Building for Hearts and Minds

Civic action began before the unit did. In 1965 and early 1966, while 1 RAR served with the Americans at Bien Hoa, its companies recorded goodwill visits to the new life hamlet of Ong Huong with a dentist and medics, and help to villagers at Vo Xu on Operation New Life; one civic action team was fired on in May 1966. In the Task Force's first months at Nui Dat the area around the base was cleared of civilians, and building the base came before helping the people around it¹. By late 1966 civic action was gaining momentum, and some Australian units were formally identified with the villages where they would undertake projects¹. The unit's list begins with that work at Hoa Long, the village next to the base: a market building finished in 1966, and the village office, built by the Task Force that October.

The Task Force's records describe a civil affairs unit added to it in March 1967 to carry out and coordinate construction, resettlement, medical and dental, education and welfare work for the people of Phuoc Tuy². The Army's own film record of 1971 notes that the 1st Australian Civil Affairs Unit was not part of the Task Force, although both were based at Nui Dat, and that by then all Australian civil aid in the province was provided through the Army, mainly by the unit's engineering, agricultural and education officers³. Its commanding officer described its work in 1969 as schools, libraries, market complexes and windmills for water, all for the villagers⁴. Its monthly narratives and reports, from April 1967, are in the Army commanders' diaries⁵.

1. Civilian aid and the 1st Civil Affairs Unit, Anzac Portal (Department of Veterans' Affairs)
2. Headquarters 1st Australian Task Force (Nui Dat) records (AWM103), Australian War Memorial
3. Minister tours Civil Affairs projects DPR/TV/1418 (F04510), Australian War Memorial
4. Interview with Commander Office of 1 Australian Civil Affairs Unit DPR/TV/1037, Australian War Memorial
5. AWM95 Subclass 17/1: 1 Australian Civil Affairs Unit (commanders' diaries), Australian War Memorial

The unit's list records 469 projects that went ahead, or may have: 284 recorded as completed and 185 with no completion on record. Another 111 were cancelled and 2 were not approved. Most (274) were in Phuoc Tuy province; 191 were on the separate list kept at Vung Tau, where a small section worked beside the logistic support group, and most of those are known only by a line of description.

Schools were the commonest work: 127 projects for classrooms, libraries, furniture and books, A$276,077. Then came water and sanitation (92 projects: wells, windmills and pumps, water reticulation, toilets), health (45: dispensaries, the province hospital at Baria, the maternity ward of Le Loi Hospital at Vung Tau), and farming and livelihoods (31: markets, pig and chicken pens, seed). Australian-made windmills were put up in villages and hamlets across the province, houses were built for South Vietnamese soldiers and their families, and agricultural projects were carried out¹. In 1969 the unit gave rice seed, tools and fertiliser to Montagnard families at Vinh Thanh, where it had earlier built a windmill and water reticulation system².

The Army's film record of June 1971 counts 253 projects completed since April 1967, from a new village and new crops to basic school materials³. The list, which runs to November 1971 and includes the Task Force's projects of 1966, records 284.

1. Civilian aid and the 1st Civil Affairs Unit, Anzac Portal (Department of Veterans' Affairs)
2. Civil Affairs Vietnam DPR/TV/1113 (F04341), Australian War Memorial
3. Minister tours Civil Affairs projects DPR/TV/1418 (F04510), Australian War Memorial

The projects cost A$1,243,458 (VN$167,677,275) in all, rising from A$21,003 in 1967 to A$169,202 in 1968 and A$162,457 in 1970, and to A$791,569 in 1971. The rise in the last year was almost all one project: number 399, the housing of the South Vietnamese Regional and Popular Forces' families, which cost VN$70,740,000 (A$516,162), more than 40 per cent of everything the list records. The unit's file calls it the largest civic action project, and lists 12 of its sites, from 10 houses at Long Dien to 80 at Ngai Giao; 1 ACAU and 17 Construction Squadron are named on it.

The Minister for the Army saw one of its sites at Baria in June 1971. The Army's film record calls the housing part of the Australian Vietnamisation programme: homes for members of the local Regional Force and their families near where they worked, built mostly by local contractors from locally made bricks under Australian supervision, with 13 sites of ten homes each completed and more under construction¹.

Who approved the work changed with its size. The Commander, Australian Force Vietnam, approved 214 projects worth A$478,600, and the unit's commanding officer 44 small ones. The Australian Embassy approved only 21, but they were worth A$741,593: project 399, the science block of Dat Do High School, classrooms at Baria and Long Huong, the electricity reticulation at Tam Phuoc, and the maternity ward at Vung Tau, most of them in 1970 and 1971.

