FBI. It’s a closed shop. No living soul from outside  gets in. The Mafia make out the cheques and Hoover improves his bank balance. Onto a sure thing.  Having  the inside track, he heads straight to the winners’ circle . He doesn’t have to listen to the feedbox noise. He listens to gangsters like Meyer Lansky.’

‘He’s a leading figure in the underworld.’

‘You might say in the overworld. Or even in the coverworld. For most people a race track is a place where windows clean people. For Hoover it’s a place where everything is completely covered. ’

‘So it is true. Crime doesn’t pay. ’

‘He is said to spend more time there rubbing shoulders with mobsters and washing his hands after people shake them than busting organized crime syndicates. ‘

‘Not washing them of culpability.’

‘In fact this germophobe denies organised crime exists.’

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Can’t he follow the long paper trail they must leave? They might spend very little on office supplies but they take in many millions of banknotes every year’.

‘In practice he puts just enough pressure on them to get them in a flap, make them nervous, not to raise their hackles completely. Why do people honour this man? Have we run out of human beings?’

‘One of his friends is the feared and fearsome lawyer Roy Cohn. He  embraces this pugnacious adviser’s hit-back-harder style.’

‘I don’t know any more what people see in Hoover. ’

‘That makes two us. He’s bought and paid for. ’

‘’Rented and on lay by more like. His agents seem to work in some ways just like the Mob. Same difference?’

‘Theres a big difference, Allan. The Mob is run by vicious, lying, cheating psychopaths. Hoover and his enforcers work for the President of the United States of America.’
‘Heil, Der Chief!’

The Bureau says it must follow where the facts lead it. So if you were asked now if you go along with him, Allan, what would you say?’

‘‘Nothing doing. I didn’t see him for what he is I’ve got my life savings that says he’s a bad pony. The wrong one to back. I wouldn’t bet on him if you paid me. I can see now his lukewarmness to the civil right movement. If that’s the case he’s not fit to breathe the same air as Dr. King. He’s obviously got a big axe to grind about Communism. With him, it’s all very black and white-and red. ’

‘His boast is his agents are very highly trained’, said Russel. ’To further the application of science to police work, many are attending universities to do research. ’

‘DNA testing, fingerprinting, laboratory procedures’, I said.

‘Those too, but also archiving the views and activities of people of interest. Sleuthing the most intimate details of their lives, their sexual peccadillos and personal matters.

 

  Conducting ‘black bag jobs’- illegal break-ins and stings,

Tapping telephones

 

Planting microphones.

‘That’s the wrong arm of the law.’

‘This twisted, squirrely plenipotentiary is pushing for more penitentiaries. While he is playing the ponies, his men in black suits with spit polished shoes seem to show up wherever American student activists repair after being beaten up. From his bully pulpit he claims anti-war protesters are ‘halfway citizens who are neither morally nor mentally mature. ’He wants them to think there are red agents behind every letter box, under every bed. Trying to disrupt constitutionally protected political activities, his special agents use all kinds of hanky panky to stifle dissent on the campus.’

HUAC, McCarthy and the FBI created the 1950’s silent generation that feared controversy and only discussed babies and baseball. However as the country became more affluent and war babies came of age, they could not understand how this affluence did not spread to everyone. The labels of ‘Communist’ they created did not instil fear in this generation.

‘What’s so special about these agents? And who is their main target?’ I asked, my jaw dropping.

‘ The Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in particular has sent up red flags with the F. B. I. ’ Russel said. ‘Here is a public university that offers a tuition-free education rivalling those offered by Harvard, Princeton, or Yale; employing a constellation of Nobel laureates, and holds millions of dollars in government research contracts.

‘I can imagine how envious fundamentalist free marketeers would feel about that’, I said. ‘Lay out for me the agency’s activities  there, Russel. ’

‘Even as the university was helping the nation win World War II by overseeing the development of the atomic bomb, Hoover sent his agents were on a long fishing expedition.  He suspected Berkeley students and professors of spying for the Soviet Union.

In the cold war atmosphere of the late 40s and early 50s, the director’s concern had grown when scores of faculty members refused to sign a special loyalty oath for university employees.

‘What’s the situation there now? Are they biting?’’

‘Over the last year the university’s been posing an even greater challenge to authority, generating one provocation after another. Hoover is said to be still spitting chips about the optional essay question for applicants in 1959. It asked, “What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?” Reference to the matter is  airbrushed out of the official Bureau accounts. He is keeping a close eye on anti-war demonstrations attended by figures such as Eugene McCarthy.

He was concerned about student participation in the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall and attempts to delay trains carrying troops bound for Vietnam.

‘Have they landed any big fish? Is there any one particular official Hoover holds responsible for allowing these actions, I asked?’

‘The campus President, Clerk Kerr. The wire haired attack dog for the corporate state saw him as insubordinate.

Clerk opened it to free speech in more ways than one. He lifted the ban against Communist speakers, saying the role of the university is not to make ideas safe for students but to make students safe for ideas. He believes that students can make up their minds and make the correct decision if they are allowed to consider all sides of a dispute. ’

‘Have all sides accepted this being fair to all?’

‘All this ran counter to the direction of the conservative leadership of the UC Regents and, last year, of the newly elected Republican governor, Ronald Reagan. In January 1967, three weeks after this straight man to a chimpanzee took office, the Regents dismissed Kerr. ’

‘There was a new sheriff in town, gunning for those professors he believed were ‘using the university pulpit to propagate their ideas’ and  ‘cloaking their subversive activities in academic freedom’.’

Aha! I was on the ball at last clued in straight from the horse’s mouth as well as it’s critics’. Carrying out a full field investigation, I deconstructed Hoover’s writings further. The name of the game became abundantly clear . The greatest tool of unscrupulous politicians wherever, without necessarily reaching the extent it did in Russia, or Germany or Indonesia, had to be fearmongering. It was the bullish Hoover’s skilful stage-management of publicity and emotional appeals to patriotism, as much as his heavy fisted, long reaching tentacles that made him the powerful incontestable figure he cut. Capturing the headlines and the public fancy, the making of the Hoover folk hero had established him securely. Sowing division and mistrust, aiming to disrupt, his staff had to be careful when approaching him.

To successive presidents, wary of offending him, aware of his hair-trigger sensitivity to criticism, he was known as ‘The Boss’.

To many others he was ‘Public Enema Number One’.

To the future president Trump he was a model whose  tyrannical playbook and that of Cohn he would revive.  Trump’s appeal for ‘alternative facts’, his urge to mask improprieties, would come as no surprise.

And it would come as no surprise that Hoover would eventually be revealed as having green lighted the murderous 1969 pre-dawn raid that killed Black Panther Fred Hampton.

.He was alarmed by the spectre of black empowerment .

He was increasingly alarmed by the activities of Angela Davis. He would list her on the  the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List. Nixon would congratulate the Bureau on its “capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis.’’

 

Reds Under The Bed.

‘Everybody’s afraid of being called a ‘Red. ’ I cut myself shaving and was afraid to bleed”. Bob Hope.

‘What did Napoleon do for relaxation? He read a book. What did Lincoln do for relaxation? He read a book. What does Congress do for relaxation? They book a red. ’ Jimmy Durante.

Taking all this in, it dawned on me that it was this police czar who was the driving force behind the Red Scare, that pivotal episode in modern history. In April 1920 concerns peaked with Hoover telling the nation to prepare for bloody uprising on May Day.His force worked hand in hand with with local police to catch labour organizers.

It was a largely successful attempt to sit on those expressing themselves and organizing legitimately, a national spasm of hatred and curtailment of liberties.

It would be replicated a generation later after the Second World War, and once more Hoover and the Bureau were centrally involved.

His fingerprints were all over McCarthy’s ackamaracka.

He supplied writers for them and instructed this strawman how to organise background briefings which allow a public relations team to get their messages into the press without having to stand behind what they say. He instructed him how to release a story just before press deadline. That way reporters wouldn’t have time to ask for rebuttals. Even more important, he advised him to avoid the phrase ‘card-carrying Communist’ which usually couldn’t be proven, substituting “Communist sympathizer’ or ‘loyalty risk.’ which required only some affiliation, however slight. If anyone suspected twitched in the wrong direction, the hammer would come down.

Hoover was both a product of and a major contributor to some of the ugliest moments in American history. This publicity bloodhound’s achievements are a particular kind of American success story, and a very disturbing one.  The star chamber inquisition in which suspected Communists were hunted out, muckraked and removed officially lasted from 1950 to 1954 but its corrosive effect lingered for much longer. It’s hard to overstate the strength of the hysteria it vented.

It aroused fears and suspicions and created hatred and bitterness.  It stifled debate and dissent. Its hallmarks were a warlock’s brew of character assassination, guilt by association and trial by publicity.

This was the method exploited by the  media kingpin played by Burt Lancaster in ‘Sweet Smell of Success.’ The kingpin bullies a press agent into  planting a rumour  that a target of his [the kingpin]  is a marijuana-smoking Communist, enough to get him fired from his work.

 Its techniques were the innuendo, the fast and loose charge, the big baldfaced lie. Its rhetoric was to harp ad nauseam on an all encompassing and largely spurious threat – that of domestic Communism. All levels of government were said to be riddled with these traitors. The racial origins of most interest to those behind the campaign were Jewish although they obviously couldn’t spell this out.  This compounded the suspicion factor in the same way it did in the show trials in Prague. The Communist Party officials who were purged also just happened to be Jewish.  As early as 1943 Joe Kennedy’s F. B. I. file, making clear his willingness to uncover Communists in the film industry, said he had ‘many Jewish friends’ there. Kennedy’s many snide aspersions and comments about Jews are found in his private notes and letters to family and intimates.’

‘How did he reply to those who pointed out that Jesus was a Jew?’

