Walking with Grunts: An Australian Army Chaplain with the 8Th Infantry Battalion in Vietnam

By Father Stan Hessey

What if youre a non-combatants in the midst of combat? How can you be a Man of God, in hell? Can you walk with the Infantryman where ever he goes, share in his training, stand with him, lie with him, duck with him, support him? Why is the soldier there? Why are you there? Is there anything helpful in the Bible that cant be found in Playboy? The military sends its chaplains off to war with its soldiers, some of whom are conscripts, yet chaplains are volunteers. Can you speak of love and peace in the midst of bombs and bullets and booby-traps, and the stinking sight of blood and bits of yours and theirs in pain, dying and dead? Walking with Grunts is about one such Padres confusions, and the men of one such Battalion, at war in a place many back home thought they should not be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jun 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781469128191

Father Stan Hessey

The author has been an Anglican priest for over fifty years. Twenty of those years were as an Australian Regular Army Chaplain. He served in Vietnam with the 8th Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment in 1969/70. He grew up in the Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla. He attended Hurstville Central Technical School until a football injury put him out. The prospect of a singing career gave place to a call to the priesthood, theological education at St. John’s Morpeth and St. Francis Brisbane. Ordained by the Bishop of Bathurst, Bishop Arnold Wylde led to parish appointments and took him from Sydney to Bathurst, North and Central Western Queensland. and the Hunter Valley. He was a delegate to the World Anglican Conference in Toronto, Canada, in 1963 and attached to the HQ of the Canadian Church. He studies the use of the Mass Media in North America and on return to Australia produced Radio and TV programmes. He and his wife Norma have been married for over 50 years, they have two children, Ruth and John, and live on Lake Macquarie, NSW. Although now retired he holds a Permission in Officiate in the Diocese of Newcastle and Sydney.

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Copyright © 2011 by Fr. Stan Hessey. 500142-HESS

ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4535-7998-5

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Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1.

THE EMPIRE AT WAR

CHAPTER 2.

ARMY CHAPLAINS

CHAPTER 3.

THE REGULAR ARMY 1967- 86

CHAPTER 4.

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM….

CHAPTER 5.

WITHER THOU GOEST…

CHAPTER 6.

BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON

CHAPTER 7.

IN THE SECRET ZONE

CHAPTER 8.

A NEW LOOK AT ARMY CHAPLAINCY.

CHAPTER 9.

OF NUNS & GUNS.

CHAPTER 10.

WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE

CHAPTER 11.

WELCOME HOME

CHAPTER 12.

DUTY FIRST

EPILOGUE

PREFACE

Many fine books have been written by Australian Vietnam Veterans describing the experiences of the Australian soldier at close quarters. In Good Company by Gary McKay was told from the point of view of a young platoon commander; Tiger Men by Barry Petersen covered working for the CIA among the Montagnard Hill Tribes; No Need for Heroes by Sandy MacGregor and Jimmy Thomson looked at the men who discovered the Viet Cong’s secret tunnels. The Battles of Long Tan and Balmoral/Coral and combat battalion by Robert A Hall dealt with the military situations that brought the Digger or foot soldier into fierce conflict with a skilled adversary. Doctors, Nurses, and entertainers have also written accounts of their experiences.

Dr. Michael McKernan wrote Padre about Australian Chaplains in Gallipoli and France. On the whole, however, there are few records of army chaplains’ experiences, and almost no insights into why someone with religious training would choose to go to war.

Patsy Adam-Smith in her book Gallipoli, included a chapter about The Padre in which the burial of the dead is his almost daily and unending role. The Vietnam War was different. We Australians did not bury our dead in country. There were no funerals, but there were of course many wounded, grieving, and dead.

The Army chaplains were recognised as non-combatants, and their role was to give spiritual support to the troops and administer such religious rites as were possible in the circumstances. For the soldiers who lost a mate the chaplains’ Ecumenical Memorial Services at company level proved a necessity, not just a comfort. During the year I served in Vietnam I was often reminded of Kipling’s Gunga Din, who tries to bring water to the troops (My ‘water’would be spiritual). Sometimes it seemed impossible. I have to use military terminology and activity. Chaplains are enlisted as specialist Army officer, like medical & dental practitioners, We have a very limited understanding of military, historical and political matters. I speak of these things as I understood them.

Many associate the term Walking with Grunts with the American Military, but it is also used by Australian soldiers referring mostly to the Infantry. They carried heavy loads of equipment (grunt), food (grunt) and water (grunt, grunt). Climbing was a grunting business, so was the dropping off the Chopper (Grunt), (Grunt), pushing through the slush (grunt, grunt); sometimes running (puff grunt); crashing to the ground (wham, grunt); listening to the bullets flying (grunt), and the mines and booby traps going off (big grunt); or the Prut,Prut,pruputter…of the Dust Off chopper.

Call them grunts or whatever, walking with these particular infantrymen was a time of great testing. Many were conscripted and very young. They did the job they were trained to do, and believe me they did it well. It was popular during and after the war to pour scorn on these men for doing their duty. Their job was not approved of by many of their fellow citizens. But they upheld the Anzac tradition. Even today those Diggers stand ten foot tall. I know, because I walked in their shadow.

CHAPTER 1.

THE EMPIRE AT WAR

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ANZAC LANDING.

A very large print of the ANZAC LANDING dominated the back wall of the

Crounlla Public School assembly hall where I attended C of E Scripture.

