Elaborating the theme in their ‘Inconclusion’, the editors reflect the bitter view of many disillusioned and cynical soldiers, both American and Australian, that the war ‘didn’t mean nothin’’. It gnawed away at morale and self-esteem, and at whatever else makes men maintain their will to fight an invisible enemy in a country the culture of which they know nothing, for a cause that has little to do with the defence of anything relating to their own values.

Surprisingly, the first chapter does not reflect the general consensus of the following five. Ian McNeill is intent on reinforcing the original Australian government and defence establishment verities that justified Australia’s intervention in Vietnam from the early 1960s. He sees military action on the side of rebels in the South as being at almost all stages directed and controlled by the communists in Hanoi; he holds that the NLF was a puppet of the North; and that Le Duan was responsible for the direction of the insurgency.

McNeill, a contributor to the official history of the Vietnam war, goes on to make some equally debatable claims about the effectiveness of the Australian Task Force in the province of Phước Tuy, and about the validity of its strategy. He states that just prior to the landing of the first RAR B Company in May 1965 at Biên Hòa, VC and North Vietnamese forces were poised to drive a wedge across South Vietnam; and appears to support uncritically the Army view that the selection of Núi Đất in the centre of the province allowed the Australian force to stand between the main forces of the enemy and the main civilian population centres. He also supports the view that resounding victories such as Long Tan and Binh Ba forced the enemy away from the battlefield so that he did not thenceforth show himself in large numbers.

The facts were less cut and dried than these. The war in Phước Tuy, as in most other Southern provinces and war theatres, was far more subtle and political. The resistance to the Saigon government and the Australian and American and South Korean and other allied forces was indigenous and civilian, and was not capable of being ‘contained’ or ‘isolated’ from the population at large. During a visit I made to the Australian area of operations in the early part of 1970, I recall a strong sense of hostility towards the Australians among many of the populace in so-called liberated areas. We were the invaders, and were no more welcome than the Americans. The lasting impression I had was that most of the people were sick of the war being imposed on them, and wished that all the foreigners would just go home.

During a missing in action search the SRV government permitted the Australian to undertake in 1984, I met several Southern communist cadres who were more doctrinaire and hard-line than their Northern colleagues. They and their colleagues had not been ‘led’ or ‘controlled’ from Hanoi during the war, but were very much their own masters.

Jeffrey Grey’s chapter on the Australian veteran makes a lot of sense. He points out that returned servicemen’s entitlements throughout Australian military history have been hard won. They first depended upon charity for recompense, and then received grudging government compensation after World War I. Improved benefits after World War II generally reflected better social security conditions available to civilians. Still better awards were provided for Vietnam veterans.

In other respects, the Vietnam returned men did much better than their predecessors from other wars, both in the field of conflict and off it. In both world wars the diggers were in it for the duration, unless their time was shortened by wounds or death. In Vietnam, soldiers were only there for a year, unless they themselves sought to extend. And the intensity of the Vietnam conflict was much less, although this was offset by the stress of not having a defined front line or an identifiable enemy. Wounded soldiers were also evacuated much more quickly in Vietnam, and had a much greater chance of recovery from the same kinds of wounds.

When he came home, the Vietnam veteran, contrary to media claims, often participated in a welcome home parade, especially when he returned with his original unit. And he also suffered no greater incidence of morbidity or mortality than his predecessors from other wars. The perception that he did appears, like much else about the war, to be borrowed from America.

In one of the book’s most interesting contributions, Jeff Doyle examines the way the Vietnam War has been portrayed by Hollywood, and how the Australian film industry has seen it. Hollywood has gone through four stages. The first was the Green Berets stage in which the war was good and the American soldiers fighting it a bunch of heroes. Stage two was more lachrymose, dwelling on the nostalgia and self-pity of the returned man. Stage three marked the ascendancy of the angry, unreconstructed war hero, who would have won the war if the meddling, interfering, gutless bureaucrats in Washington had let him. The Rambo movies were the most vivid (and psychotic) example of this genre. Fourth has been a more complex, realistic attempt to portray the moral ambiguity of the war, as reflected in such works as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Born on the Fourth of July.

