Grey Ghosts

By Deborah Challinor

'We were known to the enemy as "grey ghosts". We could be here, and we could be there.' - 'Sniper'
"We were known to the enemy as 'grey ghosts'. We could be here, and we could be there . . . " the Grey Ghosts were New Zealand's Vietnam veterans. their powerful story includes chilling accounts of death, injuries and emotional breakdown, along with the intense comradeship of soldiering, and a pervasive sense of humour that is uniquely our own. Acclaimed writer and historian Deborah Challinor interviewed 50 men who served in Vietnam, who speak out about 'fragging' (killing superior officers), the New Zealand Government's role in Agent Orange and chemical exposure, and their hostile reception when they returned. the result is compelling, reliving the Vietnam experience in vivid detail. First published in 1998, this updated edition includes new material on the subsequent handling of veterans' claims, and the reconciliation parade on Queen's Birthday weekend in 2008, when the men were finally welcomed home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Feb 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730443315

Deborah Challinor

Deborah Challinor has a PhD in history and is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including the Children of War series, the Convict Girls series, the Smuggler's Wife series and the Restless Years series. She has also written one young adult novel and two non-fiction books. In 2018, Deborah was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and historical research. She lives in New Zealand with her husband.

Book preview

Introduction

We were known to the enemy as the grey ghosts. We could be here, and we could be there.

‘Sniper’

New Zealand sent 3,368 troops to Vietnam,¹ 37 of whom were killed there.² The war divided public opinion, but its most profound impact was experienced by the veterans themselves.

The majority of New Zealanders were around 20 or 21 years old when they served in Vietnam. Most knew very little about the political situation except for the official government line—that communism would threaten New Zealand if it was not stopped in Southeast Asia. For others, the political situation was irrelevant. They went because they were soldiers and going to war was their job, or they wanted to go for the challenge and adventure. Some did not know where Vietnam was. Most discovered that Vietnam was nothing like what they had expected or been led to believe.

For the allies, the war was a political and moral disaster. It was initiated and escalated by politicians, but fought by ordinary people. In John Moller’s words: ‘Soldiers don’t start wars. But they have to go and do the job.’ The job turned out to be difficult, painful and often pointless, and some veterans are still paying the price.

The post-war difficulties encountered by a significant number of New Zealand Vietnam veterans seem not to have stemmed from the fact that Vietnam was an especially bloody or ‘evil’ war, although the political ambiguity of the Vietnamese themselves created significant moral and ethical challenges for allied troops. Rather, they appear to be a legacy of the hopelessness, disillusionment and confusion experienced during the war as a result of the ill-fated and surreal nature of the conflict, together with the veterans’ perception of how they were treated by the New Zealand public, the government of the day (and successive governments), and, for some, their own military infrastructure when they returned home.

When the first New Zealand combatants went to serve in Vietnam in 1965, New Zealand’s role in the war was, if not overtly supported, at least not being widely challenged. But by the time the last soldiers came home in 1972, the nation’s opposition to the war was explicit, organized, and public. The veterans found themselves in a confusing and, for some, very distressing position. They had grown up with and assimilated, at least to some degree, New Zealand’s war mythology. However, during their own period of military service, the national questioning of this mythology had increased to an extent that a significant percentage of New Zealanders were rejecting it.

As a result, some Vietnam veterans consider that they were deprived of the expected heroes’ welcome which they believed New Zealand soldiers have traditionally received on their return from war. They do not believe that they have been acknowledged and recognized for their military efforts in Vietnam, and some have subsequently been unable to conclude that chapter of their lives. Even the considerable number of veterans who consider that they have adjusted successfully to life after Vietnam believe that New Zealand governments during and since the war have treated them shabbily.

Some veterans feel strongly that New Zealand governments have allowed veterans to be publicly ‘scapegoated’ for the political and military debacle of Vietnam. Bruce Liddall summarizes these sentiments when he says, ‘I honestly think we got treated like shit.’ Tom Palmer considers that the New Zealand military services were ‘shafted’: ‘The majority of us were and still are professionals. The Government involved New Zealand in the conflict and we did our job.’ Dave Orbell believes that once it became evident that the Vietnam war was unpopular, Prime Minister Keith Holyoake deflected anti-Vietnam sentiment from himself and his administration to the soldiers who served there, deliberately allowing them to be scapegoated. John Moller agrees, suggesting correctly that the New Zealand Government’s decision to send troops was ‘window dressing for better trade terms’.

