‘We slept in an Agent Orange area’
Army engineer Lance-corporal Murray Wardlaw never fired a shot in anger during two overseas conflicts, but made sure his fellow soldiers could.
Now 70 and living in Palmerston North, the armourer was responsible for repairing and maintaining weapons for Victor and Whisky companies of the 1st Battallion, Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, during stints in the Malaysian Confrontation and in the Vietnam War.
‘‘I was not a front-line fighter, but kept the mortars, rifles and machine-guns operational.’’
Wardlaw celebrated his 23rd birthday in 1969 at Nui Dat Camp in South Vietnam’s Phuoc Tuy Province, as a member of the Anzus V-force supporting the American Vietnam War effort.
The whole camp was regularly sprayed with defoliant Agent Orange, a toxic brew of herbicides, to keep the grass down and lessen any fire risk during the dry season, while the jungle around the camp was defoliated extensively. ‘‘We slept in an Agent Orange area... I wondered about any run-off getting into the water supply as the well was at the lowest part of the camp.’’
He suspects that similar eye defects in his two daughters may have been the result of his exposure to the chemicals.
Once a fortnight, Wardlaw would be sent out on patrol, setting up night ambushes along Viet Cong supply lines from the southeastern hamlet of Dat Do.
Wardlaw described those nights as nerve-wracking. The camp was surrounded by multiple rows of razor wire, and entrances and exits had to be negotiated though a maze path.
At the ambush coordinates, each patrol member took an hour on watch behind a machine-gun while the others slept nearby awaiting their turn.
‘‘Scared? You bet, but I was a soldier. I knew what to do, and how to do it, and I was prepared to do it, but I never saw a Viet Cong I could shoot at.
‘‘We found out later that they were supplying an 88-bed underground hospital equipped by the Russians.’’ He was flown home via Australia at the end of his tour. During the stop-off, the soldiers were ordered out of their uniforms and into civvies. The flight was also delayed to land under cover of the early hours. ‘‘We were told not to tell anyone where we’d been or what we had done. At Whenuapai when we got off the plane we were simply told ‘to disappear’. That was a result of the anti-war protests.’’ Mounting protest and pressure in New Zealand eventually forced Keith Holyoake’s National Government to call the troops home.
Wardlaw described the Viet Cong as tough, tenacious and courageous.
‘‘We outgunned them 100 to one, but they still kept taking us on.’’
New Zealand combat forces were withdrawn from Vietnam in 1971 at the cost of 37 lives and 187 wounded. The war ended in 1975 with the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government by the Communist North. While much
was written about the conflict in Vietnam, the Malaysian Confrontation and New Zealand’s involvement in it, is not so well known.
In 1963, the former British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, North Borneo and Sarawak amalgamated into the country called Malaysia.
Under President Sukarno, Indonesian opposition to the formation resulted in continued military incursions by its forces into Sarawak on the island of Borneo.
Prior to his time in Vietnam, Wardlaw was sent to Malaysia after the Malaysia Confrontation had ended and was stationed at Terendak. ‘‘New Zealand was a
member of the South East Asian Treaty Organisation. There were four battalions in 28 Commonwealth Brigade – 5000 soldiers. We were based at Terendak Camp, which was about 15 miles from Malacca, and there was a brothel on every corner along the road.’’ The confrontation was over by mid-1966.
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