by Brian Toohey
Serong was a contentious choice. He was a Catholic zealot who—in common with Santamaria—ignored the church’s teachings on what constituted a just war. Unlike many members of the Team, he had no qualms about assassinating unarmed people. After he was replaced as the Team’s commanding officer in early 1965, he was seconded to the CIA.13 Frank Walker says he joined the CIA’s Phoenix program, where he dismissed moral concerns about killing civilians, later telling Time magazine, ‘Yes, we did kill teachers and postmen. They were part of the Viet Cong infrastructure … Everyone goes over the speed limit from time to time.’14
Serong was not simply a motorist. Until he resigned from the Australian Army in 1968, it had a responsibility to ensure he did not breach the rules of war. It failed, not least because it lost control over his behaviour. The ASIO liaison officer in Saigon, Mike Leslie, reported that the CIA decided in March 1967 not to extend Serong’s contract ‘because he sought out journalists to generate publicity for himself and declared that he was an intelligence officer rather than an army officer’.15 It seems he never mentioned this failure to renew his contract to his biographer. Nor is it clear when, or if, he told the Australian Army that the CIA had dropped him.
Although Blair admired Serong in many ways, she noted that he was a fierce opponent of communism and a defender of what he saw as ‘civilisation’, but that he did not see political democracy as central to this fight.16 After returning to Australia he became patron of a militia group called the AUSI Freedom Scouts, which the federal and state police believed had hidden large numbers of high-powered rifles on several properties in underground ammunition caches with camouflaged steel trapdoors. Its leader, Ian Murphy, was another devout Catholic, who believed the church ‘had been largely taken over by Communist sympathisers’.17
Fortunately, Serong was not typical of most Team members. In his official history of the Team, Ian McNeill said that while some Australian soldiers had been seconded to the CIA from the start of the deployment, the majority worked with the South Vietnamese Army under the operational control of the American Military Assistance Advisory Group.18 Other Team members, such Barry Petersen, who came under the direct control of the CIA, wanted nothing to do with assassinations. McNeill, who also served in the Team, acknowledged that abuses did occur and that they were not confined to the Phoenix program: ‘Assassinations, false accusations by which private scores were settled, the indiscriminate rounding-up of suspects, and torture, particularly in the early years, were included in the repertoire of some connected with Phoenix.’19 Although other estimates are higher, McNeill gives official figures showing that over 20,000 individuals were victims of Phoenix’s targeted killings program; however, ‘The Viet Cong infrastructure remained largely intact.’20
In 1964, the job of those Team members involved in training was changed to let them accompany South Vietnamese forces during operations and engage in combat themselves. Former diplomat Garry Woodard, who studied the official papers while a visiting fellow at the NAA, showed that this new role went beyond the more limited task Barwick had envisaged in 1962.21 After stressing that the Vietnamese people in both north and south were intensely nationalistic, McNeill said, ‘It is well to remember too that what is being discussed is the will of brother to kill brother and sister to kill sister. In the circumstances, a lack of will would seem a virtue.’22 Unlike Serong, many members of the Team shared McNeill’s assessment.
McNeill saw a deeper cause for the ultimate defeat of the south and its allies, saying, ‘North Vietnam could demonstrate a greater legitimacy to be the future of a united Vietnam. By its efforts, French colonial rule had been terminated and independence reached. Under the venerated Ho Chi Minh the claim by the North Vietnamese to represent the abiding aspirations of all Vietnamese was more convincing than the counter-claim by the shifting junta in Saigon.’23
There was no excuse for policy-makers to pretend they didn’t know about the force of Vietnamese nationalism—it was well documented by the early 1950s. Nor was there any excuse for rejecting the 1956 election required by the Geneva Accords and UN principles supporting self-determination. Secrecy, ignorance, incompetence and brutality combined to produce malign consequences. The US, with Australia tagging along, brought horrific devastation to a small developing country. In addition to the war crimes, torture, assassinations and widespread use of toxic herbicides, the US dropped over six million tonnes of bombs on Vietnam—more than the combined total it dropped in World War II and Korea.
And it still suffered a dishonourable defeat.
52
TESTIMONY FROM THOSE WHO WERE THERE
‘One American soldier hit … one poor woman who had a thin nylon dress and a little baby on her chest. The flame missed the woman’s face but completely burnt the baby to an ash. Why do that?’
Bevan Stokes, Australian Army Training Team, Vietnam1
SBS in 2016 gave viewers a new insight into the war in Vietnam when it broadcast a three-part television documentary series that let members of the small army group called ‘The Team’ tell the Australian public in disturbing detail about their experiences.
Only about 100 Team members served at a time. Of the total 990 Team members who were deployed through to December 1972, thirty-three died and 122 were wounded.
Called Vietnam: The War that Made Australia, the TV series shows that many members of the Team managed to retain their humanity despite intense American pressure to carry out orders they regarded as morally repugnant.2 When the Team were first deployed as trainers in 1962, some members were secretly assigned to the CIA—a practice that continued with subsequent deployments. The series shows that some Team members developed a genuine rapport with the Vietnamese and hill tribespeople they trained. The narrator explains that they soon discovered that the CIA was ordering some Team members to train their students to assassinate unarmed people. In one case, Barry Petersen said his CIA controller ordered him to create teams of assassins ‘to attack and kill and mutilate people who are enemy agents or informants and sometimes cut off their heads and leave messages to terrorise these people who are prone to be agents for the enemy’.3 Much to the anger of the CIA operative, Petersen said, ‘I can’t do that. It’s just too easy to have … innocent people knocked off.’
Apart from these requests, which went far beyond what the Australian government had told the public would be a training role, other changes soon saw Team members fighting alongside South Vietnamese government forces in battles. Some members joined the CIA-sponsored Political Action Teams (PATs) seeking to win villagers’ support through aid, while killing any Vietcong they encountered. Don McDowell, an early participant in the PAT tactics, said it soon became ‘pretty obvious that the program had run off the rails. People started to be targeted although they might not have been VC.’ He said, ‘Unless you’re a robotic twerp, you absorb a great deal of stress. I’d take a break of two or three days and sit by a beach and ruminate on how life was unfair for the poor bloody Vietnamese.’ Ian Teague was another Team officer assigned to the CIA’s PAT units. He said he wouldn’t let the members of the units become assassins instead of killing people in what was usually considered fair fighting.
The narrator says that as the massive use of US firepower increased in 1965, Team members such as Charles Emery found the American approach to war hard to stomach. Emery accompanied American task forces that called in air power to destroy entire villages. He said, ‘They were in their own villages doing naught, but they were classified as Vietcong. After the strafing and the napalming, I was told that we had killed the Vietcong and that’s troubled me all my life. It was impossible to identify them as being the enemy.’ Another Team member, Bevan Stokes, said, ‘The Vietcong might go and kill two or three villagers, but the Americans are killing the whole village.’ He said he went on one operation where the Americans used flamethrowers to burn huts: ‘One American soldier hit … one poor woman who had a thin nylon dress and a little baby on her chest. The flame missed the wom
an’s face but completely burnt the baby to an ash.’
Team member Bruce Davies said he was on patrol with a South Vietnamese battalion that came under fire from a hamlet when supporting American tanks blew it away.4 He said, ‘I was aghast. That’s not warfare, that’s almost like murder.’ He was equally enraged by how the Vietcong had left one of its young fighters chained to a machine gun so he couldn’t run off. Shortly afterwards, Davies came across a wounded Vietcong soldier, raised his rifle and came within a millimetre of shooting him. He said, ‘I realised that, whoa stop … this is just murder.’ Reflecting on his experiences, he said, ‘You really take your soldier shell and put it to one side and say, “My God, what have we done?”’
The team had to face the reality that it wasn’t only the Vietcong who could kill them. The CIA could also do so, as testified in Frank Walker’s book The Tiger Man of Vietnam. Team member Jack Leggett told Walker how close he had come to being murdered by a CIA operative, B.J.Johnson, whom he angered by refusing to assassinate four unarmed women suspected of carrying documents and food for the Vietcong.5 Walker said the CIA had appointed Leggett to run a Provincial Reconnaissance Unit that was part of the Phoenix program, but he insisted his unit would have to stay within the Australian Army’s rules of engagement. Shortly afterwards, Johnson, who worked for the CIA-run Vietnamese Police Special Branch, told Leggett to assassinate the four women. Leggett said there was no need to kill them when it would be easy to arrest them instead. He said, ‘I told him I had not trained for years as an army officer to assassinate unarmed women. He hit the roof.’ He told Johnson that even if he agreed, ‘It would not make one iota of difference to the outcome of the war.’
Leggett told Walker that at around eleven that night Johnson turned up at his house pointing a pistol at him and said, ‘I am going to blow your fucking head off.’ Leggett said he had no doubt that Johnson would have done it and believed he was only saved by the unexpected arrival of two armed Vietnamese members of his unit.
Thanks to the SBS documentary series, we now know that many of the Team’s highly professional soldiers, who witnessed the conduct of the war at close quarters, responded with a level of human decency not shared by some covert action enthusiasts, such as Team leader Ted Serong. The Team members’ accounts of US conduct in the war add to the reasons why no Australian troops should have been sent to Vietnam.6
The effects of war on the Team and other Australian troops did not always stop with their return. Apart from psychological and other effects, they had to deal with the possibility that they had been poisoned by the dioxin contained in Agent Orange—the most common defoliant the US used to destroy vegetation, including crops, to deny cover and food to the Vietcong. In effect, the US was denying food not just to the Vietcong, but to anyone in Indochina who relied on those crops. The US sprayed 45 million litres of dioxin-containing Agent Orange out of a total of 75 million litres of defoliant used between 1961 and 1971.7
The US also sprayed insecticides, such as DDT and the carcinogenic dieldren, that can seriously damage human health. With alleged use of chemical weapons in the news these days, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the US engaged in chemical warfare in Vietnam, where its effects persist.
The US tried to keep the spraying across Indochina a secret in the Western world until at least 1965. It was no secret for the locals, who could not fail to notice when a plane was spraying them and their crops with herbicides. In a cable to the State Department in 1965, the US ambassador to Laos, William Sullivan, said, ‘We can carry on these efforts only if we do not, repeat do not, talk about them, and when necessary, if we deny that they are taking place.’8
The Australian military used defoliants in Vietnam, but its instructions were to stay clear of food crops and rubber trees. The military also knew from a secret report written by Major K.J. Maxwell in December 1963 that the Americans engaged in ‘Crop destruction to deny foodstuffs to insurgents’ as well as camouflage cover.9 It is not known if the Australian military or government objected to the US about this form of chemical warfare.
Although destroying about 20 per cent of South Vietnam’s forests, the spraying failed to deny the Vietcong adequate jungle camouflage. It left a terrible legacy of dioxin contamination that can lead to cancer and birth defects in the grandchildren of the people who were exposed during the war, predominantly those who were allied to the US ‘protector’. Dioxin is an extremely toxic chemical that remains in Vietnam’s water tables and soil and still enters the food chain today. A powerful photojournalism essay in 2015 said, ‘Nearly 4.8 million Vietnamese people have been exposed, causing 400,000 deaths … One million people are currently disabled or have health problems due to the dioxin in Agent Orange, 100,000 of whom are children.’10 A University of Newcastle researcher says the US military was allegedly told that trials showed dioxin to be toxic.11
Although US and Australian governments spent years denying there was any problem with the defoliants, eventually they had to acknowledge authoritative studies showing that the incidence of cancer among veterans was shockingly high—50 per cent higher than rates in the general population, and higher still for particular cancers.
No Australian minister today could dismiss a similar problem with a sick joke as the Coalition’s defence minister, Jim Killen, did in 1980. Killen, who prided himself on his wit, told parliament on 27 March 1980 that his department had given him the names of herbicides used in Vietnam: Reglone, Gramoxone, Tordon and Hyva. He added that as far as he was concerned ‘they could be four horses running at Rosehill on Saturday’. This is the same man who opposed adding fluoride to water because he ‘knew’ it to be terribly dangerous.12
53
A DEFEAT BORN OF SECRECY, IGNORANCE, ARROGANCE AND BRUTALITY
‘War is not hell. It is fun.’
