Ian Scott joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1968 as a 17-year-old. “Vietnam was in full swing, and I thought there was a good chance I'd get involved. At that stage, I believed the hype about the Communist Domino Theory and all the rest of it,” said Ian.
It wasn’t until April 1975, that Ian was deployed to Vietnam as a navigator with 37 Squadron. “We knew the fighting was basically over and the north were going to take over. It was very clear even to young guys who weren't big on geopolitics,” said Ian. “Quite often our story of the withdrawal gets left behind.”
“There were hundreds of thousands of people pouring down from the north, trying to get away from the North Vietnamese, fearing retribution for the war. So, having withdrawn our combat troops our government was going back looking at the refugee problem. That’s what we were deployed for, we went for humanitarian reasons. We were flying rice and medicines and other food staples to Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Siam. That was our mission.”
“When we arrived in Saigon an Air Force liaison shuffled us into buses and we went to The Embassy Hotel to find our rooms and wait to be told what to do. There didn’t appear to be any chaos on the streets.”
“It was quite safe to walk around during the day, but we were strictly controlled in terms of personal security. You had to take a circuitous route to the airport every time you went, so there were no established patterns.”
“It seemed quite fine till nighttime. At night we would sit at the top of the hotel, and we’d have a couple of beers and look out over the countryside and watch the firefights over Ben Hoa and see all the patrols going around in the street.”
“The people there were quite calm, but they were very keen to get hold of US dollars because they wanted to go. They knew the writing was on the wall. You could tell they wanted to get out, but some of them had no means at all of going.”
“The airfield was really busy it was all go. We were flying out of Tan Son Nhut to An Thoi on Phu Quoc Island. We'd climb above 16,000 feet as soon as we could, to get above small arms and minor munitions, and then we’d fly across the top and down into the Gulf of Siam.”
“Listening on the radio you heard the hectic nature of the place, and at An Thoi we never shut down the aircraft because if you broke down you were buggered. We just kept the engines running and the poor buggers down the back were offloading cargo with the engines blowing at them - combat offloading.”
“It was a strange normality, there were no active fighter aircraft trying to get us, but we were still operating in combat mode and were very aware.”
“We were doing things we didn't normally do,” Ian said. “Before we did anything, everybody would go over the aircraft with a fine-tooth comb looking for explosive devices. And the senior Vietnamese guy in charge of the airfield had an F-5 fighter jet hooked up, fueled up, ready for him to get in and go.”
Ian’s strongest memories of Vietnam are connected with the baby lifts. “On our first arrival at Tan Son Nhut, there was a long black scar on the ground and a wrecked C-5 [Lockheed C-5 Galaxy]. They had lost control because the rear cargo door came off, and the plane had crashed while doing a baby lift. When we were on the tarmac for the next couple of days, they were still ferrying bodies from the crash site to a makeshift morgue.”
“A few days later we got involved in a baby lift.” Ian said, “In amongst ferrying food and medicines to An Thoi, we had a mission to pick up these babies and toddlers and fly them to Bangkok where they were going to get on a Qantas aircraft and fly back to Australia for adoption. We got to the tarmac and some buses pulled up with nuns and children and other health support workers. For some reason there was quite a lengthy delay and so we had to feed the kids. Normally, cockpit crew don’t help with passengers down the back, but everybody had to give a hand.”
“It was really sad. These little kids, with sores all over them, were going to be flown off to another part of the world, with no idea of what was going on. That is my strongest memory. That's the thing that keeps coming back to me. Those poor little kids.” Ian said, “We know war affects women and children the most. Men just do what they do, and if they kill each other not too many people seem to care but mankind itself needs women and children.”
“When we first started in Vietnam, in the early sixties and through to the early seventies, Australia was still very conservative, mainly Anglo or white, and Christian in our stated beliefs. So, to fight Communists was the natural thing.”
“The general population was not against the war, it was the younger people who weren't in the military who thought, ‘Why are we doing this?’” said Ian. “I think conscription had a lot to do with it. They saw their mates being whipped off to Vietnam, and they started questioning the rest of us.”
“I know that guys were told to change into civvies because there was a fervent anti-war mob in Australia. There were some places where if you went down the street in uniform, they would biffo you, so we would never wear uniform off base. The soldiers got the worst of it, but it was all right for us. When you’re doing humanitarian ops, like baby lifting and evacuation, it is really hard for people to say you shouldn't do that.”
Ian said, “What I don't want lost is that the soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women who went to Vietnam were doing what was asked of them to the best of their professional ability. That's what it was all about. They weren't there to fight geopolitics. They signed up to defend Australia and its interests and its interest at the time was Vietnam. For me the essence of military service is, you go and do your job to the best of your ability unless it's patently wrong. That's what you should be remembered for. You put your life on the line for your country and its interests. I don't want that to be lost.”
