ABORIGINAL war veteran Dave Cook will appear on the national broadcaster’s Australian Story about a friendship struck in Vietnam.
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Mr Cook, who served two tours with the 3 Field Troop, was recently interviewed about his friendship with 60s pop star Little Pattie.
The pair met in a field hospital.
Mr Cook, an engineer, was only days out from the end of his first tour when he accidentally shot himself in the leg while cleaning his handgun.
He was admitted two days before the Battle of Long Tan. She walked in looking for injured members of D-Company, who had held back as many as 2500 enemy troops through darkness, driving rain and dwindling ammunition.
“Little Pattie asked me if I was one of them but I had to explain what had happened two days before,” he said.
“But she wrote on my plaster cast, ‘To Dave, love, Little Pattie’.”
It was a surreal encounter for Mr Cook with the then 17-year-old, famous for Bandstand performances of songs like, He's My Blonde Headed, Stompie Wompie, Real Gone Surfer Boy.
Little Pattie was set to play a concert with stage mate Col Joye at Nui Dat when the now famous battle began.
“I said to her, ‘you’re too young to be here’,” Mr Cook recalled.
“She said, all I could hear was them yelling, ‘get her on the chopper’.
“She was sitting there with Col and they could see the munitions flying.”
The chance meeting was a morale-booster for Mr Cook.
“I was meant to be on the first flight out mid-September,” he said.
“I ended up being the last one out from my unit.
“The Viet Cong couldn’t shoot me, so I had to show them how. I went back for another 12 months but they still couldn’t.”
It was well into his second tour that the true horrors of war hit Mr Cook. He was setting up a listening post when he was stung by a scorpion on his upper arm and pulled off the mission.
Tragically, the group of four men he had been leading were soon after ambushed and killed.
“When I came out of hospital in the morning the gun smoke was like fog,” he said.
“From there I had to go and ID the men.
“From that day on everything is a blur. I went troppo.”
Back in Australia life didn’t get much easier.
“They didn’t like Vietnam vets then, and I was an Aboriginal Vietnam vet,” he said.
Even one or two of the mateships forged in service dissolved once back in Australia, “because of his colour”.
Mr Cook said they were different times. He noted that Aboriginals didn’t even have the constitutional right to vote when he enlisted straight out of Raymond Terrace High School.
“I wasn’t fighting for my colour, I was fighting for my country,” he said.
“I was leading some of these [white] men in Vietnam and I don’t know what their parents would have made of it.”
Mr Cook lived in Sydney when he first came back. A member of the Worimi, it was the 80s before he came back to Raymond Terrace to work with his brother-in-law at H&D Hardware.
“It was only then I started to feel better,” he said.
Mr Cook revealed that he had also struggled with his identity – he was a member of the stolen generation, taken from his parents at Taree and raised in Raymond Terrace.
“I’m 71 now, so you can take those first nine years off and my life’s been an uphill battle ever since,” he said.
His healing took another leap forward in 1996 on the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan.
He reunited with Little Patty and his service mates back in Vietnam.
The tour revisited some of the Viet Cong tunnels he’d encountered back then and he even met and spoke with some of his old foe.
That’s when he heard about the Vietnam Veterans Land Mine Clearing Team.
“I wanted to know how I could help,” he said.
“I’ve got another trip coming up soon. We clear the vegetation first, and with a metal detector, we locate and mark where the mines are.
“I try and do good in my life.”
What a Wonderful World, airs 8pm, August 22. Former Bandstand host Brian Henderson is guest presenter.
