Fighting the Vietnam War
I was 26 when I left my work as a country Parson to take up the prestigious position as Minister of the Cheltenham Church of Christ, Victoria. This church had the reputation for being a large and alive church but that was a mirage. the reality was quite different, as this young country Parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister had some real surprises.
As we arrived and settled in to the Manse in January 1966, Robert Gordon Menzies retired after seventeen years as Prime Minister of Australia. He sat like a great paperweight on the Australian community and during that time of great productivity the Australian community grew. His power rested upon his authority as founder of the Australian Liberal Party, his exploitation of the community fear of communism, both at home and abroad, and his tremendous capacity to adopt the best ideas, whether they originated with the Opposition or not, into his own platform.
Harold Holt was his chosen successor and immediately, in January 1966, we knew there would be an escalation of Australian involvement, with the Americans, in the war in Vietnam.
Shortly thereafter conscription was announced for all eighteen year old Australian men. It was the first time since 1945 that a National Service program was introduced into the Australian community. In March 1966 Harold Holt announced the compulsory registration of all young men and sixty three thousand eventually were called up to join the National Service program which involved two years full-time in the Army and three years in the Reserve. He also announced that four and a half thousand Australians, including National Service trainees, would be sent to Vietnam. Soon another three and a half thousand were to go to the jungles of Vietnam. In all, fifteen thousand young men of eighteen and nineteen were to fight in Vietnam.
To reinforce the Australian commitment in Vietnam, President Lynden Baines Johnson arrived for a cavalcade through Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
The animosity against his arrival was unprecedented. University students by tens of thousands protested vigorously against Australian involvement in Vietnam. Who can ever forget the image of President Johnson’s big black limousine, surrounded by security guards, driving through the crowds who were lying on the road in front of it, paint bombs spattering the guards, security men and the FBI agents.
The Australian community was angry. Students organised demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney and other capital cities. One hundred thousand people attended the marches in Melbourne, sitting down on the tram lines and totally blocking the city. Australia was grinding to a halt but at the same time, Prime Minister Holt was pushing us ever more towards Vietnam.
I had only graduated from Melbourne University two years previously and so was very close to what the students were doing and how they thought. Apart from protesting in the streets, they were using every opportunity to halt public life, calling upon young men to defy the Government and not register.
Scores of young people, brave and courageous, were coming to the churches to register as conscientious objectors. We were to begin six years of bitterness that divided the country over our involvement in the war which could never be won by the west.
The huge American war machine, heavy with its tanks and helicopter gun ships, was being bogged down in the jungles of Vietnam. The chemical, Agent Orange, might defoliate the countryside but the lightly equipped and highly mobile Viet Cong kept disappearing into the jungle. The lightly armed guerrilla fighters were causing extensive damage to the American and allied war machine while the television programs every night showed allied forces being wounded and being involved in ill conceived massacres were losing the war for the soldiers on the home front.
Many people, particularly in the Labour Party, were stridently opposing the war and people like Dr Jim Cairns were in the forefront of every moratorium protest march. They were painting the picture of David, once more defeating the huge armour-clad Goliath.
The war divided the Cheltenham Church of Christ. Mind you, the church solidly voted for the Liberal Party and supported Harold Holt. We had a number of Liberal heavy-weights in the congregation and a regular attender at church was our Federal Member, Donald Leslie Chipp. Chipp had fought eleven elections throughout his political life and was at that time, in 1966, Minister for the Navy. He was gung-ho about support for our intervention in Vietnam and cabinet solidarity made sure he was going “all the way with LBJ”, as well as his Prime Minister.
I observed over the years that Chipp would swing with the political breeze and would eventually lose favour with the Liberal Party heavy-weights in our church who were determined not to endorse him for re-election in 1977. It was at that time that he decided to retire from the Liberal Party and was inspired to found the Australian Democrats. But in 1966 Don Chipp was in full flight in support of our intervention in Vietnam.