Doyle correctly observes that the Australian film industry has been far less prolific in its output but, in suggesting that such feature films as were made were generally imitative of the American models, he does not analyse the reasons for the absence of Australian films in the Rambo or Apocalypse Now categories. American and Australian films, however, narrative and documentary alike, have failed to produce any successful portrayal of the Vietnamese side of the conflict. In movie after movie, the Vietnamese have been either non-existent or portrayed inaccurately or insultingly as inhabiting some kind of backdrop against which the allied morality drama is played out. One or two Australian mini-series have attempted to weave a token Vietnamese into their stories, but Doyle is far too generous in suggesting that these portrayals contribute to a Vietnamese perspective on the war. He does not mention the significant documentaries by Martha Ansara and Di Bretherton, which represent Australian exceptions.

Doyle describes how Australian documentary film, usually commissioned by the Army, neatly encapsulated official attitudes at the time. These efforts frequently portrayed the tall sun-bronzed Anzac bringing protection and health to the Vietnamese villagers ravaged by ‘Charlie’. The stereotypical Asian enemy is loaded with Chinese or Russian made weaponry, and the task of flushing him out of his jungle redoubt becomes a sanitary imperative, as well as a gallant stand against the fall of dominoes all the way to Australia.

In chapter four, Anne Gray produces an instructive account of Australian war artists in Vietnam, though without acknowledging Ann Mari Jordens’s work in the same area in 1987. Gray adds a comparison of their circumstances and attitudes with those of Australian artists in other wars. Only two official artists went to Vietnam, Bruce Fletcher and Tim McFayden, both recommended and supported by William Dargie. Both were subject to the strictures of the Australian War Memorial that the subject matter they portrayed had to be ‘recognisable by average human beings’. It was this conservative control over their artistic freedom, as much as the currency of abstract expressionism, and a general opposition among Australian artists to the war itself, that inhibited other artists from going. Gray also points out that there were fewer amateur artists among Australian soldiers in Vietnam than in previous wars. The result has been a relatively small collection of art based on observation of the war, which in itself reflects the fact that our military force was a token one, and that what it was engaged in was a form of civilian policing and control, rather than the more conventional types of warfare enshrined in Anzac mythology and in the Australian War Memorial.

In the remaining two chapters, Robin Gerster and Peter Pierce expand their earlier published analyses of the writing and creative efforts that flowed from the war. Gerster looks at one of the central and least endearing characteristics of the Australian soldier as a parochial and racist tourist, and how this was amplified in the Vietnam theatre. He points to the sad paradox that for many of our soldiers service in foreign countries, rather than widening their horizons, increases their xenophobia and parochialism. Pierce compares Australian and American writing, outlining Australian antagonism towards their American comrades, and the resentment the Australians felt at being part of a mere token force under the Americans, in which the act of dying for one’s country was reduced to a cynical form of political symbolism with little or no practical military value.

I would venture three criticisms on what is a generally very useful collection of essays. First, there is no attempt anywhere in the book to compare Australian and US experiences and attitudes with their response to the Korean conflict. This is a pity because the two wars were more alike than any others in which Australians have fought. Korea was in many respects a dress rehearsal for Vietnam. These were civil wars in which the allies found it difficult to distinguish friend from enemy. In both, Australian forces were squarely under the operational command of the United States, though they operated in Korea as a ‘United Nations’ command. In both, the local population was generally held in contempt, and little was known of local language or culture. And neither war was resolved or ‘won’.

Second, much is made in the book of comparisons of US and Australian war experiences and contrasts between the responses of the two allies. But no examination is made of the experiences of any of the other allied forces in the war, including the Thais, Filipinos, New Zealanders, and, more importantly, Koreans, who comprised by far the largest force after the Americans. Was it considered beyond the scope or cultural reach of the study to enlist some thoughts from Korean writers or to examine how Korean experiences of the war have affected lives or Korean military doctrine or careers? Here is a story waiting to be told.

Third, too much is made of the view that Australian perceptions of Asia really developed or found focus as a result of the Vietnam War. Australians had been going to Asia and learning from its peoples for many decades before Vietnam. The failure of our Europeanised educational system and media to absorb and utilise the wealth of knowledge they acquired has led us into conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam.