RSL and Vietnam

SMH 29 Oct Mike Carlton

What a shame the RSL was heavied into abandoning plans to build bridges between Vietnamese and Australian soldiers of the Vietnam war.

The RSL president, Rear Admiral Ken Doolan, had argued that ''we owe it to the future to do all we can to bring former enemies together''. But the Vietnam Veterans' Association wouldn't have a bar of it.
Wrongly, I think. And I know a lot of vets agree.

Mike Dutton, of Kempsey, was an army sapper - a ''tunnel rat'' - based at Nui Dat in 1971. Last March, he and 40 of his digger mates, with their children and some serving sappers, made a pilgrimage to the battlefield. There they met the former foe, soldiers of the Viet Cong's D445 Battalion who had fought at the bloody battle of Long Tan in 1966, where 18 Australians died.

''We were made most welcome and respectfully honoured,'' he told me this week. ''And they won the war. We should really get over it.''

The heartbreaking moment came at the Long Tan Memorial , a simple white cross beneath the rubber trees on the site of the battle. Wreaths were laid for each of the 35 sappers killed in the war, and a piper played a lament.

Remarkably, in all Vietnam this is the only monument allowed to the foreign armies that invaded the country last century: the French, the Americans, or anyone else. The Vietnamese built it themselves, a generous gesture by the victor.

''I think they recognised we were pretty good soldiers,'' Dutton said. ''And so were they. It's time to bury the hatchet.''