#6 The War Within with Don Tate
Former English Teacher and Vietnam Veteran Don Tate shares his life in his book 'The War Within' - from growing up in Ellen Grove, an impoverished suburb of Brisbane where outlaw behaviour was the norm, to child abuse within the state and private school systems.
His story continues with his time as an infantryman in Vietnam, a story of blatant army incompetence, and medal-grabbing by officers, and then, after being badly wounded, life as a disabled veteran.
Ultimately, it’s a story of one man’s attempt to reconcile the vagaries of faith and circumstance as they are played out in life, and the love of a woman who stuck by him.
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Don Tate The War Within (MP3 14Mb)
Note: due to technical difficulties, this recording and transcription is missing the final part of Don's talk.
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Transcript
Don: Actually, it’s my pleasure to be here today in Moreland. I've been travelling around Australia now for about the best part of nine or ten months and I probably spoke with about 50 libraries, and it’s always interesting to go to a new library and see how they're setting it all up and how it all works together. And I think quite often, the library’s a reflection not only on the city, but also on the standards of the librarian, and I think you’ve done a great job here, Mary. And again, thank you very much for the invitation to speak here tonight.
And thank you guys too for turning up. I consider it a bit of a honour when people do actually turn up to hear what an old private’s got to say. If I was a general, that would be one thing, but I'm only an ex-private, so to think that you might think I've got something of substance to say, I really appreciate the fact you’ve even bothered to turn up here tonight.
There are actually two reasons why we are here. First of all, of course, is to talk about my book, “The War Within”, of which I'm very proud and which has exceeded the publisher’s expectations now some three-fold. Unfortunately, the book was sold out before Father’s Day last year, then they got it back in the shops just in time to be sold out before Christmas, so I missed the two key selling periods, unfortunately, last year. But it’s still going very, very well.
And secondly, is to show you some films I took in Vietnam, the little Super 8 movie camera that I used to sneak into my backpack, and those films show my whole tour of Vietnam and the fact I think I'm the only veteran … I've been told I'm the only veteran who’s got an entire tour of Vietnam captured on film, right up to the very day that I got shot, in which case … the day before, I'd actually handed that camera to another bloke going on R&R and said, “Mate, take this damn thing back to the base for me. I'm sick of carrying it,” so he did. The next day, I got shot, and the very next day he came down to the hospital and captured the last 20 seconds of film of me laying in a hospital bed at Vung Tau. So my entire record of my tour is on film. Those films are now worth something like $100,000.
Now, with respect to “The War Within”, which is obviously my main focus, I must say that writing this memoir has been the greatest accomplishment of my life and I'm very, very proud of it. It’s also been the most daunting thing to do, to write your story down for all the world to read, and probably even more so, actually seeing it published. There are many memoirs sitting in desk drawers across the country, and it’s quite a journey to get from that point to this point, believe you me. Look, I should also introduce my wife, Carole, or Saint Carole as they call her around Australia. She’s sitting there in the second back row on the end there very quietly. You can introduce yourself to her later, Carole. She wants to go out and read quietly outside.
If you thought that writing a memoir was daunting, trust me, doing so to the high criteria set by a publishing house like Murdoch Books is altogether another experience. Murdoch Books is a class act, and every book that they publish reflects that. So I'm quite chuffed to be picked up by such a publishing house.
Writing a memoir is also an especially difficult thing to do when the author isn’t a household name; after all, I am no General Cosgrove, no George Mansford, not even a Shane Warne or an Adam Gilchrist. Indeed, unlike any of those men, and by most other standards in fact, I've just lived a little life. With the exception of going to war, which I thought was an earth-shattering thing to do at the time, but which many men have done, and which doesn’t really mean a great deal at all when it’s all said and done, it’s been a little life in term of accomplishments, great deeds or grand adventures.
So then, what is it about this memoir, “The War Within”, that has so intrigued people across Australia, and that sets it apart from others of the same ilk? Why has it caused such dissension? Why has it polarised the veteran community? And more importantly perhaps, why should anyone want to read the story of a man who lived just a little life?
Well, I can't answer all those questions and nor do I pretend to fully understand the vagaries of the readers’ minds. But what I can assure you of is that “The War Within” is probably a book unlike any other book that you will have read before. As those of you who might have read the various reviews of it around Australia can attest, it’s a book that touches on subjects and experiences that most other authors steer clear of, and therein perhaps lies its appeal. I will say things that others won’t. I'm not afraid of controversy and I don't run from a fight.
