Well Done, Those Men Read online

  Praise for

  Well Done, Those Men

  ‘This is a powerful, beautifully written book that should be read by everyone who wants to understand the evil, senseless personal damage done by war.’

  — Bruce Elder, The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Well Done, Those Men is a human, moving, and brutally honest account of one man’s emotionally racked journey from naïve country boy to jungle soldier, psychologically scarred veteran, and ultimately triumphant victor over the demons within.’

  — Greg Thom, The Herald Sun

  A ‘remarkable book’.

  — The Newcastle Herald

  ‘Barry Heard’s book is the autobiography of a Vietnam veteran, but it’s so perceptive it represents a whole generation ... The book is very well written, clear in its descriptions, self-aware in its assessments and, surprisingly, not depressing to read. It is amazing that Barry Heard has been able to get all this traumatic material down so vividly, and to be able to interpret his experiences so convincingly.’

  — Patrick Morgan, Quadrant

  ‘Heard writes honestly and painfully of that soiled era.’

  — Tony Maniaty, The Weekend Australian

  ‘Heard gives meaning and sense to overused cliches such as “stolen youth”, “buried horrors” and even “mateship”.’

  — Lorien Kaye, The Age

  ‘As devastating as Heard’s account of the war undoubtedly is, it’s the last third of the book — wherein he returns to a country that seems embarrassed to acknowledge his existence, and tries to deal with his shattered psyche with little support from an uncomprehending family and an ever-decreasing number of friends — that packs the biggest emotional wallop.’

  — Terry Oberg, The Courier Mail

  ‘This is a searingly honest account of one man’s battle to overcome his tormented past in an unpopular war and to recover from a complete breakdown.’

  — Ros Sydes, The Examiner

  ‘Vietnam veteran Barry Heard has written an inspiring story about a life reclaimed.’

  — Sue Wallace, The Border Mail

  ‘Heard’s recounting of his Vietnam tour is chilling. But it is the last third of the book that really hits home. In less than 100 pages, Heard describes 30 years of hell … this is an important book on a still hidden topic, and one that deserves a wide audience.’

  — Tim Coronel, Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘Well Done, Those Men is highly recommended, as a glimpse into Australia 40 years ago, as an honest account of fighting in Vietnam, and as an entertaining and thought-provoking read.’

  — The Canberra Times

  ‘This book will give comfort to many veterans and their families that they are not alone in dealing with the mental scars of war, and for others it will teach and guide us to how we, as a community, must respond to their needs.’

  — Mark Sullivan, Secretary, Department of Veteran Affairs

  Scribe Publications

  WELL DONE, THOSE MEN

  Barry Heard was conscripted in the first national service ballot, and served in Vietnam as an infantryman and radio operator. After completing his national service he returned to Australia, where he found himself unable to settle down. He had ten different jobs in his first 10 years back, worked as a teacher for a further 10 years, and then held several mid-managerial posts before succumbing to a devastating breakdown due to severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Since recovering, Barry has decided to concentrate on his writing. His short stories have received several prizes, including the Sir Edmund Herring Memorial Award and the Sir Weary Dunlop Prize. Well Done, Those Men is his first book. He lives with his family in rural Victoria.

  WELL

  DONE,

  THOSE

  MEN

  MEMOIRS OF A VIETNAM VETERAN

  BARRY HEARD

  SCRIBE

  Melbourne

  Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

  PO Box 523

  Carlton North, Victoria, Australia 3054

  Email: [email protected]

  First published by Scribe 2005

  Reprinted 2005, 2006

  This edition published 2007

  Reprinted 2007, 2009

  Copyright © Barry Heard 2005, 2006, 2007

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

  Text designed and typeset in 11/15.5pt Sabon by Miriam Rosenbloom

  Cover designed by Peter Long

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  Front cover image: Barry Heard’s mates heading home, their tour of duty over, on board a Caribou aircraft that has just taken off from Nui Dat, Vietnam

  Photograph courtesy of the author

  Back cover image: Connors Hill, East Gippsland, Victoria, Australia

  Photograph © Peter Firus, Flagstaffotos

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Heard, Barry.

  Well done, those men.

  Rev. ed.

  9781921753077 (e-Book.)

  1. Heard, Barry. 2. Vietnam War, 1961-1975 - Personal

  narratives, Australian. 3. Soldiers - Australia -

  Biography. 4. Vietnam War, 1961-1975 - Veterans -

  Biography. 5. Australia - Armed Forces - Biography. I.

  Title.

  959.7043394

  www.scribepublications.com.au

  To my wife Lyn and my children John, Denise, and Simon,

  who have lived much of this story with me.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Beginnings

  PART I: TRAINING

  Recruit Training, Puckapunyal 1966

  Infantry Corps Training, 3TB Singleton NSW

  My New Home: 7RAR, Puckapunyal

  Canungra

  Exercises Barrawinga and Nilla Qua

  Shoalwater Bay, Queensland

  PART II: VIETNAM

  Welcome to Vietnam

  The New Me

  The 5RAR Experience

  7RAR, Vietnam

  The Battalion’s First Operation

  In the Jungle

  Operation Ballarat

  Return to Base Camp

  Last Days

  PART III: HOME

  Where’s Home?

