Ripples of Wartime: Chas Martin

I was young, quite naive really, and all I knew at the time was that Bob Menzies had declared that we were going in, in support of the Americans.

I accepted the argument that communism was expanding downwards through South East Asia and we had to stop them.

But over the first few years, I tried to find out a bit about it.

I read a few books and that was where I learned that it wasn't just a case of that suddenly there was communism threatening Indochina.

There was a hundred year battle between the Vietnamese against the French to try and get independence and that the Vietnamese had fought the French to a standstill in Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and then the West had intervened again.

So eventually I was firmly of the view that the Vietnam War was a war for national independence and that we had no business there and in fact it was a criminal interference and that's what I still think.

My background is non-conformist Protestantism. Do unto others is what we were taught at Sunday school.

So my feeling about it then was well I need a bloody good reason to become part of a war machine and go and kill people and I should never hand over to anyone else the decision as to whether I'm involved in military action.

When I got the call-up notice, I didn't obey it. I sent them a letter saying why because I thought the war was criminal.

They then sent me a notice saying you know please turn up at this next intake and then I wrote a letter and said I wouldn't and then I just let that waited to see what they would do but I made a decision that I wasn't that I had to meet it.

I had to face up to that rather than go on the run. I got the summons and went to court. He said you failed to obey a call-up notice.

You are fined two hundred dollars and are you willing to obey a future call-up notice.

I said no I'm not and he said well in that case I'll have to sentence you to two years hard labour and that was straight off into the paddy wagon to Adelaide Jail which is at the very end of its life.

A week in there, seven weeks in Yatala and then the rest of the time at Cadell.

I was conscious that that was an important political statement that there was someone in jail for refusing to you know be involved in that kind of killing and so on and the war that was going on but I've always felt that I was actually lucky because I think if I had gone to Vietnam I would have been destroyed.

I would have been totally traumatised and probably you know in a way that seems to happen to some of the others.

I regard the conscripts, the ones that didn't really know what they were getting into or the ones that were you know scarred by it as victims of the system.

So as much as I was a victim I think we were all victims of a very bad decision. My life changed completely.

There was no going back once having come to those realisations you know that there was something very destructive which then it manifested itself in an aggressive war in Indochina and now it's manifesting itself as destruction of the global environment and so I went straight out of jail and I was involved in environment movement ever since.

So I mean that's it set the direction for my life.