THE first time Leongatha’s Rob Fennell saw his best army mate, Stan Whitford, was when he caught sight of him barrelling down the South Gippsland Highway in his old Zephyr.
The next time he was travelling down the highway to Puckapunyal, with his fiancée Margaret Hickey, to continue his National Service Training, the same car flashed past him again.
Rob didn’t imagine it was a coincidence, but Puckapunyal was a big place in the mid-1960s, with as many as 4000 conscripts on base at any one time, ahead of possible deployment to Vietnam.
But he managed to track him down.
“Hey, didn’t I see you on the South Gippsland Highway the other day,” said Rob, when he finally caught up with Whitford.
“Yeah, I’m from Wonthaggi. My family runs the sports store.”
And that, as they say, was the start of a beautiful friendship.
They went to Vietnam together, both sailing out on the HMAS Sydney for their 12-month tour of duty in April 1967. They were part of the same service unit throughout, and remembered by their mates for trying to punch the tripe out of each other during regular boxing sessions.
But the most amazing thing about it is, out of the 60,000 Australians who served in the Vietnam War, Leongatha’s Rob Fennell and Wonthaggi’s Stan Whitford are two of the seven men featured in the iconic Michael Coleridge photo of the 5 Platoon B Company 7RAR service unit waiting on a dusty road at Dat Do, in Phuoc Tuy Province, South Vietnam, for a ‘Huey’ helicopter to transfer them back to base at Nui Dat after Operation Ulmarra.
That photo, etched large into the Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial in Canberra, and the Australian psyche, will be the rallying point for the 50th Anniversary Commemorative Service, of the end of Australia’s involvement in the war, on Friday, August 18, 2023 from 10am to 12pm. The service will be broadcast nationally.
The other men in the photo; Private Peter Capp from Spring Ridge (near Gunnadah) NSW, Corporal Bob D’Arcy, Brisbane, Private Neal Hasted, Ipswich Qld, Private Ian Jury, Albany WA and Private Colin Barnett, NSW and the helicopter marshal, Private John Raymond Gould were all from interstate. Rob and Stan are the only Victorians, and they both come from this area.
Many Leongatha and district people, who have visited the Australian forces Vietnam memorial in Canberra, know it’s our own Rob Fennell in the photo, and come away tremendously proud, but few Wonthaggi people are aware of the connection with another of the servicemen in the image, Stan Whitford.
Stan came back to Wonthaggi after the war, and lived there for a further two and a half years, marrying his wife Robyn, having their first child locally, working in his parents' business and for a time at Cyclone Forgings before deciding to go into the motel business, ultimately moving 29 times in 40 years before settling down in Shepparton, which they love.
“His parents, Stan (senior) and Marie, ran Harry Simcocks’ Sports Store for a while, and Stan (junior) was actually one of ‘Hanley’s Milkos’, delivering milk around the town. But I didn’t know that,” said Peter Hanley of Wonthaggi, about the former local man being featured on the official Vietnam war memorial.
For Rob, it’s humbling, emotional and overwhelming, even a little embarrassing that his group was singled out for such prominence.
The tears roll down his face as he’s asked what the photograph by Michael Coleridge means to him.
“Too many memories,” says Rob.
“We’ve all stayed pretty quiet about it, it’s bigger than us,” he said.
At the time of the Canberra memorial’s dedication, in October 1992, Rob said the image was “for the whole Vietnam movement, we’re just part of that photo", although he did admit to having a "wow" moment when he first saw the scale of the memorial.
His emotional response underscores the complex feelings many Vietnam Veterans share about their experiences as conscripted soldiers, and afterwards.
“Stan was wounded, a Claymore mine. We got ambushed,” said Rob.
“A lot of the time, though, we would go on for days without seeing any Viet cong, then you’d make contact.”
The day of the photo, Rob’s group had joined the cordon-and-search operation by 7RAR of the coastal village of Lang Phuoc Hai and were going back to base in the evening without incident.
Some days they went out for as much as a week or longer, lugging all their food, equipment and supplies, digging into a location and setting up camp.
His country background helped him cope in the bush better than some but, after being plucked out of a bank job in Altona to go to Vietnam, the contrast could not have been more stark.
When they came back in March/April 1968, most 7RAR personnel went home on HMAS Sydney and landed in Sydney, only to be pelted with tomatoes as they marched into town. The Tet Offensive of January 1968 had played an important role in weakening support for the war and Rob’s group arrived home in the middle of it.
Rob, and a group of Victoria servicemen, flew into Essendon at 7.30 in the morning, and were quietly loaded into cars and spirited away so as not to attract attention.
It was an inauspicious homecoming.
Almost everyone who went to Vietnam, according to Rob, have had their troubles, his group included, with one of the fittest men in his group, also in the photo, Colin Barnett, dying of cancer before he could see the memorial.
But most managed to cope.
An avid sportsman; heavily into football, tennis, cricket and squash, Rob immersed himself in that when he came home to Leongatha, and work, two years later playing in Leongatha’s first premiership in 1970, on its return to the Gippsland league.
He married his school-time sweetheart, Margaret, in May, with Stan as his best man, naturally.
Another local Vietnam Veteran, Garth Lisle, was working for AMP at the time and encouraged Rob to start work as an AMP collector. It kicked off a highly successful career.
Never one to look back, it was only a strange turn of events that saw Rob and his mate Stan, together with their wives Marg and Robyn, return to Vietnam in later years, when Rob’s son Travis Fennell started a successful travel business there, married a local girl and had three children.
The first and subsequent visits completely changed Rob’s attitude to Vietnam, its “beautiful” people and his involvement in the war.
“A lot of them didn’t even know Australia was involved,” said Rob.
But the best thing to come out of the Coleridge photo and the dedication of the Vietnam War memorial in Canberra in 1992, is that they all attended, apart from Col, and promised to meet again, initially every four years, and now every two years.
“I hadn’t seen Stan for 20 years,” said Rob.
Ultimately the women came along too, sharing hugs, laughs and stories of identical experiences.
Rob is battling Parkinson's disease and missed last year’s reunion hosted by the Whitfords in Shepparton, who also ended up missing their own reunion after coming down with COVID, but it was a success anyway. Rob also had to turn down an official invitation to attend the commemoration in Canberra on the 18th, although he would have liked to go. Some of his mates are going, including Stan, and he’ll be there in spirit.
These days, the choice of Coleridge’s image, as the official portrayal of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, attracts plenty of comment but is universally accepted for its depiction of mateship, duty and action as well as our relationship with America. It was also one of the few colour photos taken by an official Australian army public relations photographer, who were tasked with taking only black and white images, and in fact, not even supplied with colour film.
P.S. Turns out there's another local connection.. One of the other veterans in the photo, Bob D'Arcy, has a sister, Jill Dunn, living in Inverloch,
And so representative is the photo of other Vietnam Veterans' experience that unconnected family members have sometimes proudly claimed that they have a relative in the picture as well, which is a response that is not at all discouraged by the men of 5 Platoon B Company 7RAR.
