“This Recommendation Cannot Be Approved” — Why Australia’s VC Nomination Was Blocked JJ

A phone rang somewhere in Nui Dat in the dead of night. Three days after one of the most extraordinary infantry actions in Australian military history. On the other end of the line was Lieutenant Colonel Colin Townsend, commanding officer of the 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, calling Major Harry Smith, the man who had just led 108 soldiers through three and a half hours of monsoon hell against more than 2,000 enemy troops and lived to walk out of the rubber plantation at Long Tan.

Townsend had a message. “There was pressure coming from Australia,” he said. “The deaths of so many young national servicemen were becoming a political problem back home.” Smith needed to get moving on citations for his men. He needed to get it done quickly. Three days after the battle, Harry Smith was telephoned around midnight by 6 RAR Commander Colonel Colin Townsend, who urged him to get cracking on award nominations as there was pressure coming from Australia because the number of national servicemen killed in the battle

was turning into a political problem. Despite this urgency, Townsend advised him not to get too carried away as there was a ration of one decoration per 250 soldiers each 6 months. Wait. What? The men of D Company, 108 of them, had just fought a regimental strength enemy force at 10 to 1 odds in the pouring rain, almost out of ammunition, surrounded on all sides, and held until reinforcement arrived.

18 Australians were dead. The battlefield was covered in 245 enemy bodies with evidence that hundreds more had been dragged off in the night. And the officer who had just lived through it was being told in the same breath to write citations for bravery while respecting an administrative quota that capped recognition at one decoration per 250 men every 6 months.

That contradiction right there is the engine of a story that would grind through review boards and tribunals and government inquiries for the next 50 years. A story about institutional failure masquerading as administrative process. About the gap between what men actually did in a rubber plantation in Phuoc Toy province on August 18th, 1966 and what the system was willing to acknowledge they had done.

And at the center of it all, a man named Jack Kirby, a warrant officer class two from Sydney who should have been recommended for a Victoria Cross the moment the guns fell silent, but instead became a name that the honors system buried so efficiently that it took half a century and multiple independent tribunals to dig back out.

Stay with me because by the end of this, you will understand not just what Jack Kirby did at Long Tan, but why his story represents something that reaches beyond one battle and one set of medals into the heart of how military institutions choose to remember and to forget. The story begins not in a rubber plantation, but with a mortar barrage, the opening move in a strategic gambit that would ultimately go catastrophically wrong for its authors.

By August 1966, the Australian base at Nui Dat was only 3 months old. The Australians had relocated the villagers of Long Tan and Long Phuoc to secure the new base. The recovery of these villages had motivated the enemy’s attack on the Australian Task Force. In the days before the battle, radio signals indicated the presence of strong North Vietnamese forces within 5 km of the base, but patrols found nothing.

The enemy plan was to lure the Australians from their base by firing recoilless rifle and mortar shells into it. They theorized that the Australians would sweep the area around the base in an attempt to stop the attacks, and the Viet Cong would ambush the sweeping forces. It was a textbook baiting operation. The Viet Cong 275th Main Force Regiment, reinforced by a North Vietnamese Army Battalion and D445 Local Force Battalion, had moved into position near Long Tan outside the range of Australian artillery at Nui Dat.

They outnumbered anything the Australians could immediately put in the field by a factor of 20 or more. The trap was set. They just needed to fire the bait. At 2:43 in the morning of the 17th of August, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops bombarded the Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat for 22 minutes, resulting in 67 mortar craters.

24 Australians were wounded, one seriously, who lost a leg. Seven vehicles were damaged and 21 tents reduced to splinters. The attack was precise. It had targeted the Australian artillery lines, the engineer positions, and the fire support coordination center with accuracy that suggested careful reconnaissance. The next morning, B Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment was directed to patrol from the base to locate the Viet Cong’s firing positions.

B Company achieved this task before being replaced by D Company, 6 RAR at midday on August 18th. D Company, 6 RAR under command of Major Harry Smith, had previously been detailed for a 3-day patrol southeast of Nui Dat and was instead ordered to relieve B Company the next day to continue the search. Neither Townsend nor Smith were warned of the possible presence of the 275th Regiment.

This is a detail worth sitting with. The regimental commander, the battalion commander, and the task force commander all had information suggesting a major enemy force in the area. Intelligence reports had estimated enemy strength at somewhere between 300 and 3,500 men. A range so vast it was operationally meaningless.

