POST
PRODUCTION
SCRIPT
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
INTERNATIONAL EDITION
2012
Vietnam – Wandering Souls
25 mins 53 secs
©2012
ABC Ultimo Centre
700 Harris Street Ultimo
NSW 2007 Australia
GPO Box 9994
Sydney
NSW 2001 Australia
Phone: 61 2 8333 4383
Fax: 61 2 8333 4859
e-mail
Publicity
Vietnam helped Australia find its last six soldiers missing in action. Now two Australians - former veterans Derrill de Heer and Dr Bob Hall - are aiming to return the favour.
Using Australian war records, maps and combat references, they’ve produced the first comprehensive account of where nearly 4,000 missing Vietnamese troops might be found.
In a country where most families lost someone during the years of war, the enduring grief for many is not knowing where their loved ones had fallen. Without that knowledge they believe their dead will be wandering souls who will have no peace. Nor will the survivors.
"I’m very happy to be able to return this information to the Vietnamese people, particularly veterans. Soldiers get on with soldiers. We have a particular sense of humour. We’ll drink beer together, eat noodles together. And I think where there are some very disgruntled people at home in Australia, this is really a peaceful thing." DERRILL DE HEER Vietnam veteran
Enter Laurens Wildeboer. He’s spent the years since his return from Vietnam trying to forget the horrors and futility of war. And yet he’d held onto some very strong reminders of that time – a journal, a book of poetry and a scarf owned by one or more North Vietnamese soldiers. There were very few clues but Laurens’ fellow Vietnam Vets have helped him find an important connection – the mother of the soldier who’d committed his daily accounts of battle to a journal. The journey to return the diary becomes a cathartic pilgrimage.
"You know I’ve often heard guys say you should come back here to purge the soul or purge the spirit. And it’s amazing. It’s not until you go through it yourself that you realize how beneficial it is to return and have a look at the place and meet the people who show no sign of resentment or misgiving." LAURENS WILDEBOER Vietnam Veteran
Correspondent Eric Campbell joins Laurens and the other veterans for what is a highly emotional trip back to Vietnam. Laurens’ effort to return the relics to one 85 year old generates considerable interest among the local media and when it comes to the handover there’s not a dry eye in the house.
Ceremony in field
CAMPBELL: When you’re looking for the dead, it’s polite to let their spirits know you’re coming.
00:00
Gifts for spirits in fire
Music
00:06
WALTER PEARSON: Whenever you come into these areas where people have died, or you’ve got memorials to people, it’s the custom that we put flowers or incense down just as the first thing we do,
00:10
to sort of say to the spirits that we’re here, to the spirits of those people that are gone, that we’re here and we’re paying respect to them.
00:23
Vietnamese man
(VIETNAMESE MAN SPEAKS AND PEARSON TRANSLATES)
00:30
Sometimes people have information... some individuals have information.....
00:36
CAMPBELL: Walter Pearson is a Vietnam combat veteran and a former army interpreter who now lives here in a small village.
00:42
Vietnamese man with children
He’s grown used to seeing Vietnamese friends searching for the remains of loved ones killed in the war.
00:49
Nguyen Bach Dang proffers incense
Nguyen Bach Dang’s brother died fighting Australian troops here forty three years ago.
00:55
A handful of comrades is still checking the surrounding fields to find where he was buried.
01:08
Nguyen Bach Dang
NGUYEN BACH DANG: We miss him a lot and have continued to search for him since 1975 but we haven’t been able to get any information about him.
01:17
Vietnam War file footage
Music
01:25
CAMPBELL: Australia entered the Vietnam War fifty years ago. For a decade they fought alongside South Vietnamese to stop a takeover by the communist North. Some five hundred Australians were killed and perhaps two million Vietnamese.
01:29
Fade up from b&w to colour. Modern Vietnam street scenes
A whole generation has grown up since the North won the war in 1975, but there’s hardly a family here that didn’t lose someone or hasn’t searched for their grave. Australia went to great lengths to find the remains of six soldiers who went missing in action
01:54
Campbell to camera
in the Vietnam War, but among the Vietnamese they were fighting, some three hundred thousand soldiers are still missing. It is intensely painful for the families even after all these years because in Vietnamese tradition, the souls of the dead will not have peace until they’re found.
02:17
Market
02:38
Pearson. Super:
Walter Pearson
WALTER PEARSON: From their point of view, their cultural instinct is and their desire is to have the remains brought back home. They feel that then they can do the usual rituals every year and so on around the grave and they feel that the person will be at rest.
02:44
File from Australian Story
Music
03:02
Vision of Pearson searching ex Australian Story 2007
CAMPBELL: Walter Pearson understands that instinct better than anyone. He was part of a project to find the six missing Australian servicemen. It took five years of planning, fundraising and digging until the last grave was found in 2007.
WALTER PEARSON: I didn’t know anything much about it. I actually worked on the file when I was here in 1972 but when I was approached by Operation Aussies Home and Jim Bourke I suddenly realised that there were families out there who were yet to sort of have some resolution over this issue. Every one of the families that we dealt with had a problem and it had a huge
03:04
Pearson
impact on all those families and bringing the remains home had real resolution for everyone.
