War Story Ubon 4 - The Heroes

“So...did they get you to trade...your heroes for ghosts?” – Pink Floyd

Patriotism, heroes, derring-do, marching bands. It all sounds so glamorous, doesn’t it? But the reality is something else. No one sets out to be a hero.

Very few people know that Australian soldiers roved into Laos and Cambodia during the Viet Nam war. These men were the real heroes. We only ever caught fleeting glimpses of them. They would come out of the jungle looking gaunt, ragged, bleary eyed after going out to gather Intel for our troops. We never really knew who they were, or even what they were doing. Were they out there going head to head with the enemy? Who knows?

All I ever knew was that these guys went out and faced real danger every time. A small band of close-knit men who took incredible risks. They would disappear into the jungle for days or even weeks at a time, and then one day they would materialize again. These were the real ghost soldiers.

Heroes look just like you and me. So, what makes them heroes?

They don’t go looking for it, that’s for sure. We’ve all heard about the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his friends. Is he a hero? Is this story even true? Every war seems to have one. Even the Iraqi war. But to be honest, I seriously doubt the story. It’s too trite. The propaganda machine trots it out in every war.

No, my heroes were the guys who took risks daily: The men who put their lives on the line whether they went out to face the enemy or not. The pilots and bombardiers who took off every day to fly over enemy territory on bombing runs were my heroes. They were the guys taking the huge risks. Many of them didn’t make it back.

Or the Aussie soldiers who went ‘in-country’ to eyeball the enemy; they were heroes, every one of them. It takes a special kind of courage to do that. But I seriously doubt they considered themselves heroes. They were just grunts doing a nasty job.

But guys like me working in the rear faced our own dangers.

We often heard of planes going missing over enemy territory. What really brought the reality of war to us, though, was when a plane would go into the deck on the runway next to our base. That pay night when the plane careered down the runway hitting the ammo dump while we were playing cards was only one incident. There were others.

A plane would limp home, shot up, full of holes and try to land. Some made it. Some didn’t. One plane I remember vividly had lost one undercarriage. The tower told the pilot and suggested that they bail out. He replied that he would try to land using just two wheels. It was a risk, but he thought he could do it and perhaps save the plane.

He approached the runway, gliding down as slowly as possible without stalling. He struggled to keep the plane horizontal. It touched down and started to roll forward. But the pilot lost control. The plane tipped on its side as the bombardier ejected. He rammed into a pole.

As the plan flipped over, the pilot ejected into the runway. Even as their world was collapsing around them, their natural reaction was to try and get out of there the only way they knew.

Was the pilot a hero for trying to land a badly crippled plane? Or was he just making a brave show so that he could brag about it later? We’ll never really know.

Too often, we think of heroes as the guys who take the unnecessary risk. They aren’t the ones we should be lauding. It’s the man who puts his own life at risk to help his fellow man. If the story of the soldier throwing himself on a grenade is true, then he is a hero.

The pilot landing his plane against the odds, putting two lives at risk, is not someone I would want by my side in a battle. He could easily have circled around close by the base so that both of them could have ejected safely. He knew his plane was crippled. Yet, he made the attempt to land anyway. That was a bad decision that cost them their lives.

Frontline soldiers were always joking about guys like us who worked in the rear. They even had a slang term for us: REMF’s (Rear Echelon Mother F****ers). Despite this, we took our share of the risks too. Sometimes, the danger came from within.

Keith had already served two six month tours at the base when I arrived. He stayed on the base all the time, eating all his meals in the mess, drinking the water. He refused to buy even a Coke because he was saving all him pay so that he could start a business when he returned to Australia.

He never looked very healthy to me. He was tall and gaunt. His skin was a sallow color. We just put it down to his very limited lifestyle.

When I rotated out, Keith was still there. I lost track of him for years until I heard from one of the other men who had been there with me that Keith had eventually returned home. He got out of the RAAF and started his business, as he’d always dreamed.

A few years later he came down with a strange stomach cancer and died. His celibate, monastic existence, eating air force food and drinking ‘purified’ water surely contributed to his untimely death.

Tim was an aircraft mechanic. He would be out at all hours of the day and night working on our Sabers keeping them flying. One day a mosquito bit him and he came down with dengue fever. It was the bad version. He nearly died. He was ill and weak for weeks on end. When it was over he had a bad case of the shakes. It destroyed his life.

I ran into him again a few years ago. He’d tried to pull his life together after returning home, but he was unable to get a good job. He ended up working for a bus company. He’d gone from a highly qualified air mechanic to repairing and maintaining buses. That wasn’t the worst of it. Because of his disability he had never been married. He’d never had the opportunities so many of us take for granted. He was a sick, tired old man with nothing much to look forward to. At least he was still alive.

Other men I served with came down with strange illnesses after they returned home. Sometimes, the sickness struck years after their return home. Weird cancers struck them down. Or they would suddenly start coughing and losing hair for no apparent reason.

What happened?

We can’t be sure, but we were all exposed to various chemicals in Ubon. The water tanker used to transport water to the base was filled with chemicals to kill mosquitoes after discharging the water. The driver was ordered to scrub out the tanker and flush it clean each time, but we were never sure if he had done a good enough job. I refused to drink the water so I bought a lot of beer and Cokes.


Aerial pictures of the base show a large defoliated area. The whole base was a barren wilderness compared to the surrounding countryside. We are still not sure if they used Agent Orange to clear the vegetation. The authorities deny it, of course. But cleaning that much area could only be achieved with chemicals.

Each week a team of Thais would come around our huts with a fog machine to kill mosquitoes. Even if we were asleep they would fog the place. The Thais thought it was a huge joke. We would wake up and run coughing and spluttering from the hut. Those chemicals can’t have been good for us.

You didn’t have to be out in the jungles fighting to be a hero. You just had to be there. Very few of us wanted to be. Keith and Tim both paid the price for their heroism.

© Marc Holt. All rights reserved by the author.