My editor, Sarah Baker, who’s been editing books now for a major publishing house in Australia for some 26 years, described “The War Within” simply as the most extraordinary book that she had ever read or edited, which was high praise indeed. And it has gone on to receive some wonderful reviews across Australia. But of them all, the ones that mean the most to me are the ones that I've received from my fellow veterans, from brigadiers right down to grunts, or privates. Men have told me that I've put into words the thoughts and the feelings and the experiences of the men on the jungle floor better perhaps than anyone else ever has, and I graciously accept those reviews because it’s very hard to be objective about your own work. So in the end, one can only rely on the comments of others as a measure of a book’s worth. Ian McPhedran, writing for the Daily Telegraph, said, “‘The War Within’ scales new heights in war writing,” which I was very happy to read.
But you know, I would’ve been disappointed if I hadn’t received responses like that, because I worked damn hard at making this a book that appeals to you, the reader, on every level; the visceral, the intellectual and the imaginative. And that was no easy task. I had to link the high points and the low points of a life both chronologically and thematically, and at the same time, try to do so in an aesthetically pleasing way, which was very important to me, being an ex-English teacher. I wanted to make sure that this book adhered to the inherent dictates of storytelling, making you, the reader, not want to put the book down, not want to go to sleep until you’ve read another chapter. That was the most important thing as far as I was concerned.
You can also be assured that I've purposely sought to get at the detail of those events that are too often glossed over by other authors; the machinations of a man’s mind, for example, with regards to the pursuit of sex. And I know that women around Australia have been enlightened, to some degree, and perhaps shocked somewhat, to find out what we men really think about when it does come to chasing them. What it’s like to swim naked in muddy creeks swollen by floodwaters and filled with red-bellied black snakes and eels, and waste materials and so on. And the manner in which men’s bodies are destroyed in war. I want you there beside me in the mud on that jungle floor when the bullets are flying; I don't want you 20 metres behind me. I want you to smell the cordite in the air and see the arc of tracer bullets cutting through the darkness like coloured wasps. I want you to feel the terror of knowing that you're very likely going to be shot when your officer orders you over the rise and into a Vietcong killing field.
And when that bullet smashes into my hip joint, it ricochets down the leg, displacing minced bone and meat and muscle like some European sausage, I want you to feel the agony of that. I want those men who’ve been there, done that, to be able to nod their heads as they read those infantry descriptions. And for those who weren’t, to shake their heads and be glad that they weren’t.
The reason I worked so hard at the literary aspect is because I've always been aware that so many biographies that you pick up are just dry text, devoid of any life and substance, mostly just a veneer of a life that was lived. Were there no defects of character or personality? Nothing to be ashamed of? Nothing to be embarrassed about? No warts at all in that life? In my opinion, when you buy a memoir, you want the truth of how a life was lived, not some half-arsed, sanitised version of it. So not being as honest as one can be and not including those warts and flaws of character that each one of us has, as far as I was concerned, it was to cheat the reader, to some extent, and I didn't want to do that. So in this memoir, you do get the warts as well. And I know that there are those who might flinch at them, but then again, we’ve all got skeletons of one sort or another.
Now, all that aside, it is still no mean thing to stand naked, as it were, before a readership knowing that you're going to form opinions about me and make judgments based on what you read. We are all of us, after all, prone to finger-pointing and tut-tutting. And unfortunately, the old saying is true; no man is an island unto himself. A life that’s lived for six decades is shared with many others who have journeyed part of the way with him and should they have been of any significance in that life, become part of the very fabric of the life that was lived. As a consequence, they become important cogs in the narrative, willingly or otherwise. This applies equally to family, to friends, old schoolmates, fellow veterans of the war and old girlfriends, all of whom shared the lamplight for a time as the pages of a man’s life are turned. And this is especially true to those who are nearest and dearest to him.
This is most regrettable, yet unfortunately in the genre of memoir, it’s unavoidable. Telling the story has caused my wife and I some angst, and my family members as well; there's no doubt about that. In fact, my brother Graham rang me up from Brisbane and threatened to blow my head off because I called him a coward in the book. But the thing was, he waited until he got back to Wollongong, after travelling from Brisbane, before he bothered to ring me, which sort of backed up what I said in the first place.
