Graham Cornes recalls his National Service experience
WHEN Graham Cornes’ number came up, he served in Vietnam. But he wouldn’t want his boys to experience such a lottery.
I DON’T think I ever won a raffle — definitely not a lottery — but I never had any doubt that my national service marble would be drawn out. Eight hundred thousand Australian men registered when they turned 20 and only 63,000 were called up. That’s just a one in 13 chance but I knew I would be one of them.
There really wasn’t much of a fuss made when the government of the day announced that they would be reintroducing a National Service Act in 1965. We were a nation still very much in the thrall of Prime Minister Bob Menzies. Our grandfathers had been to Gallipoli; our fathers, uncles and schoolteachers had all fought in World War II. Not that they talked about it all that much but they exuded a machismo and a spirit of mateship that we admired even though we didn’t understand it. We believed the propaganda that the communist threat was sweeping through South-East Asia and we were vulnerable. Besides, wouldn’t a couple of years in the army make men out of us?
Some of my mates were smart. They enlisted in the Citizen’s Military Forces.
One night a week and a couple of training camps was a small price to pay to stay at home. One or two took the drastic step of getting married before they had to register, so they didn’t have to go away either. I really didn’t think that much about it. Of course I registered when I turned 20 on March 31, and on July 20 I duly received the official letter saying that I had been called up and to report to Keswick Barracks on October 3. Rather than disappointment, I remember being more than a little excited about this new adventure.
Some things stay with you forever. It was a match day and mail was still delivered on a Saturday morning in those days. It was my first full season of league football and Glenelg was playing Sturt at Glenelg Oval. A record 17,100 people crammed into the Bay Oval and saw one of the SANFL’s most controversial incidents; Glenelg ruckman Doug Long kicked a goal and the goal umpire claimed he was unsighted and disallowed it. When the final siren sounded, the scores were level. Unfortunately, Sturt’s resting ruckman, a tall skinny drink of water called Graham Weir, had just taken a mark about 40m from goal. To make matters worse, I was standing him at the time. It wasn’t a convincing kick for goal, but it wobbled through for a point — enough to win the game. A tough day all around.
One of the club doctors thought that I should try to claim a medical exemption on the basis that the headaches I had when I was a kid, and occasionally had suffered since, could be classified as migraines. I presented to the military medical board but my heart wasn’t in it. My symptoms weren’t convincing and the army doctor had no hesitation in passing me fit. Just as well. I’m not sure I could have lived with the fact that I, a fit healthy footballer, was medically unfit to serve while others did and suffered.
October 3. It is the date of my father’s birthday and a subsequent wedding anniversary. It was the start of a big new adventure and I felt the surge of patriotic pride and excitement, understanding then why so many young men had thronged to the recruiting offices when war was imminent. For some ridiculous reason I reported wearing my best suit carrying a football and a guitar that I couldn’t play. I figured that I would have two years to learn, and the football?
Well that was always my first love. As well, I was bald. My footy mates had tied me down the previous night and shorn my long hair. It’s trendy now but in 1968 it looked ridiculous. Besides, the one thing you don’t want to do on your first day in the army is stand out. Actually the flight to Melbourne and the bus trip from Melbourne Airport to Puckapunyal, where the Recruit Training Battalion was based, was quite pleasant. However, the moment the bus stopped in miserable, drizzling rain the yelling, the abuse and the ridicule from the regular army staff charged with making soldiers out of us started. Having been around football clubs for most of my life, I had never been aware of any social divide. So it was with national servicemen because we came from all walks of life. However, those non-commissioned officers — the jumped-up lance corporals, corporals and even the platoon sergeants — were something else. Being regular soldiers, their rank had been conferred, not because of any specific talent, but simply by length of service. They administered their discipline and confirmed their authority with a meanness and a baseness that at times bordered on sadism.
Was it truly necessary to strip recruits of their dignity and self-esteem? The mantra “You’re in the army now recruit” seemed to justify every verbal and physical attack, even from the army dentist who would have been quite at home in a knackery knocking horses’ teeth from their lifeless skulls. After a week of this barrage of abuse, the romance and the adventure had evaporated. It was going to be a long two years.
Fortunately I escaped, albeit to a tougher, but much fairer environment. If you had completed your Leaving Certificate (Year 11) you could apply to go to an Officer Training Unit. It involved a not-too-lengthy or difficult selection process including aptitude and intelligent tests, and subsequently two weeks later I and 56 other officer recruits from the 4th national service intake of 1968 marched into Scheyville, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. It was indeed a tough course, designed to produce, in the space of six short months, second lieutenants capable of commanding an infantry platoon in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the failure rate was high, with recruits constantly being removed from the course. I did the whole six months bar the last week and was removed.
Like the majority of national servicemen, I was posted to an infantry battalion. The Seventh Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment had already completed one tour of duty in 1967 and spent all of 1969 rebuilding and training to go again in 1970. Half of its establishment was national servicemen. The one real scandal of the National Service Act was that conscripts were much more likely to die or be wounded in Vietnam than regular soldiers. Cannon fodder!
Yet, contrary to popular belief, we did have a choice.
Late in 1969, with the casualties mounting and the government under increasing pressure, the battalion was paraded and it was announced by the commanding officer that if a national serviceman did not want to go to Vietnam the army would not force him to. However, we had lived and trained together so closely that bonds of mateship had already been formed. Only one, one out of approximately 400, was game enough to say he wasn’t going — the renowned singer/songwriter Broderick Smith, who would later form the band The Dingoes. I thought he was the bravest man in the battalion.
It was only in Vietnam that the divide between the nashos and the regular soldiers evaporated. We were as one, and those jumped-up lance-corporals, corporals and especially the sergeants of our recruit training led us magnificently. The Australian Task Force operated in Phuoc Tuy province, which had been a hotbed of communist support, but by the time we got there the province had been “pacified”. We were rarely confronted with open warfare as had been the case at Long Tan or fire support bases Coral and Balmoral. We engaged the enemy through rigorous patrolling and ambushing and they quickly withdrew. In a tropical jungle environment it was tough, dirty, tiring work. In the dry season you were always thirsty; in the wet season you were soaked 24 hours a day.
They say war is heroic and romantic. It’s not. It’s 95 per cent boredom and routine with 5 per cent terror, exhilaration and grief thrown in. We really believed that we were winning the war and protecting the local populace from the invading hordes from the north. It seems so pointless now.
Then, as for all nashos, it was finished. I was in Nui Dat on a Thursday morning, King’s Cross in Sydney that very same night then playing football for Glenelg reserves back where it all started at Unley Oval on Saturday morning. The adventure was over.
Of the 63,000 Australian conscripts, more than 15,000 served in Vietnam. Two hundred were killed and 1279 wounded. I was one of the lucky ones.
Over the years, I’ve appreciated our service and am proud of the contribution that nashos made. At the same time, the anger at what was a futile war, the politicians who sent us and the treatment of the soldiers who served in that war has compounded. Those two years shaped us all — for better or for worse, but it left me with one resounding resolution. It will never happen to my sons.