More than 50 years after covering New Zealand’s involvement in the deeply unpopular Vietnam War, David Barber remains haunted by the memories of the children he encountered.
The history books record April 30, 1975, as the day Saigon fell to conquering North Vietnamese troops, ending nearly two decades of internal conflict in what the colonising French once called the “Pearl of the Orient”. But to me and hundreds of thousands of others who participated willingly or otherwise in one way or another, the war never ended. For us, the years have not eradicated memories of one of the most significant periods of our lives.
I admit to not being the ruggedly “typical” war correspondent personified by fellow New Zealander Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the conflict for US news agency Associated Press. I cannot watch movies about the war and, despite the assurances of friends who have visited Vietnam in recent years and extol its virtues as a contemporary holiday destination, I have not been back. Perhaps I should have made a cathartic trip, but international travel has few attractions for octogenarians these days and that urge has gone.
It is the children who dominate my embedded Vietnam memory. When I first flew to Saigon as the New Zealand Press Association’s newly-appointed Southeast Asian correspondent in January 1970, I left my wife, pregnant with our son, and our two toddler daughters at our new home base in Singapore. I chose to go to Vietnam immediately after taking up the post to deal with my apprehension about becoming a war reporter sooner rather than later.
My kids were healthy and had never been back to hospital since their birth. Nothing had prepared me for the sight of Vietnamese children I was to witness regularly over the next three years, many of them orphans, who had limbs blown off and other horrific injuries.
I never returned to my family in Singapore on breaks from Vietnam without requiring a few days to recover from physical and mental exhaustion, suffering, I now suspect, from the post-traumatic stress disorder condition we heard little of at that time.
Training boy soldiers
You never forget a kid like Trash Can. So dubbed by American soldiers because he looked like the contents of one. He was aged about 11 or 12 in early 1972. A Cambodian boy soldier recruited from an orphanage into a war he should not have been near, he was under 1.5m tall and wore the sleeves of his combat jacket rolled well up so he could grasp the rifle as big as himself. His trousers, baggy as a clown’s, were also rolled above feet bare because they couldn’t find boots small enough to fit him. A webbing belt weighted down with two water bottles and a bayonet held the outfit together, and he kept tipping back his helmet, which was several sizes too big, so he could see out of his clear brown eyes.
He was just one of the boys I encountered in Vietnam pressed into “serving” – denied officially and, five decades later, still as clear in my memory as the day I met him at the Dong Ba Thin military camp in Cam Ranh Bay. I photographed him and his little mate, nicknamed Herman, participants in what was surely New Zealand’s most shameful contribution to the war.
In March 1972, the government sent an 18-man New Zealand Army team to Dong Ba Thin, where they joined 120 Americans tasked with training troops of the inexperienced and vastly expanding army of Cambodia. As the war spread into Vietnam’s neighbour, the Cambodians had increasingly come under pressure from North Vietnamese troops and their Khmer Rouge acolytes.
Visiting in August, I discovered Trash Can, Herman and many like them – some only 9 or 10 and recruited from orphanages – who were given elementary instruction before going home to face battle-hardened communist troops at the front line.
All claimed to be 18 because that was the minimum legal age for service, but medical orderlies said many had not reached puberty. A US sergeant told me that about 100 of the 500-strong battalion under training when I visited were under 15.
He said he understood two of the four battalions he had trained were wiped out within two weeks of going home. “It’s hard to take, but what can we do?” he said. “We’re giving them training in every aspect of war. They leave here and go home to kill or be killed.”
As a courtesy, I told the officer heading the New Zealand team that I was going to write about the boy soldiers after I stumbled on a group of them in the camp. Accepting that I had to do my job, he said, “If I could have stopped you seeing this, I would have done. I haven’t been able to tell my wife in letters home about this.”
The army had not told the government, either, and when my story was referred to the hapless defence minister of the day, Allan McCready, he protested, “That’s not what I saw with my own eyes when I was at Dong Ba Thin.” That was true because the boys had been kept out of his sight.
The opposition Labour leader Norman Kirk declared he was shocked and felt sick at the news New Zealanders were training child killers, asking, “Is there nothing this fearful war in Vietnam cannot degrade and corrupt?”
McCready was put right after I told my office I had photos. Cabinet ordered an immediate halt to training under-age soldiers. The Phnom Penh government followed suit after Reuters circulated my story worldwide.
Kirk announced New Zealand’s military withdrawal from Vietnam within three days of winning the election and the team flew out before the year’s end.
Lingering whitewash
This month also marks the golden anniversary of the communist Khmer Rouge’s takeover of Cambodia, launching the notorious “Killing Fields”. I must doubt that Trash Can and Herman have survived.
It was inevitable, I suppose, that officials and politicians tried to downplay the impact of my story at the time. McCready claimed an “insignificant number of boys – about 10 – who were clearly below 16 years of age” had been trained since the team began working in March.
But I have never understood why the attempted whitewash continued nearly four decades later, with publication in 2010 of the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s official, so-called definitive history of New Zealand’s involvement in the war. The author, Ian McGibbon, wrote that 46 “boy soldiers” had been sent back to Cambodia – nearly five times the number McCready claimed 38 years earlier. He said my revelation was “much to the team’s anger” and led to “heart-rending situations” at the airport when the boys flew home. This ignored the feelings of the team’s leader, who was too discomfited to tell his wife what he was doing.
I went in and out of Vietnam, visiting and interviewing New Zealand troops, for three years but McGibbon did not talk to me, or to four other NZPA reporters who covered the war, including the late Derek Round, who was on one of the last civilian flights before the fall of Saigon.
Reviewing McGibbon’s book in the Listener in 2010, Round said it was puzzling that he didn’t make the effort to get the reporters’ “first rough draft of history”, as The Washington Post’s Philip Graham put it.
Seared in the memory
Trash Can and Herman are just two of the children implanted in my Vietnam memory box. I retain physical photos I took of three little urchins peeking through barbed wire in a village street and a little charmer of about 5 squatting in the mud doing her homework.
And how could I forget 10-year-old Nguyen Thi Ba or 12-year-old Vo Nuoc Hung? When I met her at a village school, Nguyen had shining black hair, a pretty face and smiling eyes that belied the horror she had seen in her short life. She crawled across the floor on the stumps of her thighs, both legs gone after she was the only survivor of 18 kids on a school bus that drove onto a mine.
Vo was luckier. He lost only one leg when he and two cousins fell onto a booby trap as they chased each other into a banana plantation while minding the family water buffalo in the paddy fields.
In retrospect, it is generally agreed here and in the US and Australia (both of which drafted conscripts for the war, unlike New Zealand) that participation was a mistake.
She crawled across the floor on the stumps of her thighs, both legs gone after her school bus ran onto a mine.
In the West, it was billed as a Cold War battle to save Asia from communism – the “domino theory” holding that if Vietnam went the way of Marxist Russia and China the rest of Asia would follow, ending democracy in that part of the world and ultimately threatening Australia and New Zealand.
In fact, it was an internal struggle between communists in the north, who were also nationalists seeking to end foreign domination of Vietnam, and what Arnett described as a “corrupt, irresolute leadership of a country sinking into its own effluent” in the south, propped up by a US locked in an ideological standoff with the Soviet Union.
New Zealand entered the war reluctantly. Prime minister Keith Holyoake first committed a civilian medical team in 1963 and sent 25 army engineers to build roads and bridges the next year. Under pressure from Washington – desperately seeking allies after Britain’s Labour prime minister Harold Wilson refused to contribute troops – Holyoake added combat forces with an artillery battery in 1965. More than 3000 New Zealand troops served there over the next seven years (see timeline, below).
The commitment was always controversial. Street protests mounted that year after the US began bombing North Vietnam and the first two New Zealand soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a land mine.
Defence chiefs in Wellington ran a targeted PR campaign designed to seduce selected editors and editorial writers into believing that the US and its allies were winning the war by flying them to Vietnam, kitting them out in jungle fatigues and arranging high-level briefings full of optimism.
As an NZPA correspondent, I travelled independently and extensively in Vietnam on many visits over three years and frequently found stories that the generals and politicians would have preferred the New Zealand public not to know, like the Cambodian boy soldiers.
In many cases, I was tipped off and helped by soldiers in the field, including high-ranking officers angry at injustices dealt them by their bosses in Wellington and the miserly politicians who sent them to Vietnam on the cheap.
