[00:00:04] (Jim) They were all good. They were all strange.

[00:00:09] (Host) That’s Captain Jim Lowe, a United States Marine who served with MACV in Quang Tri province from May 1965 to May 1966. He spent a lot of time alongside Australian forces in Vietnam, and in this clip from our friends over at Witness to War, he’s remembering what the Aussies were like.

[00:00:29] (Jim) And the Aussies all had strange names like Bucket Ass, Ted Waite. He had no butt and so he’s a bucket ass. Tiny, you can figure that out. He must have weighed close to 300 lbs. And then Curly, this guy not only had no hair, he had no eyelashes, no eyebrows. So, they all had these weird names, but they were all good professional soldiers, and they all looked out for each other when they called each other mate. They mean mate. I mean they are. It’s a tight brotherhood. The only thing close to it in American terms would be the brotherhood of the Marine Corps, but anyway, that’s the way the Aussies were.

[00:01:20] (Host) The US and Australian forces have fought side by side in every major conflict since World War I, starting with the Battle of Hamel in 1918 and culminating most recently with Australia’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Around 60,000 Australian service members served in the Vietnam War between 1962 and 1972. Their support was wide ranging infantry, airborne, medical and armored units, helicopters and planes, even a naval destroyer. Over ten years of operations, more than 500 Australians were killed and 3000 were wounded. On August 18th, 1966. The men of Delta Company, Sixth Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment fought against some 2000 NVA and Viet Cong troops on a rubber plantation in Long Tan. Soaked and muddy from the summer monsoons the Aussies lost 17, killed in action and 25 wounded, one of whom died a few days later, but they inflicted far greater casualties on the enemy side. General William Westmoreland considered it one of the more spectacular Allied victories to that point in the war. The anniversary of that battle, August 18th, is Vietnam Veterans Day in Australia. And in honor of that commemoration, today we bring you the personal story of an Australian helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971.

[00:02:53] (Graham) Number nine Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force. Our call sign was Albatross.

[00:02:59] (Host) Stick around. From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. Founders of the wall. This is echoes of the Vietnam War. I’m your host, Michael Croan bringing you stories of service, sacrifice, and healing from people who still feel the impact of that conflict. More than 50 years later. This is episode 57, Chook.

[00:03:45] (Graham) My grandparents World War I, my parents in World War II, but by the time I came along, dad was a school teacher and mum was a homemaker.

[00:03:54] (Host) That’s Graham Dutton joining me via zoom from his home in Canberra, Australia.

[00:03:59] (Graham) It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be in the military, but I wanted to be a pilot, so that was the only economic way of doing it was to go into the military. From a very young age. I’d managed to get a couple of flights with, a friend who was a farmer and also a flying instructor, civil flying instructor. He would take me out occasionally and we’d go and do some aerobatics or something, and yeah, I was hooked by my early teens, as soon as I turned 18, I applied to join the Air Force as a pilot, and was accepted. And 16 months later, I was churned out at the other end as a pilot and a pilot officer, which is the equivalent of a second lieutenant, bottom of the rank. Other people in my pilot’s course were sent to things like fighters and bombers and transports and whatever, but there were eight of us who were sent to helicopters, and from there, inevitably, you would go to Vietnam once you’d been converted and done, some got some experience. We got there in, January of 1969, started our training in Canberra, and within a couple of weeks, there’d been a fatal accident, lost two pilots. And then a few weeks after that, two of the pilots on my course, who had been course mates through, you know, for the last 18 months, were killed in a second accident.

[00:05:33] (Graham) So everything ground to a halt while they figured out. Well, in fact, they never really figured out what went wrong in these two cases, so our training was a bit protracted, so it took nearly six months, all of which was conducted on Hueys, Bravo, model Hueys. Some of which had actually been in Vietnam previously and been sent home to use as trainers. About six months of training with instructors and doing just the learning how not to disappear across the aerodrome while trying to hover or whatever. Then we went off to do support exercises with the Army, including a few weeks in New Guinea, where we worked with the Special Air Services, our Special forces people training for them and ourselves in jungle warfare. And they, in fact, were the same special forces outfit that was in Vietnam when I was there. So, we had a pretty good rapport. So it took, from the start of training to arriving in Vietnam was about,15 months. Once you were in the Air Force, though it’s one of those things where you think well, if that’s what you’re trained to do, then I should really go and do this for real.

[00:07:18] (Graham) I arrived there in April 1970. Now, by then, we were all concerned that. Oh, jeez, maybe the war will be over by the time we, we get there. But it wasn’t. It was still, from our perspective, ticking along more or less as it had for the last couple of years. In the last 3 or 4 years. Right at the end of my tour, 12 months later, things did start to wind down. Australia removed one battalion from its task force, and it was by the end of 1971, our squadron had been withdrawn and basically the frontline involvement had come to an end.