03:43
Vietnam road scenes. People on bicycles
03:50
CAMPBELL: But there’s little resolution here.
03:58
Families register missing relatives
04:02
Families gather at meeting
At mass meetings like this, families register the names of lost relatives and swap information on recent searches. It is a sad but businesslike quest undiminished by passing decades. The main problem is there are almost no official records of where their relatives were killed.
04:12
Woman addressing meeting holding Bravery Certificate
WOMAN ADDRESSING MEETING: The Bravery Certificate is only a piece of paper to prove they died a war hero – whereas to be able to find where they are requires a death certificate.
04:32
Offerings in fire
Music
04:45
CAMPBELL: Vietnam helped Australia find its six missing soldiers, known as MIAs. Australia has done little to help Vietnam in return – until now.
04:53
De Heer at Australian War Memorial
In the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, another group of veterans is searching for the dead.
05:29
De Heer with archivist
Derrill de Heer served two tours in Vietnam. Today he’s combing through the records of every fire fight Australians were involved in.
05:36
De Heer and Hall with archives
A fellow veteran, Dr Bob Hall, started the project seven years ago to assess how effective the Australian taskforce had been… but the research has also shown where nearly four thousand enemy soldiers fell. After the six Australian MIAs were found, Derrill and Bob realised they could help the Vietnamese find their missing soldiers.
DR BOB HALL: The key to this study
06:00
Hall and De Heer. Super:
Dr. Bob Hall
University of NSW
really is those contact reports. You know, as a platoon commander, I mean when you were in the bars of Dat Do I was out in the bush filling out these reports - and there are a couple of mine in there somewhere - but you know every time you had a contact you had to fill out these reports and we used to think they were useless at the time, but now they’re a record of every battle we fought and they show the date,
06:29
Army map
time, place, the number of enemy who were killed and that information gives us every approximate burial site…
06:56
CAMPBELL: They’ve called the project Operation Wandering Souls and they’ve been sharing the information with Vietnamese families and veterans still searching for peace. Derrill de Heer is about to make his final trip to Vietnam.
DERRILL DE HEER: I think this has been
07:04
Hall and De Heer
a great experience at the end of my life.
DR BOB HALL: Yeah, yeah you only get a couple of... a couple of chances in your life to make a real difference and this is one of them.
07:21
Laurens’ enlistment photo
Music
07:31
CAMPBELL: “This is how it all began. This is the day you enlisted.”
LAURENS WILDEBOER: “Seventeen years old.”
CAMPBELL: “My goodness.
01:32
Laurens and Roni show Campbell photos
What a handsome young boy you were.”
CAMPBELL: The project has struck a deep chord with one veteran who until now refused to have
07:37
anything to do with Vietnam. Laurens Wildeboer was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, decades after he served as a mechanic in the war.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: The photo was taken because it was the first time that a bridge layer had laid a bridge in Vietnam.
07:43
Laurens and Roni walk down country town street
08:02
CAMPBELL: He keeps a low profile with his second wife Roni in country Victoria, never goes to the local RSL and never marches on Anzac Day.
08:05
Laurens and Roni at café outdoors
LAURENS WILDEBOER: There was one particular incident where a Vietnamese interpreter was interrogating a peasant that we’d come across on a farm who’d been
08:20
Laurens. Super:
Laurens Wildeboer
wounded. The interpreter wasn’t getting the answers that he wanted so he shot him. And I was surrounded by my work people who were all believers in the Geneva Convention and nobody did anything and at the time I was able to dismiss that as, you know, the boys’ club..... yeah, yeah he deserved that - but later on I realised that that was just a no no and the realisation that we were killing people who were just farmers, peasants.... people just wanting to live out their lives.... raise their children..... not interested in whether it was communist or whatever – that was somebody else’s fight.
08:28
Laurens and Roni at café
CAMPBELL: Laurens vowed he would never go back to Vietnam, there were too many bad memories,
09:16
Archive. Wartime Saigon
but after hearing of Derrill de Heer’s project he’s decided to return with him to the wartime capital, Saigon.
09:24
Fade up to colour from b&w. Modern Ho Chi Minh City
He can’t show any families where their loved ones are buried, but he has something just as valuable to give.
09:32
Laurens shows photos
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Towards the end of my service in March ‘69 roughly, I was out with a squadron of tanks and the infantry had bought in some documents as well as weapons that they’d got out of a bunker system.
09:41
Handwritten poetry papers
I picked up the documents, flicked through it and noticed that it was beautifully written poetry, beautifully illustrated and there was a scarf. So I picked up two documents, there was a name on the front of one of them and I decided I wanted to hang on to these. I’m not sure if my intentions were clear at the time but later on I thought I’d like to get these back to the family
09:55
Laurens
but communications being what it was, there was no internet or , so there was no way but I just, I hung on to them for 43 years.
10:17
Illustrated poetry papers
Music
10:25
CAMPBELL: The poetry book, later translated, continued to haunt him.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: It was another thing, another chink in the armour that showed me we weren’t fighting people who weren’t human because it was so beautifully illustrated and beautifully written.
10:32
CAMPBELL: Laurens sent the notebooks to Canberra to see if the Wandering Soul team could find who wrote them.
10:48
Ho Chi Minh City street scenes
Derrill’s contacts in Vietnam couldn’t identify the poet, but they did find the identity of the second notebook’s author, a soldier whose family still lives outside Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City and now Laurens has come back to keep his promise.
10:57
Laurens and Roni greet Pearson
11:17
Tomorrow they’ll be meeting the soldier’s mother to return his belongings.
11:29
Ho Chi Minh City street scenes
LAURENS WILDEBOER: You know, I’ve often heard guys say that you should come back here just to
11:35
Laurens and Roni walk
cleanse the soul or cleanse the spirit and it’s amazing. It’s not until you go through it yourself you realise how beneficial it is to return and have a look at the place and meet the people who show no signs of any ill will or resentment.
RONI WILDEBOER: Very forgiving aren’t they, the Vietnamese?
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Yes, amazing.
11:38
Hotel exterior
Music
11:59
Laurens and Roni board bus with media
CAMPBELL: The story of the notebook has provoked a storm of interest in Vietnam. Derrill has had to hire a bus to accommodate the hordes of local media wanting to see it returned.
DERRILL DE HEER: This one has a.... like,
12:07
De Heer and Campbell on bus. De Heer shows notebooks
personal particulars form, and tells the history of this soldier and this is what Laurens found, the two books plus this scarf which has been carefully kept in the notebook. So we’re taking it back to the mother, which we found the mother through Colonel Tien who has worked in this field trying to return artefacts to families.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: You think about keeping this altogether
12:23
Laurens on bus
for 43 years, in hindsight.... my God. I must have moved 10 times in all that time. I don’t think I’ve got anything else left from all that, except this. When I say I’ve hung onto this for 43 years.... even my first wife didn’t stay that long.
CAMPBELL: As we can see. [laughing]
12:53
And what are you hoping to do today, apart from give back the belongings, the tangible link to her son, is anything else on your mind?
LAURENS WILDEBOER: For me personally and I’m not sure if I can describe it, relieve the frustration, the anger that I’ve felt as a result of Vietnam and set some ghosts free.
13:13
I’m going to make a connection with this woman… yeah.
13:38
Street from bus
13:44
Laurens and others walking to house
Music
13:52
CAMPBELL: In Australia, the pain of war has been a private burden for veterans and their families, little understood by the rest of the community. But in Vietnam it’s a shared experience, the suffering affecting everyone.
13:58
De Heer with box enters house
It’s a somewhat awkward arrival, surrounded by cameras and looking for the mother of the dead soldier.
14:15
Laurens and De Heer with mother and interpreter returning son’s possessions
But soon the onlookers are forgotten.
14:28
DERRILL DE HEER: [meeting Nguyen Thi Hieu] “So he always had this wish to try and find the family. (TRANSLATED TO MOTHER) And we were both soldiers...(breaks down)...
And ah.... here, Laurens...(takes book out of box) ...open the book up... and show it...... and this first page, open up to that page....
(TO MOTHER) Your son’s writing?(TRANSLATED TO MOTHER)
This scarf was found inside this book....
15:17
CAMPBELL: Nguyen Thi Hieu is eighty five and never learned to read or write, but she tells them she understands the notebook’s importance as the last record of her son, Phan Van Ban.
15:20
TRANSLATOR FOR NGUYEN: For several days now the children, her children has logged onto the internet, read the articles and copied and have seen this and have brought it to her and she’s known about it.
DERRILL DE HEER: Okay, so give her the scarf... this is the scarf, that was in the book. It belonged to her son.
15:31
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Can you just say, too, that I’ve been waiting 43 years to return this to her. You’re a lovely, lovely woman and I’m sorry you lost two sons in the war.
CAMPBELL: Mrs Nguyen laments they were never able to find her son’s remains.
15:58
TRANSLATOR: And when she look at this then she can see her son.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Yes, they were very good soldiers.
DERRILL DE HEER: And well respected by Australians.
16:22
Man watches through window
Music
16:37
Mrs Nguyen at altar with notebooks and toy kangaroo
16:40
CAMPBELL: The notebook and the kangaroo are given pride of place on the family shrine. Within moments, Laurens feels a weight
16:45
Laurens and Roni
he’s carried most of his life has been lifted.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: It’s going to take a little while for it to sink in but the moment has… it’s here, you know, and meeting the mother was just the most amazing emotional experience for me, yes.
CAMPBELL: Roni you seem to be losing it more than Laurens.
RONI WILDEBOER: [crying] Well I know how important it’s been to him and it’s all culminated today. I’m so proud of him. I am so proud of my husband.
16:57
Ho Chi Minh City street scenes/ People swimming
Music
17:34
CAMPBELL: With the notebook returned, Derrill
17:50
De Heer visits veterans’ group
heads off on his mission, meeting veterans’ groups to pass on the combat records from Canberra. Walter Pearson, the veteran who now lives in Vietnam, helps out as his interpreter. Today it’s senior officers from their old nemesis, North Vietnam’s 33 regiment.
