In Good Company Read online

  It was now our turn to teach the plebs how to stay out of trouble and how to get themselves organised. One method of doing this was to conduct ‘leaps’. In most institutions it would be called bastardisation—and it probably was. The junior class would be called out of their rooms at short notice and told to be back on parade dressed in whatever the platoon sergeant ordered. The last guy out incurred a penalty of some kind, which was usually amusing. If the whole lot were slow in getting out, the leaps continued until the class achieved the speed desired. Often they would be told to be out on parade with a boot on one foot, sandshoe on the other, blues trousers and braces and pyjama shirt. This frantic dressing and undressing soon reduced your room to a shambles and gear was spread all over the place. Doing leaps had a couple of side effects. We soon found out who was organised and who wasn’t and, more importantly, who could take a bit of chiacking and who couldn’t.

  Some guys went overboard occasionally and did a bit too much bastardising. Because everyone was around the same age group it was not uncommon for a junior classman to be older than his senior classmen. We had only been at Scheyville three months longer anyway and if a guy overstepped the mark to the point of being ridiculous, he would be told where to get off. One of my classmates tried this sort of thing on O’Sullivan. He was an air traffic controller, had a pretty good opinion of himself and for some reason had a set against O’Sullivan. One day he went into O’Sullivan’s room and turned it upside down. He sprayed foam shaving cream over his mirror and generally made a mess of his room. This annoyed me at the time and I told this guy that I thought he had done the wrong thing. Finally O’Sullivan appeared and came into the room quite hot under the collar having just been told by one of his classmates what had happened.

  As he began clearing up the mess the air traffic controller came into the room and started to ride O’Sullivan. Before I had a chance to get in and prevent what I thought would be a fight, I heard a terrible scream and a crash of fibro. O’Sullivan had launched himself at the air traffic controller with a flying drop kick. Outside on the verandah was the ashen-faced air traffic controller who had scuttled out of the room while O’Sullivan was picking himself up out of the fibro wall. After this incident he wasn’t bothered again and things remained fairly quiet.

  Up until this time we had had very little leave from the unit. Saturday mornings were taken up with lectures and sport was played in the afternoon. It was compulsory to play sport and unless there was the rare game against an outside organisation, it was generally inter-company sport. Being winter whilst I was at Scheyville, one could play rugby, Aussie rules, soccer, hockey, basketball or volleyball. It didn’t matter what your forte in sport was because a sports list was promulgated on Fridays which told you which sport you would play on Saturday. Naturally, all the staff would come down to watch as you bravely tried to play a suicidal game like hockey or try not to lose your temper in Aussie rules when you were tackled without the ball.

  Once in mid-winter, we travelled down to the Royal Military College at Duntroon to play rugby, Aussie rules, soccer and hockey. We won the Aussie rules and soccer but took a hiding in rugby and lost the hockey. After the games we visited the famous cadet Quarter Bar. It was someone’s 21st birthday and a fellow was perched up the tree in the Quarter Bar grounds and was knocking down a pewter which looked like it held about three large bottles of beer. This feat of drinking was followed by the drinker being sick from high up in his lofty drinking spot over the assembled first class cadets below. There was a certain coolness from the first class cadets toward us and in some cases downright snobbery. It may have been because we were nashos or were likely to be second lieutenants in a couple of months. I don’t know what it was but we were fobbed off onto the less senior second class cadets who looked after us that night.

  Another occasion when we played against outsiders was a rugby game against a team of ex-internationals called ‘The Old Slobovians’. They were led by the ex-Wallaby prop John Thornett and the team was studded with olds and bolds who were out for a good social game of rugger. They established their watering hole on the side of the field and when they felt tired they came off and another player ran on. We were not given that privilege and had to bear the burnt of these rejuvenated and often very large men coming out and pushing us around the paddock. The amusing thing about this team was that its rugby strip was yellow jumpers with bright pink English-style rugby shorts. We won this most enjoyable game because of our nippy backline, but after propping against John Thornett I felt like I had been turned into a pretzel.

  For the first 30 days there was no leave outside Scheyville and until the second month the weekends clashed with field training. So it wasn’t until we had been incarcerated for almost two months that we finally were given a decent break. After sport, a leave parade was held at 1800 hours and those people who didn’t have punishments, such as confined to barracks or extra training parades to work off, could go on leave. The leave period was set from 6.00 pm Saturday night until midnight Sunday. Failure to clock in by 12.00 pm was an absent without leave charge and you could kiss leave goodbye for a couple of weeks if you were late. The staff duty officer presided over this leave parade where one had to appear in what was known as ‘recreational dress’. Considering that this was the late 1960s and the ‘Age of Aquarius’ we must have looked like a bunch of mormons on a recruiting drive. The dress for proceeding on leave was army black shoes, black socks, grey cuffed flannel trousers, white shirt, Scheyville one and a quarter inch wide tie, and a dark blue blazer. If you topped all that off with the incredibly short haircut we had, our chances of successful recreation on leave in the long-haired, flower-powered city of Sydney were minimal.

