Nashos 1965-1972 Luncheon Talk 1100hrs Friday 14th November 2025
Nashos 1965-1972 Luncheon Talk 1100hrs Friday 14th November 2025
Speech by: Dr David Cockram, President Vietnam Veterans Association WA.
Thank you for inviting me, and VVAA WA committee members Ted McEvoy and John McPherson, to join with you as you celebrate together and enjoy each other’s company. I’m going to briefly talk about national service conscription. To begin, I’ve sourced parts of Malcolm Quekett’s article in The West Australian newspaper of 4th October 2025.
It was like Lotto, but nobody wanted to win. Inside the barrel were marbles with numbers representing birthdays. The marbles selected men to be conscripted into the Australian Army. It could mean being sent to fight in the Vietnam War.
How did it all begin? In 1962, the US asked Australia to send military advisers to Vietnam. Australia agreed, seeing it as a show of support that hopefully would be repaid if Australia came under threat by a foreign power.
The Federal Government decided to introduce a compulsory selective national service scheme, and the National Service Act 1964 passed on 24th November 1964.
The Act required 20-year-old men, if selected, to serve in the Army for 24 months of continuous service. This was reduced to 18 months in 1971.
The Defence Act was amended in May 1965 to provide for conscripts to serve overseas. In March 1966, Harold Holt announced that national servicemen would be sent to Vietnam to fight in units of the Australian regular army.
In June 1966 Harold Holt visited President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House and declared that Australia was “all the way with LBJ”.
Conscription and the lottery method brought the war home to ordinary Australians, who waited anxiously to see if their sons would be called up.
Opinion polls in 1964 indicated that 71 percent of Australians were in favour of conscription and the war. By 1966, 32 percent were in favour and 57 percent were against. By then, Australia had sent 8,000 troops to Vietnam.
On 11th June 1966 wild scenes erupted at an anti-conscription protest in Perth, in what has become known as The Battle of Forrest Place. Rival groups, those for and against conscription, screamed abuse and jostled each other.
In 1970 anti-war groups decided to hold moratorium protests against Australia’s involvement in the war and conscription. The first moratorium was on 8th May 1970. The second and third moratoriums took place on 18th September 1970 and 30th June 1971.
The moratoriums were an indication of a broad collapse in public support for the war and conscription. Source: Malcolm Quekett, The West Australian newspaper, 4th October 2025.
So, the societal background to conscription was a turmoil of those in favour and those against. But most of the young men called-up were prepared to do their duty.
804,000 Australian males registered for National Service. Of these, 63,000 men who were conscripted (8%), 19,000 served in Vietnam (30%), and 210 were killed. Many nashos were injured in training and on operations.
As we know, not all conscripts were sent to fight in Vietnam (70%). For some, this was a great relief, for others, a great disappointment, while others had a neutral focus.
Yet many nashos and regulars have expressed in later life a sense of guilt that they didn’t go to Vietnam. Such thinking and feeling in older age can be considered quite normal, for several reasons.
Army training is designed to change the brain, to inculcate the so-called warrior attitude, to move a recruit from a civilian identity to a military identity.
For example, can you remember in initial basic training being told over and over, “one shot, one kill!”.
Can you remember being taken to the on-base theatre to watch the movie Zulu, that illustrated discipline in battle. Following the movie, a soldier’s discipline to all things was carefully explained to enhance survival and defeat the enemy.
All of this, including marching and drill on the parade ground, and training and exercises in the field, and being placed in relatively contained stress situations or what’s known in psychology as a safe emergency, created new neuron wiring in the brain or activation of new neural pathways. As Donald Hebb (1949) discovered, neurons that fire together – wire together.
Of course, this is not necessarily specific to Defence Force training. Police, Fire Fighters, Rescue and Emergency Services personnel, all undergo severe training for a similar reason. To effectively perform under environmental, physical or emotional stress.
Over time in Army training, our brain became rewired, it developed new pathways, so the Army way became the normal way, including rigid obedience to orders. This enabled us to fight and defeat the enemy in strange and unusual situations and places.
The inner central part of our brain that holds all our subconscious emotional memory, and reacts rapidly for survival, became conditioned. As did other parts of our highly distributed and integrated thinking and memory system.
Our effective mental and physical performance relied totally upon training to maintain an integrated and focused brain function under stress. The aim of repeated training. Where else would bayonet fighting, ‘in, out, on guard’ be considered normal and effective behaviour in certain conditions, but in the military.
Our social survival emotions must be learned as norms of social behaviour – basically, the software we install as we develop in a particular context or culture. In our case, in Army training, where the subtle and not so subtle messages were fed into our mind and reinforced.
So, the brain neuron wiring hardens into the messages, ‘never let the team down’, ‘keep up with the group’, ‘your weapon is your best friend’, ‘sacrifice for your mates or your country’.
