After serving in the war, most Australian veterans swore they’d never go back to Vietnam. But scores have since moved permanently to the southern port city of Vung Tau.
Lindsay Murdoch
Raymond Low says he saw the first body fall from a grey helicopter that swooped low over Vung Tau beach, where his RAAF squadron mates were drinking beer and barbecuing Australian steaks under an awning.
Low was bobbing up and down on a surfboard in the choppy waters that humid day at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968, and thought at first he was seeing a US Navy commando undergoing free-fall training. However, as a US Navy patrol boat circled nearby, no one surfaced where the body splashed into the water.
Veterans living in Vietnam
50 - 60 Vietnam veterans now call Vietnam home. Living on old battlegrounds the move has laid their ghosts to rest.
Low says he doesn't know whether it was an American or South Vietnamese helicopter, but minutes later it returned, swooping over the beach at a height of about 400 feet. "I saw a second body fall," he recalls. "This time I noticed there were no flailing arms or anything like that. The man's hands were tied behind his back."
Then a leading aircraftman in his early 20s who'd grown up in the inner suburbs of Sydney, Low recalls sitting on the surfboard thinking, "What kind of a war am I in?" Low says he learnt later that suspected Viet Cong infiltrators were sometimes taken on deadly helicopter rides for interrogation. The practice was to push one of the suspects out of the door, screaming to his death, as a way of convincing others to talk.
He spent only nine days in Vietnam during the war, working on Caribou aircraft at the airstrip at Vung Tau, a city in southern Vietnam wedged between two mountains on a strip of land jutting into the South China Sea. Back then, Vung Tau had an airstrip, logistics base and about 100 seedy beachfront bars that had sprung up to cater for US and Australian forces on rest-and-recreation leave during the war. Almost half a century later, sipping a beer in the Australian-run Tommy's, a bar and restaurant near the same waterfront, Low says that when he flew out of Vietnam that year, he never thought he'd return. "I was profoundly affected by what I saw. I couldn't talk about it for years."
Now 71, Low is one of about 50 Australian veterans of the war who have returned to the country of their former enemy and settled in Vung Tau, a prosperous regional city of more than 470,000 people situated some 30 kilometres from Nui Dat, the wartime base for Australian forces. Scores of other Australian retirees, most of them divorced from Australian women, have followed the veterans, with high-rise apartment buildings and luxury hotels catering for a booming tourist industry and workers on oil rigs off the coast. Its beaches are packed at weekends with residents from crowded Ho Chi Minh City, two hours' drive away.
But Vung Tau also has a seedy underbelly and is a single man's paradise for many of the Australians frequenting bars with names like Sweethearts, Red Parrot, Hot Lips and Bearded Clam, where young, scantily clad Vietnamese prostitutes vie for their attention. Some spend their days drinking $1 beers, complaining about how bad things are in Australia, in sometimes sexist and racist rants. "I can't even call a waitress 'love' without offence being taken over there," says one veteran.
Glenn Nolan, 58, a war historian and former soldier who served in 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (RAR) after the Vietnam War, says some Australians who arrive in Vung Tau after going through a bad divorce at home fall in love with the first girl they meet in a bar.
"He sees love, she sees ATM. I've seen houses gone and fortunes lost. If they take their time, they can meet some very nice Vietnamese ladies outside the bars who are absolutely beautiful. But for others, it's Groundhog Day. They go to bars at 10am for a few beers, go home for a nap at 1pm and are back drinking at 4pm until stumps, seven days a week. It's pretty sad to see some of them."
The veterans here have an unwritten code of conduct. Anyone disrespecting Vietnamese women is bluntly told to behave or leave town. Some with drinking problems who lose control are escorted to the airport and put on a plane back to Australia. One Australian who spread a sexually transmitted disease among prostitutes was ordered out of town.
Ho Chi Hoang Kim, 29, a waitress at the popular Belly's Watering Hole, often sings Úc-dai-loi, Cheap Charlie, a song made famous during the war years about stingy Australian soldiers from the country of "big rats" (there is no word in Vietnamese for kangaroo). "Sure, some of the Aussies are Cheap Charlies but they are good men," she says. "You see them help poor people on the streets all the time."
Some Australians living in Vung Tau have happy long-term partnerships with local women. Dozens work in charities, helping impoverished local families, and in an orphanage where children have deformities believed to have been caused by Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant sprayed by the US military during the war to eliminate forest coverage for North Vietnamese troops.
Some, like Nolan, conduct tours of the former battlefields for Australian tourists, including Long Tan, 40 kilometres north-east of Vung Tau. It was here, on August 18, 1966, that 105 Australians and three New Zealanders fought off wave after wave of Viet Cong fighters in a battle that came to symbolise Australia's 10-year involvement in the Vietnam War.