[00:08:12] (Graham) In our case, we flew up from Sydney in a charter 707 and arrived in Saigon. It was hot, noisy, unpleasant at Tan Son Nhat and eventually the system got us on an airplane and flew. There were two pilots posted at the same time, flew us down to Vũng Tàu where we were based, and it was dark by then and I had no idea where we were. We were put in the back of this five-ton truck with our luggage, such as it was and, driven up to the, to the Air Force living quarters, where we were met by our CO who we knew. Everyone knew each other because we’d all been through the same system in Canberra, under training. So it was almost like a bit of a reunion of sorts. Some of these guys were just about to go home. They’d done their 12 months, but you know, you’d met them before and you knew them. And, I think that was one of the secrets to the success of our operation was the real camaraderie. Everyone, was long term, if not friends and acquaintances, pretty close.

[00:09:30] (Graham) If you’ve got to be in Vietnam Vũng Tàu was the place to be. It’s south east of Saigon on the coast. It was basically a tourist resort during French colonial days. It is now a tourist resort again. There’s a lovely beach on the eastern side of this peninsula. The aerodrome where we were based. I was there a few years ago. It’s still still in use flying helicopters, going out to oil rigs. But, at the time we had ourselves there, another Australian Air Force transport squadron flying C-7 Caribous, USAF Caribous, USAF Forward Air Controllers. It was a busy place. Now we were a very small part of it. Nine Squadron, we’re now 16 helicopters and their crews and their maintainers compared with all the infantry and so on. Our living conditions in the Air Force were pretty damn good. I mean, I had an individual little small room in a two-story wooden building, whereas our army guys lived under canvas the whole time they were there. Um, so we did pretty well. And we basically commuted every day to the task force base, the army taskforce base at Nui Dat, about, 30km north. Did our operations out of there and came home at night to a warm bed and cold beer.

[00:11:02] (Graham) It was pretty damn good in retrospect. Occasionally it did go wrong, but could have been a lot worse. I was there exactly two days getting issued with your safety equipment, your firearms, your chicken plate, your flak vest, all that sort of stuff, new helmets. And, two days later, I did my first sortie just to familiarize with the area. The helicopter wasn’t a problem. We’d by now there were there were hotel model Iroquois, but basically the same, and it was just a matter of getting used to the environment. Getting used to how it could be very busy with, working three different radio sets if you’re the co-pilot and, maintaining situational awareness, that sort of thing took you a couple of days, but we were pretty familiar with how the operation went. . And in fact, it was only I had to look the other day. It was only a week later that I did my first as a co-pilot in the first, special forces infiltration, which went bad. As soon as we dropped off the patrol.

[00:12:25] (Graham) It was east of Nui Dat in our, probably about 20 km east of what is now the city of Berea in Vietnam. In in a jungle, just a hole in the jungle. The guys would do a survey from maps and from a high overflight and think, well, that’s a good place to start our patrol. And then we’d brief extensively and the insert aircraft would be directed from afar by the flight leader.

[00:12:54] So we’d go in very low level for about 20 km on the trees and then, you know, a zigzag path and, turn up alongside the pad, do a quick one, 180-degree turn, drop off the, the half a dozen guys in the back, which took all of probably less than 10 seconds. They really wanted to get out and get away from the helicopter. And in this case, that’s exactly what happened. But as soon as we lifted off, we actually heard a gunshot, and we knew we’d have to go back and pick them up because they’d been compromised. And so that was pretty exciting. I’d only been there a week, and it was, you know, already. We found subsequently that there had been only probably 1 or 2 of the opposition on the other side of the pad and the shot that we heard went underneath the helicopter and hit one of the soldiers in his pack without hurting him. So then there was all sorts of things that used to happen, you know, gunships would roll in and demolish the trees around the area and all that sort of thing. And eventually we flew back, picked these guys up and flew home again to lots of raucous laughter. But I thought, well, a week and it’s already in fact any week after that, there was one of the patrols went, the school went hot. It was they were being pursued by a larger Vietcong force at night. And, we used to have two aircraft on standby at night, So one of them went off to be the to pull, to winch these guys out. I was in the second aircraft happily and we acted as flareship. We were over the top dropping, dropping flares to try and get some illumination on the area for the guys going in so they weren’t totally in the dark. And also for the gunships, which was we didn’t have gunships on standby. So the procedure was more or less, well, who’s had one beer? Okay. Well you’re the flight leader. Two beers. Okay. You’re the second guy, three beers where you can be co-pilot and that sort of thing. So and then during this whole thing, USAF, C-119, transport converted to a gunship, turned up, and we became superfluous because this guy had had flares lit up the entire country and more ammunition. Et cetera. Et cetera. Yeah, we didn’t have to do much, but it was a it was a bit of a hairy operation, done in the dark. And the guy that was captain of the aircraft, Robinson, who I knew very well, he was awarded a decoration for it, which he richly deserved, and that was more or less the pattern. Things would be quiet. You’d be doing the occasional troop lift or logistic support or whatever. But particularly the SAS, the Special Forces inserts, X-Fills. They could be quite exciting.