17:52
18:14
Australians killed more than a hundred of their soldiers at the Battle of Binh Ba. Walter was in the heart of the fight.
18:24
Pearson on bus with Vo Xuan Thu
These days he’s firm friends with a 33 veteran, Vo Xuan Thu. There’s an obvious respect between these old soldiers.
18:34
WALTER PEARSON: He said to me last night, look, ‘I’ve fought five different nations’ he said, ‘and the Australians were by far and away the hardest.’
18:48
CAMPBELL: What do you think about Derrill’s project?
18:54
VO XUAN THU: [Walter translates] It’s very good. It’ll help us gather more information about the people that we’re looking for.
18:58
Archival. Binh Ba battle
Music
19:14
CAMPBELL: For the 33 Regiment, Binh Ba was one of hundreds of battles as they moved through the bush living off the land. In the chaos of guerrilla warfare, they had little time to keep records of the dead. A regiment memorial
19:20
Battle memorial
near Binh Ba lists 2,100 killed in the war, out of an estimated 4,000.
WALTER PEARSON: So what you’ve got is you’ve got the name of the soldier, you’ve got his date of birth, where he came from, the unit he served in, when he had joined the army and when he died.
19:34
Pearson at memorial with De Heer and V/o: Xuan Thu
So with this one we don’t know what his family name was, we don’t even know what unit he belonged to. We do know that he joined the army in 1965 and he was killed in 1969.
19:56
CAMPBELL: Do you know where they’re buried?
VO XUAN THU: [Walter translates] No we don’t know where the majority of them are, we do know where some are but we don’t know where the majority are.
DERRILL DE HEER: So this is their ‘missing in action’?
WALTER PEARSON: In part, yes.
DERRILL DE HEER: In part.
20:06
VO XUAN THU: [Walter translates] About twenty per cent of them we know where, we’ve recovered their remains.
CAMPBELL: That’s all.
WALTER PEARSON: Yeah eighty per cent of them are missing.
20:30
CAMPBELL: Walter has only disdain for Australia’s involvement in the war. He was seriously wounded and like Laurens has suffered decades of post-traumatic stress disorder.
WALTER PEARSON: Well my personal view is it was a
20:37
Pearson
waste of time, money, effort and resources. I mean we shouldn’t have been here and if we had understood what the Vietnamese were on about which was basically reuniting their country and making it free and independent, well we shouldn’t have been here.
20:50
De Heer and Pearson with Vo Xuan Thu in restaurant
CAMPBELL: Derrill doesn’t share his dark view. As a professional soldier he says he did his job well and left politics to the politicians. What they agree on is that old enmities should be forgotten.
21:03
DERRILL DE HEER: Soldiers get on with soldiers. We have a particular sense of humour. We will drink beer together, eat noodles together and I think there are
21:21
De Heer. Super:
Derrill de Heer
some very disgruntled people at home in Australia. I think that this, this is really a peaceful thing and after all, the Australian Government has now recognised the Vietnamese Government for the last 39 years and it’s time for some people to move on.
21:29
Incense and spirit gifts on fire
Music
21:46
Nguyen Bach Dang proffers incense
CAMPBELL: Sadly it’s already too late to recover most of the soldiers’ remains. Too many years have passed, too much land has been developed and too many bones have just dissolved in the acidic soil. But simply finding the location can bring peace.
21:52
Field at piggery
Nguyen Bach Dang now knows his brother from 33 Regiment was buried in this field after dying in the battle of Binh Ba.
22:12
Nguyen Bach Dang/ Fire burning
Music
22:20
DERRILL DE HEER: There were no remains left because there’d been some excavation there and
22:27
Men at ceremony
he carried out ceremonies and the ceremonies will
22:31
De Heer
actually allow him to take the spirits back to Ho Chi Minh City so he’s been able to take home the wandering soul.
22:37
Bunch of flowers
Music
22:45
Banquet at Mrs Nguyen’s home
CAMPBELL: Back in the South, Derrill and Laurens make one last visit to Mrs Nguyen’s home. The family has prepared a banquet and an invitation.
22:55
NGUYEN THI HIEU: You are the same age as my son. Would you agree to be my son?
TRANSLATOR FOR NGUYEN: So now I want to adopt you, become my son, do you agree or not?
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Oh very proud, yes.
23:04
Laurens with Nguyen family, holds child
23:27
Family pose for photo with Wildeboers
CAMPBELL: It’s a new friendship that will bring many obligations but Laurens is happy to accept it. For him at least a war he fought 43 years ago is finally over.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Extended family.
23:33
I hope I blend in all right. [laughing, smiling]
RONI: Yeah, you do.
