One possession that I would likely not rush to rescue in the face of an advancing fire is the medal commemorating my time as a conscript in the Australian Army.
The medal was proposed by the Howard Government at the time of the 50th anniversary of the introduction of compulsory national service training in 1951. Whether the striking of the medal was politically motivated I don’t know but, taking a cynical view, the armed services would have been ever alert to the possibility of sustaining enthusiasm among their alumni. The national service medal was not a general issue, but was provided to those (eligible) souls who saw the newspaper advertisement in 2001 and filled out the application form. All told, more than 300000 men were eligible to apply, and as of 30 June 2010 125425 had done so. I sent off for my medal thinking it a bit of a joke, but having the medal provides me with a framework for this reminiscence.
Conscription into the armed services has had a curious history in Australia. All those who served in the First World War were volunteers. Half way through that conflict (although it wasn’t known at the time that the carnage was only half over) the ghastly attrition of the Western Front compelled the Federal Government to find additional cannon fodder, and in 1916 there was a national plebiscite to authorise conscription. It failed. So too did a second referendum, fifteen months later in 1917.
Resistance to the idea of conscription never faded, and with the Second World War (a mere 20 years later, hence the huge number who served in both wars) although the Government was able to introduce conscription, it was only on condition that conscripts could not be sent for service beyond Australian territory. This proviso, however, didn’t save the conscripts from being sent to serve in New Guinea, which was Australian “territory” at the time; no conscripts were sent to the Middle-East or to Europe unless they volunteered to go.
Conscription was abolished with the peace in 1945; but by 1951 Australia was at war again, this time in Korea, and compulsory military service was re-introduced. The hand of history remained heavy, however, and although all males were required to register at age 18, and all the fit ones were indeed conscripted, there was no requirement that they serve in the Korean campaign. National servicemen became members of the CMF, the Citizen Military Forces - trained servicemen to be kept “in reserve”.
It was under the system introduced in 1951 during the Korean War that I became a national serviceman, a “nasho”. The law initially required six months of inducted training, with options of Army, Navy, or Air Force; and trainees then had to remain in the CMF for five years, and to attend whatever parades and camps were held during that time by their particular unit.
By the time I was 18 in August 1957 the system had been significantly modified, principally because the Korean War had ended in 1953. The alternative service options were no longer available, it was Army only; and it was no longer a system compulsory for all 18-year-olds – the birthday ballot had been introduced, and the odds of call-up were about one in three. Moreover, if the lucky recruit was undertaking tertiary education, the six-months training camp was replaced by a six-weeks camp during the summer break in the academic year, to be followed by three consecutive annual three-weeks camps – so a total of 105 in-camp days – plus the regular through-the-year parades at (in my case) the drill hall of the Melbourne University Regiment in Grattan Street, Carlton.
[For completeness I should add that national service training was abolished in 1959…..but it was re-introduced in 1964 because of the Vietnam War (1962 to 1972). Selection was again based on a birthday ballot, now for age 20-year olds, but this time conscripts had to serve for two years continuous full-time, plus three years on an active reserves list. From 1966, active service in Vietnam was made mandatory, although this could be avoided by instead joining the CMF. There was considerable civil unrest in Australia on account of the Vietnam War, and massive protests against conscription. Overall, some 19500 nashos went to Vietnam, and 187 of them died and 1500 were injured. Conscription was ended once Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister in December 1972.]
I approached national service with some trepidation. In a way the apprehension about receiving the envelope advising that your birth date had been chosen in the ballot was as great as the apprehension about the actual military experience itself. I was notified some time in 1957, my first year of Commerce at The University of Melbourne. Coincidentally, my cousins Graeme Lee and Howard Carter – both born in 1939 but with different birth dates - were also balloted into national service.
My family was living at the shop in Bridge Road, Richmond at the time, and I was ordered to report for enrolment and a medical at the Army drill hall in Gipps Street Richmond (off Church Street, near the corner of Swan Street). The medical was perfunctory, I was declared fit, and I was in………….but with no sense of exhilaration at the prospect of serving my country. As I perceived it, what I had to look forward to was the wasting of six weeks of the coming vacation “playing soldiers” at Puckapunyal Army base.