[00:18:54] (Host) As a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, Graham Dutton earned the nickname Cook, which is an Australian slang term for chicken. If tiny weighed 300 lbs. and Curley had no hair anywhere on his body. Well, you can imagine what the Aussies must have thought of a guy they called Chook. Here’s Graham Dutton with the rest of his story.

[00:19:15] (Graham) The SAS, the Special Forces inserts X-Fills. They could be quite exciting. One in particular, I recall this was some months later when I was captain of the aircraft and, Rawdon dropped the guys off, took off, and we used to hold for about 20 minutes in case anything went bad and they should come up on a beeper if anything went bad. Well, they didn’t come up on the beeper. Someone had just held down the transmit switch and you could hear automatic gunfire in the background. So we figured, okay, we’re going to have to go. We’re going to have to go back. They’d been compromised. Gunships came in and did some work. And, 50 years later, I still recall flying quite vividly, flying down the final approach into this pad. And there was this hole in the trees and being overtaken by rockets down the left-hand side, and constant streams of minigun fire. The noise of our own door gunners, landed in the pad, out ran the special forces. And there was these gaps of earth being thrown up, walking towards the helicopter. And I thought briefly that, well, that’s it, we’re about to get shot up. And I realized it was one of the SAS guys running, running away, firing backwards over his shoulder and stitching up the earth about five feet behind him. So, it was it was not well organized either, but it was intense. So that you do remember those sorts of incidents. And certainly, there were there were several of those.

[00:21:03] (Graham) I was 20, most of us were between 20 and 23. I guess. At the time I don’t think you thought too much about it, that it was just you go back that night and everyone would have a good laugh about it, but every now and then things did come unstuck. I spent probably three months just doing dust off. And that could be that could be hair raising. I had a very memorable event there because we were we were part of the big US dustoff organization, medevac organization. We could be called out outside our province or outside our normal area of operation. And it was called out on one occasion after a US dustoff had been been shot up to go and pick up some US casualties in a province north of us, Long Khanh Province. But you’re told. Yeah, well, the reason we’re calling you guys out to go out of the province is our guys just got brassed up. Oh, okay. We did have. We were slightly different to the US dustoffs in that we believed that the opposition didn’t either understand or particularly respect the Red Cross, so we didn’t put a red cross on the side of it. We kept our door guns just in case. And I don’t think it made much difference really. But yeah, by the time we got there, it was starting to get dark and it was the only way we were going to, these guys were going to get out in the next, you know, till next morning was if we did it and we sat there for we did two, two winches, very long winches, 200 foot winches, very high jungle. And all the time I was busy because I was the captain and I was flying the poor up co-pilot, sitting there reading the engine gauges, making sure everything’s going okay and, uh, yeah. Darrell Holden was the co-pilot. Moresby. And it’s still to this day, it’s. He expected to die because he was trying to get his feet up underneath himself. And But it was immensely rewarding when he finally got four guys on board, got him away just as it was getting dark. And yeah, it’s quite emotional.

[00:23:55] (Graham) I believe they had been ambushed as a US platoon. They’d been ambushed by, quite a large force with, and hit with rocket propelled grenades. And so there were a lot of shrapnel injuries. So that was one of one of several instances, but one of the very memorable ones, and even to the end when you my second last day on operations. The scheduler when you’re getting towards the end of your tour he would try and put you on a pretty cushy number. And I was on what was called the Zero Five Mission, which was to fly the task force commander, who was a brigadier, a one star, fly him around to his various units around the province to do a daily inspection, which I’m sure everyone out in the units really looked forward to having the Brigadier turn up. But anyway, so I did that. It was a cushy number, but that afternoon, a, Australian platoon got into contact. The Brigadier, wanted to be flown out to the firebase, which was controlling the action, so I picked him up. And on the way past, we actually overflew the site of the contact and I could hear one of my friends, Ken Phillips, who was the dustoff pilot, trying to get in to get out the Australian casualties. There was a little bit of confusion. But anyway, we flew on, dropped off the Brigadier at the fire base, and I was returning to the task force at Nui Dat once again overflying the contact. And as I did, I heard the co-pilot of the dustoff coming up saying that they’d been shot up and they had casualties. And so I followed them back to the fire base, landed about 100 yards behind them all the way, and, landed beside them. And the crewman, the winch operator, uh, Alan Bloxham, had been shot in the head. And yeah, we got him on board, flew him back to the, field ambulance at Khui Dat, but he died. And to this day, I’m amazed at how quickly it turned off from the world’s cushiest job to picking up one of your own who’d just been just been killed.

