POSSUMS & BIRD DOGS
By
Peter Nolan
Reviewed by Gary McKay
Australian Army Aviation’s 161 Reconnaissance Flight in South Vietnam
Australian military history readers have been waiting for a book about 161 Recce Flight for quite some time and their wait is now finally over. Author Peter Nolan, one of a number of RAAF maintenance staff seconded to Army Aviation after its expansion in 1960, served with 161 Recce Flight in South Viet Nam in 1967-68. His job was to help keep the airframes where they should be: aloft. He has managed to capture the character of this unique unit through extensive trawling through the unit’s recorded history and by interviewing the men who were part of the unit.
By thus doing he has allowed those who ‘have been there and done that’ to portray the unit as it was during its tenure of service in the Second Indochina War, and at the same time he has faithfully recorded the major operations and activities that the unit undertook. This was no easy job as the unit was sent hell west and crooked from one end of Phuoc Tuy Province to places far and wide on a multitude of tasks in support of the units of the Australian Task Force.
Like most independent sub-units that operated in South Viet Nam, 161 Recce Flight was under-resourced, under-staffed and over-worked. The supply and maintenance system that operated under RAAF oversight at the time was not yet fully set up to support an overseas deployment. As a result, 161 Recce Flight members did what most Australians who have ever served in any major operational theatre have ever done since the Boer War, and that is ‘borrow’ from more fortunate allies. The author has captured the essence of the manner in which the Flight had to operate and has brought humour into the story that flashes like the laconic grins of its members shown in the photographs of its pages. This is not a dry history of a unit; it is about men in a war, and how they worked and played.
What is really enjoyable about this book is that it is an easy read. It is informative, without being too technical, so that those mere mortals who looked up into the sky at these airborne warriors circling above the ground troops like khaki vultures, can now fully appreciate what their role was and how they went about it. The tasking, the operations and the social aspects have all been brought to life by Peter Nolan in a fashion that does great justice to the unit and those magnificent men in their flying machines.
Highly recommended.
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