Major Peter Badcoe VC

Daughter remembers VC hero Badcoe

Tuesday - 20 May 2008 - ABC News Online

Major Peter Badcoe was one of Australia's greatest war heroes, a highly-decorated soldier whose acts of bravery and courage earned him the greatest military honour of all, the Victoria Cross.

He was killed in 1967 in a war that both excited and angered him, and tonight his medals go under the hammer as part of a collection.

The decision by his eldest daughter Carey Badcoe to sell the memorabilia started a journey of discovery about her father, a journey that ended in the very place he died in Vietnam.

"We were brought up always to know that Dad was doing what he wanted to do. He was an honourable soldier, and so we accepted his death in terms of that was something that could have happened," she said.

Major Badcoe died on a battlefield in Vietnam on April 7, 1967. His last action on that day, single-handedly trying to stop a Vietcong machine gunner from firing on his South Vietnamese troops, earned him the Victoria Cross.

Geoff Annett from the Australian Army Training Team, an elite group of military men whose job was to train and advise the South Vietnamese troops, says Major Badcoe was a hero.

"He reacted like most Victoria Cross winners, they react to the situation as they see it at the time, and nobody will understand why," he said.

The VC, which was also awarded in recognition of two other heroic deeds, was presented to Major Badcoe's family a few months after his death. Carey Badcoe was just 10 years old.

"We just thought he was invincible and so, I think we were less prepared than we logically should have been," she said.

Now more than 40 years later, she is making a pilgrimage to the place where her father died.

"To be able to see and perhaps even talk to people who were there at the time, I think would just be wonderful and will give me a sense of closeness, I hope, to the life that he was living," she said.

Major Badcoe was a professional soldier and a member of the Australian Army Training Team.

"He was very quiet, very reserved. I think it's well known he didn't smoke, didn't drink, he didn't swear much either," said Mr Annett.

'Mad Australian'

Mr Annett was based in Hue, where Major Badcoe was in charge. It did not take long before Major Badcoe's reputation as a fearless, if not reckless fighter, became widespread.

"We were in Quong Tri and there was a phone call and one of the Americans got the phone call and he said, 'There's been some action down in Hue and there's a mad Australian down there running around with a red beret," Mr Annett said.

"And I said, 'There's no Australians running around with red beret'. And I thought, 'It can't be Major Badcoe' - oh yes, it could be Major Badcoe."

Carey Badcoe says the picture that was painted for her of her father when she was a child, was quite different.

"I bought the child's story that he was terribly cautious and we knew he was brave. But when he wrote to us, it was mainly about his concerns about civilians and trying to look after the children," she said.

For personal reasons, the Badcoe family has decided to sell Major Badcoe's Victoria Cross and his many other medals, as well as the family letters he sent back from Vietnam.

Over the past few months, Carey Badcoe has been painstakingly transcribing more than 40 of those letters written by her father.

"Tuesday morning, February 7, 1967. My darling girls, I'm tired, cranky and thoroughly bummed off, so I shouldn't be writing, but it's been three or four days since I last wrote," Major Badcoe wrote.

In this letter, he describes a battle in the village of Sia:

"Then we were ordered to pull back as they were going to put in an air strike. I pleaded with the useless slobs not to, as it was an extremely friendly village," he wrote.

As part of her journey to Vietnam, Carey Badcoe is visiting that village of Sia, which was saturated in napalm, despite her father's pleas.

A local guide, Phuong Tran, has arranged a meeting with his parents who live in the village, and still remembers that February day.

"He said that there was a really big fight in this place right here in 1967 as well. A few big bombs exploded the other side," Mr Phuong translates from his father.

Carey Badcoe recounts her father's description of that day.

"They remembered it as a relatively early attack. They remembered the attack coming through near the church and actually where they took cover and they pointed to where they took cover," she said.

"You can see the bullet holes all over it. The next day he writes that he could hardly talk he was so upset.

"Houses had been burnt, civilians had died, and there'd been no VC [Vietcong] casualties that were apparent, and he was just so frustrated and so upset at the action ... I had tried to imagine what it would be like."

On the morning of April 7 1967, Major Badcoe wrote what would become his last letter home.

"Only 108 days to go, by the time you get this, it will be less than 100, my darling. I miss you and the little girls more than I can ever tell you and I'm looking forward so very much to our holiday together," he wrote.

After sending off that letter, he heard a South Vietnamese army unit was in trouble in a hamlet north of Hue. Four decades on, and Carey Badcoe is travelling along the same road that led her father towards his final battle.

"I was kind of shocked, because it was so broad and it was so open and I just couldn't imagine how you could have, how he could have fought there without being very exposed," she said.

Through Mr Phuong, she meets village leader Mr Liem who was a 17-year-old schoolboy when his village came under attack by the Vietcong.

"The time is about 3:00pm when [your] father died," he said.

Incredibly after 41 years, Mr Liem was able to describe in detail the events of the battle that killed Major Badcoe - but there was one detail that proved beyond doubt Carey Badcoe had come to the right place.

"And ... he had a red cap," Mr Liem said.

"He always had the hat. He was very proud. The red cap was the thing, because that was so distinctive. And he just said, we took the cap off, and your father was very, very handsome. It was really, really lovely just hearing that," Carey Badcoe said.

To her surprise, Carey Badcoe also discovered that the local Vietnamese had built a shrine to her father and the mothers and children who also died in battle on that day.

"To think that there's a village on the other side of the world that [has] this incredibly poignant acknowledgment of him," she said.

For Carey Badcoe, the decision to sell her father's medals began a journey of discovery - a journey that has brought her much closer to the man she genuinely regards as a hero.

"When soldiers win medals or do something, it's a one-off that you just do from adrenalin and sometimes it's just a reaction to a situation, but I feel like the whole person was what made him a hero," she said.

Stokes's gifts to nation get official unveiling

Friday - 11 July 2008 - ABC News Online

A Victoria Cross awarded to a South Australian man who died during the Vietnam war will be officially unveiled at a ceremony at the SA Museum this evening.

Media owner Kerry Stokes and the SA Government bid jointly for the medal at auction in Sydney, in May, paying $488,000.

The Victoria Cross awarded to Major Peter Badcoe will be displayed in Adelaide for a year, then moved to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

A 1861 Burke and Wills breastplate found in outback South Australia also will be officially unveiled this evening.

It was bought for $219,000 at auction, also by Mr Stokes.

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