Had the official historian talked to me, I would have challenged his claim that the New Zealanders in Vietnam were “generally happy with their lot – their morale remained consistently high … an awareness that their welfare was being adequately cared for …”
My stories included revelations that our troops – alone among the allied forces – were made to pay income tax despite the law exempting forces serving “in an operational area”. A three-man cabinet committee headed by the prime minister ruled this did not apply because there had been no formal declaration of war. It was widely felt that after making the decision to enter the war, the government failed to give the troops wholehearted support. “They made a commitment, but they were not prepared to back it with the funds and the facilities we needed to do our job,” one senior officer told me.
Soldiers accused the government of penny-pinching. They were denied a cost-of-living increase awarded back home to all public servants, including defence chiefs and other personnel. Life after all was cheap in Vietnam. Twice, the troops had their overseas allowances cut after devaluation of the Vietnamese piastre – an outrageous move because they were paid in US military payments certificates and few had any opportunity to spend the local currency.
At every base, the Kiwis relied on the Americans for not just comforts like refrigerators, ice cream and movies, but essentials such as water pumps, generators and even vehicles. At Bong Son Hospital, the NZ Services Medical Team used expired drugs and supplies of outdated American blood for transfusions. As the last New Zealanders flew out at the end of 1972, one veteran told me, “We’ve become the biggest bludgers of the Vietnam War. We’ve had to.”
Senior officers and men resented being forced to play second fiddle to the Australians, testing the traditional spirit of Gallipoli. The government declined to send an infantry battalion, as it had earlier in Malaya, instead integrating companies into an Australian Task Force.
The Kiwis were all professional soldiers who volunteered to serve in Vietnam while nearly half the Australians were reluctant conscripts, lacking the commitment to war-making and were better paid, which further stressed the relationship.
Morale inevitably suffered and controversy over the war left the army experiencing what Lieutenant General Sir Leonard Thornton, former defence chief and later ambassador to Saigon, described as a “downward swing on public regard”.
It was the first time New Zealand forces had fought, killed and died in a foreign war not fully supported by the people at home. Unlike returned servicemen of former conflicts, Vietnam veterans were not welcomed back by flag-waving crowds. Instead they were flown in at dead of night, told to take off their uniforms and advised not to say where they had been.
It was 36 years after the withdrawal before they got a cheering street parade in Wellington. Then-prime minister Helen Clark told Parliament: “The crown extends to New Zealand Vietnam veterans and their families an apology for the manner in which their loyal service in the name of New Zealand was not recognised as it should have been.”
Timeline: NZ in Vietnam
At its peak (November 1968), New Zealand had 548 army and air force personnel in Vietnam. A total of 3890 troops served in the war; 37 died and 187 were wounded. The US commitment peaked at 543,000 in 1969. More than 58,000 US troops died in the war and more than 500 Australians were killed. Two million Vietnamese civilians, up to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were killed.
New Zealand involvement:
1963 Civilian surgical team arrives in Qui Nhon.
1964 Army engineers sent for road and bridge repair work.
1965 Engineers withdrawn, replaced by 161 Artillery Battery at Bien Hoa.
1966 Battery relocated to Nui Dat with Australian Task Force.
1967 Services medical team sent to Bong Son.
1967 Two infantry companies deployed from Malaysia.
1968 Infantry companies integrated into Australian Task Force at Nui Dat.
1971 Infantry companies, Artillery Battery and NZ Services Medical Team pulled out; first training team deployed to Chi Lang.
1972 Second training team sent to Dong Ba Thin – both teams later withdrawn.
1975 Civilian surgical team pulled out.
1975 NZ Ambassador to Saigon evacuated when North Vietnamese take over.
2008 “Tribute 08″ honours Vietnam veterans and then prime minister Helen Clark extends an apology in Parliament for failure to recognise their loyal service at the time.
Vietnam – Further reading
A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. A monumental study of the war through a portrait of one American.
Dispatches by Michael Herr. An Esquire correspondent’s raw account seen through the eyes of the troops.
The Real War by Jonathan Schell. Classic war reporting by a New Yorker writer.
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. A Pulitzer Prize winner’s comprehensive account of how the US became involved in Vietnam.
Behind the Lines – Hanoi by Harrison E Salisbury. An American’s view of the war from the other side.
Deep Jay by Rod Eder. A novel about NZ soldiers fighting in the jungle, by one who did.
The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh. A fictional account by a North Vietnamese army veteran ranking with the greatest war novels of all time.