As Remembrance Day on November 11, 2013 approached, memories of the past stirred within war veteran Graeme Malone. A helicopter that he had built, then helped salvage years later during the Vietnam War, has been on display at the Australian War Memorial since 1988. He tells Geoff Helisma the story not told in the Bell UH-1B Iroquois A2-1019 helicopter’s war memorial reference.

Running 15 minutes late, I met former Flight Sergeant Graeme Malone in a hallway of the Lower Clarence Retirement Village as he was on his way to lunch. Despite looking a little worse for wear after having a cancer removed from above his left eye, Malone was chirpy as he led the way back to his room.
A makeshift sign attached to his door requests that those who enter ask for permission. Malone playfully knocks on the door and duly requests permission to enter. On the bare brick wall of his sanctum there is a small shrine dedicated to his military service and his father, Lieutenant Thomas Malone, who was an Australian crew member of the US Army Small Ships Section, which commandeered every available small Australian ship following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour in December 1941.
On the desk below his memorabilia, a folder is open. In it are clippings of Malone at last year’s Maclean Cenotaph Remembrance Day ceremony. I ask him what he was thinking when the photograph of him with his hand on his heart was taken. “What a bloody waste of life,” he says indignantly. “It’s the stupid politicians who start up a war … and they just don’t go; they don’t front up. They say do this, do that!” But Malone’s not bitter; rather, his reply to a question about his limited exposure to armed conflict in Vietnam may well sum up his philosophy: “Whatever comes, comes … and we’ll just deal with it.”
Malone was 16 when he took on a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) airframe fitter apprenticeship in 1951. “I needed to get out of Hornsby because there was nothing to do there,” he says. “My Mum expected me to be a postman, or something stupid like that. I didn’t want to do that, this is what I wanted to do.”
Malone, who first saw active service on the Malay Peninsula during a conflict between Indonesia and Malaysia in 1962, became an aircraft engineer, “and we developed into helicopter engineers”.
“When we were in Fairbairn [ACT] in 1963, the air force decided to go rotary wing, and they gave us eight helicopters, they came in big boxes. There were 10 of us all together; we built these eight, then we had a big week-long barbecue out the back of Queanbeyan at a place called Wickerslack, down by the creek. We came back to work, and low and behold there were another eight [helicopters] there.”
As the Vietnam War unfolded, Malone and his men were based at Vung Tau. “When the planes [helicopters] came in we’d service them and get them ready. If they had holes in them, we had to fix them. Quite often we had to work through sundown to sunrise to sundown. I was technical advisor and in charge of my blokes. Sergeant Graeme Wilson, who was my support man, a bloody beaut man … poor bugger’s dead now.”

The helicopters Malone and his men built were put into service in Vietnam on June 6, 1966. On April 13, 1967, after completing 489 operational missions (and a far larger number of sorties or flights) including medical evacuations, troop transport, liaison and other duties, one of the helicopters crashed.
“It was an A2 1019 and it had been shot up – the crew bailed out of course, and they got away okay. It was found at the back of Nui Dat in kunai grass. Cotter, the squadron leader, said to me, ‘You, Malone, get your arse out there and see what you can do with this thing.’
“I got my toolbox, a hand grenade, handgun and a water bottle, and away I went. They flew me out … and I had a look at the 1019, and it was certainly bloody stuffed – the arse end of it had holes in it, the tail rotor was knackered and the main rotor had three or four holes in it. So I rang the boss on the aeroplane radio and said, ‘Listen chief, this thing’s pretty stuffed.’ And he said, ‘Well what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘I reckon it would make a good training aid back in Fairbairn. He said, ‘Yeah, alright, you’re the boss, you know what you’re doing, go ahead and do it.’
“So I climbed up and tied the main rotor down, and I said to him, ‘Send out a Chinook.’ The other aeroplane picked me up and, as we’re going out, the Chinook passed us, [picked it up] and dumped the thing back at Vung Tou.”
One year later Malone finished his tour of duty and returned to Australia – he was discharged from the RAAF in January 1971. “I went home and thought nothing more of it [the helicopter].”
Meanwhile, after repairs were completed, the helicopter resumed active service in Vietnam until October 1968. From 1975 to 1979 the aircraft was used at RAAF Williamtown, NSW, and later issued to No 2 Flying Training School at RAAF Pearce, Western Australia, where it was used in search and rescue operations.
In May 1985 it was flown to the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and in May 1988 it was transported to the Mitchell store (the AWM’s conservation facility and storage hub), where it remains today.
Commenting on the futility of the Vietnam War, Malone says: “We were all very worried about the stupidity of Australia being there in the first place. It was none of our business. The Americans stuffed it up. There’d been no peace up there since [the Battle of] Dien Bien Phu [in 1954], they’ve been at one another for years. It’s just bloody stupid.”
Malone’s sense of humour, though, remains as sharp as his intellect. He tells a story about his wife Pamela, who once suffered an aneurism and a subsequent coma. She was airlifted on a CareFlight to hospital.
Upon awakening she asked Malone: “What am I doing here, how did I get here?”
After explaining what had happened, she retorted: “You bastard, all of these years and you never gave me a helicopter ride. Now I’ve had one, and I don’t remember.”