By CASEY NEILL
“I STAYED away from RSL groups, Anzac Day marches, anything like that, because we were going to be spat on and called baby killers and rapists.”
Vietnam Veteran Warren Coughlan knows comrades who still can’t bring themselves to participate.
“I’ve had that much s*** thrown on me, it doesn’t matter how many showers I take, it’ll never wear off,” he said.
“It’s got to be like water off a duck’s back, but it’ll always hurt.”
The 66-year-old Springvale RSL member first marched with his comrades in 1979, and will this year attend the Anzac Day dawn service in Cranbourne.
“Then I’ll go into the city and join the other boys and march,” he said.
“It makes it more pleasant to go down on Anzac Day and march with the rest of the blokes now that the rest of Australia has come more forward towards the Vietnam vets than what they used to.
“People don’t realise what they sacrificed for this country. People don’t realise what these blokes have done for us.”
Mr Coughlan, who recently moved from Pakenham to Clyde North, was called up for national service in July 1967.
He arrived in Vietnam on 12 August 1968 and left on 12 June 1969.
“We thought we were doing the right thing,” he said.
“We were virtually indoctrinated, so to speak, from the government’s point of view, that you were going over there to stop communism from getting in to Australia.”
He spent most of his time in Nui Dat, where he regularly went out on patrol at night.
“I remember the first patrol I literally s*** myself,” he said.
“It was around about midnight and a trip flare went off and I thought ‘that’s it, we’re gone now. They know where we are, we can’t move’.
“A bloody monkey had set it off. I thought ‘oh hell, how are we going to get out of this? Are we going to get back, or what?’”
They got back to camp okay, but it wasn’t Mr Coughlan’s only close call.
“A piece of shrapnel as big as a can of soft drink landed between my legs,” he said.
“Like an idiot, I bent down to pick it up and it was red hot.
“It was a piece of an arterial shell or something. I kept that for the rest of my time in Vietnam. It was my good luck charm.
“You have your bad times and you have your good times.”
One of those good times was a concert where a young American comedian asked the crowd for a smoke.
“And I was in the front row, and I give him a tailor-made,” he said.
“He put it in his hands and took it as if he was smoking a joint. It cracked everybody up.
“It was just the light-hearted moments like that that took your mind off what was going on over there at the time.”
And it’s these moments he returns to on days like Anzac Day.
“You don’t dwell on the bad things that happened over there, you look at the funnier times, which we all joke about now,” he said.
But try as he might, some memories Mr Coughlan can’t escape.
“Back in ‘92 when we had the opening of the memorial in Canberra, and they had Chinook helicopters go overhead,” he said.
“All of a sudden my eyes started weeping and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
“That wokka wokka wokka sound from the blades took me right back and I had tears in my eyes.”
