THE AUSTRALIAN
Brendan Nicholson Defence Editor
Canberra
AUGUST 12, 2015
“All he wants now is recognition of the true nature of his service for Australia in Vietnam and Cambodia.”At the height of the Vietnam War, John Ali was in a team of truck drivers recruited on the orders of the then army minister Malcolm Fraser for a secret mission delivering military supplies deep into Cambodia where US and Australian forces were officially not supposed to be.
He recalls as a 22-year-old diesel mechanic being taken with several other young men to Parliament House in Canberra in January 1971 and sitting at a table across from Fraser. The minister asked them to “serve your country on a top-secret mission”.
“At the end of it we had to sign the secrecy act,” Mr Ali said. “Mr Fraser told us that when we left the office we were not to talk to anybody about where we were going or why, except our mothers and fathers and our wives if we were married.”
By the end of March the men were in Phnom Penh. Over the next 18 months Mr Ali faced the same risks as the Diggers and traveled with convoys laden with arms, ammunition and fuel. But he was not formally part of the Australian Defence Force.
Now he is suffering ailments brought on by his service but he has been told he is not entitled to veterans’ benefits.
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