52 years after the Battle of Long Tan, GARY SHIPWAY and MICHAEL MADIGAN looked back on former and journalist Frank Alcorta’s history in Vietnam

HEROIC Territory war veterans are thin on the ground but if you want a bona fide, gold-plated luminary whose achievements soar far beyond those of most garden variety “celebrities”, take a look at Frank Alcorta.

Decorated war hero, adventurer, cane cutter, writer, philosopher and raconteur — the Spanish-born Frank (who really should be a poster boy for our Immigration Department) grasped the English language so swiftly he ended up not merely speaking it with admirable eloquence, but teaching it to students at Darwin’s fledgling university.

Frank even wrote speeches for the Northern Territory’s first chief minister, Paul Everingham, then went on to pen millions more words as a journalist with the Northern Territory News and as Sunday Territorian deputy editor and author, all the while keeping thousands of his fellow Australians entertained as a magnificent raconteur, the rich tenor of that Spanish Basque accent garnishing his rhetorical flourishes.

We can, and should, celebrate Frank’s extraordinary life this weekend on the 52nd anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan.

It was under the cover of darkness in that Vietnamese rubber plantation amid a thundering tropical downpour on August 18, 1966, that the then youthful sergeant Frank Alcorta was faced with a life and death decision … a decision that went a long way to saving hundreds of trapped Australian soldiers facing death or capture.

Sgt Alcorta’s A Company, crammed inside armoured personnel carriers were rushing to the rescue of the surrounded D Company when they themselves became surrounded by thousands of Viet Cong.

D Company had faced heavy fighting as the advancing battalions of the North Vietnamese 275th Regiment and Viet Cong D445 Battalion attempted to destroy them.

Alcorta always told us the decision he made on that day was an easy one.

He could stay inside the armoured personnel carrier and certainly die, or die fighting like a soldier on the outside.

“Action had to be taken quickly, if I was going to die I was going to die fighting, so I charged outside and just kept firing until my ammunition ran out,” he told us.

“My machine gunner Ron Brett came right behind me and saved my life.

“When I ran out of ammunition I used my bayonet. They were all around us. It was bloody, fierce, hand-to-hand combat. It was kill or be killed.

“I think we surprised the Viet Cong with our ferocity and they cracked and ran.”

Sgt Alcorta was one of 105 soldiers from the RAR’s 6th Battalion who fought the 2000 enemy troops.

Seventeen Australians were killed in action and 25 were wounded.

Viet Cong casualties were put at more than 240.

Frank’s heroics in that Long Tan rubber plantation prompted his company commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mollison, to recommend him for a Victoria Cross, an honour he never received.

Lt Colonel Mollison wrote: “Frank Alcorta is the bravest man I have ever met. It was a privilege to have served with him and it is a monumental miscarriage of justice that he was not the recipient of several bravery awards”.

“Cumulatively, his bravery deeds warranted a VC but all he got was an MID (Mention in Dispatches). Two things mitigated against Frank Alcorta being suitably recognised,” he wrote.

“The first is that I was no longer commander of A Coy and the second was that, when we attempted to submit commendations towards the end of our tour, we were told not to bother as the whole quota for the Task Force had been awarded to soldiers in other units.”

Few in our nation knew about Frank Alcorta’s bravery until two years ago when, after a half-century-long crusade by his former lieutenant-colonel and Long Tan veteran Harry Smith, the soldiers of Long Tan finally received official recognition.

The upshot of Harry’s campaign is that Frank is now the proud recipient of a Medal of Gallantry.

But the national salute of recognition represented by that medal is but one chapter in a life by no means defined by one crowded hour in the battlefield.

Growing up in the Basque region of Spain, Frank was 23 when he arrived in Australia in 1960 as an eager immigrant with little more than “a pair of strong shoulders and a willingness to work hard’’.

He spent some time in an immigration camp before heading bush, where he hitched his way to Queensland and joined other migrants cutting cane, shooting dingoes, building fences for graziers.

He dabbled in a little opal prospecting before joining the Army in Brisbane a few years after arrival.

In later years, Frank was far too noble to lie to the world, and to himself, about his reasons for joining up, shunning cliches about “fighting for king and country, etc, etc’’.

Frank joined the Army because he thought the pay was good.

The snap decision led to his key role in that epic battle in Long Tan 52 years ago, which the highly literate Frank was later to equate to entering one of Dante Alighieri’s circles of hell.