Vietnam Veterans’ Day will be commemorated on Sunday, August 18.
This week, we share the story of Cohuna Vietnam Veteran, Bob Maud

Bob Maud was working as an auto electrician before he was called up for National Service during the Vietnam War in 1970. He spent most of his service in Australia and at the tail end of the war, went to Vietnam to assist with the pack up.

Living in East Keilor, 20-year-old Bob was entitled to finish his electrical fitter and armature winder apprenticeship before starting his 12-week basic training at Puckapunyal. He was posted to engineers for another 12 weeks of training at Liverpool, where he learnt, amongst other things, “how to blow things up, how to debug mines, all that sort of stuff.”

Then, as Corporal in 30 Terminal Squadron (nicknamed Termites), Royal Australian Engineers, he began a 12-month posting at Middle Head in Sydney, loading ships and periodically flying to Adelaide and Townsville to load aircraft carriers.

They loaded supplies for Vietnam – food, beer, water, piping, fencing equipment and so on, and unloaded returned equipment – anything damaged and blown up, unloading and reloading the Jeparit every six weeks.

“You’ve got to be trained like a stevedore,” he said, saying you had to know how to stack, pack and use things, especially munitions. “The place where we loaded the munitions, the powder boy, if the ship had have gone up, we’d blown up half of Sydney because there were that many munitions in it.”

Deadlines meant working flat out on the wharves for long hours, supervising, driving cranes and forklifts, but there could be 3-4 weeks in between of not much work.

“It was pretty interesting; it was a good job.”

But he knows the reason for his position in the first place was the hostility in the community. “All the unions in Australia were against the war in Vietnam, so they black banned all work to be done for the army and navy. That’s why we had to do all this work; that’s the reason we were formed.”

Being Sydney-based allowed almost fortnightly visits to Melbourne to see Marianne, hitchhiking Friday nights and flying back Sundays, and a week off in late 1970 to get married – opportunities he knows he was fortunate to have.

“A lot of them [in Vietnam] only had R&R every six months. Sometimes, they’d come home but most of them couldn’t. I was very lucky. A lot of blokes were shitty on me because of the way we had it, but it’s just the way it is.”

When the government announced the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam in 1971, Bob was sent over to pack up with four days’ notice, making a flying trip to Melbourne before he went.

“I had injections Thursday, flew down to Melbourne Saturday, came home Monday morning, had more injections and went from there straight to the plane and flew to Vietnam.

“We all got sent over and I didn’t mind, we knew exactly what we had to do, and we weren’t going anywhere. There was no fighting there at that stage.”

Being greeted by jets and helicopters flying everywhere upon landing in Saigon was a shock. From there, it was a Caribou to Vung Tau, his base for three months where he worked up to 16-hour shifts in the heat to meet the sailing deadlines of the Harima Maru and the Monash at De Long Pier.

Bob was in charge of loading the 50-tonne tanks, each taking a couple of hours and two cranes to lift and load them in the middle of the ship. To avoid sliding around, they sat on blocks of wood about 1m square and were tied down with “bloody great big chains”.

It wasn’t just equipment being sent home, it was the troops too. “The boys were alright,” Bob says of those who had been fighting but now heading home. “They were just happy to get out of the bloody joint. You had the tunnel rats, engineers, infantry, artillery; they were all up there.”

The Termites lived in huts with spring-based beds with mosquito netting over the top, and quick access to food and drink, but Bob acknowledges those who didn’t.

“The food was fantastic. Just across the road from our hut was the dining room and the boozer – it was pretty handy. The poor buggers up in Nui Dat who were fighting, they couldn’t believe the food and stuff we had when they came back. They had rations. Poor buggers.

“We frequented the boozer a fair bit. Normal price of a beer was 10c. We had the best beer, the poor buggers out the bush had the rubbish.

“We had an American base next to us and we’d go through the wire and go to their boozer too.”

The Americans had so much machinery and a ship in the harbour – a mobile electric plant powering the whole area, including the Australian base. When it came to packing up though, unlike the Australians who cleaned, debugged and disinfected everything, dismantled equipment and sent everything home leaving no trace, the Americans buried theirs, even trucks.

Bob recounts some moments. “The transport mob with big carriers would come in – APCs (armoured personnel carriers), trucks and all sorts. When the Jeparit came up and we had to unload all the goods onto trucks to come back to the number one logistic support group, which was Vung Tau, we’d ride shot gun. The trucks had a big hole in the top, and you’d sit up there with your rifle and come back in; like cowboys.”

The shifts were long and the work tough, but during their downtime they swam and surfed at a nearby beach.

When all was done, Bob was flown home by Qantas on a 747. “One thing that really got up my goat was they flew us into Sydney at midnight so no one was there. I got shitty on that, so did everyone else.”

He was put up in Sydney Airport and flown to Melbourne on a domestic flight the next day, but it would be five weeks before he was discharged.

Reporting to Watsonia Barracks every morning, they were essentially killing time.

“I’d get asked to take these blokes to do some gardening. I was a corporal, so I’d take them down there, we’d turn the corner and I’d say ‘righto boys, we’re going to play golf’. Basically, they couldn’t do a thing because they knew you were getting discharged and they didn’t want any trouble. I actually grew a beard before I got out of the army.”

Discharged in December 1971, Bob returned to his job and, after spending their first year of married life apart, his wife, Marianne. The couple would visit family overseas, build a house in Melbourne and have three children. Bob also worked as a plasterer and established his own business before deciding in 1990 to move to Cohuna where he bought the auto electrical business.

He keeps in touch with people he trained and served with, and has made lifelong friends with others he met later, brought together by the bond of war.

The Termites reunited after 30 years and have been meeting annually since. But they never forget their mates who have gone.

“We get notified of people dying all the time from cancer. They did get sprayed by defoliant. What they don’t realise is we all got sprayed by insecticide. They’d come over every other night and spray. I don’t know what was in it, but I reckon it was DDT. We had a small picture theatre outside where the boozer was, and you’d sit there and a helicopter would come over and we’d all get wet.

“Where we were was swamp land. It was different. Didn’t do me any harm, not like some other poor buggers.”

Bob also mentions the numerous skin cancers he has and reflects on his attire during his service, going shirtless and wearing just shorts and a cap in Sydney and Vietnam. He also had two fusion operations on his back because of all the manual work.

Bob has since spoken to other Vietnam veterans and is glad he wasn’t infantry. He knows he was one of the lucky ones.

“I honestly can say we had the best job in the army. Just lucky. It still took two years out of your life, and you had no choice, that was it.”

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 15 August, 2024.