‘Yes’. he had to  agree, ‘but only on his mother’s side’.

Joe was anti-semitic to the point of accusing them of deliberately provoking Hitler with their movies.’

‘What was the legacy of the House investigation into the American movie industry?

Convened to uncover enemy agents, expose Communist conspiracies and write anti-sedition laws, many millions of dollars later: agents uncovered, zero, conspiracies exposed, zero, anti-sedition laws written, zero.
All it did was to  deny people their right to work.

Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals,  each person reacted as his or her nature, needs, convictions and  particular circumstances compelled them to.

By convincing  Communist  Louis Budenz to ‘turn to God’, the media preacher Fulton Sheen delivered Hoover  a rat – and names, lots of them. A very ‘friendly witness’, Budenz enthusiastically performed. This stoolie, ‘queen for a day’, was paid handsomely for his squealing, singing and spilling. After lengthy  interviewing  by FBI agents he helped send several leaders of the American Communist Party to prison for treason.

It was a time of fear.No one was exempt. Scores of people lost their homes.Their families disintegrated.

So how were they ever justified?

In the early 1950s fears of Russia and the bomb were based on a solid enough foundation. This enabled McCarthy a backing he could never have received at another time. The Chinese Communist Party had gained plenary power, Eastern Europe was under Soviet control, blocking the United States’ access to markets and spheres of investment in one-sixth of the earth’s territory. It was feared Communist domination of world markets and food supplies would slowly strangle the West’s economies, greatly lower our standards of living  and relegate the U. S. in particular to the position of second-class power.  Big Business always feared  Soviet anti-capitalist rhetoric could spur workers to seize control.

Many feared that radical immigrants and home-grown revolutionaries threatened the government, the capitalist economy, and our way of life. They said  it sowed enmity and violent class struggle around the world.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough there was a series of spy scandals involving Americans allegedly  collaborating with the Soviet Union. It was feared any secrets they passed on could lead to cities like New York becoming an instant wasteland.

The success of the McCarthyists in feeding into these fears brings to mind the old adage that there where is smoke, there has to be fire.

No senator could be so impolitic or devil may care to make such unfounded charges.  There had to be something true to it.

Well wadda ya know, representatives of Bush the Lesser’s Administration would get up to the same old tricks, crying wolf, throwing out the red meat,getting one over  people,convincing them of the imminent threat posed by Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. Would anybody care? Hollywood had introduced us to them in ‘Vietnam: The Sequel’. They’re Muslims, aren’t they? El- Gog and El- Magog. And they all want to blow up everybody, don’t they?

And with oil on his brain, Bush was convinced the US could use more of their’s.

Dubya’s team thought carefully about what they’d name their operation to invade Iraq.

The original name of the invasion of Iraq was going to be Operation Iraqi Liberation, but they realized the acronym was OIL, and they had to change it.

To liberate the oil fields, the neocons carried out a totally unjustified pre-emptive strike in full view of the world.

Acting as God’s agents against Evil gave them the legitimacy they needed to do whatever they wanted.

Setting one Middle Eastern group, whether it be by religion, by sect, by ethnicity, against the other, they gave birth to a fundamentalist frankenstein’s monster that would turn on them and all. Like the Bourbons, they learned nothing and forgot nothing. A weakening, if not collapse, of the state created a vacuum in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq,  Yemen and Libya.

Into this space a culture of violence and religious demagoguery could thrive. The main target of the attacks would not be American power or Western culture, but the states of the Middle East themselves. This time it took people less time to see through their intentions as the cracks in the imperialist façade of supremacy and strength become so wide.

You can fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some the people all of the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.; But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Everybody’s got to learn sometime.

If one looks at the economic and political realities of the world, a new form of clarity is attenuated. People know that something is wrong intuitively, they only lack the will, the motivation, to fully embrace the revolution of the mind which necessarily leads to the results.

The reason they lack the will is because the relative comfort afforded by the state and economic system has had a numbing effect. Unemployment, dissipated life savings, poverty, all forms of financial struggle—these things have a way of temporarily pulling the veil down, which is why we see our political and financial ‘leaders’ scrambling to raise it yet again so that we’ll go number once again.

It’s the work of second-rate stage illusionists who reveal the machinery behind their deception, then hurry about the stage to reset the trick and carry on with the show as if nothing happened.

How could they do otherwise? Letting the cat out of the bag is a whole lot easier than putting it back in.

One of the main targets of McCarthyism was government officials.  Many people had to prove their loyalty.  In 1947 loyalty boards were established which were empowered to examine federal employees who could be sacked on the basis of anonymous accusations to the FBI without any specific finding that they had done anything disloyal.  Thousands of federal employees were summoned before kafkaesque loyalty hearings and many were forced from government work. Under these circumstances they found their career prospects truncated. The House of un-American Activities (H. U. A. C) was set up to  target more widely roping in any poor soul who they didn’t like the look of.

It was joked that every time the Russians threw an American into jail HUAC would retaliate-throwing an American into jail.

They went after people with a liberal outlook. Burt Lancaster was nearly blacklisted in the late 40’s because of this.  The FBI kept a file on him detailing his activities, as they had done on “the Almanac gang”, the folk musicians led by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger back in 1942. Following the directive of J. Edgar Hoover they watched them for signs of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. Others under surveillance included Paul Robeson and Pearl Buck. ‘ J. Eager Beaver’, the literary critic, amassed a dossier on Pearl which rounded out to a hefty three hundred pages.

Even Bob Hope was deemed by a Wisconsin newspaper to be a “communist’ and got some hate-mail to that effect when he  joked about McCarthy. He made with a whole series of jokes involving the colour red. In his Christmas 1952 TV show, Hope made out he’d had a letter from Santa Claus: “Dear Robert, thank you for … the beautiful new brown suit you sent me … But tell Senator McCarthy I’m going to wear my old red one anyway.”

He announced “I have it on good authority that McCarthy is going to disclose the names of two million communists.

He has just got his hands on the Moscow telephone directory.”

“Eisenhower admitted that the budget can’t be balanced and McCarthy said the Communists are taking over. You don’t know what to worry about these days – whether the country will be overthrown or overdrawn.”

Referring to the security surrounding his game of golf with Eisenhower, he said: ‘I had to be cleared by the F. B. I., the Secret Service, the army and the navy-and they all had to be cleared by Senator McCarthy. ’

 

The Red Light.

Charlie Chaplin would lose his clearance. He had attracted the hostile interest of the FBI. under Hoover’s direction. Hoover wrote in a memo that Chaplin was one of Hollywood’s “parlor Bolsheviks’’ and stood as ‘an active part of the Red movement in this country.’ There was  large support for the German tyrant. People who decried Hitler before America was officially at war were seen as weird, or even communist. Powerful isolationist forces in America preached a policy of non-intervention in the troubles of Europe, and rumours of Hitler’s policy to exterminate the Jews were welcomed by anti-Semitic groups.  “The Great Dictator,” lost Charlie friends in the major studio heads. Although many of the studio bosses were Jewish, they did business with Nazi Germany pretty much until Pearl Harbour.

In spite of this antipathy to Charlie’s stance many Hollywood and other celebrities thronged  the film’s premiere.

I hadn’t been aware how any one could have hounded such a treasure for his alleged political sympathies. It would appear Hoover felt that the target of the film The Great Dictator was as much the U. S. as Germany. Not uncoincidentally most of the Storm Troopers in the film have American accents. Having found out much more about Hoover’s authoritarianism, I wasn’t surprised.

Charlie would go on to release a statement in which he condemned what he saw as reactionary groups for creating an “unhealthy atmosphere in which liberal-minded individuals” could be “singled out and persecuted.” That’s exactly the atmosphere that lead up to Hitler’s rise.

In The Great Dictator, Chaplin bitterly satirized the fascist rulers of Germany and Italy.

I hadn’t been aware how any one could have hounded such a treasure for his alleged political sympathies. It would appear Hoover felt that the target of the film The Great Dictator was as much the U. S. as Germany.

Charlie played two roles in this masterful integration of comedy, politics and satire.

The first was of a humble, persecuted Jewish barber.

 Secondly was that of the ruthless yet clownish  Hitler-like Adenoid Hynkel whose symbol is the Double Cross.

Mistaken for the dictator the lookalike barber  finds himself entering the role of Hynkel .

Announcing to the national audience that he (as Hynkel) has had a change of heart, he makes an impassioned speech for brotherhood and goodwill: “More than machinery, we need humanity! More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness!” He encourages soldiers to fight for liberty, and unite the people in the name of democracy.

He  addresses a message of hope: “Look up. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow, into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me, and to all of us.

Charlie had posed the question as to why the world of respectability and authority offered so little to the soul of man. It’s representatives interrogated him about his racial origins and sexual activities. “

In a smear campaign, he was accused of practically every sin under the sun. He drew fire particularly over his black comedy Verdoux, which was an attack on the morality of war.  This was the story of a modern Bluebeard who considers it only right and proper to bump off his wives, seeing that the state, rather than coming down on mass murderers, hails them as heroes and the saviours of their country.

He dismisses his killing of a few, for which he has been condemned, as not worse than the killing of many in war, for which others are honoured, that compared to the makers of modern weapons he is but an amateur.   “Wars, conflict – it’s all business,’ he tells a journalist before his execution, ‘One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!”

The direct allusion to the atom bomb, and the way its use by the Allies against Japan was put morally on the same plane as the German concentration camps. The USA carried the moral weight of these mass killings.

Pointing this out injured the patriotic pride of the American public. It closed many minds to his artistic merits as an actor and humanitarian.

Chaplin was accused of ingratitude to the country in which he had achieved such wealth and fame.  The release of Monsieur Verdoux provoked boycotts.

We laugh together to show we’re the same. Yet we must detour to the darker side of humour. The corollary of inclusivity for some is often exclusivity for others. Jokes can be mean and derisive, picking on those who are different, establishing who is inside the group and who is not. We laugh with people to belong, and at others to exclude. This is why being laughed at feels so horrible. It is why politicians would rather be feared or disliked than ridiculed.

Charlie shrugged off all the assaults on him: “If you step off the plane with your left feet, they accuse you of being a Communist”, he lamented.  He was accused of being unpatriotic by a spokesman for the Catholic war veterans.  He retorted that he himself had backed the war effort through donations and speeches and his two sons had fought in the war.  He had even been taken to task for having floated the idea of opening a new front against Germany in 1942. Along with other luminaries such as Pearl Buck he had played an active role in the American Committee for Russian War Relief. He denied ever having had connections to the Communist Party: “I have thirty million dollars of business – what am I talking Communism for?” When asked if he thought the Communist way of life outshined that of the US, his answer was firm: “No, of course. If I did, I’d probably go there and live.  At the same time I am not antagonistic.  But if they were to invade America, I’d take up arms. ’  Summing his feelings on where he belonged, he stated: “I have always had a sense of internationalism.  My great love has always been in this country, but I don’t feel allied to any one particular country.  I am a citizen of the world”.

Charlie was denied a re-entry visa to America when he left to attend the premiere of ‘Limelight’.  He would have had to submit to any inquiry to prove his moral worth. In 1957 he produced ‘A King in New York’, a comedy taking to task HUAC- ‘a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one. ’  The film brought fresh accusations of pro-Communism which Charlie specifically denied.

The Lives Of Others.

Russel had noticed the sender’s name printed on the envelope I placed beside my place at the table. ‘Has it already been opened? ’he asked.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I see it’s from Aaron Copland. May I?’ He held it up to the light. ‘Steaming open an envelope is one of the oldest tricks in the book, ’he said. ‘It’s really a cinch, and, if done carefully, is barely noticeable by the recipient. They go for the very end of either side of the flap, because some envelopes don’t have any glue there. Watch for any wrinkling, rubbing and tearing. ’

’Why would anyone tamper with a letter from a conductor.” I asked.

‘It could be those conducting an investigation. Don’t worry, I’m only half joking’, he said. ‘This wouldn’t happen to you- hopefully. But Copland’s correspondences were scrutinised by the FBI.’

‘Didn’t they have anything better to do? I asked. ’Moreover it’s a felony’.

‘Too right, but they are a law to themselves. They investigated Copland In 1936 for having defended the American Communist Party. As from that moment he was blackballed. In 1953 his Abraham Lincoln Tribute was withdrawn from the Inauguration concert for President Eisenhower.  He testified to the Congress that he had never been a member of the Party. McCarthy was interested in the reasons for Copland being hired to give US Embassy sponsored lectures on music in Italy and Latin America.  He asked Copland “If you were a member of the Communist Party, let’s assume you were, and you were selected to lecture you would be bound to try wherever you could to sell the Communist idea, wouldn’t you”.

Copland replied “No doubt” adding “I had no fear of sitting down at a table with a known Communist because I was so sure of my position as a loyal American”.

The Senator fired back “With what known Communists have you sat down at a table”.

“Copland replied that there were the Soviet composers he had met during his international musical career. “Well, I assume they are Communists” he said.  He was not asked to come back to any more public hearings. ’ Transcripts of Copland’s hearing before McCarthy released fifty years afterwards confirmed what Russel had said. It was said that Aaron had parried the Senator with a compound of ‘languor’ and ‘outrage’. What us lesser mortals might call ‘language’.

Horse Sense.

The January 17, 1955 cover of Time Magazine featured two lofty features of the Oregonian landscape. In the background was Mount Hood, the potentially active stratovolcano.In the foreground was Senator Wayne Morse,the perennially active critic of federal governmental folly.

I supported the encouragement of accountable government by this lean trim man, with a clipped moustache, sharp nose, and bushy black eyebrows.

I welcomed his open views on social and civil issues. He appreciated my good hearted comments.

I agreed with this fixture of the Senate on the need for greater transparency in political horse trading. Such precaution would do away with the problem of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted. I spoke of his ideals of foresight, intellectual independence and integrity. A fiery maverick, he was known as ‘the conscience of the Senate’. Once he got on his hobbyhorse and started talking about human rights, those in his company couldn’t get him to discuss anything else.

A constant thorn in the backside of his collegial troglodytes, there undoubtedly would have been a sigh of relief when on one occasion he was kicked in the mouth by one of his precious horses in training.

This left him in hospital seemingly out of the running with his mouth wired shut.  His colleagues would have some respite from this zealot from Oregon. He had once famously spoken on the Senate floor for 22 hours and 26 minutes straight.

However he would have a note taker in his hospital room relaying messages to the Senate.  Later he said it was amazing how much a man could talk with his mouth wired shut.  It was this spirit and exuberance that characterized his career.

Wayne arrived at his dissenting decision listening carefully while Johnson outlined the war’s direction .

He believed that if you give people the truth, they will make the right decision: “The interests of my country are more important than the interests of my party”.

I thanked Senator Morse for having the spunk to dare snaffle McCarthyism.

He said “McCarthyism is a dangerous threat to the freedom and liberty of every American because it substitutes trial by accusation for a trial by proof”.  He asked the Senate: “What is a nation if its gains security and loses its liberty?”

One could add, ‘or any part of it?’

Senators Morse and McCarthy were slated to debate each other on the topic ‘The Fairness of Congressional Investigations’.  The debate was sponsored by the American Federation of Labour.  It did not take place because McCarthy backed out at the last minute.  However they would square off like two prizefighters in a 45 minutes Senate debate.

Taking the bit between the teeth, Senator Morse accused McCarthy of “political thuggery”.  McCarthy had claimed that Morse was a “Communist sympathizer”. Morse was instrumental in pushing through the censure that would ultimately decide the fate of Senator McCarthy.  There were times when he would bend ideologically under McCarthy’s bulldog hectoring but he never broke.

One area in which Morse would not bend in his principles was the use of wiretapping as evidence to seek out suspected Communists.

In a statement to the American Bar Association, he said wiretapping was a police state practice and its members should resist such totalitarian methods.  He believed the wiretapping was not selective, that the privacy of those innocent of crime would be jeopardized.  He said the practice was ‘a lazy policeman’s tool and that it was a Communist tool’.

Related to his stand against McCarthy was that he took against the China Lobby. It insisted on continuing support for Chiang Kai-Shek and his government in Taiwan.

It resisted recognition of the newly created People’s Republic of China. This was sustained by the yellow press’ portrayal of the PLA   as brutal and sadistic.

Only through the intervention of  heroic Americans  could groups of Chinese be extricated to freedom.

Morse requested that this powerful lobby be investigated for reason of illegal activities.  He believed there was an exorbitant use of Treasury funds for personal financing of the lobby. He feared they would suck the US into a long and costly land war with the People’s Republic.

The Arrogance of Power

Another of the few inconvenient truth tellers in public life to dare confront the rabid senator from Wisconsin was J. William Fulbright, the Senator from Arkansas. I thanked him for this daring which he appreciated. And encouraged him in his many pursuits which I will mention in the coming pages.

His encounters with McCarthy were exceedingly vitriolic.  McCarthy was contemptuous and insulting to him, dubbing him ‘Senator Halfbright’ or just plain ‘Halfbright’.  Time and again Fulbright spoke out about the McCarthy menace.  In doing so he laid himself open to its venom. He became a special target of McCarthy’s method in a hearing to assay the suitability of a distinguished law professor to be a US delegate to the UN.  Fulbright said “This was the first time I realized there was just not limit to what he’d say or insinuate.  As the hearings proceeded, it suddenly occurred to me that this fellow would do anything to deceive you to get his way. I was deeply rebuked, repelled, offended by his conduct in those hearings”.  At one point during this sharp tangle, Fulbright pressed McCarthy for specific proof of his charges arguing ‘You shift your position every time”.  McCarthy would counter later “Men of little minds are trying to make this a political issue”.  Fulbright replied sarcastically “You wouldn’t try to do anything like that, would you?” The hearing was marked by shouts, the pounding of gavels and vituperative exchanges.  Implying that Fulbright was playing footsies with the Communists, the McCarthyist onslaught put the screws on Fulbright and his educational exchange program.  McCarthy suggested it was operated to the favour of Communists, as did Pearl Buck’s East-West association, set up to promote cross-cultural understanding.

Not only in the sanctuary of the Senate but in speeches and television programs, had Fulbright attempted to raise a general alarm about this menace with its ‘trial by headline’.  He warned that if it continued to let fly at the State Department and the schools , they could lead towards the very thing we are fighting – the police state”.

He went on “something ominous has happened to our community.  A bitterness, a suspicion, a kind of primitive ruthlessness quite alien to our traditions, has taken root and is spreading”.  One of the hate letters he received as a result of his stance read: “Tie hyena Morse and jackal Lehman around your foul coyote neck and jump into the Potomac”. On the contrary  Senators  Morse and Fulbright would work together to reach the critical numbers necessary to censure McCarthy.

  This lead to his political demise.

Noticeably one of the numbers missing was Congressman Kennedy who later conceded that the censure got to him too much both politically and personally. He was loath to fall in with more full-blooded liberals in his party, such as Morse and Fulbright, seen as “fuzzy-minded” by some conservatives. Seen as those  feeling unworthy of their possessions by those who feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.

The Jakarta Method of Terror.

Only so slowly was a fuller picture of what was happening in Indonesia coming to light. Sure, the reality of the event that triggered the violence would be the subject of speculation to this day. There is no evidence that the attack was organized by the PKI or part of a larger plot. The true identities of those behind the abortive putsch became enmeshed in the murky web of intrigue surrounding it.  Were the assassins members of the palace guard and Communists out to pre-empt a coup against the President by the generals.  Or was it a false flag operation, a sinister scheme by Suharto who somehow avoided being targeted and who just happened to know the assassins. The killings had in fact been carried out by junior army officers under Suharto’s own command. In Jakarta as in Central Java the same battalions that supplied the “rebellious” companies were also used to “put the rebellion down.”

The most provocative fact was that those targeted in the name of supporting Sukarno were by and large loyalists of the President. The only army generals who might have challenged Suharto’s assumption of power.

According to the Australian scholar Harold Crouch, by 1965 the Indonesian Army General Staff was split into two camps. At the centre were the general staff officers appointed with, and loyal to, the army commander General Yani, who in turn was reluctant to challenge President Sukarno’s policy of national unity in alliance with the Indonesian Communist party, or PKI. The second group, including the right-wing generals Nasution and Suharto, comprised those opposed to Yani and his Sukarnoist policies.

All of these generals were anti-PKI, but by 1965 the divisive issue was Sukarno.

Not one anti-Sukarno general was targeted by Gestapu, with the obvious exception of General Nasution. But by 1961 the CIA operatives had become disillusioned with Nasution as a reliable asset, because of his “consistent record of yielding to Sukarno on several major counts.” Relations between Suharto and Nasution were also cool, since Nasution, after investigating Suharto on corruption charges in 1959, had transferred him from his command.

But one thing was for sure. The unrest precipitated by this event led to the unleashing of extreme nationalism and Islamic extremism. The small scale, disorganized coup attempt was Suharto’s ‘Reichstag Fire’: a pretext for liquidating the Communist Party and seizing state power. As with the February 1933 fire in the German parliament that Hitler used to create an historical, hysterical, crisis-filled atmosphere, the September 30th Movement was exaggerated by Suharto’s clique of officers until it assumed the proportions of a wild, vicious, supernatural monster. The army’s psychological warfare specialists created the conditions in which the mass murder of “the PKI” seemed justified. To say it was overkill is the greatest of  understatements.  It led to a rogue army putting it’s feet on people’s necks, and lengthy rule by the kleptocratic dictator Suharto.

Taking things as he found them-and lots more- he crushed all opposition and curbed all freedoms .

There would be years of living dangerously.  Hundreds and thousands of so called perpetrators were systematically shot, stabbed, strangled, bludgeoned, or starved to death.

Civilians involved in this mother of massacres were either recruited and trained by the army on the spot, or were drawn from groups which had collaborated for years with the army on political matters. All the military needed to do is was point a finger, whisper a name and people were put to death. Bearing bamboo spears and hatchets, this group of Indonesian Nationalist youths appeared ready for an easy kill as they accompanied the Indonesian Army patrol around Mount Merapi to search for  Communist  followers.

The conspicuous wealth of Chinese merchants made them easy targets, and the identity-building process made many Indonesians conscious that they had a rightful leadership place in the Islamic world — and hence an obligation to participate in jihad. Thus, the historically peaceful Indonesians, as they expanded their worldview, came to recognize increasingly the importance of violence in both national and international politics.

Suharto, firmly in control of Jakarta, sent a column of special forces into the heartlands of PKI support. Tanks patrolled the streets prepared to fire on any suspected dissenters.

In its screening to uproot dissenters the military questioned suspected sympathizers under gunpoint.

Members of the youth wing were  guarded by soldiers  were taken by open truck to prison in Jakarta.

In the  wake of the incursion Muslim groups and other traditionalists were authorised to turn on PKI members, hauling them out for mass executions, night after night, choking rivers with bodies.

‘One of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.” was how a CIA publication described it. The Company  would know. It was behind it. It provided careful and systematic support. Like Suharto, it blamed the victims of the killings — the supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) — for their own deaths. The official line has always been that ordinary Indonesians rose in spontaneous opposition to Leftists who were threatening national stability. It was portrayed as a natural, inevitable, and justifiable reaction on the part of those non-communists who felt threatened by the party’s violent bid for state power. They burned the headquarters of the Communist Youth Organisation.

One of their mobs running amok attacked the Res Publica University and destroyed the campus.

A Chinese student was filmed protecting himself as he was molested there.

Party bookshops were vandalised and ransacked.

The strategists in Washington reversed course in who they backed in Indonesia. Eisenhower’s administration attempted to break up Indonesia and sabotage Sukarno’s presidency by supporting secessionist revolts in 1958. Nasution was in charge of putting these down. When that criminal escapade of the Dulles brothers failed, the U. S. began to cultivate top anti-communist officers who could gradually build up the army as a shadow government capable of replacing President Sukarno and eliminating the PKI at some future date. The generals bided their time and waited for the opportune moment for what U. S. strategists called a final “showdown” with the PKI. The US Embassy supplied the army with a list of thousands of PKI cadres for targeting.

U.S. officials were accessories to this mass murder. The United States helped create the conditions for the killings. It supported, rather than restraining or condemning, the perpetrators. The United States was not alone; British and Australian officials also supported the killings.

Time magazine hailed the PKI’s obliteration as the “best news” in Southeast Asia for a long time. Then Australian prime minister Harold Holt declared: “With 500, 000 to 1 million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it’s safe to say a reorientation has taken place.” Malcolm Fraser said there was in Australia ‘a sigh of relief … don’t look too closely at how it happened’.

The generals made their case against the PKI largely on the basis of transcripts of the interrogations of movement participants. Those who hadn’t already been summarily executed. As they say, dead men tell no tales. Given that the army used torture as standard operating procedure for interrogations, the narrative of the suspects is as reliable as an Inquisition text on witchcraft.

Certain PKI leaders were involved in a personal capacity, The rest of the central committee was in the dark, let alone the millions of rank-and-file members. If the movement’s leaders had been treated as the leaders of previous revolts against the postcolonial government, they would have been arrested, put on trial, and sentenced. All the members of their organizations would not have been imprisoned or massacred. The PKI as a whole was clearly not responsible for the September 30th Movement. The party’s three million members did not participate in it. If they had, it would not have been such a disorganised small-scale affair.

Sukarno had received Robert Kennedy twice as an envoy seeking negotiations over Konfrontasi.

In a January 1966 speech, Robert said, “We have spoken out against inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged Communists have been not perpetrators but victims?” Robert argued that the United States must speak out against all mass killings.

Sukarno compared the killings to a case of someone “burning down the house to kill a rat. Reduced to being a figurehead the great orator who had led the nationalist struggle against the Dutch, the cosmopolitan visionary of the Non-Aligned Movement, was outmanoeuvred by a taciturn, uneducated, thuggish, corrupt army general from a Javanese village.

Deprived of a major part of his political base, in a position where he lost his popular support, Sukarno ended up sidelined and isolated.

 After being forced to hand over power to Suharto the end of Konfrontasi was in sight. The Indonesian military were no longer seen as the enemy by our leaders but as heroes. As Chaplin pointed out there’s nothing like a good old mass killing to the sound of trumpets to have the state backed perpetrators lauded as saviours.

Thousands of political prisoners were banished to tropical gulags like Buru where the writer Pramoedya Aranta Toer was sent. Growing up during Dutch colonial rule followed by Japanese occupation he experienced the monstrous brutality of those military who came to power after independence. He called his memoir “The Mutes Soliloquy”.  This is a harrowing portrait of the squalid penal colony on the island of Buru on which Pramoedya was imprisoned for eleven years. His ‘crime’ was to have belonged to an alleged Communist literary group.

He was subjected to the most brutal conditions.  The prisoners on the islands had to survive by scraping whatever they could from the land itself.  They were ravaged by plague and other diseases.  Labour was harsh and the rules petty.  He saw his friends killed ‘just for fun’.  His nightmare had begun on October 13, 1965 six weeks after the kidnapping and execution of the six Indonesian army officers. He was in his study editing a collection of short stories written by Sukarno, the first President of the Republic. A group of masked men, all steamed up, gathered outside his house.  After he tried to reason with them, the police arrived and took him into custody ‘for his own safety’.  They bound him, put a noose around his neck and a soldier struck him on the head with a rifle, leaving him almost clean deaf. He begged the police to save the valuable library of books on Indonesia that he had built up over the years, but they were left for the mob to burn.

There were huge problems during the Sukarno rule.  There were food shortages and to assert its independence the government refused US aid.  However such problems fade into insignificance when compared to those thrown up by the Suharto regime.  At one point of time the populace was rationing their meagre diet of rice while Suharto and cronies were living like kings. How could people live so hand-to-mouth in such a resource rich country?  Indonesia would bring about environmental destruction on a massive scale by allowing wholesale removal of its forests.  Moreover the unleashing of extreme nationalism and an Islamic apocalyptic, end-of-days, living with one foot in the afterlife strategic vision would affect Australia eventually with the occupation of East Timor and Indonesia’s ongoing highly repressive counterinsurgency campaign in West Papua.

Governments that commit one mass killing and remain in power, like those of Suharto, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, are likely to employ these tactics again.

The tolerance and encouragement given to Islamic fundamentalism would likewise cause us great sorrow .Blowback.

In penetrating the darkest, thorniest thickets of Indonesian history I have seen my role as an educational one. To explain Nasution’s country as a monumental force in herself with her unmeasured resources, both human and material.

To  fulfil his wish dovetailed with my activities at my alma mater: helping Indonesian students amongst others over the linguistic and social hurdles that confronted them. They had won my taste buds but I wanted something more from them. As my trophy I wanted their hearts and minds. At peace. Consequent to this saga of atrocities I became duty bound to help understanding of how our countries, but particularly the General’s, could become embroiled in such horrific events in which millions and counting would perish.  And to urge that these things never be allowed to happen again.

 Not after the fact, but before it, when coverage could still make a difference. Before time and the world swallowed events.

 I would urge that  bayonets remain sheathed ’til Gabriel blows his horn. That guns go silent.

I live for the day as and when landmines are forever banned. When  the military everywhere are under the command of the civilian authority, not the other way around. I live for the day as and when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a cake sale to buy a bomber.

We have to make sure the next generation of our northern neighbours is not raised in the same cloud of ignorance. It lost so many of it’s brightest and most creative minds. It’s still dangerous there to talk about this time. Official history books still don’t address the mass killings.

There remains a culture of impunity. Many don’t want this dark past dug up while the victims still keep suffering it’s effects, their movements restricted, their job opportunities limited. Far from facing justice, those who carried out the massacres have been long hailed as heroes who saved the country from Communism. Many openly boast of the role they played and how the army gave them a licence to harry and kill. They and their supporters keep the mythical fear of Communism alive to further the interests of all the perpetrators. Without dealing with this dark chapter of Indonesian history, without breaking down the wall of silence, without learning the lessons, there is a greater likelihood it could be repeated. The divisions it created will continue to haunt people.

Inheriting the earth

 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9, NIV).

The United States and Australia should explicitly acknowledge and atone for our role in the violence that engulfed Indonesia in the 1960s, to help Indonesia confront its past and move toward justice and reconciliation.

This  would reinforce American human rights rhetoric and bolster the claims of survivors and victims’ families in Indonesia.

We should actively discourage militarism, the belief or desire of a government that a country should use military methods to maintain power and to use it aggressively to  promote national interests.

It may  imply the glorification of the military caste.

It may also imply the predominance of the armed forces in the administration or policy of the state. Exalting their role above civil society green- lights militarists  to override constitutional requirements.

Their unchallenged success in Indonesia would encourage others to act similarly against the civilian population  in places such as Chile.

In places such as Burma.

People have to keep pushing back against their ongoing assault against all that is held sacred and precious.

Nasution’s involvement in this evil that ruled the Indonesian archipelago was a consequence of his militarist glorification. His  socially conservative doctrine for the mobilising of civilian communities became the underpinning of Suharto’s repressive New Order regime and which Nasution initially supported. It’s impossible to deny that on his watch this dashing, resolute, well spoken officer helped lay the foundations for decades of authoritarian rule. Others may have beat the gamelan but the gong was in his hand.

Along with one’s bleeding for  the loss of his daughter has to be included that for his many innocent victims.

Revelation.

“If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

David Lloyd George British prime minister to the editor of the Manchester Guardian

“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but that revolution, that change that takes place will not be televised.”

                                                  Gil Scott Heron.

In a short period I had come around to a different idea of this war and the alliance totally. Too many sensitivities to tamp down were flagging up. At first my pavlovian ovation was one  influenced by my roseate thoughts on the Second World War. It had conferred unquestionable prestige on men in uniform. I could now see the Emperor in his real clothes. I was an easy mark. I was only nineteen. In Vietnam every battle, every crisis was raw material for writers and the cameras. In turn the news gatherers focused the impact of every act of drama or violence for millions of viewers and readers. Now through the open eyes of others,

recoiling with revulsion at the carnage, I saw the war being prosecuted by an industry whose sole business was death . And my oh my, was this dying business booming.

Like those who ran the show, my initial understanding of the cauldron was frighteningly superficial and simplistic. I was one of the good guys, I thought, backing the establishment to make the world a better, safer place. I didn’t know enough. I had been looking through a glass darkly. Once you unleash war, literally anything can happen. There are unintended consequences. It was a doddle to invade Vietnam but what to do on day two if we got boxed in. Going in proved awfully simple. Getting out would be simply awful.

It was one thing to beam it all back home, our boys bounding through the jungle, the feel good factor. It was another to beam back the sight of bodies in ditches or  in cadaver pouches.

The fundamental question seemed to me was: ‘Is continuation of this war  politically purposeful? Does it contribute to some outcome that  either advances Australian interests or is consistent with our ostensible moral values? And the answer, of course, was no.

I realised an important law in operation that I’d observe recurring over and over my years. Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of.

In the case of this war there were too many imponderables. The men who really run this land run it with such a thoughtless hand? They, the decision takers were making it up as they went along. We, the public, were woefully informed. I had got swept up in the momentary illusion that our involvement with such a pre-eminent power was appropriate. I thought that we had thoroughly cleansed ourself of the behaviour that had given rise to the last global torment. The war was a great influence  in my appraisal of the complexities of the human race. Like many, I had bought into a myth.  For my part the more bombs they dropped on people, the lower the discomforting penny dropped for me.

Not before time. I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash, the first of many that would change the way I viewed myself. Ding dong, I was catching on, growing sceptical of tendentious official accounts and, kept up at night, uneasy about how the war was going. It was impossible to see the corner let alone around it. Every time I made an assumption what should be true and what should be rational for our forces to do, I was wrong. So I backed up and looked at the larger story.

The war called everything into question. The value of honour and gallantry. the qualities of cruelty and mercy, the candour of the government and what it means to be a patriot.

I thought we Australians were the exception to history. History didn’t apply to us. We could never fight a bad war. We could never represent the wrong cause. The war in Vietnam proved we stood to be corrected. It exposed and created a dissonance: the declared values of Australia as a democracy and its activities ‘over the hill’  in which  these values are null and void.

It wasn’t that we’d taken on some noble measure that we weren’t quite energetic enough to pursue to it’s natural conclusion or were easily distracted from. It was that our country was, like so many other countries, capable of doing wrong and killing people without good reason, and our campaign was, in effect, an imperial kind of operation like that of the Japanese, or the French after the Japanese, or the Chinese before either of them. And those are the footsteps we were walking in.

This realisation became like a piece of shrapnel embedded in my definition of who I am.

I didn’t want it to be a blot on my moral record. I wanted no part of the killing.

I discarded any thoughts I had had of a military career. For me soldiering now looked ultimately like a dead end.

 The reality unfolding on the ground in Vietnam was chaotic. It bore little resemblance to the upbeat accounts offered by geopoliticians, generals and media outlets in the tradition of earlier wars. These life takers and heart breakers were more concerned about ink being spilled over their activities than blood.

I had had no idea the extent of the lie nor the level of deception. ‘I was assured the decision to intervene militarily was bipartisan,’ I told Russel.

‘The word bipartisan usually means some larger than usual deception is being carried out.’

‘I was assured the war would be fast and over in a couple of shakes.’

‘We are assured that every time we are taken into a new one. Otherwise who would go along with it.’

I pointed out to him, ‘Have you ever realized that the term Secretary of State contains the word ‘secret’.

‘ What’s the difference between an archaeologist and the Secretary of State?’ he asked in turn.

‘An archaeologist uncovers the unknown. The top diplomat covers the known.’

‘You might describe this top diplomat’s work as ‘lying in state.’

‘Adding to the mystery of history, no doubt.’

‘While we’re on about specialists, Allan,You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in international relations to see the truth about the war in Vietnam. As somebody said, you don’t have to be an ichthyologist to know when a fish stinks.’

The Blood Boogaloo.

 

You better listen mr president

 Oh boy don’t you mess up with my war, boy

 I wanna do I wanna do

 Lord I wanna do the Blood Boogaloo

 I’m just a Redneck son of a gun

I wanna kill me a gook before dawn.

Tim Buckley.

The chance “meeting engagements” described by Westmoreland involved  upwards of 50 US troops ending up bagged and tagged. His press conference in October 1965, after the slaughter of 155 US troops at Landing Zone Albany, in the battle of Ia Drang was a devil of this wilful misrepresentation: ‘I consider this an unprecedented victory. At no time during the engagement were American troops forced to withdraw or move back from their positions, except for tactical manoeuvres. The enemy fled from the scene.’ Of course we weren’t  told the real facts ‘til later.

Facing the facts flat on, with my moral squint I read critical reports by probing, unembedded journalists on the frontlines. By those who prized truth more than access to those sitting in high places. By those  who refused to frame the political discourse in terms of simple talking points and didn’t tailor their reports .   I was horrified by the coldness, the calculatedness, and in particular the language of American military men. Like ‘Stomp them to death’, the words of General William De Puy, Westmoreland’s chief of operations. It would turn out they were only falling in line with their boss’ ‘head-down, bang, bang, bang’ approach .

Dayan to go into the Battle Field.

 Moshe Dayan, the flamboyant Israeli man of war was embedded as a reporter on the ground with  US troops in Vietnam in 1966.

Before going there Dayan had had an audience with British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, whom Dayan had met in the early ’50s. The victor of El Alamein told the victor of the Sinai that the Americans had implemented a misguided strategy that depended on large numbers of combat troops, aggressive bombing and the civilian social engineering plan that moved entire village populations threatened by the Viet Cong into safe havens. That policy, the 78-year-old Montgomery told Dayan, was “insane.”

 Highly impressed by American firepower, Dayan supported the right of an imperial superpower like the United States to shoot “every enemy sniper with an artillery barrage.  What the Americans have at their disposal,” he said in his newspaper dispatch, “is all that a commander can visualize in a dream: helicopters to rush his men to any location; well-trained troops with the aggressive spirit and ready for action; air and artillery support; equipment, ammunition and fuel in virtually unlimited supply.”

But Dayan was less than impressed by the American tactics and strategy, and expressed serious reservations about the efficacy of U.S. intelligence. As the troops went out to search and destroy, Dayan said, “One small item is missing: no one knows exactly where are the positions of the Viet Cong battalions.  The air photos and air reconnaissance fail to pick out the Viet Cong encampments, entrenched, bunkered and camouflaged to merge with the jungle vegetation.

The Viet Cong’s M.O., he said, “was to attack American units with the aim of destroying them when the prospect of success seemed bright. Ninety out of every one hundred battles in the Vietnam War began as this one did, on Viet Cong initiative, when they deemed the circumstances favourable.”

As for the Americans, Dayan wrote that they did not make the destruction of the enemy “conditional on a favourable tactical situation.  American commanders, he said, “were eager to make contact with the Viet Cong at all times, in any situation, and at any price.”

He met General Westmoreland and was afforded full ceremonial treatment .

However he refused to accept the claim by General Westmoreland that the military goal was to help the Vietnamese people but that the American goal was to break the resistance spirit and destroy the Viet Cong.

He likened the situation in Saigon—with heavily armed South Vietnamese and American soldiers hunkering down behind sandbagged bunkers at the city’s big intersections—to what life was like in Jerusalem and other cities in Palestine under British colonial rule. Not a promising situation.

He encountered ‘the contempt of American power and arrogance’ everywhere he looked: the aircraft carrier battling wooden boats, tanks attacking wooden huts and helicopters pursuing two carelessly armed guerillas to their deaths. What he saw convinced him that the war in Vietnam was an image war in which the North Vietnamese were paying a heavy price by daring to defy the superpower.

Toward the end of his stay in Vietnam, Dayan was convinced that the war – which would certainly last much longer – was lost.

He figured that the American army had the power to destroy the Vietcong, but that it could never eradicate support and admiration for North Vietnam’s struggle for independence. At the same time the only way Dayan saw a victory for the Communists was a political—not military—one: if the Americans “for political reasons (domestic or foreign)…decide to call a halt to the war before achieving total victory.” To help this along the Hanoi government could frustrate  them, preventing them from “pacifying the country” by refraining “from pitting regular units against regular units in frontal engagements and organize guerrilla warfare.” The Viet Cong, he concluded, “cannot drive out the Americans, but they can avoid being driven out themselves. They can deny the normalization of life in the south.”

Dayan was particularly critical of the much-maligned Strategic Hamlet program and its successor, hearts-and-minds initiatives, which since 1962 had relocated Vietnamese villagers into stockaded hamlets. Dayan called them “refugee settlements.” What “the Americans call ‘resettlement of refugees on the land,’” Dayan reported, “is not really the building of farm villages but the creation of slums around their Army camps.” in his last dispatch from the war zone, he wrote, “The Americanization of the war can, from the military point of view, succeed, but the Americanization of the peace, of daily life, can only serve the Viet Cong with terrorist objectives and propagandist arguments against ‘American hegemony in Vietnam.’”

Emptying the Sea.

In the summer of 1966, shortly before Neil Sheehan of The New York Times left to return stateside, Westmoreland did him the farewell courtesy of a personally escorted day in the field. “At one point in the trip,” Sheehan recalls later, “I asked the general if he was worried about the large number of civilian casualties from the air strikes and the shelling. He looked at me carefully. ‘Yes, Neil, it is a problem,’ he said, ‘but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”’ . If Mao had described guerrillas as fish swimming in the sea, he was going to empty the sea. His object, in his own words, was to decimate the North Vietnamese population “to the point of national disaster for generations to come.’ Westmoreland -or ‘Wastemoreland’ as many afterwards came to call him- had accepted the death of a whole countryside. This was because he despaired of any other way to ease the secretary of defense’s disquiet or to sustain the national security adviser’s imbecile optimism.

The countryside alone, it was stressed repeatedly, was where the National Liberation Front had any real support and influence on a broad base in. Later the general opined that “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner… We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.”

‘ And I suppose he does. For all he cares, the entire country could go up in flames. War is a sordid business for sure,’ I said to Russel.

“It’s as dirty as the businesses who cash in on it, ’said Russel.

‘It reflects the demands of their representatives to get them the super profits that they want but can’t get in the usual way. In the words of von Clausewitz, ‘War is a continuation of politics by other means.”

‘We should make sport, not war.

Why can’t we just play ball to settle our differences?’

 ‘If only we could. Unfortunately war is a function of class society. The capitalists of the stronger industrial states no longer wage war against each other as in the past but combine to exploit and control systematically the poorer countries. The poorer, the better. At their expense, today’s multi-nationals will better absorb the turbulent cycles of boom and depression generated.

‘The system is one of destructive creativity. Capital’s endless pursuit of new outlets for class-based accumulation requires for its continuation the destruction of both pre-existing natural conditions and previous social relations. Class exploitation, imperialism, war, and ecological devastation are not mere unrelated accidents of history but interrelated, intrinsic features of capitalist development.

There has always been the danger, moreover, that this destructive creativity can turn into what has been called the “destructive uncontrollability” that is capital’s ultimate destiny. The destruction built into the logic of profit can take over and predominate, undermining not only the conditions of production but also those of life itself.’

 Today it is clear that such destructive uncontrollability has come to characterize more and more the entire capitalist world economy, prowling in search of cheap profits. fighting to encompass the planet as a whole.’

‘When did you become aware how this destructive system is shaped?’

‘In my salad days I too was ignorant and naïve. A real schnook, I didn’t know the first thing about the relationship between politics and life. No-one, even in South Australia, could have been a more perfidiously loyal Briton than I was at 17. I believed all men were equal, justice was blind, the press was free, the police were on my side and that business was honest.   Like any well brought up conservative, I felt politics was to be severely avoided. Because I had no desire to change anything in the divinely ordered social arrangement of the world, it suited me very well to consider I had no politics.

‘Yet you had another think coming, Russel?’

‘It was an exercise as a cadet sergeant in my School Cadet Corps that sowed the seeds of my doubts. The enemy, we were told, was a party of unemployed rioters, led by Communist agitators who had marched off into the hills plundering farms and orchards. ‘Intelligence’ reports came in that, intoxicated with pillaged wine, they were heading towards Adelaide which we had to stop from being sacked. In what we were told was a simulation of actual warfare we took up up defensive positions along the road, bushwhacking them, firing off hundreds of blank cartridges. That was my road to Damascus. The great takeaway that came out of that day was that the ultimate enemy we were training to come up against was not the Germans, French or other bodgy foreigners we learned about in history lessons, but one in our very midst- our unemployed fellow countrymen. Why did so many their authority exceed rather than heed what we were told about Jesus Christ, the prince of peace  who made wars to cease unto the ends of the earth. Who believed to know the poor and needy was to love them. Who wept.

‘I guess they needed a class system.’

‘Exactly. Something they use to discriminate against someone who looks like you and me.’

‘If they can drum up a fight against enemies as white and similar in appearance to us, how much easier is it for them crying wolf, to vilify one that looks different- a poor people with different coloured skin and an epicanthic fold.’

‘That’s when it’s easy for them to quote Matthew. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’

‘So are you still religious,Russel? Are you afraid of not entering the gates of heaven?’’

I’m what you might call a practising agnostic.’

‘So you’re open to persuasion.’

‘I’m like  Einstein- a ‘religious non believer.’

‘That’s a good way to put it. Someone with no invisible means of support.’

‘Some  think a man dying on a cross is a ghastly symbol for a religion’

‘My friend Peter Finch thinks like that.

He’s an admirer of Buddhism. He feels a man sitting under a bo tree and becoming enlightened is a beautiful one.’

‘What might you like written on your gravestone?’

‘Don’t mourn for me now, don’t mourn for me never – I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.’

‘Don’t you fear the punishment meted out to nonbelievers according to abrahamic religions?’

‘I believe God has a soft spot for us and our  fellow irreligionists, the atheists. We never ask him or her for anything. We’re not bothering him or her all the time, ‘Please God, help me in my time of need. Please God, lead me not into temptation’ and so on and so forth.’

‘Do you ever feel like being born again? Believing again in god, creationism and intelligent design.’

 I must admit on the odd occasion  when I look at something as complex, intricate and intelligent as Albert Einstein, I don’t think that I just could have evolved by chance.’

David versus Goliath

I can no longer sit back and allow, communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy, to sap and impurify all or our precious bodily fluids.

                            General Ripper, Dr. Strangelove

Westmoreland’s fatal flaw was that, unable to extend the war, he thought that if he confronted the communist forces directly, either on the ground or with his massive airpower, he could simply win by attrition. His ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ turned out to be the result of tunnel vision.

     At the time, few in America would have believed that a suzerain power like the U. S. would have had any problems in claiming Vietnam’s scalp. One had an army based around the most prosperous economy in the world whereas Vietnam was seen as a ‘third world’ nation. It’s resistance army of peasants, at first armed with homemade and captured weapons, then with modern firearms supplied from outside, were still without an air force, navy, or heavy artillery. It was inconceivable that it could humble the global superpower.

For many in the US military, victory was only a matter of time. They believed that this time span would be short. The Communists’ death toll was very heavy, and this encouraged the delusion that the U. S. was romping home , as Westmoreland could not imagine how relatively small countries like North or South Vietnam could sustain such massive casualties.

This led to the deliberately aggressive policy policy of search and destroy, with Westmoreland seeking to draw the forces of the National Liberation Front into the open where they could be eliminated. He believed that the NLF could be defeated through saturation use of anti-personnel ordnance, high-tech mobility, and large-unit battles, air power,  defoliation and massive bombing campaigns,

 Westmoreland was once asked: “What is the answer to insurgency?” He replied: “Firepower.” America needed to hit North Vietnam “surely, swiftly, and powerfully… with sufficient force to hurt”, as at Khe Sanh, where B-52s dropped more than 100, 000 tonnes of bombs over two months.

And troops needed to be poured in. General Westmoreland’s tactics were simple-ring Saigon in a series of giant impenetrable forts-a direct echo of French thinking, and take the war to the enemy in the countryside, and kill him faster than he could be replaced. Where possible, apply overwhelming, stunning force. Through the sledgehammer strategy of “Harassment and interdiction fire,” anything that moved could be killed.

 “A great country”, he liked to say, quoting the Duke of Wellington, “cannot wage a little war.” His idea was not to seize or hold territory but to kill enemy soldiers in their jungle redoubts. Fast machines, massive damage, quick getaway. However the resistance’s guerrilla style of warfare allowed it to dictate the strategic pace and deny the Empire it’s technological advantage. The resistance was taking the punishment, and ever and again having success in their military confrontation, but they still relentlessly pursued their political campaign from village level up. Westmoreland did not understand – nor did anyone else understand – that there was not a breaking point. Instead of breaking it’s morale, it was breaking that of the Empire.

After much reflection I concluded my call for a massive aid program to improve Vietnamese living standards was rather utopian. The Saigon regime was incapable of carrying out land reform, and with all the best will in the world, with whatever force we applied, we would always be building on sand. We were actually fighting the war to prevent Indochina from carrying out successful social and economic development. Even if we had wanted to, the Communists had control of the North and significant support in the South . Besides, the Americans, putting aid on the backburner, still felt they were militarily invincible.

‘What about working through the U. N.?’

With both the USA and USSR able to veto decisions, the UN was a nullity in cases in which there was any element of superpower conflict. A ‘neutral’ government with NLF participation could have been only temporary or superficial.

                    Enough is Enough.

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

Albert Einstein – in an essay written at age 17 for his school exams.

“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

Like most of the rest of the world I came to loathe the wholesale destruction heaped on Indochina by the prosecution of the war. I was at odds with my enlistment. It was the stabs of my conscience, not my bayonet that would now be my prod . No more soldierly silly buggers . No more training to chase ghosts through the jungle.

‘ That does it! ’I said. ‘I wouldn’t touch these warlords with a bargepole now,” I told Russel. ‘Not on your life. I’ve been had. Stung badly. I fell for their line, hook, line and sinker. They’ve led me along. Where they’re going to is the edge of darkness-but not in my name. I’m sick to death of it.’

 ‘Now you’re talking. It was only a question of time until your gorge would rise,’ he said. ‘You can be forgiven for feeling betrayed. I’m going to give it to you straight. They’re pulling the wool over most peoples’ eyes’, said Russel. ‘Putting the big one  over them’.

‘Come in spinner! ‘

  ‘In war, as is often said, truth is still the first casualty, the corpse of common sense a close second and information is as powerful as bullets. To defend their precious ‘credibility’, they’re selling a big pack of lies,’  

‘Pellets of poison flooding the waters,’ Dylan has put it. How can they justify these lies?’

‘They don’t see them as lies. They convince themselves they’re just  stretching the truth, revising it’s parameters. They see the truth as but a lie undiscovered.’

‘ If government is, in a democracy, intended to be mandated by the consent of the governed, but we don’t know what it is that they’re doing, then that’s not consent, or it’s not informed consent. If consent is not informed, it’s not meaningful. Does it have to be that way?’

‘Suppose you were a member of Parliament and suppose you were a liar- but I repeat myself.’
‘So what’s true in their stories isn’t new and what’s new in their stories isn’t true.’

 ‘Most politicians lie between their teeth all the time, not just occasionally, but all the time.’

‘How do we know when they prevaricate so?’

‘The cynical answer is that it’s when their mouths are moving. They’ve been doing it so long to them  it’s second nature. Of course not everything these pinocchios say is a lie, but anything they say could be a lie. They can’t lie straight in bed. Then there are the few who can handle the truth.’ ‘Like all good Americans, following the example of George Washington. Not only doing something senseless and destructive like chopping down a cherry tree, but admitting to it immediately.’

‘If only this romantic legend was true. Do you know why I think his father wouldn’t have  stuck it to him?’

‘ George still had the hatchet in his hand.’

‘It seems to me that many politicians were once children who were never corrected when they lied a. Lying is a normal part of children’s development but it’s frequency usually increases as their cognitive skills develop. When it does occur this doesn’t mean, however, that  their behaviour shouldn’t be ignored. It requires great sensitivity from parents and teachers. They have to explain to children that they prefer they tell  the truth, even if it’s unpleasant. They have to enforce a punishment that matches the misdeed. A disapproving look plus a reminder about what the adult expects usually gets the message across.

‘It’s a bit late for that with politicians whose lies can have such terrible repercussions. Whatever will happen to the truth if Nixon ever gets into the White House. Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Johnson can’t tell the truth, and Nixon can’t tell the difference.’

‘Unfortunately in the case of these wartime atrocities it’ll take time for the unvarnished truth to come to light.’

‘I feel shameful I didn’t cotton on to this much sooner,’ I said, eating crow.

‘ There’s nothing new about it. Just because you haven’t seen it before doesn’t mean it hasn’t always existed. But you’ve taken the first step in coming to terms with it.’

‘Nevertheless I feel a real chump. Mind you, I meant well.  In all conscience  I wasn’t trying to ingratiate myself with them. I felt safe to assume what they were doing was for the protection of our people and country. ’

‘The greatest service we can do our country is to be true to our conscience. Let’s just say you were wrong for all the right reasons. ’

‘I believed our leaders had integrity by definition. I wasn’t applying to be part of any imperialist cheer squad  and to sing its praises. I don’t want any more affiliations with these hitmen of history, the blood of innocents on my hands. I don’t want any mark on my record as an accomplice to crimes against humanity.’

‘Look Allan, every national grouping is capable of the most brutal acts and the most self-righteous excuses. Like any national entity, the Vietnamese themselves are no angels. They are obviously a divided people, but our barging in only inflames that. All people must have the right to rule-or misrule themselves. We’ve got a job of our own- righting the wrongs in our own country. We have to look at the moral failures of other nations not in isolation, but against our own .’

‘Touché. Failures I failed to see. You’re the only one I’ve told about these. Otherwise how could I ever live this down.’

‘Allan, said Russel, ‘ our ideas do not spring like Athena, fully-armed from Zeus’s brow. Nothing in politics grows in a vacuum. Our masters do all in their power to ensure they’re not exposed as the liars and killers that they are.

Any countervailing currents take time to flow . Now you should try to help   bring about change rather than try to satisfy your own thirst for righteousness. There’s no benefit in self flagellation. We’re all formed of frailty and error. The older you grow the more you’ll realise you are but a child of your age.’

‘I guess everybody has the right to be suckered once, ’I said defensively.’ To not see they’re entitled to an even break.’

‘As long as they don’t abuse the privilege , Allan. Sure, while only fools go walking on thin ice, twice, everybody has the right to be a dunce, once. You’re only young once. After that you have to think up some other excuse. Then when I became a student, I listened intently to all shades of opinion, running my own by others before casting my lot. I too was impressed by the rhetoric of certain’ ideologues whose views I would differ from. I once attended the inter-university debating competition in Sydney. The debater who impressed me as the canniest- and most fanatical- was Bob Santamaria. Many since, just as fanatical though usually in different directions, were not nearly as clever, nor, it is fair to add, possessed of such a powerful mind. This silver tongued devil preached incessantly the virtues of Franco’s Falange, of the Spanish rebels, and of Franco himself. The dictator was a murderous nazi on one side and a rabid anti-communist on the other.

To back up these views, he passionately expounded a whole theory of authoritarianism. Fascism in Germany, Italy or elsewhere was the gold standard of government, the most viable to which modern man could aspire, and all human history went to prove it. Art, science and learning, he argued had always flourished most under royal, imperial or dictatorial rule; the more authoritarian the better. In this respect Louis , the Sun-King, was the nonpareil of all times, though the absolute and continuing moral authority the Pope ought to wield over all living creatures was even more important. As debaters go, never an ‘um’ or an ‘er’, Santa seemed the best alive, but I was never converted wholly to his point of view-then or ever.’

‘You never became one of Santa’s little helpers, those little elves and sprites who do his bidding?’

‘I’d never be a subordinate claus. I endorse the general welfare clause.’

‘I’ve got a lot to learn.’

‘You haven’t had the benefit up to now of exposure to such a wide range of views. As this war unfolds further, the clearer your understanding of the issues involved will be.

Change of Heart.

And so it came to pass.  I looked more closely under the hood of the massive military machine. I studied in more detail the killer elite at the steering wheel and   how and where it  drives things along. That’s when my questioning of bourgeois ideas about war really took hold. The more I read about this war, the more my doubts lingered and multiplied as to its morality and its direction. I would have to live with myself over this and needed to be sure. I had to be on the right side of history. By virtue of my training and leisure, I had to man up more than ordinary citizens for the actions of the state. To strip back the coats of lies and deception. To go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere. It was my special responsibility to call it like I saw it. To replace my initial nescience with wiser prescience.

 I was part of the generation that I held responsible for getting our country out of that war. When asked by our children what we did about it, not to be stuck for an answer. Ours was to reason why, not to cop out, follow and fiddle blindly while Vietnam burned. My country right not wrong.

Some might invoke Horace: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ -It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country-but wasn’t it Horace who claimed that he saved himself in battle by throwing away his shield and fleeing.

Le Cafard.

One strong message coming out of the shooting gallery was that the war was taking a severe psychological toll on U. S. servicemen. They were bringing it home with them. Terms like ‘acute depressive reaction’ amongst American soldiers began appearing in reports. Their minds baked by the sun and steamed by the jungle, they were being left with invasive memories, racing thoughts, nightmares, loss of concentration, feelings of guilt, irritability and hallucinations. Servicemen may return home as tainted intruders likely to seek continuing outlets for a pattern of violence to which they have become habituated.’

‘What’s being brought to public attention is the trauma they’ve endured as a result of their service to their country. And some don’t have to have experienced combat. They’ve contracted ‘le cafard’, said Russel, ‘as did the Frenchmen before them.’

