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Vietnam veteran Stanley Walter Middleton wrote letters to
Nguyen Thi Sinh for years during the American War without
ever knowing she was his confidante. Now, they’re happily
married, living in Australia and helping others reunite. Beth
Young tells their story. Photos provided by Stan Middleton.
A recent Aussie rules football
game at Melbourne’s iconic
MCG was the backdrop for a
reunion.
With the Sydney Swans vying
for a win on the ground, a
group of Australian Vietnam
veterans converged to share
battle stories and reminisce
about the footy they played
while serving at Vung Tau during
the American War. For the
duration of their stay, they ran a
full-scale competition that saw
the opposing units contend for
bi-yearly premiership titles. A
morale booster, the game also
helped to forge strong bonds
between the players, evident in
the camaraderie on display at
the gathering.
The man behind the gettogether
is Stanley Walter
Middleton, a digger himself,
who’s been central to many a
personal reunion. His own story
is particularly poignant: upon
his return from Vietnam, and
several years of correspondence
later, he met his now wife faceto-face
for the first time in 2002.
Stan was just 20 when he
was conscripted to the Australian
Army. He completed
his training, then on August
23, 1967 was sent to 2 Composite
Ordnance Depot (later
known as 2AOD) on the Back
Beach at “Vungers,” where his
unit issued supplies to all the
other Australian units posted in
Vietnam.
Stan also rode as a shotgun
escort for convoys enroute to
Nui Dat and Saigon—a role that
was sometimes wrought with
danger. Now and then, he and
another digger would travel
along the Saigon River from
Vung Tau to HCM City and vice
versa, taking the same route the
hydrofoil now uses, to deliver
supplies. Then, the journey
could take up to eight hours and
they were often subject to sniper
attack.
Scarier still, Stan was sometimes
required to take shifts as a
sentry, protecting the camp from
raids. “We would be locked out
of our barbed wire perimeter in
the sand hills at night, propped
behind a M60 machine gun,
which wasn’t very pleasant,” he
recalls.
Still, from his time in Vung
Tau, Stan remembers with great
fondness the football he and his
fellow diggers played and the
relationships he fostered with
the locals he worked alongside.
“The friendships our diggers developed
with those Vietnamese
was very warm and reciprocal,”
he says.
One such colleague was Pham
Thi Thom, a young woman with
whom Stan developed a close
friendship. When he left Vung
Tau on May 8, 1968 the pair became
pen pals, writing to each
38 asialife HCMC