In Good Company Read online

  Similarly, there were very few of my mates from the surf club or my rugby club in St. Ives in Sydney who had been called up; consequently it was a case of what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. So I was a rather naive and ignorant 20-year-old when I attended my farewell from work at the New South Wales branch of the AMP Society at Circular Quay about five weeks before I had to report to my induction centre.

  My farewell was a disaster. I was supposed to visit my department and branch heads in the afternoon after a farewell luncheon held not far from the AMP at the Island Trader bistro underneath Goldfields House. Things didn’t go as planned and after the lunch with some of my workmates I was not in a fit state to call upon those esteemed gentlemen to pay my respects.

  I have always laid the blame for this unfortunate event squarely at the feet of Tim Pickup, who worked in the accounts department of the AMP and was courting my sister at the time. This evil man well and truly ambushed me in the cool darkness of the Island Trader bistro, and when I emerged from lunch where something like six bottles of white burgundy were consumed by half as many people, the effect of the warm March afternoon was devastating. I can vaguely remember falling over on my way back to work and throwing up into a litter bin near the First and Last Hotel. As a result of these incidents, Tim went off to buy me a shirt to replace the one I had ripped and soiled, but the shirt he purchased was somewhat too small for my neck and I couldn’t put on the tie which was the dress requirement in those days. To make matters worse I had thought it would be a good idea if I washed the tie which had dangled in the litter bin but in the process I overbalanced and fell into the fountain at the side of the AMP building.

  However, I was determined not to let these mishaps prevent me from carrying out my obligations to say goodbye to my bosses and into the building I sloshed. I would have made it but for the fact that my inebriated state and the ‘G’ forces on the lift forced me onto the floor of the elevator. A taxi was summoned and I was unceremoniously bundled into it, no doubt with great relief by those unfortunates with whom I had lunched. But I was regarded as something of a potential disaster by the taxi driver who didn’t cart me more than 100 metres before he unloaded me back into the arms of my despairing friends.

  My department head saved the day and ordered a staff car to take me home. I arrived there at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon to find my father just home from work. He was somewhat bemused by my dishevelled, drunken state and after a quick appraisal suggested I go to bed and sleep off my condition. Dad hadn’t seen me drunk before and it must have been quite a shock to see his son stumble out of the staff car, soaked to the skin and with a shirt two sizes too small draped over him. My sister later told me that such farewell ‘lunches’ for staff members were discouraged shortly after my own debacle. I only wish the powers that be had made that decision before my farewell.

  I had accumulated some leave at the AMP so my next step was to take a short holiday before my draft notice arrived. I owned a rather dilapidated but fairly reliable FX Holden sedan and it was into this trusty machine that Tony Anderson and I set off on a ‘surfari’. Tony was a former flatmate, an apprenticed carpenter and about two years younger than me. With very little money between us we managed to surf just about every decent break between Newport and Byron Bay. In the back of my mind was the idea that I had to cram every spare minute I could into enjoying myself, as anyone and everyone was intent on reminding me that once I was drafted my time would no longer be my own.

  The two weeks we spent surfing went very quickly. The surf and the sun were very kind to us and I can still remember with great clarity the day we surfed a point break just south of Seal Rocks with a couple of porpoise. As we took off on waves about four to five feet high these beautiful sleek creatures would dive right under our boards and seemingly race us along the wave. But time and tide ran out and in late March I was back in Sydney getting ready to join about 3 000 other 20-year-old men for the second intake of national servicemen in 1968.

  There was the usual round of last minute farewells and parties and I can remember my mother telling me not to volunteer for anything, no doubt drawing on her experiences as a service-woman during the Second World War. As each day drew closer I found that articles in the paper and reports on television about the war in Vietnam and the army in general drew my attention more and more. What seemed insignificant and unimportant only six months before now gained my undivided attention. Funnily enough, if you had asked me a year before what I thought about South Vietnam and the war I would have struggled for an answer and would have been unable to give an accurate geographical location of where it was. It had always been my belief that only ‘ratbag university students’ were interested in that sort of thing and only then because it was the thing to do. In 1968 they were in fact the vocal minority and most of my peer group believed that they were interested in Vietnam only because their American counterparts were demonstrating against the draft and the war and it was trendy.

  I received my draft notice, which followed quickly on the heels of my resignation from the CMF. I attended the pre-induction medical examination in York Street in the city and since I was the proud owner of most of the standard pieces of anatomy, the septuagenarian medical officer deemed me fit to serve.

  Even before we had been looked at it was an interesting medical examination. Downstairs, outside the armed forces recruiting office where the test was held, there was a group of what appeared to be university types who were handing out leaflets on how to fail your medical. Some of these methods varied—from ingenious to what appeared to be dangerous. One recommended that the potential examinee knock down something like six whiskies just prior to the medical and run from the pub to the examination rooms, remembering to run up the stairs to the examination room on the sixth floor. All of this was guaranteed to give you a blood pressure reading which would exempt you from military service. I don’t recall any such tricks amongst the thirty or so guys having their medical when I was having mine, but I do recollect that the examination was fairly cursory and relied to some extent on the honesty of the draftee.

