Where Soldiers Lie: The Quest to Find Australia's Missing War Dead

PROLOGUE

The moment two rocket-propelled grenades slammed into the steep creek bank close to the five-man SAS patrol the commander, Corporal Joe Van Droffelaar, knew it was time to withdraw.

Suffering shrapnel wounds to his face, he turned around and saw about 30 enemy in a semi-circle formation sweeping towards the creek. Making a bee-line for the nearby thick jungle, Van Droffelaar ordered his men to cease firing and stand silently, back to back, in the thick vegetation. He noticed a nearby gap in the trees where artillery fire had recently exploded and he decided that it would make an ideal extraction point.

After 30 nerve-racking minutes listening silently to the voices and whistles of the approaching enemy force that was hell-bent on finding and killing them, they heard the distinctive ‘thump, thump, thump’ of a RAAF Huey helicopter as it approached the hot landing zone. Salvation was at hand.

Buffeted by the downdraft of the chopper hovering 20 metres above the trees, the men attached themselves to the end of the rescue ropes. With a thumbs up from Van Droffelaar they were hoisted out of the deadly maelstrom.

Trooper John Cuzens saw his good mate Dave Fisher beside him as the five men cleared the trees, whooping like excited school boys.

Then Cuzens noticed it: Dave’s rope was flapping in the wind. He was gone.

VIETNAM TO KOREA

1

THE SEARCH BEGINS

When Australia’s 11-year involvement in the Vietnam War officially concluded in January 1973, six of the nation’s 521 war dead remained unaccounted for.

Known variously as ‘killed, body not recovered’, ‘missing in action, presumed dead (MIA)’; or simply ‘unaccounted for’, the six were, in order of disappearance:

Lance Corporal Richard ‘Tiny’ Parker, 24 (of St Leonards, NSW)

Private Peter Gillson, 20 (Holsworthy, NSW)

Private David Fisher, 23 (Balgowlah Heights, NSW)

Pilot Officer Robert Carver, 24 (Toowoomba, Qld)

Flying Officer Michael Herbert, 24 (Glenelg, SA), and

Lance Corporal John Gillespie, 24 (Carnegie, Vic).

It would take almost 40 years for the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and the federal government to focus on finding and repatriating the remains of the six unrecovered casualties of the Vietnam War.

*

Like many young Australian soldiers who landed on a Qantas charter jet at Saigon’s steamy Tan Son Nhut air base to begin their 12-month Vietnam War tour, Lieutenant Clive Williams was confronted with the grim sight of coffins being loaded into a US cargo plane.

‘Suddenly it was very real,’ the Australian National University (ANU) professor and terrorism expert recalled 53 years later, during an interview in a tea room at the ANU in Canberra.

Williams was a newly minted 20-year-old platoon commander with Alpha Company of the 1st Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR) when in May 1965 he was among the first group of soldiers from the initial Australian battalion committed to the war to arrive in Vietnam.

The Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) had been in-country since 1962 so the conflict was not an unknown quantity, but seeing the caskets and being bundled soon afterwards into the back of an American Iroquois (Huey) helicopter with combat-hardened crewmen left little to the imagination.

As part of the American 173rd Airborne Brigade, the troops from 1RAR suddenly had 100 Hueys at their disposal – unlike the single machine they had practised on back in Australia, belonging to the Royal Australian Air Force and with a long list of restrictive rules and regulations.

‘With the RAAF, you had to get in, put on your seatbelt, shut the door and then you had to tap the pilot on the head, signalling that you were ready to go and everybody was squared away,’ Williams recalled. ‘Of course, in Vietnam you just jumped in and the guy took off.’

With a career-soldier father (who was also on active service in 1965, in Borneo with the British Army’s 10th Princess Mary’s Own Gurkhas), army life was nothing new to young Williams. But an active war zone was something very different.

Lieutenant Jim Bourke, a platoon commander in Delta Company, was also among those new arrivals, but everything in the army is conducted in order, so Alpha Company was first into the fray.

Little did Bourke and Williams know that decades later they would be reunited for a very different mission in Vietnam.

*

By November 1965, A Company was a seasoned unit conducting regular patrols from the American air base at Bien Hoa, north-east of Saigon. On 8 November, Clive Williams and his platoon were on patrol during a five-day search and destroy mission codenamed Operation Hump in the Gang Toi Hills of Dong Nai Province about 21 kilometres north-east of Bien Hoa. They had been warned to expect enemy activity in the area but because past intelligence reports had so often been wrong they took this one with a large grain of salt.

