The Third Chopstick: Tracks through the Vietnam War

By Biff Ward

THE VIETNAM WAR ROCKED AUSTRALIA TO ITS CORE...

'The Third Chopstick' transports us back to those days. In starkly beautiful prose Biff Ward, herself a protester, seeks to understand the war from multiple angles. She balances the heartfelt motivations of the protest movement with candid accounts from veterans about what was happening for them in Vietnam and afterwards. In riveting interviews, she explores combat, the ravages of PTSD, and the acceptance that can come with ageing and peer support.

She also takes us to the peaceful Vietnam of the post-war years, capturing poignant images of the aftermath of what they, of course, call the American War. Her lyrical evocation of the people she meets and war sites she visits render the war in a new light.

'The Third Chopstick' is the profoundly moving story of one woman’s passion to bear tender witness to those involved in that tumultuous time. A must-read for all the Vietnam generation, their descendants and friends.

Peter Yule, author of 'The Long Shadow', said, I have been studying the impact of the war on the lives of Vietnam veterans for many years and I learnt more from this book than any other I have read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922812032

Biff Ward

Biff Ward’s literary memoir, 'In My Mother’s Hands' (2014), was short-listed for the NSW and WA Premiers’ literary awards and long-listed for The Stella Prize in 2015. In 1984, her ground-breaking expose, 'Father-Daughter Rape' was published in the UK and the US. Her work has been published in various anthologies. Her novella, 'In 1974', was a winner of the Griffith Review novella competition in 2017. 'The Third Chopstick: Tracks through the Vietnam War' takes the reader from her beginnings as protester through to captivating interviews with veterans about what happened to them in Vietnam and afterwards. It concludes with Biff's love of Vietnam itself, the place, the people and their memories. She lives on Ngunnawal Country in Canberra.

Book preview

Prologue

My cousin Hugh was an Australian soldier in the Vietnam War.

While he was lugging his pack and gun and a heavy radio on his back in the stifling heat and monsoonal rains of Vietnam, I was painting Stop the War placards on my dining table, standing beneath Viet Cong flags at demonstrations and raising my chanting voice at every opportunity. I kept up my protesting in one form or another until that surreal ending, the fall of Saigon in April 1975.

When I interviewed Hugh more than twenty years later at his home in Esperance, he explained that being on patrol meant having no idea where you were or where you were going and that he found this deeply disturbing. He worked out that the only way to know what was going on was to carry the wireless set, which the platoon commander used for talking to HQ or other units.

No one else wanted the job because the radio weighed over twenty-three pounds – ten and a half kilos in today’s terms – but Hugh put his hand up.

Decades later, along an unanticipated path, I became intrigued by Vietnam veterans. I wanted to know what the war had been like for them, the detail of what they had experienced. I befriended Ray Fulton, a national serviceman who had been a twenty-year-old carpenter called up against his will to serve two years in the army. While I was demonstrating, Ray was bedecked with the military paraphernalia of an Australian infantryman, patrolling through the scrub and villages of Phuc Tuy Province where he was charged with overseeing the movements of the people, who had their homes and rice paddies there. At gunpoint, if necessary.

When I met him in 1998, he was working tirelessly to help other veterans, mainly by setting up systems so that they could get their entitlements.

In the intervening years, he told me he’d been spectacularly alcoholic, homeless, crazed, in jails and psych wards but was now doing okay, thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous.

He spoke often in elliptical snippets, bewildering outbursts or questions, such as, ‘What is death anyway?’ delivered in a belligerent tone. I was always stumbling to unpack his wild words, to plumb his secrets. He was so charismatic and so volatile that he came to represent for me a kind of archetypal veteran. Years after his death I was given his own account, some seventy pages of his handwriting, outlining what had happened to him in Vietnam. Even as I gained some understanding of his exquisite agony, I felt his story was incomplete in some way that I couldn’t discern.

Years after Ray died, it turned out that the answer was closer to me than I could ever have dreamed. Cousin Hugh. In phone conversations across the country, Hugh in Esperance, me in Canberra, it turned out that he held the missing piece of Ray’s story even though they’d never met. On a wave of wonder, our words lit up tracks which had not been visible before.

Hugh and I connected the links in the tragic chain of events that had engulfed Hugh’s close friend John McQuat, Hugh himself and my friend Ray.

Closing the circle, we spoke in sounds that were soft to the ear, because the story was so sad and our hearts so full.

Part 1:

PROTEST

1

Her

It was such a small thing – a few seconds I think – that set me on the path that became the story of this book.

I was handing leaflets to passers-by when I realised the tone of the traffic had changed. It had reared up, turned into a cacophony. I turned and saw half our people on the road. This act of stepping off the footpath had turned the traffic angry. We hadn’t done this before.

Oh, my God, I whispered.