This duly happened. In those days there was an Army depot on the south side of Swan Street, East Melbourne, to the city side of the Punt Road intersection. The depot no longer exists, and that section of Swan Street has been renamed Olympic Boulevard. It was there that the members of the January 1958 intake gathered, and were loaded into a convoy of army trucks bound for Puckapunyal. [In later years we took the train from Spencer Street Station - now Southern Cross - from whence we were railed to the Dysart Defence Sidings, a little short of Seymour. and then loaded into army trucks for trans-shipment the few kilometres to our camp-site.]
Upon arrival at Puckapunyal, as I recall, the sequence was that we were first given a medical. This involved all the conscripts standing around the walls of a large hall, undressing, and then laying their clothes in a neat pile on the floor in front of them. It was hot, so no-one got a chill. The medical consisted of an officer medico, plus another officer or two, circling the room and checking for flat feet. The chap next to me was decreed to have flat feet, his army days were over after less than a day, and he was discharged. While inspecting the recruits’ feet the officers also checked for inguinal hernia by the time-honoured method of asking each recruit to cough. I am not kidding. The room was so large that I didn’t see whether anybody earned a hernia ticket to freedom and, in any case, it wasn’t polite to do too much groin gazing.
Next it was off to the quartermaster’s store to be kitted out; and we were pretty soon allocated to our units and assigned to out living quarters. And I think it was quite soon after, probably the next day, that we were given a raft of shots. Doubtless this would have included immunisation against typhoid, cholera and tetanus. It also included the BCG vaccination against tuberculosis, and here I became involved in a brouhaha. Although BCG had been around for many years, Australia was not then (nor now) considered to be a place with high risk of tuberculosis infection, and in the 1950s vaccination was largely restricted to aboriginal people. The Army made the assumption that its personnel might be exposed to tuberculosis in some wretched part of the globe, and further assumed that none of its recruits would have previously had a BCG vaccination, so everyone was a candidate. The vaccination invariably leaves a lesion on the upper arm - the typical scratch point - and as I was about to be scratched and infected the doctor noticed that I had already been vaccinated. I had not. The scab mark on my arm was the result of having been vaccinated against smallpox. This had happened prior to my trip overseas with the Sun Youth Travel contingent two years earlier. In those days overseas travel, and hence smallpox vaccination, was quite rare for children and young people, so I had to go through the rigmarole of explaining my story. Honesty is undoubtedly the best policy (!), but I’d merely talked myself into an encounter with a sharp object that I might otherwise have avoided by being less forthcoming.
I have never been a fan of needles, and have fainted more than once at the prospect. It doesn’t bother me now, but I still don’t like to “look”. Mass immunisations are never organised to take the pressure off the squeamish, on the contrary. The queue snakes through the public hall to the immunisation point set up at the far end for all to see and contemplate as their turn comes closer. The Army was no different, except that the queue was longer and the waiting time interminable.
Puckapunyal Army base was established in 1939, and was for some time the largest military base in Australia, with a peak of about 4000 personnel. In addition to the Puckapunyal camp area, there are about 40000 hectares of open range country, off limits to non-military personnel. In 1958 Puckapunyal was the home of the First Armoured Regiment of the Australian Army (proud owners of the Centurion tank fleet acquired progressively from 1952). It was also home to a battalion of national service trainees and their attached regular Army personnel.
Although there were occasions when the whole battalion was on parade together, during our time in camp we were pretty focussed on our own company, “C” Company in my case. Doubtless that was part of the Army’s mateship psychology. There was an even closer connection with those in your barrack. There were three platoons I think (hence three barracks), of about 16 men each, making “C” company of about 50 men. At one end of each barrack there was a room with two beds, possibly meant to accommodate non-commissioned officers (NCOs), but the rest was an open room. Not surprisingly, we were billeted alphabetically, so in nearby beds were Allen, Bolitho, Boyle, Bond, Bow, Beard, Bassett and Blythe.
