Interview with Paul Ham

Interviewer: How do you approach researching history?

Paul Ham: Well, it's a very good question because I think you have to have an approach, you have to have a format and a way of delving into it, which brings the information home to you. If I can just set the scene, I believe in writing narrative history. And I use the word 'narrative' pointedly because you are telling the story of the past: you are telling what happened, and it is a narrative. It has, in a sense, a beginning and an end; it has repercussions; it has the story of individuals: human beings who are subjected, in the case of Vietnam and Kokoda, to the most shocking circumstances. Ordinary young men and women dealing with something that's way out of their – beyond their experience – and to try and bring that home in my books.

I start by reading as much as I can; you have to read an immense amount to get a feel for what people have done. That starts with obviously the books that have been written already, but that's not nearly enough because those books are that author's perception of what happened. You need to get a sense of their perceptions but then you need to go much further than that and read the original documents, the primary documents as we would call them, I suppose. But really the letters, the diaries, the cables between governments, anything from the time, from that period, which enlivens, and makes us understand what the people were feeling at the time. So you start to see that event through their eyes, not through our eyes and not with the benefit of hindsight, but through the eyes of the participants. Which brings me to the way I use that information is in a sense, when I'm writing, to try to suppress the benefit of hindsight.

So I'm starting – I've cleared out the attic of my mind of all its rubbish and all its preconceived notions and I’m trying to see it through the points of view of the soldiers in Vietnam for example: what they thought as they boarded the HMAS Sydney to go to this battlefield; an adventure or an exciting adventure as many of them thought; heroes fighting for their country. So you read many diaries and letters home, which, in terms of writing military history, are absolutely vital, but in addition to that you interview as many people as you can. I put interviews down the priorities list though because, at such a great distance, the views, their opinions, their memories are obviously jaded and people get all different ideas. I mean, I had so many different accounts of the battle of Long Tan. Everyone had a different perspective on what happened. So then you have to go back to the after action reports. These are the reports the Army writes after the actual combat but even they're flawed because there are special interests at play. One commander wants to put his company ahead of the others. There's politics happening; you’ve got to understand that, even now, companies who fought at Long Tan are arguing about what actually happened.

So in the end, after the whole process of pulling all those different strands together, you have to try to reach a consensus of what constitutes the truth, or a truth. Truth is multi-faceted, and everyone has a different truth. But in addition to that, you can't just rely on our truth: the Australian take on what happened. You have to go to the other side. You have to go to the Viet Cong, the National Liberation Front as I say, that was their military wing. They were called the ‘Viet Cong’, which means Vietnamese Communist. You have to go to North Vietnam and find out what the generals there were thinking.

In the case of Kokoda, I felt it an obvious duty to go to Japan and interview the veterans in Japan – there's only two dozen of them left – and find out what they thought of us. And then you get – it starts to pull together the body of the narrative and all that information is being poured into a vessel which is eventually going to somehow become some kind of book.

Interviewer: What primary sources did you favour and how did you determine their usefulness and reliability in your writing?

Paul: Well. The primary sources I favoured were essentially any document which told me what I needed to know about this particular event, as it happened at the time. So the most valued primary documents for me, if I'm writing the experiences of soldiers at war, are of course letters home and diaries of their experiences and soldiers memoirs they may have written during the war; the impressions that their own families might have had; the letters from their family; it is not just one dimensional; the impressions of the letters and the impressions of senior commanders. So you're not just getting the private's view, the soldier's view, but you're getting various officers' view.

The war changes its shape as you go up the ranks – how they viewed the war. A general views the Vietnam War very differently from the point of view of a private soldier who is at the battlefront. So you have to then distill all those sources together, so those primary documents are extremely valuable.

Then you have to look at, as I said before, the government – war is declared by governments, so we must know what the government is thinking. My book cuts from the battlefield back to Canberra and to Washington, and juxtaposes what the Aussie digger's doing on the front line and the Viet Cong are doing to each other on the front line and look at it from the point of view of the rather comfortable offices back in Canberra and in Washington. Only then can you start to get – so those documents are crucial, the cables between the governments; we don't know what is going on in a war or even at its present time in Australia, without having access to communications between politicians. In other words, when people say to me will I write something about the Iraq War or Afghanistan, I say, well maybe in about 30 years time. In which case I'll be too old, thank God. I think that looking at the documents – as many people would know, the documents are declassified by the government after 30 years – then you have access to what actually happened from the politician's point of view. And it revealed to me the extent of my ignorance and just how much we're groping in the dark when we come to address an historical event.