‘They would say, There’s a dump at such and such a spot and you’d go there and there’d be nothing there. Or they’d say, There’s a concentration of forces in this place and there wasn’t anybody there; nobody had been there for a long, long time,’ Williams said. ‘We were a bit cynical about this, but the decision was made to move as a company due west. Two Platoon was in front and then my platoon [3], and then 1 Platoon would have been behind.

‘I guess it would have been some time after lunch when the first platoon in line was going up a hill feature and came under machine gun fire, and that was when Parker was killed.’

Twenty-four-year-old Lance Corporal Richard ‘Tiny’ Parker, from the Sydney suburb of St Leonards, was in command of the point (lead) section of 2 Platoon pushing through thick jungle up Hill 82 when they stumbled upon a strongly defended enemy bunker system. ‘Tiny’ was one of five soldiers hit almost immediately by withering machine gun fire. The other four were recovered but despite his mates’ best efforts, Parker’s body couldn’t be retrieved because he had fallen right in front of the enemy bunker.

Later in the same firefight, 3 Platoon’s machine gunner, 20-year-old Private Peter Gillson from Holsworthy near Sydney, was also killed by machine gun fire as he emerged from behind a large tree.

Again, the exposed position meant that his body, lying just 15 metres from the enemy bunker, could not be retrieved before darkness fell and the company withdrew.

Circumstances dictated that it would be more than two years before Australian forces were back in the Gang Toi Hills during the infamous Tet Offensive, and no trace of the two men was found.

The softly spoken Williams recalled the loss of Peter Gillson with great clarity more than half a century after the event.

‘My sergeant, Col Fawcett, managed to crawl up to where he [Gillson] was . . . he held his arm and said he had no pulse, but we couldn’t get him back. It was getting towards late afternoon and they [the enemy] started then coming around behind us. We were running out of ammunition and John Healey [the company commander] at that point said . . . to withdraw, so we withdrew,’ Williams said.

Fawcett exposed himself to enemy fire three times to try and retrieve Gillson’s body and was awarded the Military Medal for his heroic efforts.

The initial plan was to return the next morning to retrieve their fallen comrades but the American Brigade Commander, who had already lost 48 men, decided to terminate the operation and pull the company out.

‘We were told that there’d be another operation to go in subsequently, to go through that area, and that never happened,’ he said. ‘Nothing ever became of it and that was not very satisfactory from our point of view but obviously at our level, there was nothing that we could do about it.’

It was the duty of a platoon commander to write to the next of kin of his men who were killed in action and 20-year-old Clive Williams had to write four such letters during his 12-month tour.

‘You always say that he was a good member, a good bloke, respected soldier; all that kind of stuff and in his [Gillson’s] case that was true.’

In the years since 1965 Williams has often pondered whether he should have made more of an effort to retrieve the body of Peter Gillson.

‘On the other hand I would have lost other people . . . and I’d seen what happened with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam where they would lose lots of people taking a hilltop or to recover a body and then they would withdraw. And I thought, Well, that’s not winning; that’s losing.’

*

Clive Williams had first met Jim Bourke in 1964 during his officer-training course at the Officer Cadet School, Portsea, when Bourke was his senior ‘class father’ or assigned mentor who occupied the adjacent room. When Williams was posted to Alpha Company 1RAR the next year, Bourke was already in place as a platoon commander in Delta Company.

The men rarely crossed paths due to the way company groups operated in Vietnam, but in January 1966, two months after the operation in which Parker and Gillson were killed, Bourke and Williams both took part in Operation Crimp, also known as the Battle of the Ho Bo Woods. Alpha Company was posted to the right-hand side of Delta Company when they stumbled on the enemy bunker system. The last time Williams saw him in Vietnam, Bourke was staggering back from the front clutching his badly wounded bandaged and bleeding face.

Across the years after the war, Williams’ thoughts would often turn to Peter Gillson, but he had never considered the possibility that his dead soldier’s remains might one day be found and brought back home.

