The President of the RSL in New England said he would focus on conscripts when he addresses the Vietnam Veterans’ Ceremony ceremony on Saturday.
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During the Vietnam War, 63,735 Australian men were conscripted of whom 15,381 were deployed to the country. Approximately 200 were killed.
“I’ll be sparing a thought for those young men who were forced to go there because it was a jail term if you did not do your conscription”, said Gordon Taylor. “many people went to jail for not going”.
He will be speaking at the special ceremony is to be held at the Vietnam War memorial in Anzac Park in Glen Innes on Saturday to remember the war and those who served in it.
Mr Taylor said he would also talk about a particular battle, Bihn Ba, in which largely Australian troops fought and routed Vietcong forces in June, 1969.
The battle involved fierce house to house fighting in the village smaller than Glen Innes.
Australian troops attacked the place with infantry, armoured vehicles and helicopter gunships, routing the Viet Cong and largely destroying the village itself. The heavy losses suffered by the communists forced them to temporarily leave the province.
Vietnam was important politically in Australia (as in the United States) because it was a war fought partly by conscripts, with rising resistance at home. Just under 20,000 Australians were compelled to join the military to be sent to Vietnam and a hideous war often fought against invisible soldiers in the jungle.
Mr Taylor said of the war: “It’s important because it was a recent war where conscripts were brought in specifically to go to war.
“It was important because it showed our closeness to the USA as an ally”.
Between 1962 and 1973, 496 Australians were killed and 2,398 wounded. Conscription started in 1965, and 200 Australian conscripts were killed. Altogether, there were 60,000 Australian army, navy and air force personnel involved.
Several people now living in Glen Innes were involved in some of the bloodiest fighting.
On August 15, 1969, the life of John Urquhart was shattered, never to be put fully back together again.
He was a forward scout in Vietnam, perhaps the most dangerous job there was, probing through the jungle to meet the enemy, eyeball-to-eyeball, blade to blade.
As he tells it now in his home in Glen Innes, a helicopter gunship opened fire – what is misnamed as “friendly fire”. John was thrown into the open by the impact and there, a Viet Cong sniper hit him. The shrapnel from the gunship ripped his chest. The sniper’s bullet tore his stomach.
In a separate incident, he saw a good friend die. His partner as a scout and he tossed a coin to see who would go through a clearing first. His friend lost and was killed by a sniper.
Since then, he has suffered ceaseless nightmares: “I appear to be back at that time.” He said that sometimes people who served in Vietnam say they never felt frightened. He did: “The stress and the fear is there all the time, the fear that someone in the jungle is always watching you.”
And Allen Evans fought in Vietnam, the third of his wars after Korea and Malaya.
Today, he lives in a tidy, comfortable home in Glen Innes with his memories.
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