  But we were officers under training and a solution was not slow in forthcoming. Not too many of us had their cars at Scheyville but I was one who did. Once we were cleared from the parade therefore we would all pile into the old Holden. We would smile broadly as we exited out of the gate under the watchful eye of the duty staff and head off for Sydney. Once we had driven a mile or so down the road we would stop and quickly change into real clothes and set a bee-line for our advanced headquarters at the Coogee Bay Hotel. Because we were paid only corporal group one pay and most of our money went on laundry and Mars bars to supplement our meagre diet, we were usually tight for cash. When we booked into the rooms at the Coogee Bay, two guys would ask for a double room and then let the rest of the lads in up the back stairs.

  This was great for saving money but did very little for those who wished to entertain privately. A couple of guys gained notoriety for quick trips back to Scheyville from the Coogee Bay Hotel after sleeping in (or out). One cadet who set some sort of a record for rapid transit was Andy Hay, who owned an E-type Jaguar. His accomplishments were overshadowed by another guy, Dave Lewis, who woke up, realised he was late and went like the clappers to get in on time. To avoid the duty officer he drove in through the back gate—literally. It wasn’t until he had parked his car that he realised he had the rear entrance to Scheyville festooned all over his vehicle. Dave didn’t graduate with our class and was asked to repeat the senior term. He was a good operator and I still reckon the only reason he didn’t graduate with us was because of the back gate incident.

  Some of the fellows were married, and (even worse) from interstate. A couple of times one of the men in our platoon arranged for his wife to visit for a week or so. We would help him go over the hill in more ways than one. There was a side road up on top of the hill where all the static weapon training was done. This guy’s wife would drive up there after dark and off he would go using all the fieldcraft and movement tactics he had been so recently taught to avoid detection. While he was away we would answer his name at rollcall; and if ever one of the staff wanted him he was in the latrine or somewhere else reasonably unobtainable. We knew the directing staff were onto these occasional breakouts and so we would deliberately run the gauntlet to draw attention away from the real escape. Life was always excit
ing at Scheyville.

  A lot of our instruction in the senior term was aimed at leadership training. We would often spend whole afternoons in syndicate discussion with our directing staff discussing case histories of problems and the technique of how to solve them. I was always amazed at how quickly the time went while we did this sort of work. The culmination of our junior and senior term, however, was the field exercises. The training we received was always set in a counter revolutionary warfare environment and the enemy were the Viet Cong. The format of the exercises usually involved insertion into an area by fixed and rotary winged aircraft followed by the establishment of a company sized patrol base. After digging that in we would set off on fighting patrols and conduct search and clear operations, attacks and ambushes by day and night. The exercises were designed to assess our knowledge of infantry minor tactics and more importantly they were a vehicle for leadership assessment. During the exercise the cadets filled the command appointments of a normal platoon and the directing staff acted as umpires in the contacts we had against the soldiers acting as enemy from the regular battalions. Duration in command appointment was directly proportional to how closely the staff wished to watch you and observe how you handled the stress of the situations they created.

  For some cadets the exercises were a crunch time: they had to perform or leave. One truly memorable time occurred on our final exercise when we were advancing along a dirt track in the Colo–Putty training area south of Singleton. A couple of landrovers were accompanying our platoon as we patrolled along this winding hilly track. After a while the directing staff halted the platoon and told us to put our backpacks in the landrovers behind us. To do this we had to remove enormous towing chains, which looked like anchor chains off the Queen Mary, out of the back of the vehicles. This, the directing staff explained, was to make room for our packs which they were kindly allowing the landrovers to haul. But now we had to carry the chains and the only way these huge chains could be moved was by forming up like a prison chain gang, hoisting them up on our shoulders and shuffling off down the road. When we came to the first hill it was becoming obvious what would happen next. The landrovers ‘broke down’ and we would have to haul them up the hill. By forming a herringbone onto the chains with our nylon toggle ropes and, resembling ancient Egyptians, we dragged these inert landrovers up hill and down dale.

  The whole incident was designed to see if anyone would crack and in this particular case one chap did and chucked it all in right there and then. When guys did react in this fashion they were removed from the platoon and the exercise immediately. During my final exercise, which had been going for about two weeks, we had a change of appointments right in the middle of the exercise. We were going to move from one part of the Gospers training area to another and four Iroquois helicopters were going to move our platoon. The directing staff assembled our group and read out the lists of who would travel on which chopper. Sure enough along came four helicopters and we duly scrambled aboard and settled down to enjoy the ride. After a short lift we landed at our nominated drop off point. But only three choppers landed. During the flight one helo which had been loaded with guys who had not made the grade had been sent to another landing zone. It married up with a truck which took the cadets back to Scheyville and we never saw them again. This appeared to be a rather brutal form of removal, smacking of something more sinister or even out of a bad novel. We commemorated this event in the review just prior to graduation with a song entitled ‘The Ghosts of Gospers’.

  The survivors of that final exercise were allowed to enjoy the scenic walk-out from the training area. This jaunt was some 35 kilometres alongside a river and through the upper Richmond Valley area. But we knew the end was in sight: 35 kilometres wasn’t going to stop us now. Before long it was all over. We hauled ourselves onto buses waiting for us at the end of the gravel road and headed back to Scheyville. Once we were back in the lines the word came down the grapevine, an oral telephone system driven by lung power, that we had to parade in the mess. When we arrived up in the mess we found the adjutant standing there with a clipboard under his arm. He waited until the battalion sergeant major had reported that we were all present and accounted for and he simply said, ‘The following people will report for a commandant’s interview at 0800 hours tomorrow morning’. He then read out a list of about half a dozen names. He then continued, ‘The following people are to report to the chief instructor for interviews at 0800 hours tomorrow’ and read out about another ten names. The adjutant then turned and left the cadets’ mess. There was a pregnant pause as the news suddenly sank in: if your name hadn’t been read out you were going to graduate. The bar in the mess was flung open and we trooped in. The relief of making it through Scheyville was hard to disguise and it was difficult to commiserate with fellows who were going to be removed just days from graduation or who would be offered a chance by the chief instructor to repeat the senior term.

  The next couple of days were hectic as we had final uniform fittings and started our rehearsals for graduation parade and returned the mountain of books we had been issued. The one thing on everyone’s mind now was what corps would we be allocated and where we would be posted. To answer the first question was relatively easy. We knew that the tailor was sewing the corps insignia on the collars of our patrol blues uniform and all we had to do was wangle our way in and check out what was being sewn on our blues. I was in a dilemma at this point because I had a bee in my bonnet that Scheyville could not possibly graduate competent platoon commanders in six months and expect them to be able to do a decent job in Vietnam and survive. However I did enjoy the infantry work out on exercise and felt torn between this and my concern about whether Scheyville graduates were good enough for Infantry. There were no vacancies for the Armour or Artillery for our class and I had contemplated Artillery before it became unavailable. My corps preferences reflected my mistaken beliefs that Scheyville couldn’t produce infantry officers. I asked for Signals, Service Corps and Australian Service Canteens Organization. A Signals graduate would probably have gone to a troop in Watsonia which was heavily populated with ladies, and involved with electronic data processing. The Service Corps vacancy was for a posting to a transport platoon in Vietnam. And the Australian Services Canteen Organization job was for a canteen manager in Vietnam and had lots of potential.

  When our spy came back from the clothing store where our blues were being fixed by the tailor we were all in a quandary as to where I was going as we had never seen the badge which was sewn on my uniform. All of the infantrymen at Scheyville wore the badge of the Royal Australian Regiment, and none of us had ever seen the Infantry Corps collar badge before. In a way I was proud to have been selected to go to infantry. But at the same time I was concerned that I may not have been taught enough to keep me and my men alive if and when I got to Vietnam.

  The graduation dinner was followed by a review staged by the cadets. We were starting to feel like graduates now but one chap who made an unkind remark about Her Majesty during the loyal toast was removed the next day—only three days before graduation. The review took the mickey out of everything. On our last day, the parade was held in the forenoon. We felt like giants as we marched on. And it was quite nostalgic as we then slow-marched off between the ranks of our sons who were presenting arms.

  My parents and a girlfriend had come up for the parade and they attended the ball that last night. The ball was the first occasion we had to wear our new patrol blues, which previously we had seen only the warrant officers and officers wear. Donning this uniform was the culmination of our time as officer cadets. The mood in the gymnasium where the ball was held was euphoric. My mum was as proud as punch and looked like she would burst. My father cornered the chief instructor Lt Col Stan Maizey, a huge infantryman, and tried to find out why I had been posted to the Infantry Corps. The chief instructor’s explanation that dad related to me was curt and simple: ‘Anyone who plays front row in rugby should go to infantry’.

  Midnight a
rrived and amidst much kissing and handshaking we had our pips pinned on. The ball ended around two o’clock but the parties continued on elsewhere. The next day we said our goodbyes to our classmates and sons and took a long last look as we headed off to the real army, to see what disasters we could wreak upon it. My own destination was the 3rd Training Battalion at Singleton in the Hunter Valley, just west of Newcastle and about 160 kilometres from Sydney. I was to be a platoon commander training national service recruits. I could also be posted as a reinforcement officer to Vietnam from there. With some trepidation I pointed my trusty Holden north.

  3

  Training For War

  3rd Training Battalion was all go. The unit was training about 1100 men every three months as national service recruits or as Infantry Corps trainees. The recruit training was similar to that conducted at Puckapunyal and was three months long. After recruit training, a soldier was then given about another three months of training particularly relevant to his corps.

  I was posted in to the recruit training side of the unit and had a platoon of about 50 soldiers to command. The platoon was divided into four sections, each with about a dozen recruits. My platoon sergeant, John Mitchell, was short, tough and not overawed with nasho officers. I tried to do everything our instructors had told us, but the greatest variable of all, personality, had to be countered. Mitchell had run the platoon, very nicely thank you, for several months before I came on the scene. So I was not altogether welcome. I had been nowhere, done nothing and knew as little.