The homeless hero

THERE are no photos Dave Goodall can show me of himself as a 22-year-old soldier in the Royal Australian Army.

Nothing to remind him of the terrible atrocities he witnessed as a fighter in the Vietnam War.

What little he had was stolen when Dave was staying in a Salvation Army hostel in Nottingham - but then it was never going to be easy looking after photos and bits and pieces while sleeping rough on the streets.

All Dave has, as he wiles away his time in the basic-but-comfortable surroundings of Southampton's Patrick House homeless hostel, are the memories of one of the most bloody, appalling, and drawn-out conflicts the world has ever seen.

"I remember it as if were yesterday, although I've tried to wash it out of my memory," says Dave, who was one of 7,670 soldiers from Australia who joined the South Vietnamese, American and French troops already fighting against the North Vietnamese to stop the Communist insurgence from north to south in 1969.

As I talk to Dave in the tiny communal room at the hostel, it occurs to me that this is a strange scenario in so many ways.

Strange that Dave, a Yorkshire-man born and bred, should ever have fought in south-east Asia, considering his home country never got involved in the Vietnam War.

Strange - and in many ways, unjust - that Dave, who fought so bravely and was prepared to die 'for queen and country' should now be homeless and jobless.

And strange, considering the thousands who lost their lives in Vietnam between 1964-1975, that Dave is actually here, alive and relatively well, to tell me his story.

"I was corps-enlisted in the Royal Australian Army Ordnance Corps in late 1967 in London, at the age of 21. My wife was pregnant and we went over to Australia in January 1968 for $20 each, under the Big Brother movement.

"They were asking people to emigrate and I just wanted to travel. It's 12,500 miles and it took 32-and-a-half-hours in a Boeing 707," recalls Dave, his thick Leeds accent noticeably unaffected by his years in Australia and the south of England.

As soon as the couple arrived in Australia, Dave put his wife, Fersca - who was half Jamaican - in a hotel and went to the modern army camp at Ckapoopa, where he spent the next 10 weeks in the recruit training battalion.

With his wife living in married quarters at Moorbank, near Liverpool, Australia, Dave went on to learn the most important lessons he would need in Vietnam, as part of 12 weeks' jungle warfare training with the Gurkhas in Kunungra. It was 123 degrees in the shade and his weight plummeted by 2st, but the six principles of jungle warfare - shape, shadow, silhouette, surface, spacing and movement - were to become invaluable to Dave when the time came to join the fighting in Vietnam.

"When I went to Australia my dad told me I could end up in Vietnam, but I was ready to go - I was really full of myself in those days. I was prepared to die for my queen and country.

"We went over to Vietnam on a boat called The John Mann - the name was painted over but you could still just about read it. I was only 22 and we were all pretty worried and apprehensive about what were about to face," explains Dave.

"I was in Saigon initially and there was a lot of bombing there. It was a very dirty war.

"The tension and pressure were immense and I saw so much killing - you could smell the blood in the air."

Dave, by this time a corporal in the Royal Australian Army Ordnance Corps, was posted to Vungtau, where he wrote and received letters from Fersca, filling him in on the missed early months of his son, Richard's, life.

He admits it was very hard being away from his new family - especially after the tragic deaths of his two best friends.

"One was from Scotland and he was 22 when he was shot while on patrol.

"The other was an Australian who was only 20. He trod on a mine - all I found was his left boot covered in blood and his dog-tags.

"It was really, really horrendous. He had a pregnant girlfriend he was courting and I had to tell his family he was dead," says Dave.

"We were only kids. I was only 22 and I had just become a father for the first time.

"A lot of young men died. The average age out there was 19, whereas in the Second World War it was 26."

And Dave knows only too well how very lucky he was to come out alive, as he narrowly escaped death many times at the hands of the Viet Cong.

"There were lots of trees in the jungle but it wasn't like Sherwood Forest or the New Forest, which is solid, natural wood. A lot of the trees were rotten because it's quite damp, so you could poke your finger right into a big tree.

"One day six Viet Cong soldiers were trying to get me and I hid behind a tree, but they cut it down with their guns and luckily it didn't hurt me but it just touched my back as it fell. My mates saved me because they started firing," recalls Dave.

But he tells me he also had 'three confirmed dead' himself, including a Viet Cong soldier who nearly killed him in 1969.

"It's dark in the jungle - it's pitch-black in places - and we were in jungle greens while they were in black uniforms. One of them came up behind me and stabbed me in the back and I was very lucky not to be killed.

"I put 30 rounds in him - I panicked, I just turned round and fired," Dave recalls.

But in the end it all proved too much for Dave, and after eight-and-a-half-months he went through a nervous breakdown and lost all his hair from the back of his head.

He was sent to Concorde Repatriation Hospital in New South Wales, where he was among hundreds of young soldiers being treated for "shell shock".

"I was there for about five months and my wife used to visit me with my baby son.

"I was in a bad way. I was very nervous and my wife pulled me round - it was seeing her and Richard that brought me back," says Dave.

When he came out of hospital, Dave worked in the armoury in New South Wales, priming hand-grenades, before being sent to barracks in Melbourne to work as an orderly.

In 1974 he left the army, and Fersca divorced him a week later.

But Dave insists it wasn't the effects of war that sent him on a path to a life as a homeless man, sleeping rough on the streets and on railway platforms.

Life started to go wrong when he left the army and got caught by the police for spray-painting and changing the engine numbers of stolen cars.

He was deported back to England but decided to try his luck at getting into New Zealand on a false passport. In the end he was deported twice from New Zealand, and he came home to Britain for good in 1975, when he married his second wife within months.

Determined to make good of himself, Dave achieved a degree in medieval history and secured a job as a teacher at an all-girls' school in Leeds. But the school soon found out about his criminal record and he ended up returning to the work of his pre-army days, as a labourer.

"The way I was in the hospital after Vietnam, that cleared up. I have no nerve problems now - that was just battle fatigue, which a lot of young soldiers went through," says Dave, matter-of-factly.

"Things really started to go wrong for me with my second divorce in 1979 - that's when the bottom fell out. I moved back in with my parents and started hitting the bottle, and when my mum and dad died I just left the house and furniture and everything and told a friend to sell it and keep the money.

"My dog died at the same time too and I just couldn't cope. I took off for Worcester and York and spent the best part of eight months sleeping in railway stations."

Unable to work since fracturing his pelvis and skull in a serious accident in the early 1980s - after which he was diagnosed with schizophrenia - Dave seems quite content today at Patrick House.

Perhaps that's because hostel life has its parallels with the army - it's structured, everyone's in the same boat, and the camaraderie among the residents is evident.

Dave has at least three good friends at Patrick House who are also ex-soldiers, all of whom have seen active service in one of the great wars of the last century.

And if Dave wants to be reminded further of his army youth, he need look no further than through his bedroom window, where the next generation of soldiers are on parade at Southampton's Territorial Army centre.