23:48
Credits
Reporter: Eric Campbell
Camera: David Martin
Editor: Scott Monro
23:54
Further Information
Anyone who has personal artefacts from the conflict and would like them to be returned to family members in Vietnam, please contact:
Dr. Bob Hall,
Operation Wandering Souls Project,
UNSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy,
PO Box 7916,
Canberra BC, ACT 2610 Australia
ph: :61 2 6268 8848
fax: :61 2 6268 8879
email:
PRODUCTION
SCRIPT
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
INTERNATIONAL EDITION
2012
Vietnam – Wandering Souls
25 mins 53 secs
©2012
ABC Ultimo Centre
700 Harris Street Ultimo
NSW 2007 Australia
GPO Box 9994
Sydney
NSW 2001 Australia
Phone: 61 2 8333 4383
Fax: 61 2 8333 4859
Publicity
Vietnam helped Australia find its last six soldiers missing in action. Now two Australians - former veterans Derrill de Heer and Dr Bob Hall - are aiming to return the favour.
Using Australian war records, maps and combat references, they’ve produced the first comprehensive account of where nearly 4,000 missing Vietnamese troops might be found.
In a country where most families lost someone during the years of war, the enduring grief for many is not knowing where their loved ones had fallen. Without that knowledge they believe their dead will be wandering souls who will have no peace. Nor will the survivors.
"I’m very happy to be able to return this information to the Vietnamese people, particularly veterans. Soldiers get on with soldiers. We have a particular sense of humour. We’ll drink beer together, eat noodles together. And I think where there are some very disgruntled people at home in Australia, this is really a peaceful thing." DERRILL DE HEER Vietnam veteran
Enter Laurens Wildeboer. He’s spent the years since his return from Vietnam trying to forget the horrors and futility of war. And yet he’d held onto some very strong reminders of that time – a journal, a book of poetry and a scarf owned by one or more North Vietnamese soldiers. There were very few clues but Laurens’ fellow Vietnam Vets have helped him find an important connection – the mother of the soldier who’d committed his daily accounts of battle to a journal. The journey to return the diary becomes a cathartic pilgrimage.
"You know I’ve often heard guys say you should come back here to purge the soul or purge the spirit. And it’s amazing. It’s not until you go through it yourself that you realize how beneficial it is to return and have a look at the place and meet the people who show no sign of resentment or misgiving." LAURENS WILDEBOER Vietnam Veteran
Correspondent Eric Campbell joins Laurens and the other veterans for what is a highly emotional trip back to Vietnam. Laurens’ effort to return the relics to one 85 year old generates considerable interest among the local media and when it comes to the handover there’s not a dry eye in the house.
Ceremony in field
CAMPBELL: When you’re looking for the dead, it’s polite to let their spirits know you’re coming.
00:00
Gifts for spirits in fire
Music
00:06
WALTER PEARSON: Whenever you come into these areas where people have died, or you’ve got memorials to people, it’s the custom that we put flowers or incense down just as the first thing we do,
00:10
to sort of say to the spirits that we’re here, to the spirits of those people that are gone, that we’re here and we’re paying respect to them.
00:23
Vietnamese man
(VIETNAMESE MAN SPEAKS AND PEARSON TRANSLATES)
00:30
Sometimes people have information... some individuals have information.....
00:36
CAMPBELL: Walter Pearson is a Vietnam combat veteran and a former army interpreter who now lives here in a small village.
00:42
Vietnamese man with children
He’s grown used to seeing Vietnamese friends searching for the remains of loved ones killed in the war.
00:49
Nguyen Bach Dang proffers incense
Nguyen Bach Dang’s brother died fighting Australian troops here forty three years ago.
00:55
A handful of comrades is still checking the surrounding fields to find where he was buried.
01:08
Nguyen Bach Dang
NGUYEN BACH DANG: We miss him a lot and have continued to search for him since 1975 but we haven’t been able to get any information about him.
01:17
Vietnam War file footage
Music
01:25
CAMPBELL: Australia entered the Vietnam War fifty years ago. For a decade they fought alongside South Vietnamese to stop a takeover by the communist North. Some five hundred Australians were killed and perhaps two million Vietnamese.
01:29
Fade up from b&w to colour. Modern Vietnam street scenes
A whole generation has grown up since the North won the war in 1975, but there’s hardly a family here that didn’t lose someone or hasn’t searched for their grave. Australia went to great lengths to find the remains of six soldiers who went missing in action
01:54
Campbell to camera
in the Vietnam War, but among the Vietnamese they were fighting, some three hundred thousand soldiers are still missing. It is intensely painful for the families even after all these years because in Vietnamese tradition, the souls of the dead will not have peace until they’re found.
02:17
Market
02:38
Pearson. Super:
Walter Pearson
WALTER PEARSON: From their point of view, their cultural instinct is and their desire is to have the remains brought back home. They feel that then they can do the usual rituals every year and so on around the grave and they feel that the person will be at rest.
02:44
File from Australian Story
Music
03:02
Vision of Pearson searching ex Australian Story 2007
CAMPBELL: Walter Pearson understands that instinct better than anyone. He was part of a project to find the six missing Australian servicemen. It took five years of planning, fundraising and digging until the last grave was found in 2007.
WALTER PEARSON: I didn’t know anything much about it. I actually worked on the file when I was here in 1972 but when I was approached by Operation Aussies Home and Jim Bourke I suddenly realised that there were families out there who were yet to sort of have some resolution over this issue. Every one of the families that we dealt with had a problem and it had a huge
03:04
Pearson
impact on all those families and bringing the remains home had real resolution for everyone.
