One Memorial That We Have Forgotten

Newcastle Herald

Monday April 21, 2003

Phillip O'Neill

I AM writing from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam or Saigon as the locals still call it.

On April 30 the people of Vietnam celebrate the anniversary of the anti-American War as they know it; or the Vietnam War as we call it.

So too this week we remember wars that Australians have fought in. On Anzac Day we will say three simple words ``Lest we forget".

Fortunately I was too young to be drafted into national service at the time of the Vietnam War, but friends of my brothers were not so lucky. Some were part of the 59,000 who made up the Australia Task Force (ATF) in Vietnam. The main ATF base was at Nui Dat, dusty Nui Dat as Redgum called it in their familiar song He was only 19. Nui Dat is not too far from Saigon so last week I thought I'd go and find out about the place where my generation experienced war, where about 500 of them were killed.

There would be memorials I thought, just like at Gallipoli and Kakoda, for the Vietnam War remains the longest military engagement in Australia's history.

It took more than a day on the phone before I found a tour company with some sort of knowledge of what I was talking about.

A driver picked me up early armed with a photocopy of a hand drawn map of the Ba Ria district in Phouc Tuy Province. It showed Nui Dat and a spot where 18 Aussies had been killed in the Long Tan battle the most famous battle fought by ATF troops in Vietnam.

We drove southeast out of Saigon and two hours later stopped for directions only to get shrugged shoulders from every local approached. No one knew of any Australian war memorials or battlegrounds.

Mobile phone calls back to Saigon saw us soon hurtling off on a 40-kilometre round trip farther to the east and then retreating by back roads.

We stop at a village house and a resident smiles at our ignorance, for we are parked in the shadow of Nui Dat (actually Nui mountain!) and alongside the cleared ground that was once the ATF airstrip.

I took a photo but felt no sense of an Australian presence; this was an abandoned place.

The local took us into his home and showed us a photo on his wall of an Aussie serviceman who had once called by and shared a beer. The Aussie sent him a photo as thanks.

It's the only sign of an Aussie presence in Nui Dat I could find.

The local directed us to the Long Tan battle site and indicated a graveyard in its vicinity. Off we drove along a bumpy dirt road. And it was soon obvious that we were in the poorest of poor countryside areas, that sort of place where it just seems hotter, where dust hangs, where it seems like it never rains enough to spark the place up, where your eye is always drawn to the litter by the roadside; it's the place where they always put the garbage tip.

Well this is Long Tan, 2003.

Somewhere in these hills on August 18, 1966, a couple of hundred young Australian men fought to protect each other from complete annihilation by a more powerful force of Vietcong driven by a hunger for freedom and sovereignty over their homeland.

My driver spotted some white crosses through a decrepit rubber plantation; it must be a memorial I thought, for Christian crosses are a rarity in this mostly Buddhist country.

He stopped the car and waited respectfully as I walked towards the cemetery. I counted about 20 graves but as I walked slowly closer I could read enough of the inscriptions to tell me these were the graves of local villagers.

There was one larger cross and I searched all round it for a plaque but there was nothing.

Yet as I re-examined my map I figured I was alongside a dusty field where 18 Australians were killed nearly 37 years ago, and one was wounded seriously enough to die sometime later. But unlike Gallopoli, Kakoda, Tobruk and Changi, there was no sign in the landscape, no memorial, no names of the dead, nothing to stand in front of in remembrance. Not a formal thing.

Australia has no agreed-on stories about what happened in Vietnam, about why our troops were there. The battle of Long Tan is rarely spoken about publicly and its significance is never explained.

Stories of the lives of the young men and women at Nui Dat have not become common.

Australian and Vietnamese blood was spilled somewhere in the rubber trees where I had walked. The Vietnamese know why their men and women died and this week their nation will honour them, just as they do every year at the end of April.

Likewise Australians will gather at memorials, across Australia and in Turkey and Singapore and Burma and Papua New Guinea, in remembrance.

But in Phouc Tuy Province another load of Ba Ria garbage will be thrown on the Long Tan tip.

Lest we forget, indeed.

Phillip O'Neill is director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at The University of Newcastle.