And I must say that writing such a book is no easy task. In this instance, I had to balance both a rough, masculine voice and, at times, a more sophisticated and intellectual one. If I can quote Paul Ham, who is an international author himself and a journalist of high regard who gave the speech at the launch of my book, he said this, he said, “Don Tate does not contrive some neat and inoffensive persona. He doesn’t seek to ingratiate himself with the reader. He refuses to humble or prostrate himself before the niceties of mainstream morality. He doesn’t write with affectation. He does not seek to strike a pose or artifice.” In other words, I simply tell it how it was, as simply as I can, without paying any lip service whatsoever to political correctness of any form.
Now, there are those who might suggest that in places I've been too honest with my recollections. And in some places, dishonest. But one thing I'm not is a dissembler. What you see is what you get. I've never attempted to be grander than any other man, not braver than any other man, nor more intelligent than any other man.
And if any person who reads this book suggests for a minute that I have placed myself on a higher plane than any other, I would be shocked to the core by that, and I would say, “You are far in the wrong.” Indeed, more than anything, I believe I've been self-deprecating to a fault in this book, consciously detailing my failures and my flaws and my mistakes, and I've made no attempt to whitewash them. Why would I? I'm not a perfect person. And if there are errors in my recollections, be assured that it hasn't been deliberate, and no doubt there are errors in my recollections, be assured that it hasn't been deliberate. And no doubt there are errors in relation to the recall of events because a memoir is written from recall. No-one walks around carrying a notebook for their entire life, and there is no such thing as a memoir that is 100 per cent accurate, whether it be a politician’s, a general’s or a private’s. And there are many reasons for that. First of all, of course, is that we’re very selective with what we put into a memoir. Sometimes there are people we might like to protect, so we don't put that material in there.
In the editing process, the editor might think that the book is better served if we take a story from this particular place and put it in another place, so that might affect the chronology, which makes it dishonest to a certain extent, but it doesn’t really affect the integrity of the story. As far as the publishers are concerned, they also don't want to be sued and they don't want me to be sued, so they’ll often make changes or force changes on the author like, for example, changing Mr Jones to Mr Smith, changing a redhead to a blonde, or even changing the name of a suburb if they thought it was necessary. And indeed, I had to fight for about three or four hours to keep the name of the suburb that I grew up in in Brisbane. So for all those reasons, no memoir can be 100 per cent perfect or honest.
As well as that, writing “The War Within” for me was not only a literary process, but also a journey of self-discovery. And it wasn’t made easier by succession of head trauma that I've suffered through the years, and nor was it made easier when I asked other men to tell me various matters pertaining to me, and their recall was just as vague as mine. Or when official documentation was lacking. For some ten years I believed there were certain men dragging me out on the killing field when I was wounded; indeed, he wasn’t the man at all, but there are others who told me that he was, so their recall was just as bad. So unfortunately, for ten years I gave the credit to the wrong man, and in fact, the right man is actually sitting in this room tonight.
So that said, what is my book about? And why should anyone want to read it? According to the Illawarra Mercury, which is my local paper in Wollongong, it’s about sex, immorality, violence, revenge, remorse, regret, mateship … and that was all before I'd even left primary school, by the way … pride, patriotism, conflict, love, loss, estrangement and more sex, which covers quite a lot of territory.
But ladies and gentlemen, the title of the book is “The War Within” and the title best sums it up. It announces the struggle within a man to reconcile his attitudes towards the great philosophical cornerstones of our lives; morals, ethics and the spiritual questions that haunt us all, no matter how hard we pretend that they don't. What this book is about is the stripping bare of a man to reveal the evolution of his mind and his character over an entire lifetime. The struggle, if you will, to overcome genetics, environment and circumstances, all of which, or any one of which, could so easily have polluted or crippled that man completely. It’s about a life that was lived close to the bone and about the multiplicity of unusual and intriguing things that occurred in my life, and which have threatened to engulf me entirely at times, and the struggle to make sense of the whys and the wherefores of it all. In effect, you’ll grow up with me and you’ll grow old with me. It’s also, to some degree, a public confessional, wherein one might record all the failures of one’s life and the consequences thereof, and it’s probably those failures in particular that have so captured the imagination of some readers.
At the same time, and make no mistake about this, I've earned the ire of certain elements within the veteran community. I've dared to challenge the establishment on a number of levels; militarily, politically and even the social and class divides that do exist within our society. I have had the temerity to write about war from the perspective of the lowest infantrymen, and that hasn't gone down too well in some quarters; writing about war is generally the domain of the officer. Worse, I've dared to challenge the integrity of the military with respect to the falsification of war records and demanded that politicians endeavour to correct them, and was successful in that in May of 2008.
