Going Back (6 page)

His job took him all over the old Phuoc Tuy Province, and most of the time he travelled alone with just a sidearm and a 7.62 mm SLR (self-loading rifle) for company. By February 1967, Ben was posted to 5 RAR as a reinforcement officer. He recalled what it was like joining the battalion as a reo:

Well the first thing is that you are going in alone and you feel that . . . They had been together in country for about seven or eight months. You are the new boy on the block. The other thing is because you are in Viet Nam on company-sized operations you don't get to know the rest of the battalion officers. I met some of them Thursday week ago [February 2005] in Canberra! We were in the same battalion but we didn't get to meet because they happened to be in C Company or D Company.
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After another stint with the Civil Affairs unit, Ben found himself posted to 2 RAR, again as a reinforcement officer. This time the experience was far from pleasant:

The OC there treated me like one of those people who hadn't won the war. ‘We are here to win the war, you are one of those losers who hadn't won it up till now' type of thing, and that is a pretty hard attitude to overcome. And in some ways if I had been someone with not as much experience as I had, I would have just buckled under just from that attitude.
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Ben described his time with 2 RAR as ‘tough'. He was involved in a bad mine incident when working with the unit in late November 1967, and the man who triggered the ‘Jumping Jack' (M-16) mine was killed instantly. It is probably fair to say that Ben would not have undertaken a pilgrimage with people from 2 RAR because of the underlying emotions of his experience with that unit.

Ben enjoyed his time with 5 RAR, which he described as ‘happy. I enjoyed that platoon and I think they enjoyed me.' He believed the battalion was ‘very professional; they knew what they were on about; they didn't take silly risks'. Ben added, ‘They were there to stay alive but they were also there to win a war. They had a respect for men's lives.'
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When the Australians withdrew from South Viet Nam in 1972, Ben felt that ‘we [as an Army] had been let down. We had been let down by the politicians who had tied our hands behind our fucking backs and not let us get on with the war.' The pain of that conflict was still highly evident as he continued, ‘I am still sure in my own mind that if we had been left to run the war the way it should have been, we would have won it. 'When the South inevitably fell in 1975 he felt ‘sad, because a lot of good people were going to get hurt'.
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It is a fair assumption that Ben has post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but he works hard at managing it. He has not let it stop him from returning to Viet Nam—when he joined the 5 RAR tour group it was his fourth visit back since the war. ‘I want to come to peace with the country and I can't do that by just doing one visit,' he explained.
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Ben's other trips were privately organised tours in December 1997 and January 1998 with his partner, who is now his second wife. His reactions from the first trip were not easy to deal with, and he believed he needed to return a third time in July 1999 to where he served, ‘just to stand and reflect'.
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Ben's wife Jenny accompanied him on the trip in October 2005. He wanted to show her ‘the Army side of Viet Nam' by being on a trip with Army colleagues, as Jenny has never been ‘an Army wife', as Ben put it, and ‘didn't understand a lot of Army things'.
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Ben's expectations on the October 2005 5 RAR tour were ‘not all that great . . . just to go back and come to some sort of peace with the whole place'.
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I asked Ben if he had any apprehensions, and he said he thought that the group would experience ‘reactions', based upon his own experiences on previous tours. As it happened, I don't think this was the case, and veterans should be aware that everyone reacts differently to what they see, smell, hear and feel when they are back in Viet Nam. One cannot throw a blanket over a group and say that they will feel a certain way: we are too complex and have had too many life experiences to simplify an emotive reaction.

Today, Ben lives in Wollongong and is still serving with the Army Reserve in the RAAMC.

Captain Fred Pfitzner, Company Second-in-
Command, 5 RAR; Operations Officer, 1 ATF
Headquarters

Square-framed and muscular, Fred Pfitzner is a big bloke who stands a tad over 183 cm (6 feet). He was born in Adelaide into a large family of nine kids and moved to Canberra in 1959 to attend RMC Duntroon, where he graduated in 1962. He saw active service in Malaya and Borneo as a rifle platoon commander with 3 RAR, returning to Australia skilled in jungle warfare in 1965. While serving with the 28th Commonwealth Brigade in Singapore, along with many officers Fred did a two-week reconnaissance to South Viet Nam and was made familiar with the operational scenario in country. After posting to the 6 Task Force at Enoggera Barracks in Brisbane, he was initially told he was going as a reinforcement officer to serve as a captain in operations in the Task Force headquarters, but that was changed to a company second-in-command in 5 RAR once the ‘powers that be' realised that the blokes working in the command post should have some idea of what was going on out ‘in the weeds'.

Arriving in the unit was not as daunting for him as it was for most other officer reinforcements because, as Fred recalled, he knew the man who met him at Nui Dat: ‘[Major] Blue Hodgkinson and I had spent nine of my first thirteen years in the Army together; he was my company commander in Malaya.' His flight over was interesting: ‘I was the DCO [draft conducting officer] on a Qantas flight via Manila with a whole bunch of people I didn't know, and only another one or two officers. Maintaining decorum in Manila was not easy.' The 24-year-old Captain Pfitzner admitted to being ‘excited' about entering another war zone—it was a feeling of ‘once more into the breach; that was what I was being paid for'.
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Fred's company commander was Major Bruce McQualter, who tragically died of wounds sustained in a mine incident in the Long Hai Hills on 22 February 1967, about seven months into the tour. Fred added, ‘We lost two officers in that one and about nine Diggers and 22 wounded, from memory.' The loss of two officers from 5 RAR plus the forward observer gutted the rifle company: ‘Well, they were rooted; they were pulled back straight after it . . . They were literally a rump of a company and they were employed on minefield security while it was being built until they went home.'
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Fred then saw out the remainder of his tour from May to December 1967 as an operations officer in the Task Force headquarters working on shift in the command post, and as the Task Force patrol master coordinating TAOR (tactical area of responsibility) patrols. Fred recalls wryly:

It wasn't hard; it was 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were periods of intense activity and every now and then you could relax a bit, like in any bloody war. There were a few peaks like the first time we started operating east of Dat Do and things like that, which represented a significant change in the capability of the Task Force, being able to operate away from its own close protection.
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The pilgrimage with 5 RAR was to be Fred's first return to Viet Nam. He assumed ‘that the countryside will be as lovely as it ever was, the girls will look much the same'. Fred knew that 70 per cent of the population was born after the war, ‘so they aren't going to be too interested in a fat-arsed bunch of old farts running around'. He was also hoping to see, even though the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam is a Communist country, ‘that entrepreneurial streak—especially in the South—that was always there'. He added with a smile, ‘They are like the Chinese; they are all basically capitalists.'
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Fred had few qualms about returning, but also knew much had changed in areas where he had served (his greatest apprehension was leaving his farm outside Canberra, with his Murray Grey breeders about to start calving). Fred was one of many who were disappointed about the withdrawal of Australians from the war in 1972, especially as he was then commanding a ready reaction force—called Fred Force (Alpha Company 9 RAR)—to deploy to South Viet Nam if things ‘got untidy' with the remnants of the Australian force left in Saigon. On the fall of Saigon and the collapse of resistance to the National Liberation Front offensive in 1975, Fred stated he was ‘disappointed in the sense that we lost, and resigned in the sense that it was probably ever going to be so'.

Like many warriors who served in Phuoc Tuy Province and other areas in South Viet Nam, Fred is proud of his service. He didn't think the war was a lost cause:

Not when we were there, no. In fact I think that the Australian Army can still to this day hold its head up about its conduct of operations in Phuoc Tuy, especially in the early days because they got on top of the problem and provided the firm base from which operations were able to be launched out of the province, and we didn't ever have our hands on the back door, which could have happened.
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Today retired brigadier Fred Pfitzner—who describes himself as a ‘prickle farmer'—and his wife Helen grow Murray Grey breeders on an acreage outside Canberra and keep a weather eye out for rain that may one day again fall on this parched nation.

