....The Montagnard, or “Mountain People”, were another ally. Brown remembers them as being a good people; short, tough and “very anti communist”. They possessed small crossbows that were incredibly tightly strung and would fire a 12 inch bamboo arrow. In his room one evening Brown attempted to relieve the boredom by shooting the arrow into the thick solid wood door of his villa apartment. “It went straight through the bloody door! It was incredibly powerful.” Left jutting from the other side, the arrowhead fortunately caused no damage to life or limb. Though not fired again, the crossbow did make the long journey home to Australia.

The RTFV did not have the airspace to itself. An absence of radar and prevalence of cloud meant that aircraft were not always aware of each others presence. “I saw a Canberra dive down in front of us,” he starts, “and then another and another.” Brown describes the looping motion of the bombers using his hands in the best fighter-pilot fashion. “I had flown through the middle of a Canberra bombing raid!” At times, being on the ground wasn’t any safer. “At one of the bigger bases, I think it was NhaTrang,” Brown strains the memory banks, “I was waiting to take off when a South Vietnamese A1 Skyraider landed on its belly tank right in front of me. The whole aeroplane went up in flames.” Miraculously, the pilot, the squadron CO, escaped without a scratch. Faced with an obvious delay and readying to offer assistance, the Aussie crew shutdown their Caribou. As fire tenders whizzed by, the Tower called the ‘Wallaby’ to ‘back out’. Brown hurried to comply, “I had no sooner started it, when the starboard engine went Voomf! There were flames for about 3-4 seconds and then it went out.” The culprit was found to be a cracked component in the fuel system that subsequently sprayed fuel over the hot engine. There was a happy ending though, “Unbelievably, the deHavilland Canada representative to Vietnam was on the base. He stripped and rebuilt the back of the engine overnight and totally rewired it. The aircraft flew out the next day.”

At Vung Tau the Australian Caribous were supported by RAAF ground crews, about whom Brown cannot speak too highly. Unlike the American system of “Crew Chiefs” assigned to a single aircraft and expected to be a ’jack of all trades’, the RTFV was supported by a team of skilled RAAF tradesmen. “An aircraft would come in unserviceable and 10 people would hit it. Bang. The next morning it was on the flightline, ready to go. It was a 24 hour a day job and they worked like drovers’ dogs.” On arriving in Vietnam in 1965, Brown’s tour of duty was originally six months, though this was extended to eight months whilst he was there. In that entire time he can only recall 3 or 4 occasions when a full complement of aircraft was not available.

When describing the suitability of the Caribou to its role, he puts it simply, “100%. It was a lovely aeroplane and very strong.” Warmly describing it as a “truck with wings”, he states that he never had cause to shut down an engine in flight and rarely was an engine change required for anything other than reaching its scheduled ‘life’. Coupled with its amazing short field performance, its sturdy reliability has seen the Caribou serve in numerous theatres of operation since Vietnam. For Brown, his ‘tour’ ended in January of 1966 and he subsequently entered the civil ranks of QANTAS. Now in retirement, he was present at a recent air show when the air, dust and crowd were stirred up by the distinctive growl of the deHavilland Caribou. For those in attendance it was a display of impressive low level manoeuvrability and short field performance. For Barrie Brown it probably evoked memories of the mountains of Vietnam, tight strips, old friends and the occasional flying pig.