03:43
Vietnam road scenes. People on bicycles
03:50
CAMPBELL: But there’s little resolution here.
03:58
Families register missing relatives
04:02
Families gather at meeting
At mass meetings like this, families register the names of lost relatives and swap information on recent searches. It is a sad but businesslike quest undiminished by passing decades. The main problem is there are almost no official records of where their relatives were killed.
04:12
Woman addressing meeting holding Bravery Certificate
WOMAN ADDRESSING MEETING: The Bravery Certificate is only a piece of paper to prove they died a war hero – whereas to be able to find where they are requires a death certificate.
04:32
Offerings in fire
Music
04:45
CAMPBELL: Vietnam helped Australia find its six missing soldiers, known as MIAs. Australia has done little to help Vietnam in return – until now.
04:53
De Heer at Australian War Memorial
In the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, another group of veterans is searching for the dead.
05:29
De Heer with archivist
Derrill de Heer served two tours in Vietnam. Today he’s combing through the records of every fire fight Australians were involved in.
05:36
De Heer and Hall with archives
A fellow veteran, Dr Bob Hall, started the project seven years ago to assess how effective the Australian taskforce had been… but the research has also shown where nearly four thousand enemy soldiers fell. After the six Australian MIAs were found, Derrill and Bob realised they could help the Vietnamese find their missing soldiers.
DR BOB HALL: The key to this study
06:00
Hall and De Heer. Super:
Dr. Bob Hall
University of NSW
really is those contact reports. You know, as a platoon commander, I mean when you were in the bars of Dat Do I was out in the bush filling out these reports - and there are a couple of mine in there somewhere - but you know every time you had a contact you had to fill out these reports and we used to think they were useless at the time, but now they’re a record of every battle we fought and they show the date,
06:29
Army map
time, place, the number of enemy who were killed and that information gives us every approximate burial site…
06:56
CAMPBELL: They’ve called the project Operation Wandering Souls and they’ve been sharing the information with Vietnamese families and veterans still searching for peace. Derrill de Heer is about to make his final trip to Vietnam.
DERRILL DE HEER: I think this has been
07:04
Hall and De Heer
a great experience at the end of my life.
DR BOB HALL: Yeah, yeah you only get a couple of... a couple of chances in your life to make a real difference and this is one of them.
07:21
Laurens’ enlistment photo
Music
07:31
CAMPBELL: “This is how it all began. This is the day you enlisted.”
LAURENS WILDEBOER: “Seventeen years old.”
CAMPBELL: “My goodness.
01:32
Laurens and Roni show Campbell photos
What a handsome young boy you were.”
CAMPBELL: The project has struck a deep chord with one veteran who until now refused to have
07:37
anything to do with Vietnam. Laurens Wildeboer was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, decades after he served as a mechanic in the war.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: The photo was taken because it was the first time that a bridge layer had laid a bridge in Vietnam.
07:43
Laurens and Roni walk down country town street
08:02
CAMPBELL: He keeps a low profile with his second wife Roni in country Victoria, never goes to the local RSL and never marches on Anzac Day.
08:05
Laurens and Roni at café outdoors
LAURENS WILDEBOER: There was one particular incident where a Vietnamese interpreter was interrogating a peasant that we’d come across on a farm who’d been
08:20
Laurens. Super:
Laurens Wildeboer
wounded. The interpreter wasn’t getting the answers that he wanted so he shot him. And I was surrounded by my work people who were all believers in the Geneva Convention and nobody did anything and at the time I was able to dismiss that as, you know, the boys’ club..... yeah, yeah he deserved that - but later on I realised that that was just a no no and the realisation that we were killing people who were just farmers, peasants.... people just wanting to live out their lives.... raise their children..... not interested in whether it was communist or whatever – that was somebody else’s fight.
08:28
Laurens and Roni at café
CAMPBELL: Laurens vowed he would never go back to Vietnam, there were too many bad memories,
09:16
Archive. Wartime Saigon
but after hearing of Derrill de Heer’s project he’s decided to return with him to the wartime capital, Saigon.
09:24
Fade up to colour from b&w. Modern Ho Chi Minh City
He can’t show any families where their loved ones are buried, but he has something just as valuable to give.
09:32
Laurens shows photos
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Towards the end of my service in March ‘69 roughly, I was out with a squadron of tanks and the infantry had bought in some documents as well as weapons that they’d got out of a bunker system.
09:41
Handwritten poetry papers
I picked up the documents, flicked through it and noticed that it was beautifully written poetry, beautifully illustrated and there was a scarf. So I picked up two documents, there was a name on the front of one of them and I decided I wanted to hang on to these. I’m not sure if my intentions were clear at the time but later on I thought I’d like to get these back to the family
09:55
Laurens
but communications being what it was, there was no internet or , so there was no way but I just, I hung on to them for 43 years.
10:17
Illustrated poetry papers
Music
10:25
CAMPBELL: The poetry book, later translated, continued to haunt him.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: It was another thing, another chink in the armour that showed me we weren’t fighting people who weren’t human because it was so beautifully illustrated and beautifully written.
