Wednesday is Bowling Day

Just thought I'd mention that I bowled a personal best today. 213! That is also the best for my league this year. We're not professionals, we're mostly pensioners and grandmothers, and we play for fun. Our league average is about 140. Scores of 200 plus are still rare enough in our league to be exciting when they happen.

The Kovco Inquiry

According to leaks reported in the media today, the Australian Army’s inquiry into the death in Iraq of Jake Kovco has decided that he killed himself by accident. Jake Kovco’s mother has refused to accept this decision.

I extend my sympathy to Mrs Kovco, and to all other members of the Kovco family.

By far the greatest number of visitors to my website have been students or teachers, looking for information about my poem, He Was A Mate. What those visitors might not realise is that I wrote the poem as a way of articulating my feelings following the death of my friend Gary “Polly” Polglase, in Vietnam in 1968, and that Polly died in circumstances remarkably, you might say eerily, similar to those of Jake Kovco.

Firstly, Polly and I both served in Vietnam with 3RAR, Jake Kovco’s battalion. Secondly, Polly was killed by a single bullet to the temple, at a time when he was in a tent at Nui Dat with one other soldier. Finally, like the Kovco family, Polly’s family and friends were kept in the dark while the army fed them conflicting and misleading information about the circumstances of his death.

I feel particularly strongly about this. It is not just that Polly was a mate of mine. After all, he was the sort of bloke who had a lot of mates, and most of them knew him longer and better than I did. My particular interest comes from the fact that Polly was killed in my tent. In fact, he was killed while sitting on my bed.

I was with the rest of our platoon, on Operation Pinnaroo, in the Long Hai Hills at the time. The only member of the platoon who was back at Nui Dat was the bloke with whom I shared a tent. Polly was a dog handler, and he decided to go back to Nui Dat before the operation was over, because his dog was ill. Apparently he was sitting on my bed, chatting with my tent-mate when he was shot.

When the operation was over and the platoon returned to Nui Dat, I was only allowed back into my tent long enough to pack my gear. I saw the remains of a bloodstain and a chalk outline, both of which had been cleaned with only partial success, on the floor next to my bed. I also found a Polaroid negative in my wastepaper basket, on which the outline of a body could be seen on the floor next to my bed. There was a strong smell of disinfectant, and to this day I still associate that smell with Polly’s death.

I packed my gear and moved out of my tent. That night, with typical army tact and sensitivity, I was told I had to sleep in Polly’s bed. The next day I was transferred out of the platoon. Needless to say, so was the person Polly had been with when he died.

A few years ago, I met a member of Polly’s family for the first time, when his younger sister visited Canberra. She told me the army had given her family a series of different versions of what had happened, before Polly had eventually been listed as a non-battle casualty, killed by accident.

Is it any wonder that I feel a sense of déjà vu, and the deepest sympathy for Jake Kovco’s family and friends?

A Doubly Significant Anniversary

Today is the 20th anniversary of the passing of Phill Thompson, who, at the time of his death, was National President of the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia.

You can read my tribute to Phill on this link.

Phill (I use that spelling because that is how he always wrote the short version of his name) was one of the most inspirational people I have ever met. I was privileged to be able to watch him in action during the years in which he was National President of the VVAA and I was National Secretary.

Only Phill can possibly have known what caused him to make the decision to take his own life twenty years ago. I have always believed that the most important factor was his ileostomy operation. He was forced to have the operation he was forced to have when it was discovered that he had the familial polyposis that was the precursor to a form of cancer that had already killed several male members of his family. The heaviest workload of Phill’s years as National President of the VVAA came after that operation. He had always coped remarkably well with his health problems before the operation, and he continued to do so. But there can be little doubt that the prospect of living with this new health issue played heavily on his mind.

Apart from running the VVAA and being an inspirational leader for thousands of veterans and their families, Phill also prepared and presented the case for Vietnam veterans at the Agent Orange Royal Commission while coping with his own health problems. He was unable to sleep at night, and was constantly suffering pain and illness. At the same time, his dedication to the cause was putting a terminal strain on his marriage. His efforts to carry on under that pressure can only be described as heroic.

Today is also the anniversary of the death of John F Kennedy. I know the Australian news media reported this yesterday, but they make the same mistake every year. American history books tell us that this event occurred on the 22nd of November 1963. But between Australia and the USA there is a huge ocean, and a thing called the International Date Line. So the Kennedy assassination actually happened on the 23rd of November Australian time.

The Saddam Sentence

Once upon a time, Iraq was ruled by a despotic dictator, who routinely killed his political opponents. But that was in the bad old days. We invaded Iraq and overthrew the dictator. Now we remain in Iraq, so we can show its people a new style of politics. So what shall we do now? I know, let’s kill our new model Iraqi government’s most prominent political opponent!