Dave Morris had a grandfather and great uncles in the First World War, and his father and uncles served in the Second World War. He said, “I thought I should step up and do the same thing. On the National Service form, there was a box you could tick that said, ‘If you don't get selected or if your date doesn't come out, would you like to serve anyway?’ So, I ticked that box and I know a stack of other blokes who did too.”
Dave went through recruit training in late 1970. He remembers being paraded at Kapooka and being told that the next unit going to Vietnam would be the 4RAR. He said, “A number of us put up our hands to train with that battalion.”
Dave arrived in Vietnam in May 1971 as a line Infantryman in B Company with the 4RAR based at Nui Dat. “We’d go out on patrol for six weeks,” he said. “The night we came back we’d have a barbecue, clean our gear, go down to Vung Tau for two days, then come back and go back out on ops again.”
“We were given several grid-squares and we’d patrol down, up, down, up … In six weeks, we might cover 30km. It was search and destroy patrolling. We were looking for the enemy or their camps. A lot of the time we were looking for creek lines. If you're the enemy, you build a bunker system near water. Sometimes we found an empty bunker, but my platoon never found a full one.”
“Some of the places we stumbled upon had pretty nice scenery and some were absolutely horrendous because you were trying to walk through six-foot-tall elephant grass, and it was like a hundred degrees.”
“It was all very slow, very quiet. We used hand signals 95 per cent of the time and only whispered. An Infantry platoon in Vietnam was always on the alert. If we were static, we were usually in 360-degree all-round defence. You weren't sitting next to your mate playing cards because you couldn't. You’d be cleaning your gear or maybe catching up on sleep, and there’d be sentries out in front of the machine guns.”
“One night I’d done my sentry duty and I’d gone back to my little hootchie. I was listening to Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on my pocket transistor, when I heard this noise like something charging through the bush. To me, a city kid, it sounded like half the North Vietnamese army was charging at me. So, I got my rifle and put it on fire … then this pig jumped on top of me. I yelled ‘Ah!’ and woke everyone up, and the pig started snorting and screaming and running around the track through the other gun pit. I wondered why the blokes on the next gun weren’t opening up with Claymores, but I found out the next day they were from the country, and they knew what pigs sounded like charging through the bush.”
“I had to go and request a new hootchie because the pig had made holes in mine, and it was the middle of the wet season.”
It was wet season most of the time Dave was in Vietnam. “We were constantly wet. You’d go to bed soaking wet, dry out overnight, and within half an hour of being up you’d be wet again. I used to take my boots and socks off every night and dry them out. We really only had dry socks once a week when they got resupplied.”
Dave said, “We were wet all the time and bored most of the time because we saw very little action. When you did it was on for young and old. You might be out for six weeks and have one tiny contact. Or you might be out and have several.”
On 21 September 1971, Dave was involved in the last major battle fought by the Australian forces in Vietnam. He said, “It was a typical Viet Cong ambush. They shot up a village, knew we’d react, and had an ambush set up further down. B Company and Delta Company were involved. Delta had five killed and 14 wounded and we had 16 wounded.”
“In August, the government had announced to the world that we would all be home by Christmas, so the North Vietnamese had come down to give us a kick in the arse to send us home.”
“The only time we moved at night was after that battle. My platoon had to go down and help chopper out the seriously wounded. We formed a line and walked in the dark to company headquarters which was about 400 metres away. There was no light, they had to fire a couple of shots so we could get a compass bearing. But we all made it back, nobody got lost.”
Dave left Vietnam in December 1971. “All the Nashos in the unit were put on a Herc and we flew into Sydney. Somehow my family found out and were at the airport.”
Back in Australia, Dave said, “Some people I knew didn’t talk to me, but I never had any violent confrontations with anyone. Several years later when we were doing things like the Welcome Home Parade and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, people would come up out of the crowd and say, ‘I demonstrated against you blokes and I’m ashamed and sorry.’”
Dave said Vietnam made him self-reliant. “It gave me confidence. Even though I’ve been told I’ve got PTSD, and I take medication for it, I still believe in a positive mental attitude and try to attack things from a positive point of view rather than a negative mindset.”
“The only thing I could do was drive a truck, so I started working for construction hire companies and ended up running a couple of yards for quite a long time. Later, a job came up selling floor coverings and I got into that for the next 20 years, travelling all around the world and around Australia.”
Dave said the biggest lesson to be learned from Vietnam is, “If you’re gonna send soldiers overseas to fight, look after them when they get back. That did not happen. We came back in 1971. We organised our own Welcome Home Parade in 1987. We organised our own memorial in Canberra.”
“Look after the soldiers, if you're gonna send them away,” Dave said. “If you're not gonna do that, don't send them.”