10:32
CAMPBELL: Laurens sent the notebooks to Canberra to see if the Wandering Soul team could find who wrote them.
10:48
Ho Chi Minh City street scenes
Derrill’s contacts in Vietnam couldn’t identify the poet, but they did find the identity of the second notebook’s author, a soldier whose family still lives outside Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City and now Laurens has come back to keep his promise.
10:57
Laurens and Roni greet Pearson
11:17
Tomorrow they’ll be meeting the soldier’s mother to return his belongings.
11:29
Ho Chi Minh City street scenes
LAURENS WILDEBOER: You know, I’ve often heard guys say that you should come back here just to
11:35
Laurens and Roni walk
cleanse the soul or cleanse the spirit and it’s amazing. It’s not until you go through it yourself you realise how beneficial it is to return and have a look at the place and meet the people who show no signs of any ill will or resentment.
RONI WILDEBOER: Very forgiving aren’t they, the Vietnamese?
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Yes, amazing.
11:38
Hotel exterior
Music
11:59
Laurens and Roni board bus with media
CAMPBELL: The story of the notebook has provoked a storm of interest in Vietnam. Derrill has had to hire a bus to accommodate the hordes of local media wanting to see it returned.
DERRILL DE HEER: This one has a.... like,
12:07
De Heer and Campbell on bus. De Heer shows notebooks
personal particulars form, and tells the history of this soldier and this is what Laurens found, the two books plus this scarf which has been carefully kept in the notebook. So we’re taking it back to the mother, which we found the mother through Colonel Tien who has worked in this field trying to return artefacts to families.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: You think about keeping this altogether
12:23
Laurens on bus
for 43 years, in hindsight.... my God. I must have moved 10 times in all that time. I don’t think I’ve got anything else left from all that, except this. When I say I’ve hung onto this for 43 years.... even my first wife didn’t stay that long.
CAMPBELL: As we can see. [laughing]
12:53
And what are you hoping to do today, apart from give back the belongings, the tangible link to her son, is anything else on your mind?
LAURENS WILDEBOER: For me personally and I’m not sure if I can describe it, relieve the frustration, the anger that I’ve felt as a result of Vietnam and set some ghosts free.
13:13
I’m going to make a connection with this woman… yeah.
13:38
Street from bus
13:44
Laurens and others walking to house
Music
13:52
CAMPBELL: In Australia, the pain of war has been a private burden for veterans and their families, little understood by the rest of the community. But in Vietnam it’s a shared experience, the suffering affecting everyone.
13:58
De Heer with box enters house
It’s a somewhat awkward arrival, surrounded by cameras and looking for the mother of the dead soldier.
14:15
Laurens and De Heer with mother and interpreter returning son’s possessions
But soon the onlookers are forgotten.
14:28
DERRILL DE HEER: [meeting Nguyen Thi Hieu] “So he always had this wish to try and find the family. (TRANSLATED TO MOTHER) And we were both soldiers...(breaks down)...
And ah.... here, Laurens...(takes book out of box) ...open the book up... and show it...... and this first page, open up to that page....
(TO MOTHER) Your son’s writing?(TRANSLATED TO MOTHER)
This scarf was found inside this book....
15:17
CAMPBELL: Nguyen Thi Hieu is eighty five and never learned to read or write, but she tells them she understands the notebook’s importance as the last record of her son, Phan Van Ban.
15:20
TRANSLATOR FOR NGUYEN: For several days now the children, her children has logged onto the internet, read the articles and copied and have seen this and have brought it to her and she’s known about it.
DERRILL DE HEER: Okay, so give her the scarf... this is the scarf, that was in the book. It belonged to her son.
15:31
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Can you just say, too, that I’ve been waiting 43 years to return this to her. You’re a lovely, lovely woman and I’m sorry you lost two sons in the war.
CAMPBELL: Mrs Nguyen laments they were never able to find her son’s remains.
15:58
TRANSLATOR: And when she look at this then she can see her son.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Yes, they were very good soldiers.
DERRILL DE HEER: And well respected by Australians.
16:22
Man watches through window
Music
16:37
Mrs Nguyen at altar with notebooks and toy kangaroo
16:40
CAMPBELL: The notebook and the kangaroo are given pride of place on the family shrine. Within moments, Laurens feels a weight
16:45
Laurens and Roni
he’s carried most of his life has been lifted.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: It’s going to take a little while for it to sink in but the moment has… it’s here, you know, and meeting the mother was just the most amazing emotional experience for me, yes.
CAMPBELL: Roni you seem to be losing it more than Laurens.
RONI WILDEBOER: [crying] Well I know how important it’s been to him and it’s all culminated today. I’m so proud of him. I am so proud of my husband.
16:57
Ho Chi Minh City street scenes/ People swimming
Music
17:34
CAMPBELL: With the notebook returned, Derrill
17:50
De Heer visits veterans’ group
heads off on his mission, meeting veterans’ groups to pass on the combat records from Canberra. Walter Pearson, the veteran who now lives in Vietnam, helps out as his interpreter. Today it’s senior officers from their old nemesis, North Vietnam’s 33 regiment.