I've also, unfortunately, dared to rise about my social class; that of the battler, the private, the fighter, if you will, that makes up the army. And that has endured with some jealousy and some enmity, even within the ranks of my own class. “Who the hell does he think he is writing a book? How dare he do that. How dare he put himself above the rest of us.”
The fact is, the greater majority of veterans served across just one unit. Most of them weren’t wounded, most weren’t hospitalised or disabled. Most just came back home and settled back into society with their own set of particular problems and did their best to deal with them for the rest of the days of their lives. But what they had to sustain them was the notion of a spirit de corps; that is to say, the sense of belonging to a military unit and to be able to be clothed with nobility and the pride that comes with that. Unfortunately, my perceptions of the military and of our military heritage is somewhat different to most, and it tends to rattle the cages of those who are nice and comfortable with their notions of a spirit de corps. But one tends not to have a spirit de corps. When one spends his time across four units in the war, does get wounded, does get hospitalised for the last half of his military career, does come out of hospital permanently disabled, then finds his name missing from the battalion records of the unit that he was with when he was wounded, and then finds that one of his other two units had disappeared from the record books altogether. Not once did I ever march with a unit of men, not once did I parade in my dress uniform with Langdon. Not once did I ever stand with my mates on parade with my medals glistening in the sun. So if my lack of respect for the military offends some, that’s too bad. There are good reasons for that, and this has been my experience, after all, and not theirs.
Now, as far as the actual writing the book is concerned, I guess for me it’s the culmination of a dream, and I'm sure that many others share that dream. And always encourage people when I speak, if you do have a dream to write a book, please do it. If you’ve got the gift of writing, don't leave it laying unwrapped on your doorstep. We’ve all got something unique to say about our lives. Use it or lose it. I know that ever since I was about ten years old, I wanted to be a writer. My father and I both enrolled in an old correspondence course that we found in an old Reader’s Digest, and I think it was a bit of a dodgy course now because they promised us a diploma or something if we passed, and I know now that that couldn’t have been right. But as it was, circumstances put an end to such foolishness. So instead of a career in writing, I left school at 15 or so to raise a family of eight. My father had gone to gaol. It was a relatively minor offence; he’d knocked off the local grocery store and got two and a half years in gaol for that. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time he did it, and nor was it the last time. So for the next 40 odd years, my life went in an entirely different direction to that which I'd planned, and that's the journey that I detail in “The War Within”.
Part one of the book is set in a somewhat impoverished suburb of Brisbane called Ellen Grove, where I spent my formative years. The last night I spoke at Caulfield and damned if there wasn’t the woman right from the very same suburb and she said, “Yes, yes, 100 per cent accurate,” she said. It was really lovely to have met her.
Let’s just say it was one of the most unique environments that you’ll come across, and it still exists today much as it did 40 years ago. I used to say that a certain lawlessness prevailed out there. People that didn't live at Ellen Grove used to call it “hillbilly country”. It was ungraded dirt roads full of jagged rocks and tree roots, a fine red dust hung everywhere, right across the entire suburb. There was no electricity, no kerb and guttering, no footpaths, no comforts of any sort whatsoever, except for one solitary phone box, and that was invariably out of use from being robbed. I describe it as a wonderland for lost souls, for men like my father. But for us boys, it was more of a wonderland. A billabong was created when an end branch of the creek had broken away, and we swam in its bronzed waters for most of every summer for the seven or eight years that I lived out there. The water was full of lily pads and red-bellied black snakes. The edges were lined with scraggy paperbark trees and ghost gums that would shimmer in the night, and as well tall tallowwoods stood out like sentinels. Koalas tended to congregate in those, so my father made sure that he chopped those ones down first. “No bloody koalas are pissing on my head,” was all he said, and he chopped the first tallowwood down and the whole strand followed.
The house we lived in was of the most rudimentary type; a rectangular fibro shell, a concrete floor, metal roof, bare rafters and no insulation of any sort. The family of nine settled there to begin with, four boys on a single mattress on the floor, blankets used as dividers. In winter, water would condense on the roof, it’d drip, drip, drip all through the night on top of us. And in summer in Queensland, to relentless heat and humidity, it was like an oven down there on the floor. And there we lay, night after night, covered in mosquitoes as well.
