Live at the Shrine: Mentions in Despatches with Dave Sabben MG

Recorded live at the Shrine, listen as Dave Sabben MG unpacks his book Mentions in Despatches, which is made up of hundreds of letters that he sent home to family during his service in Vietnam.

Hosted by Peter Meehan OAM, this conversation will give you an unrivalled account of what life was like for a frontline soldier in a war without front lines.

Music:

Right on Time, Adi Goldstein

Transcript:

LAURA THOMAS: The Shrine of Remembrance embraces the diversity of our community and acknowledges the Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we honour Australian service and sacrifice. We pay our respects to Elders, past and present.

Welcome to Live at the Shrine – a series where we give you a virtual seat in the audience of one of our onsite talks. In this episode, listen as Dave Sabben MG unpacks his book Mentions in Despatches, which is made up of hundreds of letters that he sent home to family during his service in Vietnam.

Dave volunteered for the first intake of Australia’s National Service scheme before completing officer training in Scheyville. In January 1966 he was posted to 6RAR and appointed commander of 12 Platoon. 6RAR was sent to Vietnam in June 1966 and Dave served the full 12-month tour. As you’ll soon here, he was also a platoon commander at the Battle of Long Tan - Australia’s most costly battle in Vietnam.

Joining him in conversation is Peter Meehan OAM. Peter held the rank of Squadron Leader in the Royal Australian Air Force Specialist Reserve and deployed as media manager on numerous occasions to joint military operations. Peter has also had a successful career in radio, and many would recognise his voice from the Anzac Day Dawn Service and Remembrance Day Service at the Shrine, where he was MC for nearly 3 decades.

We hope you enjoy this recording, and if you’d like to attend one of our events live, head to the Shrine website for all the details.

PETER MEEHAN: General Sir Peter Cosgrove, upon reading the pre print copy of Dave's book, says, quote, 'This story must be printed'. Cosgrove, former Governor General, went on to say, and a straight shooter, he went on to say, 'we all know about the social issues, conscription, drugs, moratoriums, legacy of trauma, PTSD, divorces, suicides. But do we know what actually happened?' That is what the book is all about. Mentions in Despatches will take you into an average infantry platoon for a 12-month tour of duty in the very year the Task Force was set up 1966. Dave.

DAVE SABBEN: Thank you very much, Peter. By way of introduction for the book, everyone knows someone who went to Vietnam, and they know one or two things that they did there, but they don't seem to ask the question, 'What did you do on the other days? You were over there for 360 days, and we've heard about 10 of them, what occupied your other 300 days? 300 plus days?' I was asked the same question, and I went back and looked for accounts from the from the front lines. Wha? What did the actual forward diggers do for the whole year? And the answer was, I couldn't find any from First World War, Second World War, even Korea, and the perception of what we were doing and how we were doing it was entirely lost. The news of the war came across, but not the condition of the soldier. I made a mistake with the book. I put a paragraph in on the fly leaf on the front cover, fly leaf of the book instead of in the book itself. So probably most people won't read it, but I'll, I'll tell you what I wrote, because it is the essence of why the book was written. (reading) Hundreds of soldiers endured getting six two-hour sleeps every three days for weeks. That's enough to tell you what the soldiers were like in Vietnam, certainly in the early days, because it was just relentless pressure. When we were not patrolling, we were digging, putting up wire, clearing undergrowth, whatever. So if you can imagine surviving for weeks on end, six two-hour sleeps every three days, because every third day we were on an overnight ambush, that tells you what the diggers were experiencing, and the rest of the book just fleshes that out. These overtired people doing what they had to do day in, day out, repetitious but but beyond tiredness. So it's an insight into those other 300 days of the of the tour.

PETER MEEHAN: Dave, for those who have not looked at any of the pages yet, it's remarkable that the book is made up of letters home. When I started to read it, I couldn't put the book down, and I found out that it was impossible to read in a week, impossible to read in a month. So my first question to you. Dave Sabben, why did you decide to write and release the book now?

DAVE SABBEN: Why now?

PETER MEEHAN: After all these decades.