These messages, and many more, became deeply embedded individual and group values. I am not criticising these values.
They are essential, good and honourable beliefs and values as exemplified in the following Army statement (2025):
‘Army’s soldiers have a solemn obligation to the nation.
Their contract with Australia states:
I am an Australian soldier who is an expert in land combat.
I am physically and mentally resilient, compassionate and courageous.
I lead by example. I strive to take the initiative and pursue excellence.
I am committed to learning and working with my team.
I believe in trust, loyalty, integrity and respect for my country, my mates and our Army.
The Rising Sun is my badge of honour in service to my nation.
I am an Australian soldier – Always’.
This contract from our Army days remains as a deep belief within each one of us, of who we are. Notice the final sentence: ‘I am an Australian soldier – Always’.
But what happens when years later we feel we haven’t completely fulfilled this contract, when we are discharged without having served overseas, yet others of our cohort do go, and some even get injured or killed.
Many regular and national service soldiers of that era were not deployed to Vietnam. Some of those, but not all, might experience what is known as a moral injury. Deep down they feel they have not lived up to what they have been intensively trained for. To go to Vietnam.
A definition; Moral injury has been defined as an act of perceived or actual transgression that brings about inner conflict because the experience is at odds with deeply held moral and ethical beliefs (Maguen & Litz, 2012).
In an examination of the recruit change process, Bica (1999) states from his research that moral injury can be the result of having one’s moral identity transformed into that of a warrior, what Bica termed the “warrior mythology.” Through basic military training, a recruit’s individual identity is replaced by a group identity, which aids in creating unit cohesion. This group identity fosters the recruit’s vision of themselves as part of a band of brothers who are noble and proud which creates, what Bica (1999) terms the warrior mythology.
The belief that one has not honoured this military identity by not going to Vietnam, for some, could feel like a transgression of the warrior mythology and associated values wired into the brain.
This experience of moral injury, for some people, can result in the manifestation of the emotions of guilt and shame, even though the individual had no control over where they served in the Army. We were cogs in a large machine. Even our date of discharge was pre-determined.
Some personnel who are medically discharged through injury before their enlistment period obligation can also carry a moral injury of thinking and feeling they have transgressed their values of service deeply wired into the brain.
However, there is good news with moral injury. A healthy brain that can experience empathy is necessary in order to feel the emotional burden of moral injury (Brock, 2012).
Another piece of good news is that we can use the same brain wiring process to rewire our thinking and feelings in the present. This has the dual benefit of enabling us to keep the good values we were taught in our military service, but to weaken or remove any moral injury transgression of values thinking or feeling that we may carry all these years later.
The brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons. Each neuron maintains 10,000 connections to other neurons. Our brain is not hardwired but soft-wired. We now know that it is actually possible to grow new neurons. New neurons develop by engaging in aerobic exercise and maintaining a healthy diet, particularly increasing consumption of omega-3 fatty acids (Arden, 2015). Rewiring our brain means the more we practice a new skill or thinking, the more the brain changes to make that skill or thinking come easily. Talking with a chaplain trained in moral injury repair or with a therapist can offer a helpful ‘brain tune-up’.
The RSL Chaplaincy has developed a presentation on moral injury for RSL Sub-branches. Perhaps the Nashos 1965-1972 might like to organise a presentation from them. RSL Senior Chaplain Barrie Yesberg: 0430 507 271.
In concluding I would like to say a few words on the similarities of our two organisations. Generally, we all served in the Army between 1965 and 1972. We all trained for Vietnam about the same time. From the perspective of our common purpose and training, we are all comrades-in-arms.
Due to the age of our members, both our organisations are reaching the end-of-life date. We are both a discrete cohort, so we cannot cycle in contemporary veterans, unlike the RSL. As a result, VVAA WA is in the process of trying to initiate and develop a legacy organisation consisting of our children, grandchildren, and other like-minded protagonists. This will mean our heritage is carried on long after we have gone. This process is likely to take some time. What the legacy will look like we do not know, but we hope it will include a major Commemorative Service on or near 18th August each year.
WA has a number of discrete and strong legacy military associations, for example; the Rats of Tobruk Association, and the 2/16th Battalion Association, to name but two.
Given our commonality, we are happy to work closely with the Nashos 1965-1972 Association on this project or any other relevant to our military service.
August 2026 sees the highly significant 60th Anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan. Of the 17 members of Delta Company 6 RAR who were killed in this famous Battle of Long Tan in 1966, 11 were National Servicemen.
Thank you all for your service to our country. Whether you deployed to Vietnam or not, wear with honour the badge you have been given of being a unique group of young Australian men who served their country and in doing so never took a backward step.
Thank you, we the people of Australia are so proud of you and your sacrifice.
You may be aware that the Government is planning on holding, on the 14th February 2026, a National Commemorative Service to acknowledge the 75th anniversary of National Service 1951-72.