Many of the myths are associated with the fact that the Australian task force in Vietnam included thousands of national servicemen, conscripted under a highly selective ballot. The ‘lottery of death’, as its opponents dubbed it, was based on young men’s twentieth birthdays, at a time when the minimum voting age was twenty-one. Ever since national service was announced on Remembrance Day 1964, myths about the scheme, and the experience of the ‘nashos’ in Vietnam, have flourished. Like many historical myths, some contain an element of truth, while others are almost totally misconceived.

In The Nashos’ War, Mark Dapin challenges many of the most common and influential myths surrounding the experience of those national servicemen who served in Vietnam. Dapin is a talented journalist and novelist who has also edited the Penguin Book of Australian War Writing (2011). He knows good writing and can turn an excellent phrase, but he does not sacrifice accuracy in the pursuit of colour and emotion. His aim is not to create or embellish myths, but to examine them rigorously. Dapin provides a brilliant portrait of the extraordinary variety of the nashos’ experience.

As an important start, he puts the experience of the nashos into a wider context. Between 1965 and 1972, 63,740 young Australian men were called up, of whom fewer than one in four – 15,381 to be precise – served in Vietnam. Consequently, there were 15,381 different stories of what it was like to be a nasho in Vietnam, and three times as many different experiences of what it was like to be a nasho who did not serve there. Many served in Malaysia, Singapore, or New Guinea; far more never left Australia.

Since 1964 there have been numerous myths, what Dapin calls ‘a treasury of fool’s gold’, about the national service scheme. One, which recurs throughout the book, is that national service was deeply unpopular. In fact the public in 1964 welcomed a scheme which, they thought, would straighten out delinquent young men. That was never the intention of either the politicians or the army. Instead, national service was introduced to raise the quality, not merely the numbers, of the army’s recruits.

Much of the popularity of the scheme remained, encouraged by many in the media, even after casualties began to rise. At the time, and ever since, much has been made of an Australian tradition of opposition to compulsory service overseas. That principle was written into the 1903 Defence Act and underpinned the divisive controversies of 1916 and 1917. But it competed for Australian hearts and minds with another tradition, one of deep respect for military service. In the 1960s many young Australians wanted to prove themselves worthy of the reputation gained by forebears who had fought in the great citizen armies of the world wars. Some, no doubt, had in mind the material rewards for overseas service. Even in the early 1970s, in the era of Moratorium marches and worldwide protests, many more young Australians volunteered for national service than refused to register or to accept the call-up.

Bombardier Larry Davenport of Victor Harbor, SA, behind his M60 machine gun during Operation Toan Thang at Fire Support Base Coral in 1968 (photograph by William Alexander Errington, Australian War Memorial ERR/68/0520/VN)

Dapin also challenges the idea, which appears to have developed after the war, that there was an ongoing conflict between soldiers, whether national servicemen or regulars, and protesters. A corollary was the assertion that troops were flown back to Australia at night, smuggled in to avoid airport protests. The reality was both more complex and more interesting. Protests were fewer and less well attended than many accounts suggest. Protesters, for the most part, were careful to aim their criticisms not at the soldiers themselves but at the government that had committed them to the war. Nearly every battalion in the task force received a ‘welcome home’ parade, where large crowds cheered and threw confetti. The well-known protest by a lone woman at the first such parade was not emulated in later marches. The timing of the flights by chartered Qantas aircraft, which brought some servicemen home, was based on commercial requirements. Arrival at night allowed Qantas to reconfigure the aircraft for commercial use the following morning. There is little reliable evidence of airport protests.

The real conflict occurred not between stereotypical groups of protesters and soldiers but within individuals, as those whose birthdays were drawn from the barrel addressed their own consciences. As Dapin shows, the contention that all nashos who served in Vietnam were, in effect, volunteers is as inaccurate as the contrary view that all were profoundly opposed to serving. Dapin not only demolishes the rumours that the ballot was rigged to provide the army with the skills it needed, but also explains the changing nature of the intakes. University students were allowed to defer their service until the completion of their course. Thus there were no graduates in the first intakes. The schoolteachers turned up in force after two years, always in the January intakes after university and school commitments had ended. Medicos took several more years.

Were star footballers and other sportsmen given special treatment, as many alleged? Again, the story is complex. Depending on their state of origin and preferred code, readers will relish the stories of Harry Neasham, Graham Cornes, Bobby Fulton, and a cohort of Essendon footballers. Test cricketer Doug Walters was one of many national servicemen only required to serve in Australia. As Dapin notes, the celebrated batsman became batman, or orderly, to another nasho, one of those who graduated from the officer training school at Scheyville for national servicemen. Walters knew his officer as ‘Skip’; millions of Australians came to know him as Tim Fischer, later deputy prime minister.

Australians have, it seems, an insatiable appetite for books on the experience of war. While this book is concerned only with the nashos in Vietnam and only with certain elements of their experience, it gives vivid, authentic, and diverse answers to the perennial question: ‘What was it like?’ Dapin’s overriding theme is that the truth is always more subtle than the myths. The conclusion to one chapter serves as an epitaph to the book: ‘There are no dead certainties in Australia’s Vietnam War – it’s always prudent to lay a bet both ways.’