DAVE SABBEN: The book wasn't written originally to be published. It is actually the letters that I wrote to my then wife, daily, almost daily, but daily at least by content. It happened that my wife's father had been a warrant officer during the Second World War, so he was interested in my deployment from the warrant officer's point of view, what weapons we were using, what tactics, how are we going about doing things? And of course, that wasn't quite what my wife wanted to hear. She wanted to know what we were going to do afterwards, and were going to build a house and have kids and so on. So I was writing to two different audiences in the one letter. As well as that being a warrant officer, he wanted to know the intelligence operations behind the fighting, what was happening in the base, what were the intelligence reports doing. And so when we finished the intelligence reports, they weren't subjects to secrecy. So I sent him those, and I sent him a set of maps. That meant that from the time that I got back all those letters which I had asked to be to be preserved for my own memories, were then put aside, and we got on with life. And then, as you probably know, my coming back in '67, the war went wobbly in '68, Tet, finally ended in '72 when we came home, and ultimately ended in the third Indochina War in '75 when the North took Saigon, and so Vietnam was then unpopular and nobody wanted to talk about it. The letters were put aside, forgotten. Who wants to know.

DAVE SABBEN: And it wasn't, that didn't change until relatively recent times. The stigma of the Vietnam War still persists, although it is changing. Inspiration of the current book was really to put together a scrapbook for those that I had served with who didn't have the opportunity, as I did, to write letters. So I assembled all the letters. Then I cut out most of the mushy stuff. I added a lot of technical stuff, the stuff that my wife and my father in law knew at the time, but the reader wouldn't, so I had to give a bit of background information, but made it readable to someone who was not necessarily military, and I put it together with a few photographs and photocopied it and sent it out to the diggers who had been in my platoon. And the reaction there, not from the diggers themselves, who appreciated the book, but from their families, was to say, 'Why isn't this published?'. So as the book records, I took it to the AWM, who I had been dealing with in the form of giving things to them, adding to their collections. And I said, 'Look, I've got a book that I want to send out, and I've got a couple of dozen photos, but can I have some more?' And Brendan Nelson happened to be the Director of the War Memorial at that time, and he said, 'Yeah, sure, I'll have a look at it, and we can probably get you a couple of photos', Contra deal to what I'd been giving them, maps and routine orders and so on. And after a couple of days, he came back and said, 'Look, about this book? Yeah, we can help you on one condition', 'Yes, Boss, what's that condition?' 'Well, you've got to publish it'. 'Okay, give us a couple of dozen photos, a dozen more photos, and I'll publish it'. And he had, he said something to the effect of, 'Don't worry about 12 photos. Go to our collection and take any photos you want. This book has to be published. And what's more, when you've decided which photos you want and you decided your format, I'll put you in touch with Peter Cosgrove, and he will be interested in this book too'. So that's what happened. I went through the archives, I picked up another 200 or 300 photos from the AWM, put it together in the format. It became a very heavy, A4 book because of the content, I had to make it a good quality reproduction on good quality paper because of the AWM photos. That explains the book and also, unfortunately, I'm sorry, I apologise, explains the cost of the book as well. I'm sorry. So last Anzac Day, I released the book, I published the book, and that was the first set of sales. And here we are, a year and a fraction later, almost doing a launch which hadn't happened before.

PETER MEEHAN: Dave, what is the one thing, I didn't serve in Vietnam. I joined the Air Force Reserve much later. So I'm one of the readers in the audience that we're looking for something to take away from the book. What is the one thing, or multiples, if you will, that people unfamiliar with the war will take away from your book