It was 1965 and we were protesting Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. We’d been gathering every month on a Friday afternoon outside the Commonwealth Government Offices in Martin Place, Sydney, the closest we could get to the politicians making decisions in Canberra. The law stipulated we keep moving, so we trundled up and down the footpath in an oval shape. We chanted as we walked, ‘Get out of Vietnam,’ giving it a rhythm with three stresses, ‘Get out of Vee et Narm!’ At first there were thirty of us. Now we numbered around two hundred and we were about to do something different.

Ian was on the Pitt Street kerb, gesturing to me to come. I raced to join him and we swung into the middle of the road, our legs springy with youthfulness. Adrenalin flared from my fingertips. The cars behind us were snarling.

Pitt Street, based on a cart track from the original white settlement, is a narrow ravine of tall buildings so the clamour from the cars and our shouted slogans funnelled upwards, then fell back down. I raised my face to the cloud of sound, a benediction of sorts.

At the next corner, King Street, the police had already circled their wagons, blocking the road. Our crowd surged towards them, baulked and then dozens sat down. What? I’d hadn’t seen this before. Australia had not seen this. My eyes raced from sitters to police to the on-lookers collecting on the pavements. The tone of the surround sound had changed, the car horns now cut through with screams and voices barking on police walkie-talkies.

I started back and leapt to the footpath, nervy as a wallaby. My feet kept backing me away from the road while my eyes stayed on the sight of people being dragged towards paddy wagons with open mouths and wild faces.

I kept moving backwards until the window of Prouds Jewellers stopped me. My stockinged left calf touched the glass, my hands splayed beside the flare of my white linen skirt. A middle-aged woman, Greek perhaps, part of the crowd of on-lookers, was standing beside me. We both stared at the street, at what was unfolding in downtown Sydney.

With pounding heart, I was watching my people and then, across an instant, I was in a world of shimmering green, sunlight slicing between trees so brightly that giant leaves were translucent, like sheets of sheer silk. There was a high-pitched wailing sound in my ears. My body was small, clothed in grey and black, my bare feet clutching for purchase in a world of dirt. I was hemmed in by tall bamboo, trapped against the trunks as four or five soldiers, huge white men with guns across their chests, came at me. They were in a line and they tramped straight towards me until the front one was pushing with his gun across my breasts, forcing me to stagger. The high-pitched whistling became louder, a sound that seemed to flow from the grey gleam of the guns and the soldiers blocking and then unblocking shafts of light as they moved. He shoved his gun against my arms where I’d crossed them, my hands clutching my shoulders. His knuckles pushed into my flesh.

I heard a scream and then I was back on the Pitt Street footpath. The Greek woman was gaping at me, the glittering gold and silver in the window flickering beside us. When I looked at her staring face, I realised that I was the one who’d shrieked and that it had startled, even frightened, her.

We turned our dazzled gaze back to the street. At first, my eyes were sightless, still filled with glinting green. I squeezed them shut and shook my head. The people on the footpath shifted like cattle, as though in slow motion. In a break among them, I saw people being shoved into paddy wagons, others being handcuffed. There was a man’s shoulder, shockingly white, where his shirt had been torn. The crowd of commuters on their way to trains at Wynyard or ferries at the Quay were stilled like statues, staring at the melee. Taking a big breath, I stepped to the gutter and looked three or four storeys up to see faces pressed against glass, circles of pasty cream looking down. Beyond the buildings a twilight sky was beginning to glow.

Everything was silent, like watching a black and white movie with no sound. It seemed that my sense of hearing had been left behind in the jungle. As I looked down from the sky, back to the road, my hearing came back with a crack. It happened so suddenly that I lurched from the wave of car horns, sirens and shouting.

I spied Ian and flew towards him.

~ ~ ~

The next morning, we spread the newspapers across the kitchen table. Forty-seven arrested. The father of one, a doctor who went to the police station to bail his son, somehow ended up in jail himself. A doctor, no less. One report said there were ‘arguments among bystanders … that were nearly as intense as those between police and demonstrators.’ People in the crowd agreed with us. I yelped with glee.

This action was the moment our movement emerged, full-throated: our brave ones arrested, our voices sweeping across front pages, our phones ringing hot with plans for the next action.

And my woman from the green world? She stayed with me overnight, grey and frightened but insistent. I woke the next day and heard the words ‘I’m not a pacifist’ resounding through my mind. I blinked and felt a new truth settle in my marrow. If I were Vietnamese, if I were in fact her, I would be carrying a gun. I wondered what that would feel like, how my hands and fingers would arrange themselves on the metal.

Until that moment, I had always thought of myself as a pacifist in the easy way one can under Australian summer skies. Now, aged twenty-two, I knew absolutely that I was on the side of the people resisting those they saw as foreign invaders, the Americans and the Australians.