Vietnam was a real war, regardless of the New Zealand Government’s decision not to declare it as an ‘operational area’, or an active war zone, at the time.³ New Zealanders were killed in Vietnam, and some came home with tangible disfigurements, traumatically amputated limbs, and severe psychological and physical health problems.

The Vietnam War was being fought less than 40 years ago and, unlike New Zealand veterans of earlier wars, many Vietnam veterans were only in their early 50s at the time of interview—ordinary people who go to work, raise their families and stand in supermarket queues like everybody else.

The Vietnam War is living history for all New Zealanders and still a part of veterans’ lives. For them, a certain song or the sound of a helicopter brings back memories, smells bring back memories, and memories bring back smells. Whether or not their experiences of Vietnam have ultimately been positive or negative, it is important that the veterans’ stories are told. New Zealand’s Vietnam veterans have already been ignored. They should not also be forgotten.

This book, although only a brief glimpse at the experiences of a small number of those who fought in Vietnam and not necessarily representative of every New Zealander who served there, is an attempt to ensure that this does not happen.

1

The Road to Vietnam

The Vietnam War was as odd as it was brutal.¹

Although the Americans were responsible for escalating what was essentially a civil war in Vietnam, other nations were also dragged into the quagmire the conflict became. New Zealand was one of six nations allied to the US in Vietnam, alongside Australia, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and South Vietnam. Their enemies were the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), the formally organized arm of the communist Vietnamese military, and the Vietcong, the communist Vietnamese guerrillas.

The New Zealand Government sent troops to fight in Vietnam for three reasons:

The first, and by far the most important, was that New Zealand depended for its security upon the United States and must give a high priority to maintaining its relationship with that country. The maintenance was believed to involve giving support to American regional security policies. The second [reason] was that Communist governments in Southeast Asia would pose a strategic threat to New Zealand’s security. Thus when the United States became involved in preventing the rise to power of a Communist government in South Vietnam, two imperatives to New Zealand involvement reinforced one another. In addition, New Zealand had developed the habit of co-operation with its other ally, Australia, in regional security matters, and Australia’s enthusiasm for involvement became a third factor in New Zealand’s policy.²

When Prime Minister Keith Holyoake announced to the New Zealand public on 27 May 1965 that an artillery battery would be going to Vietnam in a combat role, it is unlikely that he foresaw the political and social upheaval which would result from his administration’s decision. The following day, in fact, he confidently stated, ‘We believe the great majority of the people in this country will support the Government’s decision that a combatant unit should take its place alongside the forces of South Vietnam, the United States and Australia and a growing number of countries who pledged to support South Vietnam.’³

To understand why the war in Vietnam was such a political and military disaster for America and its allies, it is necessary to look at how the US became involved there in the first place. The American desire to have the flags of other western allies also flying in Vietnam, and the motives of those allies for going, also need to be considered.

Ho Chi Minh and the fight for Vietnam

Vietnam has been at war for the past 2,000 years. To most Vietnamese, the troops who fought there in the 1960s and 1970s were simply the latest invading foreign power. For many Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh, leader of the movement to unify Vietnam under a communist flag, was the legitimate inheritor of a historical struggle for independence.

Born in 1890, Ho left his homeland at the age of 21 to travel the world and study communism. In 1930, he founded the Indochinese Communist Party and studied revolutionary theory and tactics with Mao Zedong in China.

Eleven years later, he returned to Vietnam where he formed and led the Vietminh (Vietnam Independence League, forerunners to the Vietcong) in fighting the Japanese, who controlled the country after France fell to the Germans during the Second World War, until September 1945 when he proclaimed the Independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). One week later, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, France’s chief military commander, landed in Saigon with 35,000 troops and his own declaration: ‘We have come to reclaim our inheritance.’⁴

China had earlier supported the Vietminh in its efforts to expel the French, but early in 1946 the Chinese withdrew their support in exchange for France conceding its extraterritorial rights in China.⁵ This forced the Vietminh to reconsider its policy towards the French, and Ho subsequently entered into an uneasy truce with France in March 1946. Accused by some of his countrymen of compromising, Ho Chi Minh reputedly replied: ‘It is better to sniff French dung for a while than eat China’s all our lives.’