Raymond Low, who spent 22 years working on aircraft in the RAAF in Australia and overseas before leaving the service in 1995, says it was only in 2002 that television programs rekindled his interest in Vietnam. He says he then began making frequent trips there, booking into a cheap hotel in Vung Tau for weeks at a time.
"Every trip was better than the previous one," he says, adding that he now lives in Vung Tau for months at a time, but travels back to Australia for business and to deal with health problems, including a lung condition. (Medical treatment in Australia is free for veterans receiving TPI – Totally and Permanently Incapacitated – pensions.) "The people are generally friendly, although in any developing country you find people who will scam you if they can. I've made good friends here. The cost of living is low. And I feel totally relaxed … this is where my heart is now."
Some of the stories Vietnam veterans tell about the war are recycled, embellished; old Asia hands are sceptical, for instance, about Low's account of bodies being thrown from a helicopter, especially over an area where troops went for R&R. But Low insists the story is true and he has a US magazine article with a photo of a suspected North Vietnamese infiltrator falling from a helicopter.
Peter Taylor, a machine-gunner with 5th Battalion RAR, left Vietnam in March 1970 on the light-aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney, marking the end of his 11-month tour of duty at Australia's Nui Dat base. "I remember sitting on the back of the boat watching [Vietnam] disappear and saying to myself, 'I will never return, never ever,' " he says. "That lasted 35 years."
Taylor, 68, doesn't want to talk about the war, how he was wounded or how some mates never came home. "It takes a lot to get rid of some of the terrible things you did and saw," he says. He's sitting with his partner of two years, Chau, 34, at a table in a corner of Belly's, which serves lamb shanks and is an unofficial clubhouse for many of the veterans.
For decades after the war, living in Canberra, Taylor hated the Vietnamese. "We'd been told all the propaganda … that they were bad buggers and we should kill them. That they eat babies and sell their sisters, all that stuff. But it was wrong. They're a beautiful race of people and they need our help."
Taylor, who has three adult sons from two marriages in Australia, returned to Vietnam in 2005 with a couple of mates to attend a ceremony at Long Tan. He wanted to leave after two days. "The smell was still here; everything like that," he says. But he stayed for several weeks and, after repeated trips, now calls Vung Tau home.
"There is no pressure here as long as you keep your nose clean and don't get into any trouble with the police, or anything like that. If you want a taxi, you just walk out and get one – unlike in Australia, where you have to wait an hour. And I don't like the way Australia is changing. I just don't agree with the people they are bringing to Australia these days. They are not workers – not like the Vietnamese when they came to Australia on boats [after the Vietnam War]."
Taylor is a key figure in the Vung Tau Veterans & Friends Children's Fund, a charity run by Australians that repairs houses for poor local families, among other things. "If street kids need an operation or something like that, we can hold a fund-raiser and get the money at the drop of a hat," he says. "The boys will all chip in."
Glenn Nolan, who married a local restaurant owner 11 years ago, says Australians living here feel they have more freedom than at home. "Australia has become too much of a nanny state, where you have a minority dictating to the majority. One example is the Muslim issue: you can't say anything. You're gagged."
Here, he says, you can have a few beers and drive without worrying about losing your licence. "You know you've had enough when you fall off your motorbike," he laughs.
Russell Hutchinson, 67, says those people who criticise him for marrying Hanh, a local woman 42 years younger than him, "can all get stuffed". Hutchison was a raw navy recruit aged 16 when he made a brief port visit to Vung Tau in 1965, returning in 1967. He believes he is sterile as a result of water contaminated with Agent Orange that was recycled on the ships he served on, and admits he is quick to become angry.
He met Hanh in a bar in Vung Tau bar seven years ago. Hutchison, who has an irregular heartbeat and other health problems, receives a TPI pension of $877 a fortnight. (Many of the Australian veterans in Vung Tau receive the TPI pension, which entitles them to benefits that include medical care. Hanh will be eligible for an Australian war widow's pension if Hutchison dies before she does.)
"Hanh would die for me – I mean that," Hutchison says, sipping beer in a bar below the single-room apartment he rents near Belly's Watering Hole. "But she must be thinking, 'If I put up with this old bastard for another 10 or 20 years' – she knows my health problems – 'and then he kicks the bucket', she will only be in her 30s or 40s and she'll be set for the rest of her life, with a war widow's pension that will allow her to look after her family. That is a fortune in this country. Here, the family comes first. I know that. I don't care. I love her to bits."
Later, over a meal of prawns, I ask Hanh what she thinks of Hutchison, a former bus driver on the NSW Central Coast. "I love him. I take care of him," she says. Hutchison says he can "count on the fingers of two hands" relationships between Australians and local women that have lasted for years in Vung Tau. One Australian bought a house for his new bride but a week later came home from the bars to find that all his clothes were on the footpath and he was locked out. "This shit happens all the time," Hutchison says. "Other marriages work okay. That's life."