The young Minister from the country just graduated from University and himself not much older than those who were being conscripted, realised that straightforward protest against the Vietnam War would neither win friends nor influence people. Almost immediately I arrived in the church I was asked to take sides, either with young students connected with the church whose stance as protester or conscientious objector I admired, or alongside the heavy-weights in our church who were totally committed in the support of Harold Holt. I decided that what I needed to do was try to change the attitude of the community through education.
This was going to be a brave attempt at survival both for myself and for the young men I didn’t want to go to Vietnam.
Within weeks of settling in to the Manse I announced that we would have a public forum on Vietnam and Conscription in the Cheltenham Public Hall. I chose the public hall as it was a neutral territory and I would not risk the wrath of the church Elders and Deacons by holding such a meeting on church property. On the other hand, they couldn’t very well stop me from organising something in the public hall. The public meeting attracted enormous attention from the local papers.
I had the difficult task of chairing the public meeting with the official spokesman of the Australian Labour Party, the Democratic Labour Party which, in those days, were still a powerful force in politics, the Liberal Country Party, as well as students and lecturers from Monash University and a representative of the anti-war clergy. Two hundred and fifty people crowded into the Cheltenham Public Hall and it was a brawl from the start. It didn’t matter which speaker was speaking, there was always a section of the hall ready to boo and chant. Even when I tried to call for peace, hammering away at the table at the front, to allow someone to be heard, there were shouts directed to me such as “Give him to the Viet Cong!” My attempt to educate the community was not making much progress. We had merely shifted the scene of the battlefield from the Mekong Delta to the Cheltenham Public Hall.
My next attempt at educating the same congregation was to encourage them to come with me to another educational program in which I took part called “Vietnam – The Truth”. That meeting was addressed by Malcolm Fraser who was then Minister for the Army; Gough Whitlam who was the Deputy Labour Leader, Tom Hughes QC and MP and Dr Jim Cairns MP. I tried to give reasoned argument about why we should not have conscription but the political heavy-weights rolled over me. Hundreds of people attended and the debate was televised on ATV Channel O (now Channel 10)) around Australia. Hundreds of my church members attended and while many patted me on the back for being game I wasn’t sure how many of them were actually supporting my stance.
The Vietnam war came closer to the Cheltenham Church of Christ the day Steve Dart knocked on my study door and told me that the marble with his birth date on it was pulled out of the barrel which meant he was called up. Steve was one of our fine young fellows who was totally opposed to conscription into the war but felt if his number came up, then he would have to serve his country. His commitment to the war and obedience to the government’s law were quite commendable. We gave Steve a good send off as he attended church in his ill-fitting uniform. I determined to send him a letter every week together with the church paper and other information and organised a few people to support him on weekends when he had leave.
One of his letters back to me we published in the church paper. It reads “The Chaplain is very important in our unit. Chaplain Winn invites us to his home for fellowship. In our unit we have a map with coloured pins on it representing 72 churches that are praying for our company. We don’t forget you and I want you to continue to pray for me.” Soon after Steve Dart’s name was drawn a second time. Then he was on an aircraft bound for Vietnam.
Just a little while later I wrote an article in our church paper announcing with the deepest regret that Steve Dart had been killed in Vietnam. His death shocked our church and his fellow young people. After an incredible delay, his body was flown home to Melbourne and his funeral was organised at the Cheltenham Church of Christ. His widowed mother, who lost her only son, needed all the support and encouragement that we could give.
It was the first time I had taken part in a significant Army funeral. For days the Army prepared for what was to be a very large public relations event. On the day the church was packed out, not just with relatives but with Army personnel and hundreds of National Servicemen were drawn up outside the church. It was a full parade. All the streets and the highway around Cheltenham were closed. Hundreds of soldiers stood with rifles reversed and the ugly gun carriage looked totally out of place outside the front doors of the church. I paid a tribute to Steve Dart as best I could and then members of the other ranks carried his coffin out and placed it on the gun carriage which was then hauled along behind the military band as hundreds of people joined in a slow march.
The death and funeral of Steve Dart captured the imagination of our community in a way that none of the protests could. People were beginning to ask questions about why we were in Vietnam and why should young conscripts be sent and why should eighteen year old boys die in a country which wasn’t ours and for a cause which we could not win.