1. Minister tours Civil Affairs projects DPR/TV/1418 (F04510), Australian War Memorial

The list names the units that did or helped with the work for only 80 of the 469 projects, so what it shows of the Task Force's help is a floor, not a total. The Civil Affairs Unit itself is named on 38, often as supervising. 17 Construction Squadron is named on 15, among them the largest: the Regional Force housing, the repairs to the province hospital at Baria (A$35,543), the Bau Tram school at Long Toan and village water supplies at Long Son. The Task Force is named on 16, from Hoa Long's village office in 1966 to windmills and village water supplies across the province in 1968 to 1970, community centres, and a dispensary at Ngai Giao; its engineers are named on 3 more. The combat units appear on a few each, usually on something close to where they were based or working: 5 RAR on bridge repairs at Binh Ba in 1967 and a windmill at Ong Trinh, 7 RAR and 104 Signal Squadron on a scout hall and badminton court at Hoa Long in 1970, 8 RAR on a youth and sports centre, 4 Field Regiment on a dispensary at Tam Phuoc, and A Squadron, 1st Armoured Regiment, on a market at Vinh Chau in 1971. At Vung Tau, units of the logistic support group, the Air Force base and 102 Field Workshop helped with schools, an orphanage and playgrounds; and United States Navy Seabees worked on a market, a rice warehouse and a meeting hall in 1969 and 1970. Army stores supplied materials for 30 projects, and South Vietnamese soldiers or Revolutionary Development cadre worked on 13.

The Task Force also gave the work its security. Of the 222 projects that can be placed within a kilometre and dated, 83 had contacts recorded within 1,500 metres while the work was under way: 188 contacts in all, most of them security tasks, patrols and ambushes (48, 44 and 43) by the units guarding the villages. On the Task Force's side 9 were killed and 79 wounded, 144 enemy were recorded killed, and 34 of the contacts were mine incidents. Most came in 1968, around Hoa Long, next to Nui Dat: its north and south schools, being built from 1967 to 1968, had 29 and 17 contacts nearby, and the market's water supply 20. At Ngai Giao, where a market and Australian windmill were opened in October 1968, the village had been cordoned and searched by 5 RAR and 6 RAR¹.

17 Construction Squadron's own record in the contacts is of that other work: 39 incidents from 1966 to 1971, 32 of them mines, most struck by its bulldozers clearing land and rebuilding Route 44 in 1970. The squadron also trained Vietnamese apprentices¹.

1. Civilian aid and the 1st Civil Affairs Unit, Anzac Portal (Department of Veterans' Affairs)

Civic action was meant to win the people's support for the South Vietnamese government, and for the Australians as well. The credit tended to go to the soldiers who did the work rather than to a government the people rarely saw, so it earned the Australians some goodwill but did little for the government¹. The unit also followed the fighting. After the battle at Binh Ba in June 1969, the Task Force Civil Affairs Unit arrived to help resettle the villagers left homeless¹; the list records supplies for Binh Ba's war victims that year, and the rebuilding of homes damaged in the Tet offensive of 1968 (A$19,951).

In the last years its biggest work served the handing over of the province. The Regional Force housing, the Army's record says, was part of the Australian Vietnamisation programme, keeping South Vietnam's local soldiers and their families together near their posts². Other projects did the same on a smaller scale: married quarters for the Popular Force at Baria built with the self-help of 445 Regional Force Company, and materials for barracks and dependants' quarters at Thang Nhi near Vung Tau.

The work had its own dangers. On 10 January 1968 two Viet Cong fired on a Civil Affairs medical team, wounding one Australian and three South Vietnamese soldiers; a child was hit and died of wounds. The good intentions and effective projects were compromised, in the Anzac Portal's judgement, by the realities of military operations, a misunderstanding of local culture, people and needs, and the unpopularity of the South Vietnamese government¹.

1. Civilian aid and the 1st Civil Affairs Unit, Anzac Portal (Department of Veterans' Affairs)
2. Minister tours Civil Affairs projects DPR/TV/1418 (F04510), Australian War Memorial

The list is a draft compiled from the unit's case files, its project register (AWM314 264) and dossiers 442 to 444; files could not be found for many projects, and its compiler notes that they are at times incomplete and inconsistent. 179 of the projects have no cost on record and 180 no date, most of them on the Vung Tau list.

A project's cost is its actual cost where the file gives one, otherwise its estimate; a cancelled project counts only what was spent on it. Dollars are as the file records them for 24 projects; the rest are the piastres at the official rates of the day: VN$118 to the US dollar, the rate South Vietnam's National Bank set in 1967¹, and the Reserve Bank of Australia's rate for the month from July 1969, when its series begins² (earlier and undated projects take July 1969's). That comes to between VN$130.87 and VN$137.06 to A$1. The unit's own figures, where they give both, work out at VN$131 to A$1, so the converted dollars are close to what it reckoned.

The files give grid references to 100 metres for 187 projects. The others are placed by a four-figure grid, a named school or hospital, their hamlet or village (from the grids of other projects there and a gazetteer), or, for 191, only at their district's seat: the Battle Map leaves those out of its grid. A contact near a project while it was being built is not evidence that the contact was about the project: in the villages around Nui Dat there was fighting whether or not a school was going up.

1. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume V, Vietnam, 1967: Editorial Note (document 114), Office of the Historian, US Department of State
2. Historical Data: Exchange Rates, Monthly, July 1969 to December 2009 (F11), Reserve Bank of Australia