Operation Ballarat extract   autobiography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 Operation Ballarat
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Notes

  • Editor's note: Barry Heard (b. 1945) was a national serviceman, drafted into the army in February 1967. He served as an infantryman and radio officer in Vietnam, and had been fighting in the jungle for several months before the day he remembers as 'the worst in my life'.
  • pp. 157-165

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing Mark Dapin (editor), Camberwell : Viking , 2011 Z1828081 2011 anthology extract autobiography correspondence diary war literature

    'From the cliffs of Gallipoli, through the jungles of Vietnam, to the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, Australia's short history is a story of war.

    'The battlefield has shaped the way we define ourselves - the Australian values of mateship, courage under fire, larrikinism - but few of us have witnessed these scenes firsthand. Soldiers writing from the front and journalists on the ground have formed the way we think about war and so formed the way we think about ourselves.

    'In The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing, author and journalist Mark Dapin has gathered together the finest of these accounts. Starting with Watkin Tench's observations of an Aboriginal war party, we see the terror, confusion and occasional heroics of the front line through the eyes of some of our best writers, including AB Paterson, Martin Boyd, Patrick White, Alan Moorehead, Kenneth Slessor, Peter Cundall and Barry Heard.

    'These remarkable letters, diaries, memoirs and reports remind us of our history, and of our responsibility in recording and remembering what happens in the wars we send our soldiers to fight. (From the publisher's website.)

         Camberwell : Viking , 2011     pg. 381-390
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Related Works

y separately published work icon Well Done, Those Men : Memoirs of a Vietnam Veteran Barry Heard , Melbourne : Scribe , 2005 Z1188305 2005 single work autobiography

'Australian Vietnam vet Barry Heard draws on his own experiences as a young conscript, along with those of his comrades, to look back at life before, during, and after the Vietnam War. The result is a sympathetic vision of a group of young men who were sent off to war completely unprepared for the emotional and psychological impact it would have on them. It is also a vivid and searingly honest portrayal of the author's post-war, slow-motion breakdown, and how he dealt with it. Well Done, Those Men attempts to make sense of what Vietnam did to the soldiers who fought there. It deals with the comic absurdity of their military training and the horror of the war they fought, and is unforgettably moving in recounting what happened to Barry and his comrades when they returned home. As we now know, most Vietnam vets had to deal with a community that shunned them, and with their own depression, trauma, and guilt. Barry Heard's sensitive account of his long journey home from Vietnam is a tribute to his mates, and an inspiring story of a life reclaimed.' (Publication summary)
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Last amended 3 Apr 2012 11:18:43
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