By CASEY NEILL
“YOU’D be six weeks without even taking your boots off, and when you did, your feet’d just bleed.
“No blisters or holes in the skin or anything, it just used to ooze out through the pores.”
Warragul’s Andrew Wells served in Delta Company, 3rd Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, patrolling Phuoc Tuy province in Vietnam.
“We used to go out for up to six weeks at a time,” he said.
“I had no clothes left, they’d just rotted off and been torn off … so we had all these old sandbags our food supplies had come in, just stitched up the front.
“There’s times there when you think, ‘I’m honestly not going to see tomorrow’.
“I spent one night there covered in another man’s guts.”
Mr Wells recalled another terrifying moment when the leaves on the tree beside him disappeared.
“Then you hear the machine gun go a bit later,” he said.
“The bullets were travelling a bit quicker than the sound. It’s just something I’ll always remember.
“We saw too much.”
Despite the horrors he experienced, the Dandenong RSL member doesn’t regret volunteering for national service as a 19-year-old from Drouin.
“It was the best thing I ever did,” he said.
“It was all a big adventure. I was looking forward to the next day, seeing something else.
“I didn’t plan for people to go shooting at me. That wasn’t part of it.”
On 24 April, he and about 60 comrades were to reunite for a service at the Vietnam War Memorial at Dandenong RSL. They’ve come together every four years for the past 20 years, since returning to Australia on 16 October 1971.
“It’s the greatest thing,” he said.
“Nobody talks about Vietnam. Only about the good times. It’s all just good fun.”
They sailed out of Port Adelaide bound for war aboard HMAS Sydney on 16 February 1971.
Just two weeks later, they saw two of their comrades killed in combat – Lieutenant John Wheeler and Private Paul Manning – and two severely wounded.
The Delta Devils will march in Melbourne’s Anzac Day procession for the first time on 25 April, carrying flags for their fallen.
“But Anzac Day’s about the other guys. It’s not about Vietnam veterans,” Mr Wells said.
“They’re the ones who gave us this good country we’ve got.
“I could never represent them. They did it hard, to what we did.
“The people on the side that hold up signs saying thank you. It’s really hard to hear.
“What are you thanking me for?”
But fellow Delta Devil, Clive Usher, from Cranbourne, disagreed.
“I’m proud to wear my medals now and people are proud to see us wearing them,” he said.
“At one time, I wasn’t. We were called baby-killers.”
He was conscripted, and had been hoping his marble would come up.
“My dad served in the World War II in Borneo and two of my brothers served in Malaya in the Malaysian conflict. Army was in the blood,” he said.
He’ll never forget his company’s first contact.
“We’d harboured up for the night. They’d followed us in and waited until we’d settled down and finished our night routine,” he said.
“Then the shit hit the fan.
“We were only young boys. I turned 21 in the bush.”
When Mr Usher returned home, his proud father took him to their local RSL, but he wasn’t accepted.
Since he was 14, he’d worked for the Postmaster-General’s Department (PMG), which boycotted mail going to Vietnam.
“When I came out of national service, I went back to PMG and I was hated for ages,” he said.
“No one trusted me. I was treated like a second-class citizen. We were for a long time.”
Treatment from an enemy soldier on his first trip back to Vietnam in 2001 was far better.
When he took a pair of broken sandals to a boot maker, their conversation turned to the war.
“He was a north Vietnamese private soldier … who basically followed us around during our time there,” Mr Usher said.
“He said ‘I have so much respect for you. You honoured our dead.’
“If we killed someone, we buried them.”