The truce was short-lived, and the subsequent political and guerrilla war between the Vietminh and the French lasted almost 10 years. China decided once more to support the Vietminh, and began supplying weapons and matériel to the Vietnamese nationalist front in January 1950.⁶ Vietnam was now effectively split between a communist-influenced north and an anti-communist south headed by Emperor Bao Dai but directed by the French.

The war between the Vietminh and the French culminated in a seven-week siege at Dienbienphu in 1954 where the French were decisively beaten on 7 May. Under intense domestic pressure for a rapid conclusion to the war, France, together with eight other international delegations, participated in the Geneva Convention in Switzerland in July 1954.

An Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam, providing for a military demarcation line at the 17th parallel, was drawn up and signed by the delegates.⁷

Other solutions for the management of Vietnam were also drafted, including the prohibition of further troops and military activity in the area, and a resolve to hold elections to address the problem of unification, but none of these further resolutions were signed by the delegates.⁸

The elections were not held until 1959 and were considered a sham by most observers, as only supporters of the South Vietnamese Government were allowed to stand for election (the opposition being disqualified for various reasons), ballot boxes were stuffed, and voters coerced.

Fighting between the north and south resumed in the meantime and intensified. American journalist Stanley Karnow writes: ‘In the end, the Geneva Conference produced no durable solution to the Indochina conflict, only a military truce that awaited a political settlement, which never really happened. So the conference was merely an interlude between two wars—or, rather, a lull in the same war.’⁹

US intervention in Vietnam

You have a row of dominoes set up, and you knock over the first one and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you have the beginning of a disintegration that will have the most profound influences.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower¹⁰

During the Second World War, America had maintained a relatively covert presence in Vietnam in the form of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. The OSS, together with the Chinese, had provided Ho Chi Minh with funds on the understanding that Ho and his colleagues would rescue ‘downed American and other Allied fliers, sabotage Japanese efforts and generally keep the Japanese off-balance in Vietnam’.

When Ho proclaimed the DRV in Hanoi in 1945, American OSS officers stood beside him.¹¹ Ten days later, however, the US agreed to supply vehicles and relief equipment to the French in Vietnam.

American strategists during the Second World War viewed Southeast Asia ‘only marginally, a minor sideshow to the main Asian theatres in China and the Pacific’, and they considered it more essential to support the French, whose fate was deemed ‘vital to the uncertain future of Western Europe’, than to back Ho Chi Minh, a known communist who opposed France. To support Ho may also have encouraged the expansion of communism, a possibility which was beginning to unsettle the Americans.¹²

Five years later, in 1950, the US increased military assistance to the French in Vietnam when it agreed to provide weapons and American military advisers. In November 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President and the war in Vietnam ceased to be regarded as a colonial conflict and came to be interpreted as a war between communism and the ‘free world’, the fear of an overt Chinese presence in Vietnam giving rise to the domino theory.

Eisenhower considered that if the North Vietnamese communist attempt to take over South Vietnam was not stopped, communism would then spread throughout the whole of Indonesia and probably farther.¹³

This fear of communist expansion had increased by 1954. Although a US delegation verbally agreed at the Geneva Convention to abide by the Geneva Agreement, the Americans did not accept the clause prohibiting further troops and military activity in Vietnam. US economic and military assistance to South Vietnam subsequently increased steadily over the next 10 years, albeit covertly, chiefly because such activity clearly violated the Geneva Agreement.

The Americans also felt it necessary to underwrite the consistently unstable South Vietnamese Government, viewing it as a bastion of anti-communism. Emperor Bao Dai, South Vietnam’s Head of State, was a playboy and a gambler who spent much of his time in an ‘intellectual torpor’, but whose political interest in Vietnam could be aroused if he felt that events might affect him directly.

