[Vietnam Veteran Francis Donovan (they/them)] I grew up in a very orthodox Catholic family, and the tradition we came from was Irish Catholicism. I didn't fit at all. Couldn't make friends. I just felt so different.
Even back then was very unclear about who I was, what my gender was. I saw an ad for the Army, so I went down to St Kilda recruiting office the day I turned 17 actually.
I thought, well, a uniform will get me there. Everyone seems to love the soldiers and the sailors, you know, maybe I'll fit into that quite well.
At Watsonia we were put on a bus and sent us off to Kapooka which was the Army's one RTB - First Recruit Training Battalion. And we got off at bus and the first thing that happened when we got off the bus was this booming voice from somebody wearing a white lanyard who we came to know as Bombardier Floyd commanded at the top of his voice “Get in line you useless bunch of children!”
[Francis laughs] Oh, this is the army, right.
It was at that point that we were then marched to the Q store and got our first pair of jungle greens. I was excited. Yeah, I think we all were excited. This was something quite different. This is something that people at home weren't doing and knew nothing of.
[White text on black background] Francis left for Vietnam in May 1966.
[Francis Donovan] Each company had three platoons. 10 platoon of D Company came under mortar fire. When that finished, I was called forward the Company Medic because there'd been casualties. And there were a few. But the most serious of which that was evident was actually a young fellow by the name of Les Farren.
Les was found laying … with basically his, his whole groin area destroyed. Legs almost separated. And Les regained consciousness just for a few moments
in time to say two things: “Don't let me die, doc. Don't let me die.” And then it was silence. And then he just called for Mum, as so often happens, and died right here in these arms. The first Victorian National Serviceman ever killed in action.
And then somebody is yelling for me, “Doc, you ought to come over here. You got to come over here. We've got Danny.”
Nobody had seen where Danny, who is a Corporal Section Commander. And Danny, by contrast, to Les was laying and he'd been undetected for 10 or 15 minutes, quietly, with no apparent wounds evident, except where... except a small, shrapnel entry wound above his... behind his eye. That was it. He was out, dead. Gone. Danny would not have known what happened.
I mean I knew in my head, I knew when we left Australia that we were we were at war, but it was kind of like “Yeah so what?” Suddenly it's real.
[White text on black background] On the 18th of august 1966, an isolated company of 108 Australia soldiers encounter a Vietcong forward force estimated at more than 2000.
The resulting conflict became known as The Battle of Long Tan.
[Francis Donovan] The following morning my unit was to accompany the remnant D Company 6RAR back into the battlefield, initially to assist with the body count. Body counts were everything in Vietnam, that's how success was measured by how many bodies there were. I mean, bizarre isn't it? But that's how it was.
So my job as medic was to accompany the body search party … confirm dead.
And so I was able to count the two-hundred and forty-five remains of young enemy soldiers on the ground. Basically in traditional... you’d think this was trench warfare.
They were in their lines and the whole rubber plantation was destroyed.
And it was just this mass of destruction on the ground. There were bodies... I actually had to put limbs together to make up bodies, you know... in some cases.
On the one hand, there's Les and Danny and, you know, dead on the ground from a targeted mortar attack 10th of June. 18th of August there's two-hundred and forty-five of them and eighteen of ours dead in a major set piece battle.
How can one bunch of young men totally destroy another bunch of young men without actually knowing why we're doing it?
[White text on black background] Francis served 12 months in Vietnam from 1967-1968.
[Francis Donovan Robert Frost, the American poet “Mending wall”. And the line goes, “Before I build a wall, I'd want to know what I was walling in and walling out.”
Now, when I look at my uniform, I find myself going ‘before I put on a uniform,
I'd want to know what I was hiding inside and from what outside we were hiding’.
The thing about uniforms is that they hide more than they reveal. They hide the inner man and woman and make us all look the same. And we're just not the same.
[White text on black background] After returning from Vietnam, Francis left the army in 1970 to pursue a career in social work.
In 1982 they became a co-founder of what became known as Open Arms, providing critical counselling to returned veterans and their families.
‘End of transcript.’
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