Nora Ephron1
In 1964, Robert Menzies’ government followed its worst political instincts and decided to boost Australia’s small expeditionary forces in Vietnam by 1000. These numbers grew to over 7600 before the war ended in defeat. The decision resulted in the needless deaths of over 520 Australian soldiers, and over 3000 were wounded in a war that inflicted terrible suffering on the Vietnamese people.
Estimates of the number of Vietnamese killed vary from about 1.2 million to over three million, with civilians making up the majority of the higher estimates. These figures do not include deaths in Laos and Cambodia, nor in the war against the French. About 58,000 US soldiers died, 4000 South Koreans and almost forty New Zealanders. Many surviving Allied soldiers, as well as large numbers of Vietnamese, suffered prolonged illnesses.
In committing the initial battalion after sending a small training team in 1962, the government didn’t invoke the ANZUS Treaty. Nor was it acting on a US request for this many troops or an invitation from the South Vietnamese government.2 The Cabinet wasn’t advised by departmental officials: it chose to rely mainly on its own blinkered view of the world and that of the hawkish Air Chief Marshal Frederick Scherger.
Unlike some of his ministers, Menzies was notoriously uninterested in Asia. When announcing the battalion’s deployment on 29 April 1965, he said, ‘The takeover of South Vietnam would be a direct military threat to Australia and all the countries of South and South-East Asia. It must be seen as part of a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific oceans.’ This reasoning, dubbed the domino theory, assumed that monolithic communist aggression would spread from Indochina to topple all the countries along the path to Australia. The communists won, but the dominoes never fell. If an excuse for not intervening were needed, Admiral Grant Sharp, the head of US forces in the Pacific, acknowledged on a visit to Canberra in October 1964 that Australia’s commitment to Indonesia–Malaysia might preclude it from deploying troops further north.3
Cabinet’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee had made the decision on 17 December 1964 to send the army battalion to Vietnam, although Menzies did not tell parliament until 29 April 1965. The committee consider
ed a letter from President Lyndon Johnson requesting 200 more combat advisers, but not combat troops. But the committee decided on a full battalion, provided the South Vietnamese government made a request. It didn’t. Former diplomat Garry Woodard said the decision was strongly advocated by the new foreign minister, Paul Hasluck. His predecessor, Garfield Barwick, had warned that Australia needed to be careful not to be seen, in Woodard’s summation, as the ‘US deputy sheriff’ in Asia, but unlike Barwick, Hasluck shunned advice from his own department.4 Malcolm Fraser, who was defence minister between January 1966 and March 1971 and had earlier been army minister for two years, said in his 2014 book Dangerous Allies that Air Chief Marshal Scherger basically wrote the key Cabinet submission.5 However, in sharp contrast to current military planning, Lieutenant General Sir John Wilton insisted that the Australian Army must not be integrated with US forces but instead should operate separately in Phuoc Tuy Province.6
Labor leader Arthur Calwell replied to Menzies’ 29 April announcement with an exceptional speech on 4 May 1965, written by Graham Freudenberg. Calwell told parliament there was a ‘civil and guerilla war in South Vietnam, aided and abetted from the north’. He said there had been eight or nine governments involved in the South Vietnam president Diem’s murder in 1963, and none had popular support. Calwell correctly predicted that sticking to the existing course ‘would surely and inexorably lead to American humiliation in Asia’.
Contrary to Menzies’ core premise, Calwell rightly argued that the nationalistic communist regime in the north was not a Chinese puppet but part of a country ‘with a 1000-year history of hostility towards China’. In 1948, Ho Chi Minh had warned colleagues against seeking Chinese help to combat the French, saying he would ‘sooner sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life’.7 (Since winning the war in 1975, successive communist governments in Vietnam have largely remained antipathetic to China.) Calwell concluded that Labor would oppose a ‘cruel, costly and interminable’ war that would ‘prolong and deepen the suffering’ of the Vietnamese people and possibly see troop numbers rise to 8000 and the use of ‘voteless, conscripted 20-year-olds’. It was a prescient call. Troop numbers reached a peak of 7672 in 1968 and a total of 19,000 conscripts were sent, plus naval and air force units.