In 1954, Bao Dai appointed Ngo Dinh Diem as his Prime Minister. Diem, however, was unpopular because of his unshakable belief in his own infallibility, his mistrust of everyone outside his own family, his anti-Buddhist and pro-Catholic beliefs, his arbitrary and repressive social and land reforms, and his inability to comprehend that aspects of the communist revolution had some appeal for the impoverished peasants of South Vietnam.

The Americans supported Diem because, in the words of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, ‘We knew of no one better’, and US patronage suited Diem, as he was well aware of his weaknesses. Diem’s popularity did not increase, and in November 1963 his government was overthrown and he and his brother executed. The story was put about that they had committed suicide. Neither the South Vietnamese nor the Americans conducted an inquiry into their deaths.¹⁴

General Duong Van Minh, leader of the group which ousted Diem, became South Vietnam’s Head of State. Described as a ‘model of lethargy’, he did little to govern South Vietnam, and was himself overthrown in January 1964.

Minh was succeeded by General Nguyen Khanh, who was equally incompetent. He lasted until August 1964, when he capitulated to strong public pressure, resigned, then agreed to return as Prime Minister of a somewhat flimsy coalition government.

In September, a coup was attempted against Khanh and his government by 34-year-old Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky. It failed. Ky, however, made a further successful attempt in February 1965. The Americans, although glad to see the back of Khanh, considered Ky, who favoured purple jumpsuits and carried pearl-handled revolvers, to be ‘the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel’.

Ky remained in the upper echelons of South Vietnamese government for several years, but was quickly replaced as Prime Minister by an ageing school teacher and former mayor of Saigon, Tran Van Huong, who himself lasted only three months, perpetuating the extremely unstable political cycle which was to continue until the South fell to the communists in 1975.¹⁵

The Americans continued to prop up and often manipulate South Vietnamese governments over the years, despite the fact that these governments were corrupt, incompetent, and immensely unpopular. Support was in the form of advice (rarely heeded), financial aid, increased military advisers and, in 1962, US combat troops.¹⁶

John F. Kennedy, elected President in November 1960, continued Eisenhower’s policy of rejecting the option of total US withdrawal from Vietnam, but balked at escalation to outright war, favouring the concept of the ‘flexible response’ to counter insurgency rather than the ‘massive retaliation’ promoted by the previous administration.

By May 1962, there were 5,000 US troops covertly operating in South Vietnam. Kennedy’s administration also approved and implemented Operation Ranch Hand, a staggered programme of dumping ‘an estimated 19 million gallons of defoliating herbicides [Agent Orange among others] over 10–20 per cent of Vietnam and parts of Laos between 1962 and 1971’. Operation Ranch Hand was intended to deprive the Vietcong, successors to the Vietminh, of cover while they moved down from North Vietnam and through the South.¹⁷

Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 and succeeded by Lyndon B. Johnson. He continued the cautious but steady build-up of US military personnel in Vietnam (21,000 by July 1963),¹⁸ fearing that the fall of South Vietnam to communism would leave him open to attack from right-wing political adversaries and ‘shatter my presidency, kill my administration and damage our democracy’. He refused to openly admit that he was committing the US to outright war in Vietnam, choosing to manipulate the media rather than mobilize public support, but commit America he did.¹⁹

Then, in 1964, an incident occurred that gave Johnson a legitimate excuse to abandon the obfuscation he had so far employed. On 2 August, the USS Maddox was chased by three North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Tonkin Gulf off North Vietnam. The Maddox fired on the North Vietnamese, who fired back. The Americans did not sustain casualties, but Johnson advised Hanoi, seat of North Vietnamese political power, that ‘grave consequences would inevitably result from any further unprovoked offensive military action’ against US ships ‘on the high seas’.