If ever we were to change the mind and attitude of the community, the funeral of Steve Dart gave us an excellent opportunity to very gently ask people to reconsider their attitudes. Over the next few years I ran a continuous stream of programs to help understand the Vietnam War, its causes and conduct. I ran programs to provide support for our troops who were already there and for the citizens of Vietnam who were being injured by land mines in vast numbers.
The church responded with a huge petition urging our government to send additional aid to help the citizens of Vietnam. We ran the program entitled “Vietnam Profile” which told the story of World Vision’s help with children who had lost legs because of land mines. We took up offerings for wheel chairs and crutches for amputees.
We ran a program and raised money to provide education facilities for blind children, but the program that made us more conscious than any other was when we started to develop relief packages for war widows.
The women of our church started gathering nylon stockings, wool and cotton to be sent to Vietnam. We had the “Viet-kits” for widows in Vietnam. They provided sufficient goods to help a widow make and knit and sew to earn money to help her own survival. We brought together supplies of materials – wool, cotton, needles and everything that was required, for hundreds and hundreds of packages which were wrapped in thick plastic. There were “Viet-kits” for children with educational materials, brand new clothing, medical supplies, bandages and the like, together with some packets of sweets. Soon the old wooden hall at the Cheltenham Church of Christ was set up with long lines of tables for stacking, packing and wrapping. And it seemed that every time we had a special offering or a work party to force discussion about Vietnam, we found attitudes were changing and questions were being asked. There was no longer wholesale support for Australian commitment to this unwinnable war.
Then a nursing visitor came to our church. Sister Susan Terry had been serving ever since 1964 at the Long Xuyan Hospital in the Mekong Delta. The lovely Australian nurse showed horrific slides of the damage to children and villagers in the hospital where she served. She was under constant attack from both sides and how on earth she ever survived was a wonder. Machine gun bullet holes pierced every wall of the hospital where day by day she served, a lone Australian nurse in an heroic situation.
The hospital at Long Xuyan meant “House of Love” but the pock marks of war on the wall all round indicated that there was not a great deal of love being shown to those brave people who were serving there. What Susan Terry showed us was an ordinary farmer ploughing with water buffalo while helicopter gun ships circled over head, firing at almost anything that moved. Her photographs revealed an incredibly poor people in an underdeveloped nation caught in the thralls of war. A young woman, born at Bathurst and educated at Mac Robertson Girls’ High School in Melbourne, brought home to so many people the tragedy of Vietnam.
Gradually I noticed that attitudes towards the war were rapidly changing, even in our very conservative church, dominated by the heavy-weights of the Liberal Party. The fact was, we were fighting war with education and were winning. John Gorton became Prime Minister and the protest marches grew even bigger. He was followed by William McMahon, who promised to bring our troops home by Christmas 1970. That promise was not kept. Eventually, on 13 November, 1972, the Labour Party swept to power and Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister after 23 years of Liberal Government. His campaign theme “It’s Time” swept the country. They repealed the Conscription Act, released National Service protesters from gaol, and brought the troops home from Vietnam. The pace of legislation was breath-taking but the war was over.
Shortly the Americans would withdraw and the Australian troops who fought so valiantly and who died in such large numbers would not be given an official welcome home. Australians were in a mood to end the war but not to recognise the contributions made by those who went.
Unlike other wars which Australia had fought, there was no united country behind the troops. There was no sense that our forces were fighting for God, King and Empire. That era was over. The jungles of Vietnam had been victorious over the armoured might of allied forces. And the war that was fought in Australia left a whole generation of young people soured against the government of the day.
Meanwhile, in the Cheltenham Church of Christ, we needed to get back to the work of being the church – of supporting the needy and of seeking to overcome the hostility that existed between so many. I think the tide of war within our church changed the day I conducted the funeral of Steve Dart.
That night, I spent some time in my study writing up my journal and looking out the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road intersection that was dominated by the lovely church with the high white tower, noting down the events of another day as suburban Minister.
GORDON MOYES