Gallipoli good, Vietnam bad

In 2004 I interviewed Ray Martin by asking him:

… you’ve been a big supporter of the Anzac Legend over the years. Considering your enthusiasm and passion for the Anzac legend, could you explain why you didn’t volunteer for military service in South Vietnam? (1962-72).

Don’t journalists who report on war have a professional and moral obligation to undertake some form of military training, much in the same way we require doctors, lawyers and mechanics to be "trade tested"?

Martin responded (by fax on November 15, 2004):

I found your fax offensive, but I’ll answer it.

Being a patriot, eulogizing the Anzac legend etc doesn’t require anyone to volunteer to fight a senseless, immoral war. Even Peter Cosgrove [then Chief of the Defence Forces] has acknowledged that Vietnam was wrong.

Your nonsense about ‘moral obligations’ to serve in the ADF [Australian Defence Forces], irrespective of the rights or wrongs of the war, is just that nonsense.

I support everyone of our troops who put their lives on the line. But that doesn’t require everyone else to sign up, every time Canberra decides to go to war.

Being a patriot doesn’t mean you blindly accept what the pollies [politicians] want. You’re entitled to your opinion. I’m entitled to disagree.

Martin provides no evidence to back up his assertion that Vietnam was immoral. For the record, General Cosgrove called the Vietnam War a mistake because it was militarily un-winnable not immoral, much in the same way that famous WWI correspondents Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and (Sir) Keith Murdoch called Gallipoli a disaster at the time. The Allies of which Australia was a member ended up winning WWI. The “Free World,” of which Australia was a member together with the United States, lost Vietnam in 1975 but won the Cold War against communism in 1989. Robert McNamara, the architect of the US war in Vietnam, later admitted the war was a mistake.

Respected commentator Dr Gerard Henderson has made the brilliant point, missed by many but so obvious:

As a consequence of Watergate, [US President] Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford, under pressure from Congress, walked away from the US commitment to provide military supplies to the anti-communist regime in South Vietnam.

This contributed to the conquest of South Vietnam by communist North Vietnam, which was supplied by the (then) Soviet Union.

Australia and the United States entered the Vietnam War in 1962 and pulled out in 1972 because of internal political pressure without losing a single battle. For three years an underdog ragtag South Vietnamese military managed to hold off the Communist North until 1975. If Gallipoli is seen as a romantic failure why not the three-year valiant struggle by our allies the South Vietnamese with their backs against the wall?

Be that as it may, the Martin mantra is that Gallipoli was good, but Vietnam bad.

This is an introduction to Martin’s story for 60 Minutes about Gallipoli (April 21, 2001):

Eight thousand, seven hundred and nine Aussie soldiers were killed at Gallipoli, but now 10 times that number of Aussie tourists make their pilgrimage each year. Most of them are about the same age as the soldiers who died there.

As Ray Martin reports, it's a phenomenon, almost a rite of passage - young Australians in search of our history, and perhaps in search of themselves.

The tone is reverential for Gallipoli but not for Vietnam. Why? Gallipoli was a military failure that cost more than 8,000 Australian lives and was fought in someone else’s backyard, Turkey.