Even with the passing of 35 years, Jim Bourke hadn’t been able to put the demons from his Vietnam service behind him. He had begun helping the Joint Prisoner of War Accounting Command (JPAC), a US government body set up to account for their missing war dead. This prompted him to question what his own government was doing about the six Australians still missing from the Vietnam War. The answer was that it was doing nothing, so in 2002 Bourke set up a volunteer organisation called Operation Aussies Home (OAH), with the aim of recovering the men.

During his numerous research trips to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra Bourke would often catch up with Williams for lunch and try to convince his somewhat sceptical former comrade of the merits of searching for Parker and Gillson.

‘I was thinking, Well, what’s the value of digging somebody up to bring them here to put them in the ground again?’ Williams recalled. ‘Jim kept saying, It’s important to the families, and I thought Well, I don’t know, because when somebody has remarried and got a new family, this is all past history. I wasn’t really thinking about the sort of situation with Robert [Gillson’s son], for example, where clearly it did matter to him.’

Jim Bourke’s first OAH search mission to find the bodies of Parker and Gillson took place in 2005, with 1 Platoon veterans Gordon Peterson and Trevor Hagan by his side.

After he returned from Vietnam, he asked Williams if he could recall the exact location of the fatal battle.

‘The army’s records were not very good. Whoever kept the war diary for 1RAR wasn’t very competent or wasn’t very interested because it’s very poor,’ Williams explained.

There was a significant discrepancy of more than a kilometre between where the Australian veterans of the battle and the Vietnamese commander at the time, a Mr Bao, thought the two missing men had been killed. Bao had said he recalled the battle precisely and that his force had withdrawn from the area that night for fear of air strikes, but before leaving they had buried the two dead Australians together in a weapons pit within a radius of 70 metres from where they fell.

‘In May 2006 I went to Vietnam to help pin down the exact location of the A Company action,’ Williams said. ‘We retraced A Company’s approach to Hill 82 from the night harbour location and it soon became clear where the main action had occurred – some 400 metres east of the official war diary location and 1400 metres from the location suggested by Mr Bao.’

The general optimism within the OAH group was tempered by the more pessimistic views of some, including Clive Williams, who had estimated the chances of locating Parker and Gillson at about one in 10 because the area had been redeveloped and cleared for crops.

‘Williams felt it would be very much like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ Bourke wrote later. ‘However, in a determined response Gordon Peterson, Parker’s acting platoon commander in November 1965, pragmatically opined, There’s only one way of finding out and that’s to see if we can find them.’

In March 2007 he led an advance team of himself, Peter Aylett and interpreter Walter Pearson back to Bien Hoa to begin a detailed search for Parker and Gillson. David Thomas and Paul Brugman brought in ground-penetrating radar and the team was joined in early April by another OAH member, Ray Latimer.

They began the painstaking job of surveying 4000 square metres of ground and digging some 30 holes searching for any trace of the two men.

David Thomas uncovered the first signs on 16 April – two pairs of Australian boots. By 18 April they had also unearthed the operational map from Operation Hunt that the Australians had carried in 1965.

In 2018, Peter Aylett recalled the crucial discovery with a laugh: ‘I took the map and I cleaned it, just putting water over it and dabbing it dry. I didn’t want to damage any of it and I thought, This is it, we’ve got it! I took it over to Jim, who was in dialogue at the time, through the interpreter, with a Vietnamese minder and handed him the map, saying, Jim, here’s the Operation Hunt map, we definitely have Parker and Gillson, and regardless of what I was expecting, what I got was, Of course we’ve got Parker and Gillson, that’s what we are effin’ well here for!

‘I retreated with that to one side of the clearing and thought, Okay, smartie. In a few minutes Jim finished the dialogues still with map in hand, unsighted, went to the other side of the clearing and obviously thinking about the dialogue once that had assimilated, he then thought, What have I got in my hand here? You could almost see his eyeballs drop onto the map and what does he come out with? I know this, this is the Operation Hunt map; look, it’s got the patrol sectors on it!

‘Yes, Jim.

‘This means we’ve actually got Tiny Parker and Pete Gillson!

‘Yes, Jim.

‘And without missing a beat he looked directly at me: That’s what you were trying to effin’ well tell me, wasn’t it.

‘Yes, Jim.’

By then the Australian government was on board, thanks largely to the newly appointed Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Bruce Billson, who recognised the importance of Bourke’s work and was prepared to back him. A Defence team had been assembled and was in Vietnam looking for the remains of another soldier, John Gillespie.