Years later, when other protesters moved on from Vietnam but I could not, I saw that the Vietnamese woman in the jungle had snared me that day. She had cast a thread, fine and graceful but tough, just like the silken certainties of the Vietnamese people who, though I didn’t know it then, had been overcoming invaders for over a thousand years.

I had no way that week, that month, the rest of that year, of anticipating where she would lead me in the decades to come. That I would spend years pursuing Australian veterans to tell me their stories in an effort to feel what it had been like for them. That I would visit Vietnam then return, again and again, reaching for the war through any connection I could find. Or that the Vietnam War, what the Vietnamese naturally call the American War, would become for me a lifelong metaphor for the triumph of ingenuity, resilience, determination and love.

When asked by others why Vietnam looms so large in my life, why I can’t let go, my mind always goes back to her. I see her smallness, feel the terror clamping my chest and the longing in my hands for a gun. She inhabits me.

2

Chopsticks

Thirty years later, I began seeking out Vietnam veterans, the men who were part of my generation. I wanted to know what the war had really been like for them, what their individual experiences were. But I didn’t know a single one.

The first veteran I found was Graham. I picked him out of a line-up of speakers at a conference of protesters, veterans and Vietnamese Australians. It turned out he would answer any question I asked.

For a couple of years there, Graham and I talked a lot.

One balmy evening in 1998, I arrived at his Pyrmont terrace in Sydney, as I’d done several times before. When he ushered me inside, there was another man, some kind of bushie, slouched in a creaky canvas chair, a black dog beside him with its chin on his knee.

This is Ray, Graham said.

The man grunted Hello and slid a quick look.

Graham would’ve told him that I’d been a protester. I felt him checking me out. I wanted Graham to myself, so I didn’t want to know this other man at all. Maybe he’d stay at the house while Graham and I went to dinner.

But when Graham said, Let’s head off then, Ray stood up. He told his dog what he was doing and we filed through Graham’s backyard and started the walk across Darling Harbour to Chinatown. Ray had the bronzed look of outdoor people, fair hair going grey, a blue-checked lumberjacket, jeans. A lean, lithe man. He walked a step apart from us, which was fine by me.

At the food court, Ray knew exactly what he wanted while Graham and I fussed over healthy choices. Ray had eaten most of his Peking duck before we even began. When he was finished, he pushed his chair back and, as though a switch had been flipped, spoke to me directly. You want to know about Vietnam?

Yes. Yes, I do, I said, swallowing a hard stalk of Chinese broccoli.

Vietnam fucked me up completely, he said. Mad, I went, absolutely mad. I was violent, alcoholic. For seventeen years I was gone … He trailed off for a moment.

I tell you what, his eyes hooked mine, when you’re lying in the gutter covered in spit and spew, the rest of you rushing about look pretty strange from that angle.

I pictured myself with my sequin-covered briefcase and my shoulder pads, heading to a meeting. Oh dear.

I thought God was telling me the way, he went on. I thought I had the answer and everyone else was mad.

I was thinking, Here’s a right one. I’d wanted to know what it was really like for them and now I was being told a story with dimensions I couldn’t have envisioned, like happening on a gold nugget when you’re expecting, at most, a little glitter.

I built a boat, he said, and set out from Darwin. Aiming to die, I was. Somehow I’m still here, he guffawed.

He mentioned jail and a psych ward, he talked of AA and beginning to get things together. There was nothing specific about his time in Vietnam. Just spitting fury: a total fuck-up, insanity. His anguish was so ferocious, so blazing, that the clattering around us disappeared.

Eventually, when he slowed a little, I asked about now. How is it at this stage?

It’s like this, he said, and leaned forward to clear a space on the table. He placed his small white bowl, with its smears of soy and oil, in the centre. He lifted his chopsticks, one in each hand, and laid them across the top of the bowl about two centimetres apart. Then he looked up at me, checking he had my full attention.

Imagine that this area in here, he said, his finger waggling between the chopsticks, is normal life. You know, he flicked another look, this is where people get born and grow up and get married or don’t, and have dramas and kids and all that. They know other people and they go to work and live their lives. Right?

I nodded.

Well, here, his voice rose in emphasis. Here, he said, taking one of my chopsticks, here’s where the veteran lives. And he placed the third chopstick very precisely, parallel beside the others, same distance apart, so that there were now three chopsticks creating two equal spaces.

He waggled his finger in the newly created zone. The veteran lives here, alongside but separate, see? He can see this life, he pointed back to the first space. He can see what other people are doing, but he can’t join in. He doesn’t know the rules any more. It might look like garbage to him. It’s got no connection to what’s happening inside him, see?

Yes, I was nodding. Yes.

Well, the secret is … He was getting louder. The secret is for the veteran … for the veteran to work out how …

My eyes were skipping back and forth from the three chopsticks to the pincer of his finger and thumb he was holding way above his head. He was moving the pincer slowly, closing in.