DAVE SABBEN: An understanding of the nature of war as it really is, not as Generals and Colonels and Prime Ministers see it, but as the diggers see it. When you're going to go to War, what does it mean? What does it mean to Joe Blow, average digger? This particular book deals with one year in one platoon's life, and by association, other platoons around it. And reading it, you will get an insight into what it means to go to war, the human cost. There's no deep delving into the emotions. This is just, this happened. This happened on a daily basis. We repeated this. We did this for days on end when we weren't doing this, we were doing that. This is blow by blow, day by day. What it means going to a war as Vietnam. Now remembering that Vietnam was not a conventional World War One, World War Two type war. It was what we call counter revolutionary warfare, or CRW. It's a style of war which was newly introduced, and we weren't familiar with it, so we were learning not only a new environment, but a new style of warfare. And that is essentially a form of literary effort that I could not find anywhere else. Because when it occurred to me that I should do it, I went to other writings to see if anyone had done it before, and it appeared that no one had given me a day by day what happened on Gallipoli? We read about the campaigns. We read about the assaults and the results of assaults, and we read about withdrawal. And you go up to the Western Front and you read about big campaigns and what generals did, what did the diggers do? And there's no reasonable account. And so I thought, 'Well, now's as good a time as any. I'm going to produce a book that shows people what war looks like out of the foxhole'.

PETER MEEHAN: Decades later, you start reading the letters again that you wrote decades beforehand, some of the vivid memories that must have come back reading those letters. Did you have any bearing on those vivid memories? But how important these letters would be 50 plus years later in telling the story, or were the letters just put in a box along with the golf clubs?

DAVE SABBEN: I can't say that I had a great knowledge of what the impact of the book would be, and I don't think I've felt it yet. However, the memories evoked by the letters I tried to keep as they were. So yes, in the letters, I cut out some of the mushy stuff, and in the letters I added some of the technical details and backgrounds, but I tried my best to keep the letters in tone as they were, so I was not affected by by going back and pondering or dwelling on the letters, if you like, I took the job of just a reporter. This is a guy that's written at the time. I'll make it palatable, but here it is, warts and all, and you'll see complaints I've written about and escapades that we got up to the good, the bad, the ugly. I complain about things. I I criticise other people, rightly or wrongly. It's just a dead set report. So I wasn't personally affected by the revisitation. People nowadays now think, well, we've got Vietnam Veterans Day, or we've got Anzac Day. And we think, one day a week, one day a year, I'm sorry about wars and campaigns and so on, but for a vet, for a Vietnam veteran, every day is Anzac Day. You're thinking about it all the time. Something reminds you every day, a mate, an object on your table, a memory, whatever. So it's always Anzac Day for us, and always, in Vietnam's case, Long Tan day. And the number of times I was called upon to talk about Long Tan because of my unique experiences just brings it all back. So, yeah, I don't know if I've answered your question specifically but that was the tone of the book.

PETER MEEHAN: Let's get into the engine room a little more of the day to day affairs of your your soldiers and others. Amry, now did the small arms weapons compare that your guys had with those of the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army? Comparison?

DAVE SABBEN: Comparison, we were behind the eight ball. The enemy that we faced even the VC, but more so the NVA, were equipped with the latest weapons. It is entirely propaganda to think that we were fighting a bunch of unorganised people in black pyjamas with World War Two weapons and bolt action rifles and so on. That's that's propaganda. The whole image put out during the war by both sides was the North Vietnamese grasshopper against the American elephant, the elephant and the Grasshopper comparison. False. It was always pictured that we were fighting VC who were cunning and inventive and using panji sticks to inflict casualties and so on, in the whole process of the war, in American medical records, not one single soldier died from a panji wound, not one.

DAVE SABBEN: Back to their weapons. They had AK 47s, essentially light, smaller weapon, 30 round magazine capable of firing on automatic, and a lighter round and a 7.62 short round. We had as our main weapon an SLR, longer, heavier, 7.62 long, 20 round magazine, not able to fire on automatic. So they were way ahead of us with the AK 47. The RPD machine gun, same, same characteristics, than than their RPD against our GPM, GM, 60. They had their magazine, the belt of rounds in a round magazine out of the weather. We had belts of MG rounds loose beside the weapon, fed into the gun, and picking up all the leaves and sticks and twigs and mud and so on. They beat us on the machine guns. In the early days, our grenades, as often as not, didn't go off. Every one of theirs went off. We had a shortage of claymores for the first year or so, we didn't have Claymore mines until late in our tour. The enemy had their own form of Claymore, not a jerry rigged backyard job. This professional Claymore mines. They had 61 millimetre mortars down to platoon level. We didn't. They had 82 millimetre mortars to company level. We didn't. We had them at battalion level. So every time we picked up a weapon of theirs, it was better than ours. That could have been fixed if we had had the guts to say, SLR is no good. AK is better. We will take AK, we'll use AK. The diggers would have preferred that. Same with the machine gun. Yes, so yeah, we were behind the eight ball there. And indeed, if I can pass a political comment, I think we still are.