17:52
18:14
Australians killed more than a hundred of their soldiers at the Battle of Binh Ba. Walter was in the heart of the fight.
18:24
Pearson on bus with Vo Xuan Thu
These days he’s firm friends with a 33 veteran, Vo Xuan Thu. There’s an obvious respect between these old soldiers.
18:34
WALTER PEARSON: He said to me last night, look, ‘I’ve fought five different nations’ he said, ‘and the Australians were by far and away the hardest.’
18:48
CAMPBELL: What do you think about Derrill’s project?
18:54
VO XUAN THU: [Walter translates] It’s very good. It’ll help us gather more information about the people that we’re looking for.
18:58
Archival. Binh Ba battle
Music
19:14
CAMPBELL: For the 33 Regiment, Binh Ba was one of hundreds of battles as they moved through the bush living off the land. In the chaos of guerrilla warfare, they had little time to keep records of the dead. A regiment memorial
19:20
Battle memorial
near Binh Ba lists 2,100 killed in the war, out of an estimated 4,000.
WALTER PEARSON: So what you’ve got is you’ve got the name of the soldier, you’ve got his date of birth, where he came from, the unit he served in, when he had joined the army and when he died.
19:34
Pearson at memorial with De Heer and V/o: Xuan Thu
So with this one we don’t know what his family name was, we don’t even know what unit he belonged to. We do know that he joined the army in 1965 and he was killed in 1969.
19:56
CAMPBELL: Do you know where they’re buried?
VO XUAN THU: [Walter translates] No we don’t know where the majority of them are, we do know where some are but we don’t know where the majority are.
DERRILL DE HEER: So this is their ‘missing in action’?
WALTER PEARSON: In part, yes.
DERRILL DE HEER: In part.
20:06
VO XUAN THU: [Walter translates] About twenty per cent of them we know where, we’ve recovered their remains.
CAMPBELL: That’s all.
WALTER PEARSON: Yeah eighty per cent of them are missing.
20:30
CAMPBELL: Walter has only disdain for Australia’s involvement in the war. He was seriously wounded and like Laurens has suffered decades of post-traumatic stress disorder.
WALTER PEARSON: Well my personal view is it was a
20:37
Pearson
waste of time, money, effort and resources. I mean we shouldn’t have been here and if we had understood what the Vietnamese were on about which was basically reuniting their country and making it free and independent, well we shouldn’t have been here.
20:50
De Heer and Pearson with Vo Xuan Thu in restaurant
CAMPBELL: Derrill doesn’t share his dark view. As a professional soldier he says he did his job well and left politics to the politicians. What they agree on is that old enmities should be forgotten.
21:03
DERRILL DE HEER: Soldiers get on with soldiers. We have a particular sense of humour. We will drink beer together, eat noodles together and I think there are
21:21
De Heer. Super:
Derrill de Heer
some very disgruntled people at home in Australia. I think that this, this is really a peaceful thing and after all, the Australian Government has now recognised the Vietnamese Government for the last 39 years and it’s time for some people to move on.
21:29
Incense and spirit gifts on fire
Music
21:46
Nguyen Bach Dang proffers incense
CAMPBELL: Sadly it’s already too late to recover most of the soldiers’ remains. Too many years have passed, too much land has been developed and too many bones have just dissolved in the acidic soil. But simply finding the location can bring peace.
21:52
Field at piggery
Nguyen Bach Dang now knows his brother from 33 Regiment was buried in this field after dying in the battle of Binh Ba.
22:12
Nguyen Bach Dang/ Fire burning
Music
22:20
DERRILL DE HEER: There were no remains left because there’d been some excavation there and
22:27
Men at ceremony
he carried out ceremonies and the ceremonies will
22:31
De Heer
actually allow him to take the spirits back to Ho Chi Minh City so he’s been able to take home the wandering soul.
22:37
Bunch of flowers
Music
22:45
Banquet at Mrs Nguyen’s home
CAMPBELL: Back in the South, Derrill and Laurens make one last visit to Mrs Nguyen’s home. The family has prepared a banquet and an invitation.
22:55
NGUYEN THI HIEU: You are the same age as my son. Would you agree to be my son?
TRANSLATOR FOR NGUYEN: So now I want to adopt you, become my son, do you agree or not?
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Oh very proud, yes.
23:04
Laurens with Nguyen family, holds child
23:27
Family pose for photo with Wildeboers
CAMPBELL: It’s a new friendship that will bring many obligations but Laurens is happy to accept it. For him at least a war he fought 43 years ago is finally over.
LAURENS WILDEBOER: Extended family.
23:33
I hope I blend in all right. [laughing, smiling]
RONI: Yeah, you do.
23:48
Credits
Reporter: Eric Campbell
Camera: David Martin
Editor: Scott Monro
23:54
Further Information
Anyone who has personal artefacts from the conflict and would like them to be returned to family members in Vietnam, please contact:
Dr. Bob Hall,
Operation Wandering Souls Project,
UNSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy,
PO Box 7916,
Canberra BC, ACT 2610 Australia
ph: :61 2 6268 8848
fax: :61 2 6268 8879
email: