The War Within

by Don Tate

At the age of 19, Don Tate volunteered for duty in the Vietnam War. This is his story, of the trouble-strewn path to manhood in the shadow of his father, a violent petty criminal surviving horrific war injuries and years of hospitalisation and struggling to find a place in society that did not want to recognise his military service.

Genres: Biography

464 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2008

Reviews

[M.A. McRae]

Note: this review contains spoilers - though not, I think, anything that will make the read any the less worthwhile. I have not given this book a star rating. I don't know how to rate it.

The War Within.

I have sometimes thought that young men think of nothing but fightin’, drinkin’ and rootin’. One thing I gathered from Don Tate’s autobiography is that I was more right than I could ever have believed. It is unusual to find an autobiography that shows all the worst aspects of a person, rather than the best aspects, but this one does.

He was raised rough, the eldest of a large family and his father a criminal, though rather a stupid one as he regularly spent time in prison. And his father encouraged fighting, hitting his sons so that they become accustomed to being knocked down and then getting up again. ‘Learning how to use your fists seemed natural in that environment. A chipped tooth or a bloodied lip or nose was part of the ritual, a quick way to learn how to defend yourself. ‘Keep your guard up,’ our father would say, giving me a clout on the chin, then when I did defend myself, he’d put one into my breadbasket and knock the wind out of me. That brought the second part of the lesson: ‘Keep your elbows together when you’re defending.’

It is the story of Don Tate’s life – he gets knocked down and he gets up again.

But as he writes it, Don Tate is not an admirable character. Women are for sex, and men are for fighting, usually with little reason.
Indeed, by the time he is in the army, he appears to be a perfectly despicable man, violent and unpredictable, with little regard for any civilised values - this view is from his own story in his own words. There was an incident in which he and a mate threw a ‘Chink’ off a train, didn’t know whether he was dead, injured, or unharmed, but their only thought was that they should ‘create an alibi’ so they would run less risk of being charged with a possible murder. And sbout that mate – Doug Peterson. Tate saw him as a good mate. He admired him. ‘I’d seen him beat the living daylights out of a woman once in a back alley outside a club in George Street, and when I’d gone to intervene, he’d threatened to bash me as well.’ And later: Peterson was talking: ‘Ah, me and a mate of mine from Rottnest picked up this abo whore,’ he said, ‘and we took her about twenty bloody miles out of Perth for a good rootin’. We bought her a bottle of gin, and she reckoned we could have whatever we wanted in return. But the bloody bitch drank the whole bottle by the time we got there, and was pissed as a fart and raving like a lunatic, and started jackin’ up about it all. Big bird she was too, a real fuckin’ heifer. Anyway, we gave her a bit of hurry-up and she came across for both of us eventually, and we roughed her up a bit for the fun of it afterwards because she was a slut.’

As I said, despicable.

And yet, there are hints that there was always another side to his character, which he barely mentions. Early on, there was something about writing competitions and doing well at English. It was so buried in other things that it was easy to miss. And while in Vietnam, ‘He’d put me out as an early-warning sentry in a bamboo thicket while the rest of the blokes were digging their shell-scrapes for the night, and I’d taken the opportunity to whip out a notebook. I was working on a poem to my mother when he crept up behind me.’ A poem for his mother? It doesn’t fit with the tough, uncaring, semi-criminal he depicts himself as. He also took photographs, including film, another example of a creative streak.

Does Tate have a deep self-hatred that he prefers to show the worst aspects of himself? I think he may be judging himself as worse than he is. But what do I know? It is so very far from my life experience.

The Vietnam War, and Tate was heavily involved in action from the very first patrol. He sees battles, he sees injustice, he sees incompetence, and he sees the wrong men getting the medals. It is ugly. And the 'R & R' breaks could also be ugly. He and a mate went into a rough neighbourhood, 'ficky fick' is offered, and they are happy to take advantage. But the woman his mate was using started to bleed - a miscarriage. ‘I didn’t know the ins and outs of what he’d done. But what I saw in that bowl, that night, swimming in the pool of blood, wasn’t just a dead baby, but a measure of their lives when it was all added up. The sum total of all of them, the people of that war-torn country, with us and the Americans going berserk in it. Their lives were just a bloody mess.’

Tate was very badly wounded, and his war ended - at least that particular war. He spent around two years in hospital including twelve months in a full body plaster. For a formerly active man, it's a wonder he was able to remain sane. He has a real resilience. In spite of everything, he battles on.

It was when he was in hospital that he met Carole, the woman who was to be his wife. Carole sounds a wonderful woman, understanding and forgiving. And there was a lot to forgive at times, as he still liked fighting and he still liked women.

