Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Five hundred and twenty-one Australians were killed in action in Vietnam. The problem with looking at statistics is that statistics are just statistics; they do not tell any personal stories and they do not give the feeling of the tragedy involved in each of those cases. Today I am speaking about just two of those people who were killed in Vietnam: Flying Officer Michael Herbert, who was 24, of Glenelg in South Australia, and Pilot Officer Robert Carver, also 24, from Toowoomba. Pilot Officer Carver was the navigator-bombardier and Flying Officer Herbert was the pilot and aircraft commander. They were both in No. 2 Squadron RAAF and they were flying in the I Corps region in South Vietnam, conducting a bombing raid approximately 60 kilometres from Da Nang. This occurred on 3 November 1970.

About 30 years ago I crawled through a Canberra bomber. I can tell you it is an incredibly cramped aircraft. It is very old-fashioned, particularly in today’s terms. The bombers first flew 60 years ago. It required incredible discipline to fly these aircraft, particularly at night. Just picture the story of these two men and numerous others who were flying these missions day in, day out. Picture them sitting in the briefing room with knotted stomachs, with an ever-present fear of the mission—but not a fear that meant that they were not going to conduct their mission. They knew what they were doing. They were highly disciplined. They were doing a job. They worked with that fear but that fear was ever present.

Picture them taking off at night. People who have flown over Australia, and particularly to Western Australia, can imagine just how dark it would have been over jungle type regions with very little habitation and very few electric lights. They flew at 22,000 feet in the pitch black. Occasionally they would see what is referred to as AAA, anti-aircraft artillery. They would see tracers coming up or explosions of flak. At 22,000 feet you are above most of that; nevertheless, you see these shells and bullets trying to get towards you. You fly for an hour and 22 minutes and you try to find your target. You then find it and you bomb it. In this case, the bombs were dropped at 8.22. Shortly after that, the aircraft disappeared from radar.

As I said, 22,000 feet was higher than most of the AAA. There were no known SA2s or SAM2s, which were very large radar-guided missiles, in the area; however, they could still have been there. I am reminded of the late General Robin Olds talking about, as he called it, the ‘terribly impersonal personal nature’ of having a surface-to-air missile fired at you. This missile is inanimate, yet it is coming, as he said, to get you. I can only imagine what must have run through these men’s minds through the mission. No-one really knows why that aircraft was lost. As I said, there have been theories such as a heat-seeking missile; however, I am not aware of a heat-seeking surface-to-air missile at the time that had that sort of range. Another theory was that perhaps one of the bombs hung up, so to speak, within the aircraft when they conducted their bombing mission and that it exploded a little bit later. But, as I said, no-one will really know what the reason for that crash was.

But I do know that Australia owes those who have died in our service a great debt of gratitude, and I can only imagine the emotions that must be going through the minds of the men’s families as they now have closure and realise exactly what happened to their loved ones. At least now they have that certainty, which they did not have before. But this is also something that we really need to consider for the future. This is why I will continue to push very hard for proper evaluation processes for our defence capabilities to ensure that our defence men and women have the very best equipment that they possibly can. We have to remember that these men and women are going and fighting—abroad, generally, in the Australian context, and extremely rarely defending Australia directly. There is great potential for them to perish in combat, and we have to do everything that we possibly can to reduce the numbers of those killed and also the numbers of those who are wounded and the severity of their wounds. So we need to ensure that we have adequate capability—in fact, the best capability that we can possibly get—for our fighting men and women, and we also need to ensure that the acquisition processes that are followed are better defined than they are at present so that we get those capabilities to our men and women as quickly as possible and do not have the protracted delays and problems that we currently have.

Having said that, this is a condolence motion for Flying Officer Michael Herbert and Pilot Officer Robert Carver. I would like to suggest to Australians that, when they think about our losses in combat, they remember that these people are not mere statistics; these are people who have died in Australia’s service. Every story is personal and, where people are killed, every story is tragic.

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