This was just as well, because Bourke and his colleagues had been working ‘unofficially’ and were in Vietnam on tourist visas. When they reported their find to the authorities in Bien Hoa and to the Australian Defence attaché in Hanoi, Captain John Griffiths RAN, the Vietnamese ordered them to cease operations and stay away from the site.

So the Australian team was told to put the Gillespie operation on hold and go to the OAH site. They arrived on 22 April and, under Bourke’s instruction, unearthed the remains.

When Jim Bourke rang Clive Williams from Vietnam to tell him that that the remains of the two soldiers had been found, the former infantry officer was dumbfounded.

‘It took me a few days to really come to terms with it,’ he told The Canberra Times. ‘To actually have found the remains I thought was just incredible.’

*

Peter Gillson never met his baby son, Robert, who was born in July 1965 while his father was at war. Like many new dads, Peter had regaled his mates with photographs of his beautiful boy that had been sent by his young wife, Lorraine.

In 1984, when they were living at Glenfield in outer Sydney, Lorraine and Robert were first approached by a group who were planning to search for Peter Gillson’s remains. Nothing came of it and it was not until many years later, when Robert was living in Melbourne and had joined the Army Reserve, that Jim Bourke appeared on the scene.

‘It wasn’t until I met Jim that I realised there was serious consideration for looking for Dad, someone having the ability or the financial backing and support network for such an adventure,’ Robert said.

Speaking at his home in Frankston on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in early 2019, Robert recalled that it was 2005 when Bourke told him about his plan to put a team together, to break through the political barrier that had plagued many people before him and to establish an organisation capable of going over to Vietnam and having a red-hot go at searching.

Throughout the process Bourke never promised that a search for his father’s remains would be possible let alone successful.

‘He included me all the way through and I regarded it as a very nice thing done by a very nice man regardless of the outcome,’ Robert said. ‘I was pleased that someone was making the effort. I put no pressure on Jim and his team to come up with any result.’

Bourke was extremely sensitive to the feelings of the families of all six of the Vietnam missing. He met with Robert Gillson and other family members to reassure them that his motives were pure and that he was acutely aware of the potential emotional cost of his actions.

‘He got under our skin well before he left the country and subsequently he knew that he had my full backing,’ Robert said.

*

Bruce Billson’s support would prove vital to the delicate task of persuading the communist government of Vietnam to allow its former enemy Australia to mount a military operation to repatriate the soldiers’ remains.

Despite Australia’s largely positive relationship with Vietnam in 2007, especially when compared with the United States, Billson recalled some tense diplomatic moments during the negotiation.

‘We had a really good collaborative relationship with the Vietnamese authorities, the military and the provincial authorities as well and they were happy with the humanitarian approach that we were adopting,’ he said.

Unlike the repatriation of American MIAs, which were deliberately low-key affairs, Billson was keen for a more public ceremony out of respect for the families. He was also able to open several fronts at the government-to-government level. After working as a junior to then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer he had a sound working knowledge of the Australian aid and trade program with Vietnam.

The Australian government had developed a close postwar working relationship with the communist regime in Hanoi and was assisting it in many ways including in support of Vietnam’s membership of the ASEAN trade grouping.

‘We were actually running everything from lifesaving programs in the central provinces to microfinance activities down in the south,’ Billson explained. ‘We were helping to sewer an area where there was an orphanage that was run and funded by Australians. We were respectful as visitors and we understood the loss of life on both sides [of the war].’

Billson, along with then Australian ambassador to Hanoi, career diplomat Bill Tweddell, and Defence attaché Captain John Griffiths RAN, had to tread very carefully. Despite having dotted all the diplomatic ‘i’s and crossed all the ‘t’s Billson still felt very nervous as the RAAF VIP jet approached Hanoi’s Noi Bai International Airport in June 2007.

Suddenly, the ADF brass and the ‘old and bold’ in the RSL had become very interested in the work of OAH. Such was the official enthusiasm for the find that the ambassador visited the dig site on Anzac Day following the official ceremony at Long Tan. The excavation was complete by 29 April, when the recovered remains were officially identified as Richard ‘Tiny’ Parker and Peter Gillson.

‘The government and Defence suddenly took an interest in matters,’ Peter Aylett recalled. ‘From that point on they did all they could to be seen as the helpful people that they hadn’t been. The irony was that the government and Defence then took on the role that Jim was asking them to take on before we actually started. By example, Jim and yes, his team had changed the attitude of government and Defence.

