Vietnam Veteran Paul Davison wakes up crying one morning and soon after quits his job as a NSW Police Sergeant.
It is the year 2000 and it comes after months of mental anguish over the job. Unbeknown to Paul, he’s been living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for years, but writes it off as sleep trouble and heightened instincts.
“I remember walking from where I live in Freshwater to Shelly Beach and always looking around, sussing things out,” he says. “I get upset when women walking towards me are looking at the ground – I think they should be aware of what’s going on around them.
“It’s all part of the PTSD. I don’t do this anymore.”
The condition emerges after a 33-year career in the force. “I have always been able to take a superior yelling at me. I just smile and shrug it off. But by the end, I just want to lay-one-on the bloke berating me. That’s when I think ‘OK, I’ve never been like this before’.”
A friend at the RSL suggests Paul sees a psychiatrist in Mosman who happens to be ex-Navy, which he does. The doctor asks Paul about flashbacks, dreams, and waking at 2-2.30am hot and sweaty. “This happens,” Paul confirms. “It happens all the time.”
Evidently, he is a typical case. He gives Paul some literature on the symptoms. The descriptions of PTSD behaviours closely match his own experience.
Paul’s story is one of the 30 in a book by Dave Morgan called Never Forgotten Vol 2.
It’s an informative read, poignant, as Vietnam Veterans’ Day is this Tuesday, 18 August.
His tour of duty was from December 1969 to October 1970.
Paul, a committed surfer since his youth, will be the first to tell you that he did not want to go to Vietnam. But the relatively new constable stationed at Drummoyne is conscripted into National Service. He tries everything to avoid going. He reports his bad knees, and his lower-back issues which means he can never ride a motorbike. But orders from high-command, and an obstinate physician, sees him on a plane bound for Vietnam.
“I really think we are going there just to help out,” he says.
Paul’s unit is B Squadron, 3 Cavalry Regiment, stationed at the main Australian base at Nui Dat. One of his duties is as a driver of armoured personnel carriers (APCs).
“Normally you go to a forward delivery troop where you spend a couple of weeks becoming acclimatised, then you go to the unit,” he says. “But I am left behind and miss this part of the training. I go straight to the unit and they put me in the officer’s mess, which I think is pretty cruisy. The next day one of the fellas hits a mine and is killed, and they send me out.”
It’s not usual for new drivers to lead. They’re generally further down the line, following the tracks of the lead driver. But for his first assignment, Paul is driving the lead track: “Every time I hear a crackle in the headset I think ‘this is it’.”
“Every time I hear a crackle in the headset I think ‘this is it’.”
Those first couple of days are harrowing but he comes to accept the futility of living in fear. “I think ‘this is stupid’ and that worrying is not going to do me any good.” Rather, he takes on the sentiment of Alfred E Neuman (Mad Magazine) on a poster in his locker … ‘What, me worry?’
He also develops a disdain for some officers, and in what he sees as abuse of authority. Some, he claims, are straight-up incompetent. “Also not a fan of politicians,” he adds. “I don’t go to commemorative events anymore. I object to politicians getting up and making speeches. They don’t care about lives. They only care about votes.”
He goes surfing during one R&R break at Vung Tau, and gets a board from a local hotel. He surfs alongside barbed wire which runs along the beach into the water, separating the soldiers’ area from the public. Paul sits on the other side of the wire.
“There is a lovely little right-hander, clean, about 4ft, no-one out, and a fella waving at me from the beach. He is a Second Lieutenant in charge of the Beach, or something. I ignore him. When I come in he starts to get up me about the beach being closed. I say ‘Mate, you’ve got to be kidding. You’re worried about me drowning when tomorrow I’m back in the bush and there’s a good chance I could hit a mine’.”
In one incident, he recalls driving an APC through a creek during Operation Hammersley, a standard security deployment, when the Section Sergeant’s vehicle driving behind is struck by a rocket propelled grenade (RPG): “They could have been only a couple of metres away,” he says of the enemy. “The bush is that thick. I can’t see anything.”
Paul says RPGs and land mines are the things you’re most concerned about. Some of his mates are killed, others wounded. They weigh on his mind even today. He says it’s not just on Vietnam Veterans’ Day when he thinks of the friends lost during the conflict: “I often think about them – don’t need a particular day.”
He is laid back and speaks with ease, telling stories, and occasionally regaling in laughter. He says he makes more close friends over two years in the army compared with 33 years in the police.
Paul has one of those personalities that is unchanging. Cool under pressure. The kind of man you would want next to you in a crisis. The kind of personality which can choose, amid the tumult of jungle warfare, to not worry about anything! But even with this genuine bravado, the insidiousness of war buries itself deep in the psyche.
He remembers his visit to the ex-Navy psych and learning more about PTSD: “Before the diagnosis I would never call them ‘flashbacks’.
“No, it’s like watching movies.
“And in them I can picture our mates, as plain as day.”