  Finally the big day came: the first day of May, 1968. My intake of New South Welshmen from Sydney had to report to the army depot at Marrickville at about 8.00 am. My dad drove me out as we had been informed by letter that we would be going to our training depots by service transport and we couldn’t use our own cars. It seemed that my freedom was being eroded even before I had put on a uniform.

  There was chaos at the induction centre when we arrived. The police were out in force and the footpaths were choked with protesters. This time they weren’t all young students but also included a matronly band of dissenters who rallied under the flag of the ‘Save Our Sons’ movement. Dad was unable to get closer than 400 metres to the gate and so we said our goodbyes and I walked down to the gate with my suitcase and took in the bedlam around me.

  At the gate the scene was fairly hysterical. Almost every woman there was over 40 and intent on doing her utmost to hinder the police allowing draftees free passage into the depot. There wasn’t any actual physical violence that I could see in all this noisy mayhem, but there was no shortage of chanting, placard waving and not so fake ‘crocodile tears’. It was all very emotional and judging by the reactions of the young draftees who were watching all this from inside the depot grounds, it was not without its effect. Some of the guys were quite impressed by the intensity of the demonstration.

  Once inside the depot we were marshalled into alphabetical lots and in the shade of the trees experienced our first taste of ‘hurry up and wait’. Eventually we were processed like so many sausages and had another medical examination, a dental check, eye test and blood test. This last test provided some minor drama as some twenty men fainted on the lawn outside the hut where they had had their fingers jabbed and given blood. This activity resulted in a huge urn of tea being produced from somewhere for which everyone was grateful. It didn’t really matter that one could not decide if this ‘brew�
� as it was called was tea or coffee, it was welcome.

  There were about 300 men as far as I could estimate being inducted and most were still present when we were assembled in mid-afternoon on the parade ground. We were told the New South Wales intake was exceptionally large and there was not enough room to take us all at the 3rd Training Battalion up at Singleton in the Hunter Valley. Consequently, some of us would be going to Victoria to do our basic training at a place called Puckapunyal.

  As this announcement was made, there was a groan from somewhere in the group. The groaner turned out to be an ex-CMF trooper who had savoured the delights of this Victorian resort and wasted no time in relating the peculiar attractions of this far flung establishment. He described in great detail the extremes of climate we would suffer, from searing heat to bone-chilling cold. And all this in one day. I wasn’t sure if this guy was having a lend of us but I thought his voice had a ring of truth about it and it didn’t sound too good. Naturally, it was to this destination that I and some 150 other lucky individuals were packed onto three coaches that evening. Our sleep was shattered at about midnight when our bus ran off the road and came to a halt against a tree. Luckily, no-one was injured apart from the driver who was a bit shaken up but otherwise alright. After a chilly wait for about 15 minutes the other two coaches arrived and we were transferred onto these with our gear. Needless to say we were tightly packed in and had to sit on our cases in the aisles for the remainder of the journey. Sleep was out of the question and comfort was where you could find it.

  As dawn was breaking our depleted convoy entered Puckapunyal. I don’t think many of us on board that crowded bus had much of an idea of where we really were. No-one had given us a detailed briefing of where Puckapunyal was or exactly how long it would take to get there. I had never before heard of the 2nd Recruit Training Battalion and, taking in the cold, wind-swept countryside, I was beginning to wish I never had.

  The buses drove onto a parade ground and pulled up in front of a warrant officer who was standing ramrod straight in the bleak morning light with a pace stick under his arm. He was looking straight ahead and didn’t look directly at any of the dishevelled, unshaven and bleary-eyed civilians who spilt out of the coaches onto his bitumen parade ground.

  Once we had all gaggled into a most un-military group with our hands jammed deep into our pockets as protection from the icy wind that was blowing, the regimental sergeant major finally spoke.

  ‘Spoke’ is probably a kind description of the noise that emanated from this impeccably tailored gentleman. It was more like the roar of a lion. The effect of his commands was startling. In no time at all he had this ‘rabble of civilian humanity’ almost lined up into a recognisable column and was marching us off to our barracks. As we valiantly tried to march along carrying our over-packed suitcases, we were given a guided tour of what we were passing and why it was ‘out of bounds’. To the constant bellowing of ‘lep, right, lep, right, lep, right, left’ we finally found ourselves in front of what was to be our home for the next three months.

  These pastel blue, wooden dwellings didn’t incite us to gaze in awe and wonder at their beauty or remarkable architectural design. What was uppermost in our minds just then was a hot feed and a bed. The hot feed we soon were given but the bed was a long way off. From breakfast until dusk that evening, my group, which by now had been identified as 23 Platoon, was ‘marched in’.

  All day we were herded by our platoon staff, who were referred to as ‘Ack Is’ or assistant instructors. These men were also our section commanders and though we didn’t know it at the time, some were also nashos. With the efficiency of sheepdogs they moved us from the mess hall to the quartermaster’s store, regimental aid post, linen store, company headquarters, armoury and clothing store. After each establishment we were doubled back to our lines to deposit our latest acquisitions in our lockers and trunks. By the time the sun was setting on our first day at 2nd Recruit Training Battalion we had been issued all of the essentials to enable us to undertake basic soldier training.