PETER MEEHAN: Well, on that point, Dave, decades on, what's been learned? What changed for the diggers, say, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, in terms of weapons? A brief response.

DAVE SABBEN: Unfortunately, not enough. The steyr style weapon was not as good as the AK, and it might have been better than the SLR, but it was not as good as the AK. The AK has lasted for 50, 60, 70, years, so it must be a good weapon. We don't have that. Tactics. So far as I know, up until Afghanistan, we were still teaching our soldiers conventional warfare three to one advantage. Any vet or ex servicemen in the in the room here will remember the three to one advantage. You need a platoon to take on a section. You need a company to take on a platoon and so on, doesn't apply in CRW, counter revolutionary warfare, it doesn't apply. So we didn't change our tactics. We didn't change our weapons greatly. We did convert over to the steyr, and we kept enhanced versions of the armalyte. I found the amarlyte a very good weapon, so long as you maintained it well, you'd had to pour oil into it while you were firing almost. And that's because the machine, the machinery in the weapon itself. And I won't go into the technical detail here, but, but again, the enemy the Taliban, was not a backyard outfit. It was a well equipped professional, professional army without uniforms and so on. But don't underestimate what their supply line was, and they had it. They they were able to give the Russians a hiding just before we got there. So not to be sneezed at.

PETER MEEHAN: We're preparing to go on to Long Tan, and you mentioned earlier moving away from weapons, about the sleep ratios, two hours down, up alert, more sleep. Up, alert. Nasho versus regular. Did you see in the field any marked difference between or not?

DAVE SABBEN: No difference whatsoever. After basic training, what came out of Kapooka and Puckapunyal, didn't matter whether it was national service or regular. The only difference was that nashos had the digit seven as the second number of their regimental number. Only difference. From there on, it went to core training, so everyone got the same training, and then into unit training, everyone went the same. No difference whatsoever.

PETER MEEHAN: Okay, now Long Tan we, we the world, the royal we, the Long Tan story has been told over and over again, but this book does take a different view, as Dave has already pointed out, there are some analogies in the book that you will find absolutely fascinating to read. Back a few years ago, Dave and I went into a radio studio to record this segment, which typifies, bear in mind, it's reproduced, it's not actual audio footage, what it was like at the start of the Long Tan battle and after it started, have a listen to this.

(Recording) 108 men of Delta Six deploy in open formation, cautious, silent, slow they patrol into a rubber plantation. Suddenly, contact, Chase, deploy, advance now, yard by yard. They hit a massive enemy, but are themselves hit hard. These aren't VC, they're NVA. The men in front protest. They've got to beat the best they face to prove that they're the best. An hour of firefight ensues. 11 platoon takes the brunt. 10 platoon hooks north but hits a second group out front. 12 platoon hooks south and clears a way to fetch their mates. Withdraw to one position now. We must consolidate. Close up around the casualties as the enemy makes ground, bring the big guns closer in. We'll trade them round for round, the whap, whap, whap, of choppers approaching through the rain. I see red smoke. Roger, that. Won't get this chance again. The choppers tilt. The cargo spills delivering their freight. The ammo swiftly passed around, rearmed. The soldiers wait. Another human wave comes in again, the bugles sound. The fury as guns, big and small, bring death to those around. Silent prayers come to mind amongst the gunfire's din, the Anzac soldiers stand their ground as darkness closes in. Dusk, the APCs fight through to reinforce their mates. Outside the small perimeter. Hundreds have met their fate, and a legend was born.

PETER MEEHAN: Dave, the late Harry Smith, Commander Delta Six. He was a very insightful and inventive man, and you knew him very well. If I can put it this way, what's been attributed to the success of Long Tan has been ammo resupply, monsoon storm, close artillery support, arrival of the APCs, the reinforcement forces, mostly, hmm. Now, any good luck involved there or planning?