Captain Ron Shambrook, Quartermaster,
Company Commander and Company
Second-in-Command, 5 RAR

When Cairns-born Ron Shambrook turned eighteen, he went straight into the CMF and shortly after that National Service (the first scheme in the 1950s). He was promoted to second lieutenant in 1953 and later became a company commander. Cairns then, like all other CMF units, changed when the Army adopted what was known as the Pentropic organisation.
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Cairns lost its battalion and Townsville was the centre for the 2nd Battalion, Royal Queensland Regiment (2 RQR), which was one of three battalions that previously formed the 11th Brigade. When this reorganisation came to the Militia Army in 1963, Ron was basically out of a job in uniform. As he put it, ‘I had the opportunity to join the Regular Army, and I did.'
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He was recommended for Regular Service and took the plunge after talking with his wife Elizabeth. Ron was posted to 1 RAR at Holsworthy and, as was the custom in those days, this substantive major had to drop a rank and was now a captain in the Australian Regular Army.

At this time 1 RAR were aware unofficially that they might be deploying to Viet Nam and Ron wanted to stay with 1 RAR. The 5th Battalion was about to be raised and Lieutenant Colonel John Warr, who was the battalion Executive Officer of 1 RAR and was about to be made CO of 5 RAR, said to Ron, ‘I want you to be my Quartermaster in 5 RAR.'
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Despite 33-year-old Ron's protestations and lack of quartermaster training, he was given the task of raising the indents to crank up 5 RAR from a stores perspective. It was a monumental task, and one that Ron found one of the most frustrating but also rewarding jobs in his career.

Ron had been to New Guinea but had never been to Asia. He said, ‘There was excitement, I wanted to be there.' Ron's tour diary in Viet Nam reads like a ‘Rent a Captain' bouncing from one job to another. The CO kept his promise after the battalion was settled in and Ron went off to a rifle company as a company second-in-command, then acting company commander of Administration Company, followed by a stint in Task Force headquarters. After he was promoted to major he ended up commanding Charlie Company 5 RAR.

Like Fred Pfitzner, this was to be Ron's first trip back. Unfortunately his wife Elizabeth fell ill just before departure and had to stay home, which was a great disappointment to both Ron and his wife. When asked why he wanted his wife to accompany him, Ron explained the catalysts for his decision to return:

I wanted to take Elizabeth back and show her some of the areas. Up until last year I had no intention of going back at all. We were sitting in Wagga at the RSL after having laid up the colours of 5 RAR the night before. Half a dozen of us suddenly brought up this suggestion of going back as a pilgrimage rather than as a tourist and it snowballed from there. And now I am excited to be going back. I don't particularly want to go and see the American War in Viet Nam, I would rather go and see what we did, and remember those colleagues; we had 25 dead and about 100 casualties.
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Ron expected the country to have changed significantly, but was still looking forward to visiting places like Nui Dat. Asked if he had any apprehensions, he said:

I am certain it will pull a few emotional chords at certain places. I have done a lot of touring in recent years and there will be some of that. I am looking forward to North Viet Nam and the northern part of [South] Viet Nam, which we didn't see because we didn't win. [Chuckles.]
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Ron was sad at the outcome of the war, and not just from a military perspective; the loss of lives on both sides was dreadful and a cause for regret.

Today Ron and Elizabeth live in retirement in Brisbane.

Captain John Taske, RMO

John Taske served in South Viet Nam as an RMO with several units including 5 RAR, 6 RAR, 1 Field Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery (RAA) and 8 Field Ambulance.

John is an adventurous man who made the military his career after medical training, retiring with the rank of colonel. He was accompanied for most of the trip to Viet Nam in 2005 by his second wife Tina, who had to leave the tour before it finished to attend a conference elsewhere overseas.

This was John's first trip back to Viet Nam. His main reasons for joining the pilgrimage were:

To have a holiday, renew old friendships, see those parts of Vietnam that I saw on my tour of duty, and see what changes time and peace have brought. I also want to see parts of the country that I haven't seen before.
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