By ALESHA CAPONE
IN THE sweltering jungles of Vietnam, John Pilkington would mix shaving cream with his tuna “to give it a bit of taste”.
Aged in his early twenties, Mr Pilkington had volunteered for Australian National Service and become a forward scout and rifleman in the Vietnam War.
As a member of the 6th and 9th Battalion, Mr Pilkington took many photos while serving in Vietnam.
One of the images, which features an army backpack with a bullet-hole, hangs on his bedroom wall in Taylors Hill.
The pack was shot while Mr Pilkington was lying on the ground beside it, re-loading his rifle’s magazine.
“So if I’m having a bad day, I can look at that and say, ’at least, I’m alive’,” he said.
Mr Pilkington has encouraged residents to support members of the Melbourne West Vietnam Veterans Sub-Branch, who will be selling fund-raising badges this week.
Mr Pilkington said he and many other Vietnam Veterans will never forget the ’disgraceful’ way they were treated upon returning to Australia during the 1970s.
“No-one was against them protesting against the war,” he said.
“What we didn’t appreciate were the brain-dead idiots – as we call them now – who spat on us and tipped paint on us, the people who came and put the blame on the soldiers, who in fact did a bloody good job.
“We did what we were told to do, and asked to do, in an honourable, honest way.”
Mr Pilkington remembers travelling home from the airport with his father, a World War II Veteran, after flying back to Australia:
“My father said to me, ’War? You call that a war? I was in a war, you were in a skirmish’.”
“I said, ’Dad, when bullets are flying around your head, you are in a war’,” Mr Pilkington said.
A book about Mr Pilkington’s battalion, by Rob Laurent, has a passage about the returned soldiers which says they “found the courage and earned the pride, which has always been associated with the name Anzac”.
“It still brings a tear to my eye,” Mr Pilkington said.
For details about Vietnam Veteran’s Badge Week, contact Ray Matthew on 0400 107 130.