Two days later, the Maddox intercepted messages from North Vietnamese in the area which gave the captain ‘the impression’ that a further attack was imminent, blips on the ship’s radar implying that torpedoes were approaching. The Maddox fired on and sank several North Vietnamese boats. Analysis of the incident revealed that ‘The radar-scope blips were apparently freak weather effects while the torpedoes were probably due to an overeager sonar operator.’ Nevertheless, Johnson ordered that reprisal air attacks be made against North Vietnamese targets, and both sides rapidly gave up any pretence of covert or clandestine military activity.²⁰

The war escalated and did not end until March 1973 when the last US troops left South Vietnam. Approximately 2.7 million US service personnel served in Vietnam throughout the conflict.²¹

Between 26 September 1945—the date of death of Lieutenant Colonel Peter A. Dewey, the first American to be killed in Vietnam²²—and the withdrawal of the last US combat troops from Vietnamese soil on 29 March 1973, 57,939 Americans died.²³

Australia and New Zealand become involved

If South Vietnam falls to the Communists, it will then be the turn of Thailand and Malaysia and every other small country in the area. In this eventuality the threat to New Zealand would be that much closer to home and if we are not prepared to play out part now, can we in good conscience expect our allies to help later on? Communist terrorism must be halted…New Zealand’s vital interests are at stake in this war.

Prime Minister Keith Holyoake, 1965²⁴

The US did not want to be seen to be intervening alone in the civil war of another country, even if its reason was to stop the rampant spread of communism, and so it sought the active support of other nations to give the American presence in Vietnam international credence. Simply put, the Americans wanted as many allied flags flying in Vietnam as possible.²⁵

In 1961, in an effort to reduce domestic and international criticism over his decision to increase military aid to South Vietnam in direct violation of the Geneva Agreement, Kennedy looked for support from his international alliance partners. He first approached the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), but France, Pakistan and Britain vehemently opposed military involvement in Vietnam.²⁶

Kennedy then looked toward the ANZUS alliance, the mutual defence pact formed between Australia, New Zealand and the US in 1951. The Americans canvassed both Australia and New Zealand for their support late in 1961 and, at an ANZUS Council meeting in May 1962, the Australians responded by offering to send military advisers, small arms and ammunition to Vietnam.

New Zealand did not make a firm response at the time, but, after a visit to New Zealand several days later by the US Secretary of State, Holyoake advised that the request would be considered. In the end, he did not respond, an indication of his ongoing reticence toward making a military commitment to Vietnam, and his desire to see the situation resolved politically rather than with force.²⁷

But, ultimately, neither New Zealand nor Australia was in a position to ignore the American requests for assistance in South Vietnam. By the early 1960s, after several years of exceptionally high domestic growth, the US was expanding its political, military and economic horizons, and New Zealand and Australia were both looking for new international partners.

Both nations had matured within the economic and military ambit of Britain, and had closely identified themselves with British imperialism, but Britain’s decline in international power during the 1950s, and its desire for membership of the European Economic Community, meant that Australia and New Zealand no longer had a guarantor for their economic and military security.²⁸ Both nations, therefore, turned towards the US to fulfil this role, securing the patronage and support of the Americans via several alliances, including ANZUS and SEATO.

The motive behind the Australian commitment to Vietnam was to ‘tighten the American alliance beyond the loose bonds of ANZUS’²⁹ in an effort to reinforce Australia’s defences against the spectre of communist expansion in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.³⁰ It was this objective that led the Australians to initially despatch an Army training team to Vietnam in July 1962, and to subsequently increase their military commitment to a full battalion by May 1965,³¹ a move that was considered then, as it is now, to be the biggest single step by which Australia came to be committed to the war in Vietnam.³² Australia’s military commitment lasted until December 1972, with over 59,000 Australians serving, and 508 dying there.³³

New Zealand responded to American requests for assistance in Vietnam less enthusiastically than the Australians, earning this country an international reputation for being ‘the most dovish of the hawks’. It has been suggested that ‘As one of only two Western democracies to send combat forces to support the United States in Vietnam, New Zealand certainly qualified as a hawk, but, unlike Australia, New Zealand leaders never offered the United States the effusive backing embodied in Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt’s famous all the way with LBJ remark.’³⁴

New Zealand, however, had a strong interest in Southeast Asia after 1945, and it revolved around the political acceptance of an allied strategy for the containment of communism.

