Interview with Paul Ham

Interviewer: Colonel Francis Serong is arguably one of Australia's greatest war time officers, yet he holds nowhere near the status and recognition of someone like Monash. Why do you think this is?

Paul Ham: Well, any Army officer listening to this interview, who heard Serong's name ranked with Monash, will probably be a little dubious to say the least. I'm not criticsing your question. I mean clearly, on the face of it, Serong was in many ways was a great commander but Serong wasn't really actually a commander in Vietnam. His command was only for the first year or two when he was leading the Australian Army Training Team, which is a small unit of jungle-trained soldiers, who were advising the South Vietnamese who were our allies. Serong commanded that, but even then he didn't really do his duty; he was much more caught up in the intrigues of the CIA. He was our first officer seconded to the CIA in Vietnam which is why I called the chapter describing Serong's role in Vietnam The Quiet Australian, a direct echo of The Quiet American, the book by Graham Green, on the Americans’ first involvement in Vietnam. He was the Quiet Australian because he was embedded in the CIA; he had access to top level American Intelligence. He was quite unpopular in many ways with his fellow officers; he had a difficult passage through the junior ranks up the path. The book spells this out.

But I will say he was quite a chilling character as well; quite, in some ways, frightening: certainly a little bit spooky. I mean he headed up the Phoenix Program; didn't head it up: I should say, he was heading up the training of the soldiers within the Phoenix Program. The Phoenix Program was launched by the CIA in the late 60s to destroy the Viet Cong infrastructure, which was the euphemism given to the tax collectors, the postal workers, the cooks, the teachers, the doctors – all the people who supported the enemy. Now, the reason why this was so controversial is that Serong was training the assassins; let's be blunt about it: these were assassination squads sent out into the jungle to kill civilians. And he was training them and the book recounts this in detail. And many soldiers did not want to be a part of the Phoenix Program; they were not trained to kill cooks, to kill postal workers, to kill teachers.

It must be said though – this is certainly no defence of what was happening but I'm just putting it in context for historical purposes – that the Viet Cong had been killing teachers and doctors and postal workers since 1959. Any village which declared itself neutral, or did not cooperate with the National Liberation Front, was regarded as an enemy village. They were bribed, they were subjected to relentless propaganda and if they still refused to cooperate, they were then attacked. And the first target of the attack tended to be teachers, doctors – where it hurt most. In other words, the people helping the village to survive, the medical officers. And this was going on for a long time and that story did not get back to the Western public at the time. We did not see the horror of Viet Cong atrocities coming out. So, it's a very complicated war and you've got to look at the motives; any historian has to look at the motives behind the Phoenix Program. However horrendous they were, they were responding to something that had been happening for eight years in villages all over South Vietnam.

To top it off, therefore, he wasn't really a commander, he was more an advisor in Vietnam. He did however advise in the end the South Vietnamese government. He was retained as a sort of ... so his copy book was top secret, we didn't know what he'd done there for many years afterwards. Even the official autobiography of Serong doesn't bring out his involvement in Phoenix. So he's a complex character; he's a dubious character; his command role was really – the best one could say about it was that he was clearly a strong leader of the training team. He clearly was a driving, political soldier; he knew how the political field worked. He could wedge himself in between the American government and the Australian government and find himself doing things which a man of his rank wouldn't normally be doing. He was a Lieutenant Colonel, never a General, and was regarded as a Brigadier at the end. So I'll just top that off by saying Serong's a complicated character and regarded with some suspicion by the Australian forces.