I was born in Summer Hill, in 1931, an only child in a working class Sydney family. My Anglican father had emigrated from London to Australia at the age of nine with his family, and from him I probably inherited a strong sense of belonging to the British Empire. He started work as a blacksmith striker to harden himself for an after-hours life as a boxer at Leichhardt Stadium. He was known in the ring as Newtown’s Wonder Boy. For most of the rest of his life, after he married and retired from the ring, he worked as a lorry driver. My mother was a fifth generation Irish Catholic Australian, with five sisters and five brothers, from a shearing father and a bush-bred mother.

Until I was three years old we lived in Newtown and Bondi. My parents then moved to the house my father built in North Cronulla, in what was then mostly cow paddocks, swamp, sand hills and bush. The area was opened up by the Sutherland/Cronulla railway line that was built just prior to the WW2. It was here I grew up and went to school. I hated cricket and played Rugby League. The stories of heroes great and small filled my head: King Arthur and his round table, Herewood the Wake, Francis Drake, Livingston in Africa, Gordon in Khartoum, Dick Wittington and Florence Nightingale, Chinese Morrison, Grace Darling, Cook, Bass and Flinders, Burke and Wills, Stuart, Jacky Jacky, Kennedy, and dozens more missionaries, merchants, soldiers, and Empire builders. I was an inattentive scholar. Under some teachers I did well. Others gave me no encouragement. I was nearly expelled from Hurstville Technical, before ending up a prefect. I often roamed alone, sometimes with my mates, along the cliffs and beaches from Kurnell to Port Hacking. We explored the swamps of Woolooware Bay and the great sand hills, stretching from the sea to Botany Bay, which rose to dominate a desert fairy-land, my play ground. In my imagination I was both Lawrence of Arabia and Robinson Crusoe. There in the dunes I watched the filming of Forty Thousand Horse Men and The Rats of Tobruk. The first soldiers I ever saw were those Light Horsemen. I was fascinated by the world of soldiers which I saw in other films such as Four Feathers, Gunga Din, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Dawn Patrol – perhaps because of the stories I had heard about my grandfather’s brother Charles, who served with the 13th Hussars, perishing in the Boor War, and my grandfather, who was wounded at Bulle Court in WW1. He even returned to the front for another go.

During WW2, Infantry were camped around our house on the second line of defense against the Japanese invasion, and the first army food I ever tasted was the yellow custard they cooked in big copper pots. Each soldier had three rounds of ammunition. Along the beach-front the front line was made up mostly of barbed wire which was soon hidden beneath the ever moving sands. The artillery consisted of dummy guns made from industrial chimneystacks. There was a Vickers Gun on the Kingsway pointing down the hill at the Cronulla Picture Theatre. The general community feeling was - Boy, the Japs are going to be sorry if they try to land here! Nevertheless, all along the coast half-built houses were abandoned. The wealthy left. My Dad built an Anderson air-raid shelter in the back yard. At school we had shelters and air-raid practice.

Having grown up in the atmosphere of war, I have never forgotten its closeness. On May 31, 1942 the sounds of gunfire could be clearly heard, and we shivered as we listened. It was the military response to the Japanese Midget Submarine attack on Sydney. From our street we had a clear view across Botany and the city skyline, with the bridge and the AWA tower the highest buildings. On another occasion the air raid siren sounding during a trip to the pictures, and a solemn announcement suggested …..perhaps we should all go quietly home. This was getting serious.

In the dark days of 1940 I became a school cadet, answering the call: Anyone want to be a Corporal? Step forward! I stepped forward and was soon armed with a Martini-Henry, the British Empire’s first self-cocking, lever operated, single-shot action service rifle, which was used to suppress the Zulus in Africa. Later I was given a .303 Lee Enfield that predated the Martini-Henry by about fifty years. We were dubbed Australia’s Last Hope.

Eventually VP Day came, and Australia was declared safe. Three cadets were chosen from a number of Secondary Schools to march in the big parade, and I was lucky to be one of them. We formed up at the Sydney Show ground and the march took us down the old route via Martin Place and the Cenotaph. Decades later I marched there again, as a returned serviceman.

Although I was a bit reluctant at first, because in those days it was sort of sissy, my other great passion was for singing, which my mother encouraged from an early age with music and elocution lessons. I won the Richard Threw Trophy in 1946 (Dicky Threw was a prominent teacher), and it looked like I might become a concert singer. In those days we had no Opera House and professional singers usually had to go overseas to advance their prospects. To make ends meet you could sing at weddings, songs like I’ll Walk Beside You and Because God Made You Mine. I began to be asked to sing in a variety of places including a high spot in the Sydney Town Hall among the support acts with Peter Dawson starring. I joined the choir of St Andrew’s Cronulla, and experienced a real sense of God’s presence for the first time. The assurance which that brought me has remained throughout the years. Then, when I was 18, I met and came under another influence.

Fr. John Hope was the Rector of Christ Church St. Laurence on Broadway near Central train station, which has remained my spiritual home ever since, and he was often called The Archbishop of Railway Square. He was a great priest and an inspiration to thousands. With his encouragement I too felt the call to the church. After 5 years spent testing my faith and training at St. John’s Morpeth, and St. Francis, Brisbane theological colleges, I was ordained by Bishop Arnold Wylde, famous as the Red Bishop of Bathurst. He was not a communist! The red referred to the colour of a Eucharistic Book he authorized, and the court cases that followed.

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Priesting 1955.

For the next fourteen years, before joining the regular army, I was a parish priest, often in remote country areas, including three curacies where I served as the assistant deacon. Early on I turned a parish car over, much to the parish council’s horror. For the next sixty years