[00:26:50] (Graham) By 1970, there was starting to be vocal opposition to it, and we knew that. And we would hear about that, and we were all very aware of it. In fact, sadly, some of our, a couple of the wives were adversely affected by simply by people being very, not abusive, but very negative towards them, which, none of their business. I mean, we’re just doing our job, but it didn’t impact us on a day to day basis. We were aware that there was there was significant opposition, and even amongst ourselves, there were, you know, couple of good friends were, you know, I could see that this was a bit of a crock. Yeah. The whole war was not well organized and probably not well thought out from day one. But when you were being paid by the government and the government says, you know, we’re having a war here, you don’t get to pick your war. So, we just did our job. We were very fortunate in that we didn’t suffer any repercussions when we came home because we remained in the in the military with the same people we know all along, but guys who were discharged as soon as they got home, a lot of those suffered some. Some of them found it very hard. Yeah, I’d like to think that these days, even though there were people opposed to recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they didn’t take it out on the troops. They aimed at where it should have been aimed at the government. So I didn’t suffer any ill effects of that. We’re well aware of, that and of course, the war was winding down units were pulling out. In fact, I, bizarrely enough, at one stage, our living quarters used to be within a larger US Army base. And then the US Army contracted their base, and we wound up this little island of Australia, in suburban Vũng Tàu. When we, when we got in our vehicles to drive down to fly the aircraft, we had to go through a US Army checkpoint to get down to the aerodrome. So that was, that was a little bit, bit of a bone of contention.

[00:29:45] (Graham) I went back and flew helicopters in Australia for a couple of years before moving on to back to fixed wing. And that couple of years was an anti-climax. It was probably the most dangerous, probably the most dangerous time in my flying career because I been there, done that, overconfident. Fortunately, nothing really serious happened to me, but a couple of my colleagues had had accidents, largely through overconfidence, fortunately not fatal, but we were young and silly. When you’re 20, it’s time to go home. I was 22. The wheels come off occasionally. You are infused with that feeling that it can’t happen to you. It will happen to someone else. Fortunately, you don’t think about these things too much at the time.

[00:30:46] (Graham) For us, in the in the in the flying world, you’d have, you know, literally a few minutes of things being really horrendous and then returned to calm, whereas infantrymen were slogging through the jungle waiting to step on a mine and be out there for days at a time when the drop of a hat it could all go bad. Great sympathy and respect for them. Yeah, we’re in very dangerous situations for brief periods of time, and then flew off back to the bar that night and let our hair down. We lost about 520 killed, bizarrely enough, I think when we built our memorial in Australia back in the 90s, there were about 8 or 9 missing. We have managed to locate all the MIA’s since. In fact, the last MIA to be recovered was in 2009, who was actually a member of my pilot’s course. He was one of the guys who went to bombers. His aircraft disappeared one night near the Laotian border, and it wasn’t rediscovered until 2009, which was rather sad. He and his navigator were both killed, obviously. And, before that, one of our dustoff’s just after I left Vietnam was shot down and the medical orderly was an MIA, but we knew that he’d been basically been incinerated in the aircraft when it when it had crashed. And so some remains were recovered, I think at about 2005, something like that. But yes, we got all our MIAs back, which is rather wonderful.

[00:33:09] (Host) After leaving the Royal Australian Air Force in 1983, Graham Dutton spent a few years working for the Australian equivalent of the FAA and then flew commercial jets for Qantas for 20 years. In the early 90s, he was flying a jumbo jet somewhere over Tajikistan when he called out to another Qantas jet coming in the opposite direction.

[00:33:28] (Graham) And I made this call and out of the ether comes, g’day, Chook. And I recognized him immediately. I said g’day Bats, like Batman’s bats. And I’ve often thought this Russian’s down below thinking what a chooks and bats doing up here. What’s the story? What’s the code?

[00:33:52] (Host) Small world. Thanks to Chook for sharing his story and to Rosie Urbine for her industrial strength help in making this interview possible. And of course, we want to thank our friends over at Witness to War for sharing the audio from Jim Lowe’s interview. Check them out sometime, witnesstowar.org. Jim Lowe passed away in September of 2016. We’ll be back soon with more stories of service, sacrifice, and healing. See you then.

Full Interview with Graham Dutton