Even when handicapped by a permanently ruined hip, Tate still thinks it’s a good thing to have a fight – ‘manly’ or something. A large part of this attitude was his stupid father, no doubt. Tate's father was not much of a man; it didn't stop his oldest son loving and admiring him. A comment from his father that very much pleased him - ‘Jesus, you can blue these days. I didn’t think you could go that well. Good onya!’

The years passed, jobs, children, fights, infidelities, but also in this time, Donald Tate went back to school, and eventually qualified as an English teacher. And again he makes little of this at the same time as he details those things he is not proud of. Or is he proud of them? Most people hide away their more stupid actions, but Tate displays them defiantly - like 'Judge me if you dare.'

Tate was always a battler. He battled other men, he battled circumstances, and he battled the histories - his unit had been wiped from history. It was largely because of Don Tate that it was corrected.

And still he battles. There are people who deny what has been officially acknowledged, and people who call him a fraud - he calls them 'gutless bastards.' But he has had official acknowledgement that all he has claimed is fact. That is quite enough for me; I would not dream of calling this man a fraud.

He battles himself as well. He has lived a life with a sort of aggression that is foreign to most of us. After he made an attempt at suicide, he found himself with a therapist. After many, many sessions, the therapist points out a few things for him - ‘You survived a harsh upbringing, and helped raise your brothers and sisters in a difficult time. You risked your life and fought for your country. Only a small percentage of men ever get to do that. I know you saved some schoolgirls from something terrible one time too, and never got any recognition or reward for it. I know you were bashed on other occasions, while you were a teacher, which you haven’t even told me about. I’ve done some research of my own on you, Don Tate. I know more about you than you think. Yet, despite all that, you kept at it. You gained a university degree. You’ve received community honours, even a medal, I understand. I heard you played representative sport at one time, despite your leg problems. And you’ve stayed married to your wife Carole all this time when many, many veterans haven’t. And you’ve raised a family you can be rightly proud of. What more can you ask of yourself?’

Any man or woman who sees war action is scarred by it. Tate says that the images would last a lifetime - ‘the impact of that bullet smashing through the bones of my hip joint; of straining to run through that mud into the storm of machine-gun fire; of the bodies at Thua Tich, sprawled in the dust, broken and bloodied, and again, on the way into Xuyen Moc, shredded; of the shattered leg of ‘Doc’ Dann; of the hatred and despair in the eyes of the mother of that dead fetus, and the stink of it, and the blood, drip, drip, dripping; and of those first dead bodies on my very first patrol an eternity ago, torn asunder, the eyes open, yet unseeing; and the weight of a dead mate, carried out on my shoulder on bamboo poles.’

Tate has had a great deal of ill luck in his life, he has lived with pain ever since that bullet ripped apart his hip joint, but in one thing, he was very lucky - his wife.
'My greatest treasure had been the wife and children I’d been blessed with, and to a large extent I’d failed to fully appreciate them. While each of my children had grown into a fine adult with a professional career, with not a single black mark against them, mostly they’d forged their own way. I’d been too concerned with figuring out my own path, making excuses, looking for answers. Sure, I took pride in them, and in their successes, but it was all their own doing, nothing to do with me. In that alone, I realised, the cycle had been broken. The sins of the father had been appeased.'

It has been a privilege to read this book. It has opened my eyes to a life and a character so far removed from my own experience. There are not many books that make a change to a reader's world view. This one does.

[Bernie Weisz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review Written by Bernie Weisz Vietnam War Historian October 26, 2010 Pembroke Pines, Florida U.S.A. Contact: BernWei1@aol. com Title of Review: Don Tate's Vietnam Experience: "I didn't Know it Then, But By Going to That War, I'd Also Taken 2 Steps Back As A Human Being!"
Don Tate's memoir, "The War Within" is so vast that it could have made three separate books. Not only a memoir of his role as an infantryman in an extremely unpopular war, this is a story of how a man can beat the demons within, overcome the goblin's of his past, and ultimately forgive himself for transgressions he thought unpardonable. The oldest of eight children, he spent most of his childhood in Ellen Grove, a suburb between Brisbane and Ipswich, Australia. This memoir is a soul bared to the world- a record of lifelong deeds, including those he would perhaps have preferred to forget. Don Tate readily admits that particular matters tarnish his accomplishments. There are subjects in this book rarely touched upon in other memoirs. Most notably is his volatile relationship with his father- a man who simply could not obey laws. Although Tate's love for his father is blatant, he is put in compromising situations rarely called upon for a youth so innocent. Most of Tate's younger years, up to the point of his joining the Australian military was juxtaposed with the sad fact that his father was incarcerated for one reason or another. A theme that is immediately apparent is Don Tate’s readiness to fight, bred and bashed into him. He ultimately spends his life quarrelling, fighting authority, battling the Viet Cong, trying to correct perceived injustices, and even struggling to maintain his own sanity. Tate takes you on a ride that almost leaves you breathless- abused in school by a sadistic teacher, beaten up by an Australian gang banger, almost mortally wounded in action, shot in the hip by the Viet Cong, as he almost "off's himself " in a suicide attempt, and in countless hi jinks with the opposite sex, and most lamentably, the near erasure from the Australian record books of his military service, an inconsolable injustice that takes four decades to correct. One can’t help but observe that he is no quitter. Four years in the writing, this incredible memoir covers subjects we are all familiar with to some extent- graphic sex and violence, friendship, revenge, remorse and regret. Other territories covered, but not limited to, are war, pride, patriotism, conflict, love, loss, estrangement, suicide, Christianity, God, infidelity, and especially pain (excruciating physical and unbearable mental.) In a particularly disturbing first Part to the memoir, "Sins of the Father" Tate painfully lamented his father's destructive, alcoholic and violent behavior towards all in his family. With his father's frequent spells behind bars, young Tate, the oldest son of a family of eight, was forced to leave school at the age of fifteen. Compelled to fend for himself at an age where most American youths are playing sports or planning for the future, his life went in a direction he never dreamed would occur. Lacking paternal direction, socially, morally, or ethically, Tate's life up to the age of eighteen was whimsical- a litany of near-death experiences and adventures. After almost killing himself and a carload of fellow teenagers, Tate volunteered for Vietnam instead. Of the period before his patriotic endeavor, Tate says: "It was just a time for sowing wild oats-a blur of breasts and beer and legs opened amid the sound of surf crashing on the sand." Typical of the soldier not anointed with the reality that "war is hell", Tate felt that the apex of masculine nobility was fighting for one's country, vis-à-vis with the enemy on his own turf, engaged in mortal combat. Another falsism to be to be smashed was Tate's illusion that Australia would honor his patriotism thereafter the war, and that his Vietnam war record was a badge of honor. Although he attributes his fallacious reasoning to an immature eighteen-year old mind, he also "thought" that if he was wounded in combat, he would be properly cared for medically- a myth that is now self evident in the wake of the current "Agent Orange" medical mismanagement scandal in both the U.S. and Australia. Ignoring the cliché "never volunteer for anything", Tate did exactly that. Self recruiting himself for an army infantry unit destined for the jungles of Vietnam, he would serve as a rifleman across four different Australian army units. At the seven and a half month juncture, a Viet Cong AK 47 slug to his hip would forever change his life . Endless small contacts, search and destroy missions and enemy bunker assaults are vividly encountered. As the reader will see, Tate was smart enough to bring with him a "Super 8" camera documenting parts of the action he partook in as well as different periods of his Vietnam tour of duty, an indisputable fact that some slimy detractors many years after the war tried to deny Tate's participation in. People lie, real video clips do not. The author has sent me parts of these clips, and I was very impressed with this footage, causing this reviewer to shake his head incredulously at Tate's detractors, foolish enough to assert the ridiculous premise that Tate was never in Vietnam or wasn’t involved in combat, and that this book is a product of his imagination. Prior to being shot, Tate thought that because he was unhurt in some very close calls, like so many other young men did, he felt he was indestructible. However, it is made clear that this nineteen year old's illusion of war's grandeur was about to evaporate. Tate's reaction to battle, commonly known as "combat adrenalin" as well as life and death struggles was typical. An irreplaceable quest for excitement and exhilaration was forever ignited. Once out of Vietnam, the void left in the absence of those waves of adrenalin left a void that even today still presides. Tate correctly points out that many Vietnam veterans, in struggling to fill that void, picked up destructive drug and alcohol habits, or took on dangerous risk taking, precarious pursuits to equal that unattainable rush that only their combat experience could produce. This book has descriptions of violence only one with a strong stomach can endure. Don Tate saw death, killed, saw his fellow "diggers" horribly wounded and maimed, and even retrieved body parts of men alive only moments before. One particularly horrible memory was where Tate at age nineteen picked up a dead Viet Cong soldier to bury him. The body broke in two, and the deceased man's intestines landed all over Tate's boots, causing him to instantly regurgitate. The smell of death is just as strong to Tate today as it was forty years ago. Four percent of men involved in combat in Vietnam were wounded. Tate was one of that 4%. Without spoiling the plot, Tate was also part of an illegally created Australian platoon (the 2nd D&E Platoon) that was involved in a "sapper's funeral" – the destruction of bodies killed in an ambush, and the stringing up of other bodies to the backs of armoured personnel carriers. In an attempt to cover-up these deeds, Tate alleges that his platoon was removed from the history books- and only reinstated in 2008 after a fierce battle with the government and the military. Tate survived the ambush in a Viet Cong bunker system some months later, and after a two year period of hospitalization, was devastated to learn that parts of his wartime service including the 2nd D&E Platoon and the unit he was wounded in, the 9th Battalion, had "mysteriously and suspiciously" been erased from his service records. Except for the fact that his colour movie footage proved his entire service history, he would have found himself in a bureaucratic ‘no-man’s land’. The intelligent decision to film parts of his tour provided indisputable proof of his service- unassailable by those who would argue otherwise.
But "The War Within" truly started for Don Tate once the conflict in Vietnam was over. In the hospitalization process, he endured endless infections, skin grafts, disintegrating bones, watching from a hospital bed as his schoolmates and fellow veterans went on with their lives. The only saving grace for Tate was a godsend in Carole, his wife who stuck by his side through everything and anything. The balance of this book documents Tate's struggles to right the wrongs of his unit's history erasure, the "2nd D & E Platoon" from the history books, a fight that is discussed in fascinating detail. In correcting this terrible injustice, Tate was accused by many ex-servicemen of lacking "espirit de corps" by insinuating that the Australian military abuses the most impressionable and vulnerable of soldiers and unfairly rewards undeserving officers of rank with "gallantry medals", giving them immoderate and improper rides through life after the conflict. Tate took a big risk asserting his belief that the Australian military doesn't respect or care about the Vietnam veterans that fought for their country."The War Within" can be a synonym for an unwarrantable fact that Tate suffered a threefold alienation- fighting in an unpopular war, being wounded and permanently disabled by it, and then by attacking the warmongers that sent him there in the first place, and is now largely alienated from the veteran community that should have welcomed him with open arms. The real gist of this book, when it is really broken down, is Tate's dysfunctional relationship with his father affecting him in every aspect of his life, and continuing to this today. Taught by Tate Senior that one's ability to take a punch and how many women could be "caught" was a measure of manhood, the author learns the hard way that "the sins of the father" didn't prove anything at all. Nor did going to Vietnam. Tate now believes that after experiencing his "war within" , each man must gauge his manhood by his sense of responsibility to his wife, family, community, rising above the hand one is given and ensuring that one's children do not repeat the sins of their father. In Don Tate’s "The War Within, Americans are treated to a rare trip through Vietnam's jungles though an Australian's eye. Tate covers everything from parental, sexual and physical abuse, war and it's atrocities, unscrupulousness corruption of history and spiritual identification. Although this memoir is a colorful, and cerebral dissertation, a final comment Tate made echoes innumerable American accounts of grunts attempting to make sense of their Vietnam tour of duty in hell. Lamenting on a sole midnight sentry shift in the jungle, Tate writes: "The jungle, with it's vines and creepers and thick, umbrella canopy, had an awful, claustrophobic edge to it at times. I couldn't help but feel a wave of loneliness sweep over me as I peered into it. I mean, I was thousands of miles from home, fighting in a country I'd never seen marked on a map, and doing it for vague philosophical reasons, and doubtful political ones, and it was as dangerous a thing as anyone could imagine. And while I wasn't prone to sentimentality or reflection, that night I got to pondering about where I'd come from to after all this time. Staring at the dark can do that. I mean, I was in a war, and all, but so what? And what did it mean to me?"

I thoroughly recommend this book. It is memorable, significant, exceptionally meaningful, and historic!

[Elizabeth L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A surprisingly captivating read. One that gave insight into a soldiers take on the Vietnam War, but it was so much more than a novel about a war from his perspective. It is a novel about life, in all its twisted, perverted, hideous, humorous, heart wrenching, and wonderful glory.
I loved every page of this book

[R.B. Clague · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The War Within' is a warts and all portrayal of a life that is, by any standards, extraordinary. It at times made me blush, and left me feeling decidely voyueristic. It made me cry (which is something that doesn't happen often); it made me want to shout at Don, 'Don't do that', or Don't go there', even though the events had already happened. I can't say that I enjoyed the book, but I can say that I loved it, if that makes any sense. I had the pleasure of meeting the author, and his memoir takes pride of place on my bookshelf. It's an interesting, gripping, heartbreaking story, I think anyone can relate to. I would highly recommend it as a piece of first class Australian literature. Bravo, Mr. Tate, bravo!

[Perry Mowbray]

This book is raw. I'm glad we read it, but I don't think we'll be reading it again...