Like the Americans and the Australians, New Zealand saw Southeast Asia as a serious gap in the front against communism. The conflict in Vietnam between the French and the Vietminh was not seen as the product of an awakening Vietnamese nationalism but as further evidence of the communist desire for world domination, already evident elsewhere.

The threat of communist expansion, and the possibility that this might directly impact on New Zealand, was taken seriously by New Zealand policy-makers. They therefore set about ensuring that, should a communist advance and attack eventuate, New Zealand would have the security of military assistance from several international powers. To this end, New Zealand had signed the Canberra Pact with Australia in 1944, which pledged both countries to work together in the post-war Pacific,³⁵ committed to the ANZUS alliance in 1951, SEATO in 1954, and in the same year agreed to the establishment of a Commonwealth Strategic Reserve (CSR) stationed in Malaya, a region where communist unrest was evident, to which it would contribute forces. It was envisaged that New Zealand forces in the CSR would be available for SEATO action as well as United Nations or Commonwealth operations.³⁶

New Zealand was therefore highly dependent in the late 1950s and early 1960s on other more powerful nations for economic and military security, and was not in a position to renege on alliance obligations. New Zealand historian Roberto Rabel summarizes New Zealand’s situation at the time as follows:

There is broad agreement that intervention in Vietnam grew out of the intersection of major trends in New Zealand’s external relations after 1950: a growing reliance on the United States as the guarantor of New Zealand’s security, symbolised by the ANZUS agreement; a corresponding shift in principal alliance orientation away from Great Britain, despite the continuation of traditional ties to Britain and the Commonwealth; closer cooperation with Australia in regional affairs; a burgeoning fear that the spread of communism in Southeast Asia constituted a strategic threat to New Zealand; and the related acceptance in the mid-1950s of a New Zealand security commitment in that region, embodied in the shift to a strategy of forward defence in Southeast Asia and membership of SEATO. These general developments during the 1950s provided the conceptual and geopolitical context within which policy makers in Wellington responded to escalation of the Vietnam War in the following decade, eventually drawing New Zealand into that conflict because of broader alliance commitments and the overarching logic of the security policies which sustained them.³⁷

When the Americans first approached New Zealand for assistance in November 1961, after their own decision to substantially increase aid to Vietnam, the New Zealanders decided that the vital issue, so far as they were concerned, was ‘not the need to restore stability in South Vietnam, but to preserve our position with the United States as our major ally’. Attempts were made to ‘dissuade the United States from intervening in force with combat troops’ and, in an effort to reinforce this non-military stance, the civilian New Zealand Surgical Team was despatched to Qui Nhon on the coast of South Vietnam in 1962.³⁸

The Americans interpreted this contribution as a sign of increased New Zealand interest in Vietnam and stepped up their requests for a New Zealand military commitment early in 1963. During a visit to Wellington, the US ambassador took pains to emphasize ‘the importance which the United States attached on political grounds to having other respectable countries such as New Zealand associated with the operation in Vietnam’. At a SEATO meeting in Paris later that year, the American Secretary of State explicitly requested of the New Zealand Defence Minister that New Zealand ‘put more uniformed personnel’ into South Vietnam.

The Americans were once again disappointed. Holyoake agreed to send a small team of military personnel to South Vietnam, but in a non-combat role. A team of 25 New Zealand Army Engineers was subsequently despatched in 1964 to assist with civilian reconstruction work in South Vietnam.³⁹

US requests to New Zealand for military assistance peaked in December 1964 with a letter from Johnson to Holyoake. Holyoake seriously considered responding by reminding President Johnson that New Zealand had only very limited military resources and that New Zealand’s primary military commitment remained in Malaysia with the CSR. Unfortunately, New Zealand’s stand against military involvement was being undermined by Australia’s active support for American escalation of the war, and their decision of January 1965 to offer a full battalion for Vietnam service.

The Holyoake administration began to fear that alliance relations would be seriously weakened by a failure to follow suit. Holyoake’s delayed response to Johnson’s request suggested that the Engineer detachment already in Vietnam could be increased, but that the Government would defer a decision ‘until it is possible to see more clearly what our people would be willing to support in military terms’.

At a tripartite conference in Honolulu in March 1965 instigated by the Americans, the New Zealanders put forward their