SATURDAY, February 4, 1967, was a difficult day at the office for Major Peter Badcoe.
An officer with the Australian Army Training Team in Vietnam, he had spent the previous afternoon in a “fairly inconclusive scrap” with Vietcong forces at Hung Tra on the border of North and South Vietnam.
Saturday dawned with fresh fighting. Badcoe’s letters to his wife, Denise, and their three daughters recall that as his team of South Vietnamese soldiers entered the village of Sia, they"met the VC coming down the road".
“I was up with the point and we saw them a fraction before they saw us … We opened up and dropped several in the road and then it was straight out of the Wild West,” Badcoe writes.
Soon it was obvious that Badcoe’s troop of 150 men were outnumbered. “Then we were ordered to pull back as they were going to put in an air strike,” hewrites.
“I pleaded with the useless slobs not to, as it was an extremely friendly village … but we were overruled by the people at the Division and forced to pull back and they saturated the village in napalm.”
Badcoe doesn’t name "the useless slobs’’, although military experts say he is most likely describing a US air division.
Badcoe and his South Vietnamese colleagues were enraged by the attack. “It didn’t get the VC, they had all dug bunkers, but it got a hell of a lot of the villagers,” the Australian writes.
“When I said, ‘Well, now you are done, let’s get in there and clean it out’, they still refused to go in … All the advisers were ropeable. We called the Rgt Cmd (regimental commander) and theAPC (armoured personnel carrier) commander cowards to their faces.”
Two months later, Badcoe, 33, was killed by enemy fire in the Huong Tra District. The man who was scathing about the allied napalm attack on a central Vietnamese village, and who had dared to call his commanders cowards, remained loyal and committed to the end.
For his courage, Badcoe was awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest medal for bravery, when on February 23, 1967 he sprinted 600m across an area under enemy fire to ensure the safety of a wounded US medical adviser. He then led an attack on the machinegun emplacement, killing the gunners and recovering the body of another US adviser.
Badcoe also received the US Silver Star with Oak Leaf and the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross with Palm, Gold Star and Silver Star.
These and other medals, and a selection of 37 letters, audio recordings he sent to his family, photographs and other material will be auctioned in Sydney onMay 6.
Apart from the medals, which have been on loan to the Australian War Memorial since 1982, most of the artefacts have spent the past four decades in a timber box in his wife’s home.
Auction house Bonhams and Goodman estimate the collection could fetch between $400,000 and $600,000, although chairman Tim Goodman said “we just don’t know until we start marketing the auction and the public become aware of it”.
“But there is no doubt this is a very significant collection.”
Paul Ham, author of the new history best-seller Vietnam, yesterday described the letters as “very valuable documents by a man of extraordinary experience and courage”.
Ham said Badcoe’s outrage over February 4, 1967, “reflects a pattern that occurred throughout the war … The Australians found themselves again and again goingagainst the grain of the American war”.
Badcoe’s attempts to work with villages and protect them from Vietcong “was the right approach, it was the more humane approach”, he said.
“And that’s not just me saying this, but every military commander I’ve spoken to in Australia agrees.”
The Sia bombing had a profound impact on Badcoe.
“I spent all day Sunday and half of Monday getting out the bodies and cleaning up and trying to get the people a place to live and some food,” he writes in his February 7 letter.
“What do you say to them when their houses have been burnt and their families burnt to death? I was so furious and disgusted I don’t think I said a word all day. I just couldn’t speak.”
Badcoe’s eldest daughter, Carey, was 10 when her father was killed. She has spent the past few weeks transcribing the letters and says they have given her enormous insight into Badcoe’s strong ethics and his unwavering commitment to the South Vietnamese troops.
“As a child, I had no sense of that. But the way he talks about his troops - he often refers to them as ‘kids’ - and the work he did with them … he has a wonderful style of leadership, of standing up to lead the men on,” Ms Badcoe said.
Of the actions her father witnessed in Sia, she said: “He just doesn’t sound like the sort of person who would have shut up about these sorts of things. I can’t imagine him toeing the line.”
Ms Badcoe, who is chief executive of the Australian Business and Community Network, declined to say why her family was selling the prized collection. “It’s a personal issue, but my mother and sisters and myself are completely united in the decision.”
Australia has many private wealthy collectors who would love to own the Badcoe collection. Public institutions such as the Australian War Memorial are unlikely to bid because of the high price. Their only hope is a generous benefactor who buys it on the museum’s behalf, or bequeaths it at a later date.
AWM senior curator Nick Fletcher told The Weekend Australian: “The memorial would love to display every VC awarded to an Australian. That isn’t possible, however, and we’re extremely grateful to the Badcoe family for allowing us to display the medals for such a long time.”
Of the Badcoe letters, Mr Fletcher said: "It’s unusual for an older soldier to write in that kind of detail. The first time men go into battle they tend to feel a need to express their thoughts. But as they become more hardened and realise the realities of war, their response is more that they want to block it out.
“Major Badcoe is very honest, not only in how he describes action, but in his responses to it. He was brave, loyal and clearly committed to the job, even though you sense through the letters he wanted desperately to be with his family.”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23448129-31477,00.html