  Melbourne Lessons

  No Time for Exams

  The Long Way Home

  1992

  1993

  1994

  1995

  The Aftermath

  Heidelberg

  Back to School

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  REPORTS, STUDIES, AND COMMITTEES OF INQUIRY have shown that Vietnam veterans are an unhealthy lot, and that our children are at high risk of ill-health as well. For most of my life, as it happens, I have had good physical health. But therein lies the confusion. In fact, I have been very sick. My illness isn’t measured by my pulse rate or my cholesterol levels. I haven’t been a drunk in years, I eat well, and my doctor always compliments me on my fitness. My illness has been in my head, as a result of memories I carry around with me. Some I found repulsive, sickening, and disgusting. They made me angry — very angry, at times. Others were so sad I would rate them as the most painful things I have ever experienced. The good memories were swamped. I was rarely able to plug into them.

  For years after returning from Vietnam, I kept my illness hidden with long hours of work, study, sporting pursu
its, and anything that produced total exhaustion and allowed me to fall into a bed and sleep. It was a successful ploy. In the early years I had endless energy and lived as a recluse. Then I married, kept to my demanding schedule, and continued to live in a cone. On the surface, I am well educated, have had a successful career, and my family are to be admired. But I was wearing out; my resilience to the flashbacks and nightmares was weakening. Two hours’ sleep a night, or sometimes four, was the norm. I became hyper-vigilant, wary of crowded places and doorways, and my general physical health deteriorated.

  Other veterans I knew well were in mental health care or struggling to work at a job. Some were close mates — blokes I went through Vietnam with — and their deterioration frightened me. Then there were the suicides, and others who died too young. It was becoming all too common. I was no longer able to hide Vietnam from myself. It was similar to when I first returned. There was too much happening, but this time I wasn’t able to shut it out by working longer hours and studying. It never occurred to me, even though I was told, that I could get help. I considered mental illness or a failure to cope as a weakness. This was a warped idea I held and grew up with; men just get on with it.

  The warning signals were there, particularly when I made appointments with my doctor after I started suffering chest pains. Every visit found my heart to be sound. I was declared fit, but exhausted. Then one night I collapsed. I knew I was dying, and I now believe I welcomed the event. Obviously I survived, but the episode left me with many problems and the life of a loser. It was hard. The changes required to get my life back to some form of normality were daunting. I had no strength, mentally or physically. But I had a vague will to live. Perhaps more important was the fact that I didn’t want to die that way — ever. It wasn’t right or fair to those around me. I wanted to be me … whoever that was.

  This book is about a series of events that covers most of my life. Some, particularly at the beginning, I enjoyed writing about, and I hope you will smile along as I did when I wrote them. Writing about them brought the memory of the pleasure I experienced at the time.

  Then there are those powerful moments and events that I wanted to take to my grave. My putting pen to paper about these incidents and torrid times in my life was an attempt to finally purge many demons. It started as a journal, and then I connected events into short stories or chapters of my life. With some hesitation, I showed a piece to a psychiatrist. He encouraged my writing, which led me to open up about my deep guilt over matters that soldiers are reluctant to share. For me, this was a first. Usually such revelations took endless patience and cajoling from the psychiatrist, or the security of a safe haven like the one that was offered at the psychiatric ward at Heidelberg hospital, where I was a patient for a time.

  I never planned to put this work into print. I simply felt that my family, particularly my children and some very close friends, would be able to understand me a little better after reading what I had struggled to write and, until recently, had refused to say. Even then, my attempts at verbalising my thoughts and feelings, particularly about Vietnam, would always be cut off by tears and a dry throat that refused to let the words flow.

  But good fortune has been my companion for the last eight years. I have had a caring wife and family, along with good professional help. Slowly I have regained strength after nearly allowing death to take away my pain and experience. Gradually I wrote the frightening stories, in between writing about the better times.

  My fear when writing about my painful memories was that if I touched on the Vietnam War, or the protests that followed, I would pay for it later that night. For many years I had tried unsuccessfully to push intrusive flashbacks of those experiences from my mind. All too often those fleeting visions were signals that the nightmares would be returning. They were violent episodes that would wake me, sweating in a wet bed and petrified. Then I would bewilder those close to me because I would offer no explanation.

  Finally, I became able to write about the dark times without nightmares. Today, most people I meet are repulsed by war. But war is often only a small part of the battle that determines the rest of a soldier’s life. That is what this book is about.

  BEGINNINGS

  I WAS BORN in Melbourne in 1945, the second of three boys. Four months before my younger brother was born, when I was 17 months old, my father died. Despite this family tragedy, I grew up happily in the outer suburb of Ringwood, where we lived until I was nine years old. Of my early youth I have nothing but fond memories — of school, the matinees, the tuck shop, neighbours, and fun. Life was a treat. The weekly arrivals of the horse-drawn bread cart and the iceman were special events that we waited for with excitement, as it meant a slice of fresh bread to savour or a lump of ice to suck on. Come weekends, there would be a trip to the Saturday-afternoon movies in the Ringwood Town Hall, where Hopalong Cassidy and Tarzan righted the world’s wrongs. Afterwards, for threepence, we could buy enough chips for the two of us.