‘By the end of the next two and a quarter years, all Vietnam missing in action had come home and a moral obligation on behalf of the Australian public, the Australian people, had been fulfilled.

‘Thank you, Jim.’

*

Bourke’s son Anthony clearly remembers the day they found the first two MIAs.

‘When the news came through, I was flicking through my emails and read that they found Parker and Gillson, then just went on with my day,’ he says. ‘The next morning the phone was ringing off the hook with radio stations wanting interviews with Dad, and driving to work and hearing Rob Gillson and Gordon Peterson on the radio you realise just how big an achievement that was for a bunch of guys in their sixties and maybe even seventies to go over there and dig and find the two guys.

‘My brother and I used to joke that the only way you could get him to pay attention to you was if you were dead – and if it’s not good enough to be dead, you had to be dead and your body not recovered and once you get to that stage, he’d start looking for you. It was in jest but that was his level of commitment.’

It was early morning in Melbourne when Robert Gillson received a phone call from Bourke in Vietnam.

‘He told me he had some news; that they had found some things that he believed were my dad’s.’

The items included boots and dog tags, but despite the emotion of the moment Robert was quite sceptical and decided to ‘wait and see’. He didn’t have to wait long for the dog tags to be confirmed as the property of Private Peter Gillson. After that it was a whirlwind of phone calls and meetings as plans for the repatriation of the remains were developed in a life-changing process that Robert Gillson describes as ‘humbling and beautiful’.

‘The Vietnamese people were outstanding in their outward display of respect towards us,’ he said. ‘I found myself standing across the room from the men who had fought against my dad. That was quite a humbling experience from a military and a personal point of view. All the while we were received in their country with honour and respect. They are some of the things that will sit with me forever.’

Private Peter Gillson had been a somewhat mythical figure to his son. Robert’s mother had remarried when he was a boy. When he began high school and he learned the family’s full history, he decided to revert to the surname Gillson.

‘Prior to the ceremony [in Hanoi] there was only a collection of photos and stories,’ he said. ‘Suddenly, there was this casket that represented a lifetime of questions. It was overwhelming and emotional and almost surreal. The biggest memory was that I had stepped out of my regular life and now I was in some other life looking in at myself going through this amazing and peculiar process.’

Another key event took place before the handover of the men’s remains in Hanoi.

The Defence team’s chief investigator, SAS Major (retd) John ‘Jack’ Thurgar, contacted Labor MP and fellow Vietnam veteran Graham Edwards who happened to be in the country on parliamentary business. A double amputee after standing on a landmine during his tour of duty, Edwards had become a potent symbol of the struggle of Vietnam veterans.

‘I rang Graham because he didn’t know about it, and I said, Mate, I think you should talk to the minister and I think you should be here when we sign over these remains,’ Thurgar said.

The presence of an Australian politician who was in the country on official business added a great deal of kudos to the occasion and that reverberated all the way back to Hanoi.

The handover ceremony went off without a hitch. As the solemn bugle notes of the Last Post echoed for the first time across what was formerly enemy territory, a sweat-soaked bearer party of soldiers from 1RAR carried the two caskets up the ramp for the start of the final leg of their long journey home.

It was a ceremony that, as a journalist, I was privileged to witness. Standing on the steamy tarmac that day, watching the tears stream down the cheeks of Peter Gillson’s remarried widow, Lorraine Easton, and son, Robert, as the flag-draped caskets were loaded on board a RAAF C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, it was impossible not to be moved.

During the 45-minute ‘ramp’ ceremony, Mrs Easton’s hands seldom left her son’s knees. She was too upset to speak, but later issued a few simple words. ‘This is obviously a day of mixed emotions . . . it is difficult to describe how I feel. The whole experience has been rather surreal, but I am thankful that after 42 years Peter is finally coming home.’

Jim Bourke, Peter Aylett and team members Clive Williams, Gordon Peterson and Trevor Hagan as well as Robert Gillson were all offered seats on the VIP jet for the flight back to Australia, but they all declined, choosing to travel with their mates, perched in the uncomfortable webbing seats inside the noisy Herc to RAAF base Richmond via Darwin.

‘I’d never have done it any other way,’ Robert Gillson recalled. ‘That was the place