Sensibly, the Army had put together those recruits who were undertaking tertiary education, and that’s what “C” Company comprised. There were non-tertiary recruits in camp at the same time too. Here my story becomes a bit confused, because tertiary students were in camp for six weeks only, whereas the others should have been there for just short of five months. (By 1958 the original 176-days intakes had been reduced to 140-days.) There must, therefore, have been some overlapping of training schedules for the summer camps. One day when visiting the camp library I saw specific evidence of recruits who were not in tertiary education - a classroom of about 20 nashos who had been identified as illiterate, and who were being given intensive English lessons. It was clear that these lessons took some priority over military training. The Army did some fine things.
My initial fears about camp life mellowed to misgivings, and then disappeared altogether, and my army experience proved to be generally enjoyable, even rewarding. I never found the discipline and the regimentation hard to handle – reveille at six, ablutions forthwith, straight to breakfast, making your bed and space ready for inspection, the endless polishing of the brass belt fittings, and the endless spitting and polishing of boots. None of this was hard for me; nor was “square bashing”. Being taught to drill in unison, the endless hours on the parade ground, can be thought of as a process for robbing men of their individuality, and of indoctrinating them with the reflex to take orders without question. But it is more. It produces camaraderie; it is an object of pride in itself. There is satisfaction in marching and drilling to perfection. And we had great enjoyment on route marches from the accompanying ribald songs, many of which I have never forgotten.
This is not to say that the six weeks in camp was totally stimulating. There were numerous hours spent just waiting, hours of frustration and boredom. There were numerous SNAFUs (this is the American version – Situation normal: all fucked up), which we preferred to call SOMFUs (Same old military fuck up). And I regret that there was a pretty overt intellectual snobbery expressed by us university types towards the lesser-educated NCOs who were in charge of our training. Mind you, the scoffing tone didn’t exist at the outset, and it emerged only against those NCOs who had exhibited some less than noble trait - like the sergeant who offered to have his wife iron our shirts - for a small fee! He never again had our respect. This same sergeant had started our first day of training with the news that (holding up his rifle) this is my rifle (then holding his crutch) and this is my gun; (rifle) this is for fighting, (crutch) and this is for fun. Thereafter it was a serious misdemeanour to refer to your rifle as a gun.
Through our six weeks we not only learnt to march, to take orders, and to be disciplined in every way, but we learnt about weaponry, and how to stick a bayonet into a swinging bag of straw. Our rifles were Lee-Enfield 303s, bolt action, single shot, with a clip of 10 bullets. Lee-Enfields, introduced in 1895, were the standard issue rifles of the British Army, and several of the Commonwealth Armies. There had been later modifications, but the rifle had basically remained the same. Around 17 million were made. The year of manufacture was stamped on each rifle, and we could see that some of our platoon had rifles that were over 50 years old. Ancient rifles or not, the Lee-Enfields were a classic weapon, indeed the weapon of choice for snipers. The sights were not telescopic, but were able to be adjusted for long distance, with a maximum calibrated range of two miles (3.2 kilometres). That’s an extraordinary range; but be assured, if the shooting was accurate the target would be felled at that distance.
We practised first at the 25 yards range in the Puckapunyal camp site. I was pretty proficient at that short distance. Later, out on the rifle range, my aim was not nearly so good – from 200 yards to 800 yards it became progressively worse; and it wasn’t until some time later that I discovered I was short sighted, and that I needed glasses.
Another time on the range we practised hand grenade throwing – one throw apiece. The standard issue “pineapple” hand grenades, with the held-down lever and the ring-pull release had, like the Lee-Enfields, been around for ever. They weighed one-and-a-half pounds, 765 grams. I read somewhere that 75 million were made during the First World War. What an appalling statistic. They are more properly called Mills bombs. The depiction of grenade usage in the movies is usually fanciful. Grenades are designed to distribute shrapnel upon detonation. That distribution is not one-directional – shrapnel goes in all directions. It is said that a soldier with a good arm can toss a Mills bomb for about 100 feet, approximately 30 metres. The lethal range, however, is greater than 100 feet. Thus any soldier who doesn’t toss from behind cover is likely to become a victim of his own weapon. Toss from a trench okay, toss into a doorway okay, drop into a tank hatch okay, but toss on the battlefield at the advancing enemy – nuts. There is also the issue of timing. Originally, the Mills bomb detonated seven seconds from the release of the lever. The pin could be pulled, and the lever held down indefinitely, with no problem – apart from the problem of putting the pin back, or finding a spot to trigger the explosion safely for the thrower and his comrades. But it was found that seven seconds was too long. It gave time for the enemy to take cover; or, worse still, for the enemy to toss the grenade back. The problem could obviously be solved by holding on to the grenade for several of those seven seconds before tossing it, but this strategy carried its own risks. In 1940 the detonation delay was reduced to four seconds.
Grenade day on the range was far and away the tensest experience of my national service – worse than the injections! We had practised with dummy grenades; but when it came to the real thing the regular Army personnel were taking no chances, although they were on tenterhooks nonetheless. We nashos were all sheltered in bunkers below ground level, and one-by-one we were ushered into the bunker from which we would be throwing over the lip to the open ground beyond. The routine was counted down by the sergeant and, once we’d thrown, all those in the bunker hit the ground. Several other regulars were in the bunker, primed and alert. One was dressed in body armour and held an upright mattress, and it was his job, should the nasho panic and drop the grenade in the bunker, to smother it with the mattress and his body. Given the stories we’d been told about the force of a Mills bomb I think those in the bunker probably believed that such a manoeuvre would have represented a free ticket to martyrdom. I have a recollection that the grenades we used were of the older seven second type, but you know what: if there had been a cock-up the effect would have been the same!
During the Second World War many Australian troops were issued with a personal machine gun, the Owen gun. The Owen was Australian-designed in 1939, and was regarded as very reliable, regardless of foul operating conditions. Hence it was popular in the mud and rain of the New Guinea jungles. Around 50000 Owen guns were made; and the weapon was still being used during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But we nashos never saw one in 1958. I guess there was no need: Australia was not then at war, and there was no particular point in us being trained in the use of a personal automatic weapon. We were, however, trained in the use of the Bren gun.
I don’t recall the rules that governed the deployment of Bren guns, how many per company, but I think it was one per platoon. Each Bren had two gunners, one to do the shooting, and one to assist, carry spare ammunition etc. The Bren had been introduced into the British Army (and by osmosis, the Australian Army) in 1935. It was of Czechoslovakian design, and took its name from Brno, the place of design, and Enfield, the place of manufacture. It was an infantry weapon, although it could also be mounted on vehicles. It was regarded as the primary infantry light machine gun. It was magazine fed and not belt fed, and it fired approximately 500 rounds per minute. It was the same .303 calibre as the Lee-Enfield infantry rifle. Its effective range was 600 yards (500 metres), although it had a maximum range of 1850 yards. Few of our number were chosen to be Bren gun carriers, but we all had to learn the gun’s mechanism – including learning how to “strip” and re-build – and to learn its capabilities. A notable feature of the Bren is that, without being directed by the gunner, it will not send hundreds of bullets to the same spot but will saturate a teardrop-shaped area of the landscape ahead.
During our six weeks at Puckapunyal I achieved the second-best sun-tanned arms and face in the platoon, second only to a chap of Greek parentage; and I became the fittest I’ve ever been. We had unlimited access to the camp picture theatre, and – unless we’d been rostered for guard duty – had leave passes to Seymour for Saturday evenings. Given the absence of an enemy, guard duty was understandably boring, profoundly boring, and my trick to keeping alert and awake was to try silently to hum through each of my thin collection of LPs, track by track, note by note.
The culmination of the six weeks was a bivouac of several days into the Puckapunyal scrubland, to give us a taste of “real” battle conditions – so real that although we carried our rifles (and Bren guns) we had no ammunition! There was never any suggestion that we should be issued with helmets and, truth to tell, we were happy enough with our slouch hats. We did learn how to dig slit trenches. And we did learn to cover our faces with charcoal for night-time combat; and we learnt to stick grass and small branches into our hatbands for day-time camouflage. Crawling along on your elbows with your rifle held at the port - horizontally in front of your body - is not meant to be easy, but on a stinking Australian day at the end of a long summer, it is particularly un-nice. Still, it was a lesson in the reality of war – the truism that it has never been for the foot-soldiers to choose the time and the place. By the way, after hearing the scary stories of bazookas, armour-piercing shells and such like, and the survival rate for tank crews who take a hit, we were unanimous in our view that, front line or not, the infantry is the better forward unit to be in.
The remembrance of slit trenches brings back the memory of the night it rained. A slit trench is as long as you want to make it – a four man trench is longer than a three man trench, and so on. As to height: the ones we dug on the Puckapunyal range were deep enough for us to stand in them up to about our middle chest – we had to be able to rest our rifles on the edge of the trench. The slit trenches weren’t very deep front to back, hence their name – just roomy enough so that we could drop down for cover without becoming jammed. Throughout the bivouac the heat had been dreadful, and the digging of the trenches had been quite a business. It would have been possible for at least one person to sleep in the bottom of the trench, but not very appealing; and although we were involved in a serious war game against another unit, everybody chose to sleep on the ground on their groundsheets. Everyone, that is, except the soldier who was on guard. The guard changed every two hours through the night, and guard duty was undertaken standing in the trench. During the night it rained, boy did it rain, so much so that there was water in the trenches up to the knees of those on duty. I was on watch for the hours just before dawn, and the sun actually arose before “stand to” was called. I saw a remarkable sight – soldiers laying everywhere still asleep, drenched through, and the sun causing steam to rise from their sleeping bodies. Then they were wakened, and everyone jumped into the slit trenches and the water and the mud to be ready for a possible enemy attack. As the morning progressed we all dried off…….and nobody developed so much as a sniffle from their night in the rain.
And so the restrictions of the “holiday” spent at Puckapunyal drifted into the freedoms of student life, 1958 version. I attended periodic parades at the Grattan Street drill hall, but remember little. There was no space to practise marching and drill, so I imagine that our instructors tried to teach us things like map reading, and (advanced) Bren gun dismantling and re-assembling.
In January 1959 and January 1960 I was off again, to the obligatory three-week camps. This time the camps were run by Melbourne University Regiment; and rather than occupy the national service lines at Puckapunyal, we were quartered at Site 17 to the east of Seymour (Puckapunyal is to the west). I have checked the internet, and the only reference to Site 17 says that it had been the training ground for the Victorian Mounted Rifles (a unit formed in 1885), and later the Australian Light Horse. It was formerly known as Kitchener’s Camp. We nashos were never told of this illustrious history. My two stints at Site 17 are not separate in my memory, and I’m mostly unclear about which recollections relate to which year.
While Site 17 had full ablution and dining facilities, we were not housed in barracks, but in six-man tents. The tents were A-frame, and the only place we could stand upright was in the middle under the centre ridge. The tents were fitted with duckboards, and we slept on hessian palliasses. Our first task on arrival was to fill the hessian bags from a supply of fresh straw. The site was no more or less hospitable than Puckapunyal but, as it happens, the summers were hotter.
It needs to be understood that MUR, the Melbourne University Regiment, has had a traditional role of training future Army officers. The grand plan of the military for general mobilisation and warfare is that the bulk of the front-line fighting will be done by the volunteers and - depending on Government policy at the time - by the conscripts. The permanent Army will not be used to fight, but rather to train these soldiers. There will obviously be initial timing delays, but the strategy makes sense. If the whole of the permanent army is deployed at the commencement of hostilities, and is wiped out, who will train the recruits who come after? The scenario also requires a new wave of officers. The existing officers are needed in the field from day one, but there must be a replacement plan. Enter the likes of MUR, regiments specifically designated as officer training units. Whether this meant that at Site 17 we were given the kid glove treatment, or whether we were fast tracked or hot housed, or whatever, I don’t know. But I do recall classes that you would not expect to be part of a typical army training regime. We were, for instance, taught to prepare impromptu talks; and taught to eliminate ums and ahs when delivering speeches. This latter technique - to fill the space between utterances with dead silence rather than bridging with non-words - was a lifetime lesson for me.
The MUR was not immune from stupidity, though. Near the conclusion of one camp we went on the obligatory bivouac, and we played the obligatory war games. On our way back to camp we halted on the banks of the Goulburn River. Why? Well, while we had not been issued with live ammunition during any of our manoeuvres, the unit had been carrying thousands of rounds. So instead of returning this ammunition to store, and filling out the inevitable forms, the unit lined up along the river, took up our firing positions of choice (prone or kneeling), and blasted away at the opposite bank. This mayhem went on for ten minutes or more. There were so many rounds fired that some of the Bren guns became red hot and misfired. Other Brens were able to sever river red gums, which went tumbling into the River. Disgraceful in retrospect, and disgraceful at the time. Our CO was – gasp – very concerned about wasting the taxpayers’ money, so the order went around that every brass shell had to be recovered and taken back with us. The destruction of the environment and the wastage of lead and gunpowder was apparently not an issue.
One side effect of the furious onslaught on our hearing was that I had ringing in my ears for ages, and eventually tinnitus in my left ear that continues to this day.
Another MUR inanity was perpetrated by the regiment’s own in-house biological and chemical warfare group. These people did not create or deliver biological and chemical weaponry – at least I hope not – rather they were concerned to deal with the aftermath of such an attack on our troops. They were in the decontamination business. The only decontaminant we run-of-the-mill soldiers ever encountered was water; and we became guinea pigs in an experiment to show how the whole unit could be effectively decontaminated. So there we were out in the bush, and we had to remove our clothes and run through a cold shower – and then double back and get dressed. No-one was spared, indeed our chubby and Shelley pink CO led his men through. No-one was spared, that is, except the biological and chemical wallahs, who watched the whole proceedings fully clothed. In a real-world scenario I suppose we would have spent somewhat longer under the shower, and would likely have applied some soap. And our contaminated uniforms would have been discarded and we’d have been provided with new ones. All that the experiment proved was that it was possible to improvise a showering apparatus, and to truck into the bush sufficient water to douse the whole unit.
For one of my Site 17 years, maybe both, there was a significant heat wave, and I recall that the daytime temperature stayed above 100 degrees Fahrenheit for nearly the whole time. As it happens, cousins Graeme and Howard were in camp at the same time as my MUR camp – Graeme at Puckapunyal, and Howard also at Site 17 in MUR – and there was one memorable weekend when Kath and Bill Warren (Graeme’s parents), and the Carter family, arrived on the Sunday and took the three of us off to Lake Nagambie. Refreshing swims but, even better, Bill was then driving his Ford Custom utility, and in the back had brought a big zinc tub filled with ice and soft drinks. Bliss.
Then there was the weekend I went AWOL. My parents, Gordon and Gloria, had rented a house at Carrum for some weeks of the Christmas vacation, and they were there with my younger sisters Margaret, Kathy and Judy. I was at Site 17, missing out, and enduring a heat wave. So I absconded for the day. This, I know for sure, was in the January of 1960. I know it was 1960 because Gordon was ill, and lay on the couch for all of the day that I was at Carrum. He died three months later.
The Army never has taken, and didn’t then take, a benevolent view of soldiers who are absent without leave, and apart from the military police in jeeps who patrolled the area nearby to Puckapunyal and Seymour, there were patrols in the Melbourne CBD. These latter, I suppose, weren’t specifically looking out for service personnel without leave passes, they were there to ensure that military personnel committed no public nuisance. Still, there would be no joy in being picked up. Getting to Melbourne was easy – just stand on the highway, and thumb a lift…….which is what I did. The rest of my journey is a blank. I presume that I simply took a train to the city from the spot where I was dropped, and then a second train to Carrum. That wouldn’t have been hard. But the return to Site 17 must have taken some doing. I could hardly have thumbed a lift outside Flinders Street station; so after getting to the city from Carrum I must have taken the Upfield train, alighting at Fawkner or Gowrie, and then walked the short distance to the Hume Highway and allowed my thumb to do its magic. Anyway, the whole episode was negotiated without a problem or capture, although I was no doubt fearful throughout.
There was one incident, however, that’s worth recounting, and it concerns the first leg of my journey, the getaway from Site 17. I was positioned on the roadside beyond the camp, alert to the possibility of a passing jeep-load of military police – known affectionately as provos, and distinguishable by their white rather than khaki “webbing” (belt and gaiters). I was in uniform, so the sight of any jeep would have propelled me into the roadside ditch. I had walked a fair way from the Site 17 gate, so when a car appeared I had no way of knowing whether it had come from the camp, but I presumed not. The driver was alone, and seemed happy to give me a lift – all the way to Melbourne as it transpired. He quickly heard out my story, and what I was planning; then as we neared Seymour he pointed out the jeep coming towards us, and told me to get down below the dashboard. As I dropped down I looked at the back seat – and there was an Army officer’s cap! My chauffeur was a regular Army captain….and a good guy.
I conclude the saga of my Army days with the story of the password. This, again, concerns war games. We had been split into two “armies”, and the task of my army was to infiltrate if possible the lines of the enemy – who were dug in on a bush-covered gently-sloping hillside more than a kilometre away. Our push didn’t get started until after sunset, probably around 9 p.m. We covered the distance to the enemy lines first walking stealthily, then crawling. For night-time engagements – especially when the enemy looks like you - it’s necessary to have passwords, say “idiot” to which the response is “pencil”, the idea being that the words must be unrelated and the first must give no clue to the second and lead to a lucky guess by the enemy. We advanced in patrols of around ten men, each patrol accompanied by an NCO as observer. Our patrol indeed did get as far as the enemy’s forward position, but we ran into one of their defensive patrols. It was very dark, one of their number called the first part of their password, we weren’t able to respond, and we skedaddled into the scrub with blanks being fired at our rears. But we now knew the first part of their password.
I had seen many movies in my teens, and I knew what Hollywood required to be done. When we next encountered an enemy patrol I called out their password, and received the second half in response. We passed safely by; and, furthermore, spent the whole night progressively infiltrating their lines and trenches. Our success was reported to the war games overlords, and our army was declared the “winner”. I was something of a minor hero; and I can think of no better note on which to finish…….except to say that national service training was totally abolished after I had completed my second MUR camp, and I never had to attend the third. I was obliged to return the key parts of my uniform to the drill hall, including my slouch hat and rising sun badge. I was able to keep my two pairs of boots, one of which I still have. I wasn’t able to find my Army-issue pullover, however, and its non-return meant – somebody said - that I couldn’t be formally discharged. Anyway, I haven’t been bombarded with letters of demand over the years, although I bet the Army hasn’t forgotten. There is, though, no chance of them ever wanting my services again.
The national service medal is of bronze. The ribbon has a central yellow stripe, flanked in order by dark blue, white, green, light blue and ochre stripes. The reverse has no words, merely a full sun motif, with the Southern Cross superimposed over the radiating sunbeams, all surrounded by a cogged wheel reminiscent of the Rotary International logo. The obverse has an anchor, a pair of wings, and crossed swords, with a star above; and a St. Edward’s crown at the top that attaches to the bar through which the ribbon is threaded. It has the words: “Anniversary of National Service 1951-1972”. There is a presentation vinyl box; and the cardboard slip-case has the reminder that for around 85 days I was a guest of the Australian Army – my service number 3780677.
Gary Andrews
Postscript: The service number quoted above is not strictly correct. There should be a forward slash between the first two digits, the 3 and the 7. Before the days of widespread personal computers we didn’t use the expressions forward slash and backward slash – we referred to forward slashes as “obliques”. In the Army we were frequently required to state our service number, and mine – 3/780677 – was “three oblique seven eight oh six seven seven”.
Second Postscript: Because of my blurred recollection of the two MUR camps at Site 17 I have sent away for a copy of my Army records. These are sketchy indeed, basically showing dates in and dates out. There are the usual personal particulars – hazel eyes and brown hair etc. – but nothing about “performance”. The records confirm, however, that I was a national serviceman in 20 National Service Training Battalion from 7 January to 24 March 1958, and a private in the Citizen Military Forces (attached to Melbourne University Regiment) from 25 March 1958 to 30 June 1960. There is no reference to the missing pullover. But, to my surprise, I have ben advised that “you may wish to contact the Directorate of Honours and Awards regarding your possible entitlement to a further award, the Australian Defence Medal”. Good grief!