  I still recall my big brother doing well in the annual billycart race down Greenwood Avenue — which was some achievement, as Ringwood was a city. There was always something happening. The last exciting thing I remember is standing beside the railway line in 1954 and waving a flag frantically as the new Queen and her husband rushed past. I didn’t realise they were at the rear of the train, and managed only a fleeting glance as I turned to leave.

  Sadly, after my older brother Ian died in an accident, our family moved to Tongio in far-east Gippsland. My mother had grown up there as a child. It wasn’t even a town. There was a sign that said ‘Tongio’ on the side of a narrow dirt road in the middle of a group of farms, and the post office was a spare room in someone’s house. It was sixteen miles from Omeo, an old gold-mining town located just below the snow line of the Victorian Alps. The entire area is called the ‘High Country’, but that is a latter-day tag. One thing Tongio certainly was — remote.

  For me, the move was terrible. My younger brother and I travelled up from Melbourne in my new dad’s 1938 Chevrolet ute (my mother had just remarried). It took four hours to reach Bairnsdale, which was a large regional town. Then the road headed due north into the rugged Great Dividing Range. Both of us vomited to the point of exhaustion with carsickness from Bairnsdale to Swifts Creek, a slow three-hour grind. We shared the back with a dog, a goat, and furniture. It was a dirt road, narrow, and had bends all the way. The dust was choking.

  It was just on dark when we first arrived at a deserted house on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. I could just make out an old weatherboard house in a huge paddock. There were no neighbours. I rushed up onto the veranda and opened the door, which didn’t have a lock. Frantically, I slid my hand up and down the wall near the architrave, trying to turn on the light. I soon found out that there was no switch, no lights, no power, no hot water, no radio, and no toilet. Well, that’s not quite true: there was something out the back that was called a dunny. It was halfway up a hill about fifty yards away, and it had a door with a latch that refused to stay shut. Admittedly, once inside, there was a magnificent view over the valley, but this scary, small cell-like room had a very deep hole under a seat that hosted redback spiders and a foul smell.

  There were many wild animals prowling the paddocks. Some were called Hereford cattle; others, merino sheep. In the bush, which was in every direction on the border of this small farming district, were wild kangaroos. They roamed the country in the dark, and were capable of attacking me and tearing out my guts. At least, that’s what the kids at my new one-teacher school told me. There were fifteen of them. These bush kids were different. They were quieter than city kids, and spoke a lot like grown-ups at times. They were concerned about the weather, the lack of rain, or severe frosts. They rode and walked long distances to school, and seemed to have endless chores to do and no time for hanging around after school. I hated Tongio, the bush, the school … everything. Ringwood was my paradise lost.

  Some of those problems disappeared when the Tongio Sch
ool was burnt to the ground after I had been there only 18 months. As a result, our family had to move just down the road to a small two-bedroom house on the Tambo River at Doctors Flat. I then attended Swifts Creek Primary School. It was much bigger: some of the classes held over a dozen kids. I felt more at ease in this bigger school. I made a couple of mates, and soon become involved in the earthly pursuits of kick-to-kick, marbles, and cricket. Slowly, I ventured into the bush and explored the river. I gained skills such as a good eye, and never got lost in the mountains. Within a couple of years I loved to camp out with my horse, some mates, a rifle, the camp oven, and a First World War canvas sleeping-bag. I became adept at trapping rabbits, hunting wombats, and fishing. I enjoyed trekking for days into the unknown, and saw some amazing wildlife.

  However, like most boys, my career path was set out for me: leave at the end of year ten, or Proficiency as it was called, and get a job. Most would work in the local sawmill, some would return to the farm, and the odd one would get an apprenticeship. The only kids pursuing an education had left the area years earlier, and went to private schools in Melbourne and Geelong. Most of them were boys.

  In late October 1960, I left school and worked with my step dad, who was a plumber. Naturally, I didn’t pass my final year at school, but what use was an education?

  After eight months working with my father, I was told that I would be moving to Ensay, which was a farming community. I would live on the property from Monday to Friday as a farm labourer. It took me over an hour to get to the farm on my horse, but the job was a wonderful experience. At the end of each day, I showered and dressed up for tea. It was usually a large, three-course meal. During the meals, discussions would centre on breeding, pastures, and management decisions. There was never any swearing. At least one night a week, one of us would be involved on a committee. They were fine people, excellent farmers, and very involved in the community. I was treated like a son.

  The Omeo shire was huge, and spread out over 50-odd miles from end to end. The main towns were Benambra, Omeo, Swifts Creek, and Ensay. Everyone knew everyone else. These isolated communities thrived because people supported each other. They contained many diverse organisations. In a bushfire, for example, the locals would marshal their many skills, and never needed to depend on outside volunteers. Somehow, food would be prepared for such emergencies, and tractors with water tankers on trailers would always be at the ready. I remember leaving a cricket match along with both teams to fight a grass fire at Omeo. Once we’d helped put it out, we returned to the game and kept playing.