They called it the “Mini Tet” offensive. In late April 1968 the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army launched a second wave of audacious attacks on Saigon and across the south in what would become the deadliest month of the Vietnam war for the United States and its allies.
In early May, the 1st Australian Task Force deployed two battalions to an area twenty kilometres north of Bien Hoa city to intercept and disrupt the enemy forces withdrawing from Saigon. Several fire support bases, or FSBs, were established to provide artillery and mortar support for patrols from 1RAR and 3RAR deployed north from their base at Nui Dat. One would be immortalised as FSB Coral, the others FSB Balmoral and Coogee.
The Battle of Coral–Balmoral, launched early on 13 May with a concerted enemy attack before the FSB defences had been completed, would be the first time the Australians met North Vietnamese forces in regimental strength and became their biggest and most costly engagement of the war. Twenty-five Australians were killed and another ninety-nine wounded.
Late the following afternoon, 5 Platoon of B Company 1RAR was operating about a kilometre from Coral when the patrol was ambushed by a squad of enemy. As the official history of the war would later recount, the forward scout and the commander of the leading section were hit before heavy enemy fire isolated the two wounded men.
Private Richard Norden, a nineteen-year-old from Gundagai in New South Wales who had enlisted in the army two years earlier, requested covering fire and dashed forward under heaving enemy fire to reach the section commander, killing one enemy on the way.
“Having expended his own ammunition, he grabbed the automatic weapon of the dead Viet Cong soldier and fought off another enemy as he assisted the section commander back to the section,” the official history recorded. “Although wounded, Norden again went forward under enemy fire and reached the forward scout, killing the Viet Cong who had been using the scout as a shield. Seeing that the scout was dead, Norden returned to the section, collected grenades, and cleared the area, enabling the scout’s body to be recovered.
“His three attacks into the enemy position resulted in the position being secured. Norden was personally responsible for killing three of the enemy. For his outstanding example in saving the life of his section commander, recovering the body of the scout, and at the same time reversing the enemy’s advantage, Private Norden was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.”
Norden survived the war to receive his DCM back in Sydney but died in 1972, at the age of twenty-four, killed in a motorcycle accident while serving with the ACT police.
“What do you have to do to get the VC?,” NSW governor Sir Roden Cutler is reported to have remarked rhetorically as he pinned the medal to Norden’s chest. Cutler was well qualified to ask, having lost a leg and won the Victoria Cross while fighting as a forward scout with the Australian 2/5th Field Regiment in Syria in 1941.
Former governor-general and Chief of the Defence Force, Sir Peter Cosgrove — who himself had won the Military Cross in Vietnam — was equally nonplussed. He had been “blown away” when he first read the citation describing Norden’s bravery. “I thought, when I read that, this bloke should have got a VC,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Cutler and Cosgrove were far from alone in their disbelief. From soon after the war, some of the men who fought alongside Norden in Vietnam and many others have been tenaciously battling an obdurate defence bureaucracy to see his exceptional bravery rightly recognised with the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the Commonwealth. It would take fifty-six years for their efforts to finally succeed.
Cynics might suggest there was more than simply an act of belated justice in the great fanfare surrounding yesterday’s Remembrance Day announcement by governor-general Sam Mostyn that Norden had become the fifth Australian to be awarded the VC for valour in Vietnam. What better than an outpouring of patriotic pride amid a growing tide of disaffection with a government? What better indeed than a celebration of heroism to divert attention from a Defence establishment mired in a catalogue of atrocities by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, a royal commission’s unmasking of an epidemic of military abuse and suicides and a bureaucracy found to be routinely failing to meet the need of veterans.
While prime minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged at the announcement “everyone who has championed and advocated due recognition of Richard Norden,” he offered no clue as to why it had taken so long to recognise “the deeds that are more than worthy of the highest military honour our nation can bestow.”
The truth is there have been years of bureaucratic indifference and outright opposition to awarding a VC to Richard Norden. Earlier this year Chris Forde, who was Norden’s platoon commander in Vietnam, shared the frustration of his supporters. Many of his soldiers had displayed exceptional courage in Vietnam, he said, but Norden’s bravery was “above and beyond… the stuff from which legends are born.”
He told the Australian: “On that particular day, there wasn’t a one in a thousand chance of surviving the deeds that Dick performed. Each of his three sorties were death defying. In fact… if I hadn’t been cut off and was able to have had an influence, I wouldn’t have let him do what he did. It was suicide and there was every chance that I would have been fighting to extricate another body.”
In 2020 George Hulse, a lieutenant-colonel had who fought in the Battle of Coral-Balmoral as a twenty-one-year-old, wrote to the then chief of army, Rick Burr, arguing that Norden’s actions fulfilled the criteria of exceptional bravery under fire required for the awarding of the VC. He got short shrift. Burr declared that he was not satisfied that Norden had “performed acts of conspicuous gallantry, or a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty.” What’s more, he said, despite his undoubtedly brave and gallant actions Private Norden had been “doing what was expected of him as a rifleman, albeit in hazardous conditions.”
This response infuriated Norden’s supporters but was hardly surprising. The Defence hierarchy has long been vehemently opposed to retrospective gallantry awards, in part out of concern about diluting the status of recognised acts of gallantry and opening a potential floodgate of questionable claims. The posthumous VC awarded to able seaman Teddy Sheean in 2020 — for famously strapping himself to his gun and continuing to fire at Japanese aircraft as HMAS Armidale was sunk in the Timor Sea in 1942 — took seventy-eight years to arrive and decades of acrimonious debate. Ultimately, it required former prime minister Scott Morrison to overrule his defence minister Lynda Reynolds, who had rejected the tribunal’s recommendation in favour of Sheean.
But General Burr’s somewhat patronising obstinance didn’t deter Richard Norden’s backers and they succeeded in forcing a formal hearing into their claims. In June 2022 the tribunal recommended to defence minister Richard Marles that Burr’s ruling be rejected and Marles recommend to the governor-general (and the King) that Norden be awarded the VC.
The fact that is has taken a further two years to reach this week’s conclusion will only feed the view that the result has as much if not more to do with the government’s need for a good news story than righting a historical wrong. •