And for five of the nine years that I lived out there, my father was in gaol, so the task of clearing the land fell to my brothers and I, using axes and crosscut saws and fire. When he was at home, my father blasted anything that didn't move to shreds with gelignite that he’d acquired illegally, and inculcated his own brand of toughness into his boys with his fists. So we lived our days with the sounds of falling trees or stumps being blown apart, with a smell of ironbark and eucalyptus smoke in our nostrils, and blood in our mouths. At school, we were the whipping boys of cowardly teachers who took full advantage of our wretchedness and their superiority, being forced to sit in the wastepaper bin in front of the entire class for long periods time as the teacher put shatterings of waste pencils over my head, was one little torture. Being belted on the school veranda with a baseball bat was another.
A boyhood mate of mine who contacted me recently declared that despite the ruffian appearance of us boys from Ellen Grove, he declared that we were young noblemen. In retrospect, I rather like that description. But it was also an environment the adults all seemed to be running away from something; from responsibility, the law, and spouses even. So collectively, there seemed to be a suburban vacuum when it came to any sort of social, moral or ethical direction, though my mother did her best to impart some. Unfortunately, she was outnumbered by my father. To some extent, youngsters could be easily led astray.
Now, that’s not to say that I seek to lay the blame for my own failings as an adult on the shoulders of either my parents or of that particular environment, because that would be a weak and a cowardly way out. The truth is, regardless of those factors, we’re all gifted with free will and with an innate sense of responsibility and decency, and we either choose to exercise them or not. It would be more honest of me to say that I simply chose not to. So there was going to be consequences for me in my life.
Now, I'm not going to detail the many and varied events of my boyhood, because even though … people across Australia are finding them so fascinating, because they're all there in the book. But it was also certainly a time when some of the great impressions of life began to manifest themselves. Who are we, really, and what's the sense of it all? And is there some divine hand that guides our path or plays with us as he sees fit? I'm forced to confront those issues as I dodge exploding windmills, collapsing tunnels, storms, car crashes and near death experiences. And that was all before I even set foot in Vietnam. It’s a theme that I pursue throughout this book, in which I must say, sadly, is never completely resolved, much to my wife’s chagrin.
However, in part two, the young boy takes a step into manhood to some extent and leaves Ellen Grove behind him, so he thinks, when he decides to enlist in the Australian Army to better himself and the family name. He thinks that by doing so, he can constructively and positively enhance the family name. Despite that rough upbringing, I somehow became imbued with the notion that there was nothing nobler a man could do in his lifetime than to fight for his country, and nothing grander than risking life itself on a battlefield on its behalf. The way I saw it, bearing arms against the enemy was a greater expression of the preparedness to sacrifice all, to face an enemy soldier on his own turf and to engage him in armed combat face-to-face. Now that’s what it was all about, and I wanted the full war experience, and I was going to get exactly that.
But I was also naïve enough to believe that my countrymen honour such patriotism and that for the rest of my days, I would wear my war service as a badge of honour. And even more so, if I happened to be wounded in action, managed to score some scars of some sort, some physical evidence of combat. Such was the height of my intelligence and passions when I was but 18 years old. And I was wrong on all counts because as it turned out, I served in the wrong war; Vietnam. It was a war where there was no honour in it. In the first place, I had the misfortune of volunteering to be a reinforcement, arriving in Vietnam on Christmas Eve of ’68.
Now, I must say that those of you who have never experienced the war from the perspective of the infantry reinforcement, that the reinforcement walks a slightly tougher road than most other men because when he joins his new unit, which is already at war, he’s new to them in all respects. He hasn't socialised with them, he hasn't trained with them, he knows little about the idiosyncrasies and strategies and tactics that they employ in the field. He has no real connection with them. So regardless of length of time he spends with that unit, the reinforcement never really belongs to them in any sense of the word. He is at first an intruder and thereafter something of an outsider, and he’ll always be denied a sense of belonging that’s so important to the psychological health of veterans when their warring days are done.
But at the same time, I must say that I was the sort of young bloke who probably never should have been allowed in the army in the first place, let alone being sent off to fight a war in Asia against one of the most cunning and ruthless enemies that this country has ever taken on in a war. It was an enemy that held all the advantages.
It had the clandestine support of the locals, knew the terrain and the geography better than we ever could, and had been fighting a guerrilla-style war for centuries.
Note: due to technical difficulties, this recording and transcription is missing the final part of Don's talk.