The secret, he said, is to learn how to be here in his own stuff and at the same time, how to join in … And he whipped the middle chopstick away, high in the air, and held it triumphant, like a conductor on a crescendo. That’s the trick. Remove the third chopstick! he crowed.

I stared at the space he’d created. It was double the area normal people inhabit. He put the third chopstick on the table and all three of us kept watching, looking down at the new space. I imagined people moving back and forth across the invisible divide, the society of awareness he’d created within the tiny bowl.

You can’t take the crap experience away from the veteran, he said. It’d be bloody wonderful if you could! He cackled again. But the veteran can learn to do some normal things …

I cut in. But you seem to be saying that it has to be one way, that the veterans have to do all the moving across …

He interrupted me. No one over here, his finger poking in the normal-land side, even realises the third chopstick was ever there. They just think this guy is fucked or that one’s an idiot. They don’t know how to do it, how to step across.

There was a beat and then he laughed. The veterans mightn’t want them to, in any case. We’re fine! he mimed, saying, You just stay over there. We’re all right. We’re hunky-dory over here!

We all laughed. I felt like crying too.

~ ~ ~

An hour later, wandering across the Darling Harbour foreshore, the two veterans and the protester, a trio of greying hair, Ray suddenly stopped. His hands went out in front of him in the universal gesture of supplication.

I was just a kid, he declaimed. I was this tall bastard in a foreign country and they stuck weapons all over me. He gestured to guns, grenades, mines, bandolier hanging on his body. And I had to stop a little old man trying to go in or out of his own village … No one should ever have done that to me! Or to the old man!

His voice dropped to a deep growl, It was criminal.

Only we three existed on that whole concourse. Graham and I waited while the fury ploughed through him. Eventually his shoulders dropped, he growled again and then shook himself like a puppy.

Now what? I wondered.

Coffee, announced Ray.

We found a front table at a neon café emporium. The towers of the city were a hanging garden of light rising up before us. We became a little skittish in front of such urban glory.

After the drinks arrived, I asked about Granville, the place where they had their Federation for Vietnam veterans, and how it started. They settled into a duet, bouncing off each other, finishing each other’s sentences, laughing and joking through a saga of breakaways from the RSL, of lobbying and meeting-stacking.

Graham and the others, said Ray, would point me in the right direction and off I’d go. I had energy, see? When he laughed, his mouth transformed from thin, tight bushmen’s lips to curves of pleasure.

Graham, he said, was down at Bermagui with sand between his toes, sitting in an armchair out the front of his house in the bush, strumming his guitar! We’d ring him up and he’d go, ‘Do this or do that …’ He had all the answers, see?

They were laughing uproariously.

Graham had already told me that when he left the army, he became ill, spent weeks in hospital, had many tests, many drugs. When he was discharged, he still felt terrible so he found a health farm where he discovered fasting and stayed for weeks and became well.

Medieval knights, he explained, used to go into a monastery after being on a crusade. It was well known that war took years to recover from. I was a soldier for twenty-three years, overseas for twelve and fought in Malaysia and Vietnam. A veteran has to be careful; you don’t squander your energy.

After the fasting, he spent thirteen years mostly alone, making music, keeping quiet.

I felt honoured to be peeking into this world of arcane masculinity, a softer secret place where men dealt with the pain that war had thrust upon them.

Ray described the job of listening to guys when they first came in to Granville. Now Terry, he said, does it by rifling through their medical records and asking a barrage of questions and filling in forms, quartermaster style. Some guys like that method.

Me, said Ray, I just sit there and listen to them telling me they’re fine and their life is going all rosy and then I’ll ask, ‘Do you take your wife out to dinner sometimes?’ No! says the guy, no way. ‘What do you mean?’ I’ll ask. And he says, I’m not a poofter. There’s nothing wrong with me! She’s perfectly happy at home!

Through our laughter, he continued, So I say to them, Do other people go out to dinner with their wives? Do other people have visitors to their house? Do other people sit with their back to the wall at all times so they can see the door?

No one, I thought, no one else in Darling Harbour this Saturday night could possibly be having as satisfying a time as I am. I wanted to know and they wanted to tell.

Graham recounted a story of a guy who worked in a bank and used to go into the vault to have his lunch. While in there would put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger over and over again.

Oh, no, I gasped.

When the guy came to the Federation they asked him if he thought that was normal and he said, Yeah. What’s wrong with that?

Graham was laughing hard.

So we said, Well, where did everyone else have their lunch? Did everyone else have it in the vault and put a gun in their mouth? Oh, the guy goes, Oh. Maybe not. No, they don’t.

I was feeling the bedrock of their grief and how they were dancing with it, darting in and out, their black