DAVE SABBEN: Certainly a lot was attributed. The credit for the good luck has not really ever been analysed. Harry formed the company in January of '66 a newly formed company when National Service people became available, and the company came up to full speed. And by then, Vietnam was starting to hit the headlines, and it was expected within the Army that we would be sent to Vietnam sooner or later. As a sideline, I might say that national service wasn't introduced for Vietnam at all. When national service was being formulated in the early 60s, the target was Indonesia, not Vietnam. Vietnam wasn't an item. When Vietnam became an item, then we had a ready made national service supported army.

DAVE SABBEN: So once we realised that we were going to be training for Vietnam, Harry put on his thinking cap and basically went back to square one, rather than just, you know, read the the routine orders as they come, and act on them. No, apply some thinking. What sort of war is Vietnam shaping up to be? What what war had the French fought and why did they lose? Well, the Vietnam war wasn't ever a conventional war, not until the third Indochina War, the invasion of South Vietnamese after South Vietnamese after we left and the taking of Saigon, that was conventional war. Up until then, it was counter revolutionary warfare, because they were the revolutionaries, and they were countering the South, and they were infiltrating small groups and bigger and bigger and bigger groups, but there were still the guerrillas in the bush, and we understood that if we became involved, we would be involved not in a conventional war, which we I mentioned also we'd been training this three to one ratio, and probably still do in our training establishments. But how do we fight a counter revolutionary warfare? Well, we had a couple of hints, because we'd been fighting with the British in Malaya, in the insurgency, and Harry had been in Malaya. And Harry had also, when he'd been in Malaya, came come back and become a commando. And in fact, he was promoted out of commando into the regular army, from Captain to Major. So he was a newly made up, ex commando having Malay experience and he analysed our potential tactics in Vietnam as not being conventional warfare. Don't worry about the three to one rule. We've got to beat that. We've got to we've got to be better than that. So how are we going to do that? Well, he had just come from Commando, which was a CMF unit, a citizen's military forces unit, part time unit taking people off the street, taking recruits off the street, and training them to be Commandos, part time. And here he was in newly made up into a six battalion with 50% of his people National Service, diggers off the street. And can he train them to be commandos? And the answer is yes. Why not? So he established a training system which trained us as if we were commandos. And what's the difference? You say? What's the difference between infantry and commandos? Infantry trains to fight at company level battalion in bigger wars, but company level and platoon level, not much below that. Sections don't go out and do patrols in the bush in conventional warfare, they do clearing patrols and so on. But that's all.

DAVE SABBEN: But he trained us down to section, and then within sections, group level, and he cross trained us on on weapons. So every digger knew how to operate all the weapons. Every digger knew his superior's job so any digger could take over command of a section. Any section commander could take over a platoon sergeant. Any platoon sergeant could take over from an officer. The independence then required the ability for people to operate as individuals or as pairs of people, mutually supporting pairs, and that required a lot of fitness. The accent became not so much on, on, on platoon formations and manoeuvres as fitness, field signals, because in those days, one radio per platoon, remember, each digger didn't have a radio, field signals, formations in the bush, initiative, the ability to communicate with someone under fire and possibly not visible, forms of communication where you knew what the other bloke was thinking before he did it. And we trained that into our company.

DAVE SABBEN: Now, at the time, the rest of the battalion looked at us, scratched their heads and called us names, and the battalion commander didn't take lightly to this either. The battalion commander went on record saying, 'You're over training your your company. Come back to what our RO's are'. And Harry had a couple of kind words to say to the battalion commander about that, which set the trend for the rest of Harry's career, unfortunately, but had had the company at Long Tan not been commando trained and able to operate as individuals, they wouldn't have survived, and with the fire control that I've just talked about, the armalites and so on. So that was the way Harry approached us going to Vietnam. And the consequence of that was the unpopularity that Harry bore, because after Long Tan, if you analyse Long Tan, you can't explain one one company surviving three and a half hours out there in a bare rubber plantation. And there's photos of the of the rubber plantation there, there's nothing to hide behind. You just can't explain it otherwise. But it's to the detriment of the senior command that they didn't look at Long Tan and analyse what it was that saved us. And you just mentioned a couple of things. The weather saved us. It helped the enemy as well. Direct fire support. Very, very close. Yes, the arrival of APCs and so on. Yes, they all contributed, but the infantry company survived three and a half hours of intensive, consistent battle. How do you explain that? Our frontline ammunition was 60 rounds per man on the SLRs. 60 rounds doesn't last long in three and a half hours, we took a resupply, and they might have got another front line of 60 rounds. So 120 rounds, any any given digger on the day didn't fire more than 100 rounds, and yet, two thirds of us were still alive and fighting off the enemy at the end of three and a half hours, those things never got addressed, and the rest of the army didn't get the benefit of the lessons learned.

PETER MEEHAN: So it's interesting that infantry tactics at the highest level of command, and I include ministerial tactics, didn't get a Guernsey? No, that's quite incredible. We need to wrap up on Long Tan. So allow me to take the journey, the history page from 1966 now to 1969 and the arrival of the Long Tan Cross.

(Recording) All units of 6RAR deploy from base location, cautious, silent, slow, they advance into the smashed plantation. The trees are bullet scarred and dead. Shell holes pock the ground and still the debris of the fight lies littered all around. Discarded kit, a sandal here, a rusty bayonet there. The ghosts of lives lost violently hang heavy in the air. North flank secure and south flank too. In an outward face, West and East join the ring to enclose this honoured place. Stand to the sentry forces out among the trees each man set to protect this place of memories, this place of bloody violence, of shrapnel and bullet shell, is now a place of silent calm and not a raging hell. The whap, whap, whap of a chopper, its cargo held in slings. I see the cross, roger that, stand clear in case it swings. The chopper hovers, cargo is lowered, eager hands accept the freight. The cross is gently locked in place, secured. The soldiers wait. The Pipers play a haunting tune as the lament they sound and deathly silent men recall the fury all around. The silent gunfire lingers still amongst the prayers that day, the soldiers stand their ground again. That's the soldiers way. They pay respect to all the dead, no matter how they died, who came and fought and paid the price, no matter for which side. And a memorial was dedicated.

PETER MEEHAN: The late Sir Harry Smith, commander of Delta Six. Now you mentioned the adjustment of the tactics, this is my closing comment. And Dave, I know you'll have one. He, he perhaps won the battle. Contributed significantly to the Battle of Long Tan before it was fought. Is that fair comment?

DAVE SABBEN: Essentially, yes, because, because he defined how he was going to train his men in January of '66. Effectively, he had a fighting force that was going to achieve the result that he foresaw in August. So, yeah, he, I guess it could be said that he won the Battle of Long Tan in January that was fought in August.

PETER MEEHAN: Now, the book, the book, I urge you to, and I know the interest in the room is just terrific. I found it impossible to read in a year because every page has got so much in it, driven by letters, driven by letters home. Truly incredible. Closing comment, Dave?

DAVE SABBEN: Well, first of all, thank you for being here and for your interest and for your questions. If you're looking for an explanation of a diggers level view of war, then this is a book that doesn't have a peer. It is without comparison. I would urge you to consider reading the book or passing it on, not only for military, for what it contains in the military, it's a story about leadership, what you need to be thinking of when you're involved in other things. And that I found when I went through Scheyville, through the officer training course, that all the principles that I learned and in officer training were applicable to my civilian life when I came back, all of them, punctuality, attention to detail, passage of communications and so on. And it's all there in spades, and it's as current as today, because we're seeing in the newspapers things about diggers being shooting enemy in Afghanistan. Well, this book shows that a good soldier, a good leader, debriefs every patrol, so even if I if I'm not on a patrol, and my sergeant takes a patrol out, when he comes back, I debrief him. It's my responsibility. I find out what happened there, and if something happened there that I should know about, I would act on it. So some things in the military are not as they were, and we're paying the price for it.

PETER MEEHAN: Please join with me in thanking Dave Sabben for giving, just giving.