‘Cafard’ is French for cockroach, isn’t it?’

‘It is and all, and I’ll explain why in a minute. One of it’s more malignant symptoms is a hatred of everything and everyone, with urges to kill others and oneself. With these moods the slightest irritation can set them off.’

‘Is this condition peculiar to soldiers in Vietnam? I asked.

‘The term originated from the French colonies in general. Members of the French Foreign Legion suffered extreme boredom in their stockades and took to letting fly at cockroaches (les cafards) with their rifles.’

‘So it’s about men in the army going barmy. When time crawls like a sick cockroach. Is it in all armies?’I asked.’

‘In all armies and navies since time immemorial, the bane of the universal soldier.’

‘What brings this about and how do military personnel deal with it?’

‘It’s caused inevitably by regimentation, hardship and prolonged separation from wives and loved ones.

It can  happen in the pre-embarkation period and during the de-mobilisation period. It can happen in forward or staging areas. Even in pleasant surroundings the minds of  soldiers  inevitably return to thoughts of home.’

‘Soldiers since civilization began have found effective means of releasing psychological pressure. In extreme solitude the individual soldier has to deal with it in the same way as prisoners in isolation do to get through. When time slows down they have to fill it.’

‘A watched pot never boils.’

‘ Between madness and sanity there’s a shifting boundary and in solitude one must push away from the border of madness. One has to look for any little bit of life, admire it and study it. The ants, the cobwebs, even the rats that gather crumbs in the middle of the night.’

‘The birds of the air that perch on one’s window sill,’ I said thinking of Burt Lancaster as the Birdman of Alcatraz.

‘Those too. These are insignificant things in the normal world. But each of these things is a universe. As diverting as that of our fellow humans.’

‘I remember reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. To pass the time, the German soldiers in the trenches competed amongst themselves to smash the corpse rats. To vary their diet, the rats skittered brazenly amongst them to snatch the piles of rotten, mouldy bread away. Their tiny pink feet ran between the men’s legs and through the deadly gauntlet of carefully aimed boots and stabbing bayonets. In the film ‘King and Country’, the British soldiers court martial and execute a trench rat for biting the ear of one of them.’

‘You can see it in‘The Long and the Short and the Tall’. Remember Private Bamforth played by Laurence Harvey. He’s bedded down in the Burmese jungle with his small British sonic war patrol, sent to investigate the movements and strength of the Japanese opposition. And what do we see Private Banforth in doing in the dilapidated store-hut?’

‘He’s prancing around , dancing with his arms around his comrades, singing “Hey-jig-a-jig”. All these pressures come to bear in this drama , don’t they?’’ I said. ‘Hindered by a malfunctioning radio, the young recruits, far from home, face a futile but perilous stand-off with Japanese forces. They  can’t guess whether or when to move on. Sweating it out in the intense heat and humidity of the jungle, rain dripping down from the roof and steam rising up through the thick undergrowth, they curse those who sent them, and each other.’

‘Men invent neurotic patterns of ritualistic criticizing, if only symbolically those responsible for their boredom, depression or pointlessness’, Russel said.

‘This claustrophobic story, is shot through with all these feelings, isn’t it? The army banter is all about military incompetence and how poorly led they are, the sergeant who, despite his best efforts, is a dead loss at leading. The young privates exchanging insults, revel in the exotic natures of each others’ regional identities as though Britain contained the whole human race and the rest of the world were made up only of faceless enemy soldiers. There’s lots they don’t know about their own countrymen and women. They confront the enemy within when class tensions and personal rivalries erupt. They threaten each other.’

‘’And can lead them to do terrible things.This comes with ‘Le cafard’,’said Russel,. ‘the collective name for all the inconceivable stupidities, excesses and crimes which jangled nerves can commit.’

‘All this reminds me of ‘The Bedford Incident’ which I saw recently. The skipper of this ship is all triggered up, geared to humiliate a Russian submarine in Arctic waters. Chain smoking, his stomach tied up in knots, he’s frustrated from the endless hours of waiting, the uncertainty and doubt. Whacked up, he’s fuming, feeling ‘trussed, tired and nailed to the wall’ because the High Command is holding him back. The situation was abnormal, inhuman and dangerous. A mistaken command led to a nuclear explosion.’

‘Le Cafard has become the ubiquitous shorthand for the blackness of the soldier’s situation, a very unnatural one. The paralysing fear and anguish in the face of death, about what could come their way in a split second. They can go days without incident, then all of a sudden, bang, very strong feelings of shock. Horrors they may not face  every day, but once in a while that something unexpected will happen that has the power to completely reshape the rest of their lives. The way they react to it, deal with it and move on, is what can be truly inspiring.

However in “cafard” murder hides, and suicide and mutiny. It means self mutilation and impromptu flight. It is the height of madness and the depth of despair. It can start with the enlisted man gloomy, sitting glumly on his bed for hours, speaking to no one, answering with gross insults, doing the queerest things. Suddenly the madness may turn into a senseless explosion or fit of fury; men suffering from a bad case of “le cafard” will run a bayonet through their comrade’s ribcage, without any reason, without any outward cause.’

‘I wonder why. Where do we find it at it’s worst?’

‘The “cafard” in a legion is at its worst the more distant the region, the more desolate the outpost, the more extreme and unfamiliar the climate.

When the sun burns down relentlessly from the cloudless, deep blue sky, the wind-whipped sand stings the face, when the steaminess of the jungle clogs the body’s pores, this is time for ‘le cafard’.

‘It sounds like ‘going ‘troppo’,’I said, ‘as my father and our men in the Pacific theatre called it.’

‘For young men , closer to the frontlines, under tremendous stress, the fear, loneliness and firearms can be a deadly cocktail. A lot of do-it-yourself and accidental deaths in war are labelled as combat casualties, but in fact due to soldiers falling prey to ‘le cafard.’ It doesn’t help that the military is permeated with a cult of machismo that does not allow anyone to show fear or being faint of heart. And it’s not something the army will encourage you to study up.’

‘I guess so, Russel.’

‘ I know so, Allan. I worked amongst men affected so during the War’, he replied.

‘What steps do the military take to counter this malaise?’

‘Well as you know to defuse frustrations and boost morale, they send movie and radio entertainers to perform for military audiences at bases wherever. In the jungle, in the desert, and in all weathers.

They brought comfort to isolated outposts and combat zones. The British did this famously with concert units that included Vera Lynn and Peter Sellers.’

‘And the Americans with Bob Hope’, I said.

‘Exactly. help to break the monotony, ease the loneliness and give the troops in combat zones across Vietnam a couple of hours splitting their sides laughing—and a memory for a lifetime. For the few who get to his shows , it takes their minds off their surroundings and the goings on even if only for a little while.’

 ‘Those who see him perform in Vietnam say his shows make them feel they are not forgotten in this increasingly unpopular war. They believe- right or wrong- that their sacrifices, in their war, are as important as the “Big One” in which their fathers fought.’

‘It must be hard to get laughs in such a setting? A lot of his jokes are tritely twee, I must admit.’

‘ All successful comedians have to dissect contemporary culture, politics and changing societal mores. Hope’s classic opening monologues of rapid-fire jokes always take jabs at the GIs and the specifics of the local situation. His country club putter patter has had to take on a sharper edge. It’s hard to be a comedian and be part of the establishment because the job of comedians is to satirize and to poke fun at the powerful people.  If he wants to stay relevant  he’s not going to get away with the same material on soldiers in Vietnam as with his usual family oriented audiences. His shtick includes a constant, sometimes bawdy banter with the other performers, taking plenty of shots at the absurdities of military life while conveying a real sense of how difficult it is for the troops to be away from home during the holidays. He’s also making recreational drug use in America and among troops in Vietnam his comedic target. Oh thud and blunder! He’s started appearing onstage in military uniform shirts and jackets outlandishly decorated with patches, stripes, stars and insignias.’

‘Last year ago his troupe flew next to Cam Ranh Bay, where Bob scolded the troops: “I don’t know what you guys did to get here, but let that be a lesson to you!” Baking in the hot sun, the troops, laughing wildly, often shirtless, cigarettes dangling from their lips,  roared in agreement.

The tenor of that Christmas tour reflects changing attitudes in the United States regarding the course of the war, and Hope’s evolving flippancy didn’t shy away from it.

He reassured the troops that “the country is behind you 50 percent.” He then added, “I’m very happy to be here; I’m leaving tomorrow!”

Acknowledging the vast crowds, he pointed out the men perched on telephone poles or watching from distant hilltops and asked “Are you on our side?”

At one show before 10,000 men of the First Infantry at Lai Khe,  so near the fighting, Bob said, “We had to give the Vietcong half the tickets”

“We figured it would be all over when we got here this time,” Hope told the crowd he performed for in 1972. “But no luck. Not only did they fail to reach agreement in Paris, but now they’re fighting over the hotel bill.”

With his knee-jerk support of the Vietnam war and the Nixon White House in the early 1970s, Bob’s banter would eventually wear thin with disillusioned servicemen and fall out of favour. As with Chaplin and his pro-Soviet sentiments, his period of synchronicity with the American mood would come to an end because of the direction of war.

For the upcoming generation of warriors battling to secure the Empire, having someone like Bob to take their minds off their dire situation momentarily would be no more than a thought.

His huge trove of punchy, biting one-liners were liable to end up in the arms of  any fighting force that wanted to employ them for their own purposes.

‘You’ve spent a lot of time in the past reflecting on the effect war has on people. In fact you yourself ,Russel, have had  quite a past.’

‘Enough to last several lifetimes.’

Now  tell me about your own work with servicemen going troppo.’

‘Thereby hangs a tale, Allan. How about we hold onto that thought and I’ll tell you about that on another occasion. ’

‘That’s fine with me. I’m not going anywhere.’