  However, training was the last thing on anyone’s mind that evening and most of the thirty men in my hut were asleep soon after dinner. This was amazing—for ‘dinner’ was at the ungodly hour of 5.30 pm. Just about everyone in our hut was out like a light by 6.00 pm. And so it was a rude awakening when our assistant instructors burst into our hut at about 7.00 pm to announce that they were now going to show us how to put on a uniform so we could all begin to at least look like soldiers the next day.

  For the next two hours we were shown how to pack our gear in our lockers, make our beds, tidy our hut and finally put on the uniform we had been issued. This last task was far from easy as the issue point at the clothing store was concerned only with the fact that you had ‘three pairs of trousers mil green, three shirts mil green, three pairs socks woollen brown’ and so on. The fact that none of the items fitted you was irrelevant just as long as you had been issued them. Having done my CMF basic course it took me little time to get organised, so from the time our platoon staff left until close to midnight, the ex-trooper and myself helped the rest of our platoon put their basic webbing together, sort out their locker layout and so on. By the time we put our heads down that night we were buggered and a bomb could have gone off in that hut and no-one would have known.

  For the next couple of days we were pushed from pillar to post receiving briefings, collecting more equipment and filling out seemingly endless paperwork. This was when the true anonymity of being a soldier began to tell. We had to learn our army number. For nashos it was a standing joke that our army number ‘wasn’t a number it was a memory test’. Every national serviceman was allocated a number which began with his state of induction as a prefix; for example 1 for Queensland and 2 for New South Wales. This was followed by his national service indicator which was a 7. I was never sure what the next digit represented but I always believed it was the last number of the year in which you entered service, in my case 1968. Then followed the remainder of his number which meant that most national servicemen ended up with a 7 digit number as opposed to regular army men who had a 5 digit number. For several weeks my number was 2789606 until one day I was told that it should be 2789609. It was never explained to me why this was so: I simply became a new number.

  One of the high points in our first few days at ‘Pucka’ was the inoculation parade. In May at Puckapunyal it is quite cold and on the particular day my platoon had to line up for their needles a stiff wind was blowing dropping the temperature even lower. The drill was that you lined up outside the regimental aid post with only your underpants on as you would be stuck with a small-pox injection in one arm, a typhoid injection in the other and another injection in your rear end. The result of this mass injection was at times dramatic. Apart from nearly freezing to death, the cumulative effect of this multiple puncturing by the medics was pretty devastating. The morning after our needling we fronted onto the 6.00 am parade and as we stood there in the bitterly cold dawn about half of the platoon collapsed onto the ground. By the second day the rest of the platoon went down.

  Foot drill was taught at least twice a day, not including the daily administration, parades for reveille, meal parades and dismissal parades. We did drill with sidearms, without sidearms, in quick time and in slow time. Everywhere we went we did our drill ‘by numbers’. All of the pauses between drill movements were punctuated by ‘the regimental pause of two-three’, which usually sounded like ‘tup three’. Every where we went we had to ‘call the time’. If we didn’t do it loud enough the drill instructors would make us do the drill movement again until we did it right and whenever the volume was not loud enough, a ‘drilly’ would scream at us to ‘use your balls’ and repeat the movement. I’m sure some of these drillies were deaf as we usually finished the drill periods hoarse and with a headache from screaming ‘tup three’ for hours on end.

  After a couple of days we were finally confronted with weapon training. Unlike the previous years of large
scale mobilisation and military training, this 1960s generation of recruits weren’t all from the bush. A lot of the men in my platoon had never fired a rifle before, which I know didn’t please our assistant instructors because they would be the ones trying to teach us how to handle these weapons and stay alive at the same time. Having done my CMF training, I found that I was gaining in expertise as a rifle shot and looked forward to our visits to the range.

  The routine of drill and weapon training was sometimes broken by a spell of kitchen duty. My image of kitchen duty that Beetle Bailey, the GI cartoon character, used to do was shattered on my first mess duty: not only did I not have to peel a ton of potatoes, I didn’t even have to wash a mountain of dirty plates! Automation had come to the army. Instead, all one had to do was feed the washed potatoes into a large washing machinelike device and after tumbling for about half an hour they came out ready for the cooks to attack.

  The only things the automatic dishwashers couldn’t clean were the huge pots and pans known as dixies; the name for these enormous cooking pots originated from the British Indian army experience. It was pretty messy, dirty work and this chore was known as underwater panel beating. The men would do anything to get out of it. On one occasion one of the men on duty with our group decided to avoid dixie bashing and get rid of his workload by dumping the dixies in the large waste disposal bin at the rear of the kitchen. The sergeant cook found the dixies, and the culprit. Not only did he charge the unfortunate recruit, but he made him search through the bins where all food scraps for the pig swill was dumped. The sergeant had him literally wading through this incredible sludge for half an hour feeling for discarded pots. Not surprisingly very few dixies went missing after this little episode.