Impoverished families from the Mekong Delta send their daughters to Vung Tau to work in the bars, he says. "It's hard, but they do whatever they have to do to get money to send back to the family. They go to bed with blokes. It's as simple as that." Hutchison adds that he has seen girls as young as 15 working in the bars. It was in Vung Tau, in 2005, that former pop star Gary Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, was convicted of sexually molesting two girls aged 11 and 12. He was jailed for nearly three years before being deported.
Long Tan is silent now, only a late-afternoon breeze rustling through nearby rubber trees. Here, half a century ago, 108 soldiers of D Company, 6th Battalion RAR, hunkered down for four hours in a tropical downpour, outnumbered at least 10 to one. At the end, piles of enemy soldiers lay in red mud, mutilated by a barrage of artillery fire.
All but 17 Australians survived (another soldier died later from his wounds) and by Australia's official count, 245 Vietnamese were killed and three captured.
But decades later, the battle remains a sensitive issue for Vietnam, which still claims in propaganda that its forces were the victors. The country's rulers cancelled official events marking the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan last August 18, angering several thousand Australian veterans and family members who had planned to attend a commemorative ceremony at the site of the fighting where an unmarked white cross stands.
Now, despite the high-level political intrigue over the battle, Australian veterans have forged ties with their former enemies. Plans are underway for a joint Australian-Vietnamese war memorial and an RSL-like centre in Vung Tau, where former foes can meet socially.
Rod "Rocket" Harlor, 68, who mostly fought in Vietnam with a platoon of 9th Battalion RAR and was based at Nui Dat in 1969, says one of the reasons he has made Vung Tau his home is because of friendships he has made with the Vietnamese, including some former North Vietnamese soldiers. "Most of the people here don't know of the war – they were not born when it happened," Harlor says, standing arm in arm at the Long Tan cross with Vo Xuan Thu, a veteran of the North Vietnam Army who has memories of battles with Australians. "Vietnam is a very young society. The Australian veterans have no problems with the locals, including our former enemies like Mr Thu here, who is a good friend to us."
Harlor says the Vietnamese saw the Australians as the "honourable" enemy in a largely American war. "We did the right thing by the POWs and civilians," he says.
Thu insists on commenting, too. "I am very happy to be with [the Australians]. They are my friends and I really appreciate their friendship, their understanding and their feelings," he says in the Vietnamese language.
Harlor, whose wife passed away in Australia years ago, says he can't get the smile off his face when he walks around Vung Tau, which has better infrastructure than most Vietnamese cities. He pays $400 a month for a furnished apartment with a pool and Wi-Fi. Competent medical and dental services are cheap compared to Australia; a bowl of noodles costs less than $2, a beer $1. "The kids give you a high-five on the street and somebody will just pull up on a motorcycle out of the blue and want to have a chat in English," he says. "It's a wonderful place to live. I swore I'd never come back after the war, but here I am."
The radio crackled "contact" in the Battalion Operations Centreat Nui Dat at 3.20pm on August 18, 1966. Graeme "Breaker" Cusack, a second lieutenant with 6th Battalion RAR, was first to hear that Australia's fiercest battle of the Vietnam War was underway.
Cusack clearly remembers the dramatic events that unfolded in the following hours but says he has lost all memory of the next day, when he went to the battlefield while soldiers were carrying out the gruesome task of collecting body parts (most of the Vietnamese casualties had been hit by fierce artillery barrages).
Years later, in Australia, a counsellor suggested that Cusack return to Vietnam "to put the ghosts of the war to rest". "I replied, 'I am not going back to that so-and-so country,' " he says. But in 2004, he watched Mel Gibson's movie We Were Soldiers, which tells the story of the US's first major battle of the war. Then a Tour Vietnam brochure arrived, unsolicited, in the post.
He called a mate who'd also served in the war and booked a trip, arriving 38 years to the day after he had flown out of Vietnam. On that initial return trip, he met a Vietnamese woman in her late 30s called Ha. Within two days of returning to Australia, he decided to sell everything and move to Vietnam, leaving behind three failed marriages and bouts of suicidal depression.
Cusack married Ha in 2005, but that marriage didn't work out, either, and in 2011 he married his second Vietnamese wife, Phuong. They live 30 kilometres from Vung Tau in a house where he displays his war medals and memorabilia. On a clear day, from his garden, he can see a mountain range 15 kilometres away. It was there, during the war, that the North Vietnamese occupied a series of secret tunnels and bases from which they launched attacks on the Australians at Nui Dat. In return, "we bombed the shit out of them", he says.
Aged 78 and suffering the early stages of a nervous disorder, Cusack says he has never looked back since moving in 2004 to Vung Tau, where he has conducted battlefield tours and volunteered his time to be caretaker of the Long Tan cross.
Four years ago, Phuong gave birth to a girl, Anna. "I never thought I would have a baby at my age," says Cusack. "But she is just the most beautiful girl in the world. She helps keep me young. I love it. This is home now. I will die here."
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