Based on intelligence at the time, recounted D Company leader Smith, “My commander indicated a weapons platoon and protection, perhaps 50 to 60 VC, probably long gone. No indication was given to me of any larger force in the area.” Major Harry Smith was a career soldier born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1933. He had served with the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment in Malaya as a platoon commander reinforcement officer for active service in the Malayan emergency.

He had trained his company the way he understood jungle warfare from that experience, emphasizing individual marksmanship, platoon level initiative, and the kind of discipline and aggression that made small units dangerous. What he was about to need all of that for, nobody had told him. Patrols continued on August 18th.

D company left the Nui Dat base at 11:15 a.m. bound for the Long Tan rubber plantation. As they left, the sounds of a concert by Australian entertainer Little Pattie reached their ears. They entered the Long Tan plantation at 3:15 p.m. that day. B company, the men they were replacing, was already heading back toward Nui Dat to catch that concert.

Rock music drifting through the humid afternoon air. The war, at that moment, must have felt almost manageable, almost normal, almost like a job you went out to and came back from. D company was 108 men total, including a three-man New Zealand artillery observation party from 161 battery. Three platoons, 10 platoon under Second Lieutenant Jeff Kendall, 11 platoon under Second Lieutenant Gordon Sharp, and 12 platoon under Second Lieutenant Dave Sabben.

Company headquarters, the signalers, medics, the company sergeant major, and walking among them, a 31-year-old warrant officer from Sydney, broad and heavy with the build of a man who had been an army soldier since his late teens, carrying the experience of Malaya in his bones and the respect of every soldier in the company in a way that rank alone cannot manufacture.

Jack Kirby. They called him Big Jack. Jack Kirby was a career soldier. Born in Sydney in 1935, he enlisted in the Australian Army shortly after his 18th birthday. Kirby was a Malaya veteran and naturally a big build. Appointed CSM of D Company, the experienced Kirby soon became popular with national servicemen and regular soldiers alike.

They respected him for both his experience and his abilities and affectionately nicknamed him Big Jack. 68 of the 108 soldiers with D Company that afternoon were national servicemen, conscripts who had been in the army barely 12 months and had seen no significant combat. The backbone connecting the experience of their company commander to the green edges of their own soldier selves was the warrant officer who moved among them steady as the rubber trees around them.

As D Company moved through the rubber plantation with two platoons up and one platoon moving behind, 11 Platoon commanded by Second Lieutenant Gordon Sharp on the Australian right ran into a small group of Viet Cong. After a short exchange, the enemy fled eastwards with 11 Platoon in pursuit. Little did the Australians know that they were about to collide with a major concentration of enemy forces.

At 3:40 p.m., 11 Platoon advancing in extended line came under intense fire from a concealed enemy force. The Viet Cong, positioned in depth with automatic weapons, RPGs, and mortars launched a ferocious attack. Within minutes, the platoon was pinned down and casualties began to mount. The sudden onslaught took the Australians by surprise.

Unlike the usual hit-and-run tactics of the local guerrillas, the Viet Cong in this encounter stood their ground and engaged the Australians in a pitched battle. What Smith had stumbled into was the entire offensive capacity of the Viet Cong 275th Regiment, the force that had been sitting in the jungle for days waiting for exactly this moment, exactly this patrol, coming exactly where the mortar attack had been designed to draw them.

The baiting operation was working. The only thing not working was the assumption that a company of Australians, outnumbered 20 to 1, would break. Almost as soon as the battle began, a torrential downpour of rain added to the gloom in the rubber plantation. The Australians were surrounded, short of ammunition, and fighting an enemy whose strength they could only guess at.

The rubber trees stood in their precise colonial rows, 40 ft high, the canopy above blotting out the sky. The monsoon hammered down through the leaves and turned the red earth into mud. Visibility collapsed to 30, 20, 10 m in places. The enemy was everywhere in that red murk, advancing in waves, and D Company was a perimeter of Australian bodies in the mud firing at muzzle flashes, counting their rounds, counting their dead.

Company Sergeant Major Warrant Officer Big Jack Kirby, handled the distribution of the rounds to soldiers lying in the mud under constant enemy fire. Kirby was the mainstay of the defense and an inspiration to soldiers. His burly figure moving among the men as he distributed ammunition and organized the collection of the wounded.

He moved between positions in the open. Every step he took exposed him to fire that had already killed 17 of his men. Every time he reached a soldier running low on ammunition and put a new magazine in his hands, he was doing it under conditions that the Victoria Cross was invented to recognize. And then came the moment that would define the argument over his decoration for the next 50 years.

At a critical point in the battle, Kirby rushed out of the D Company perimeter to silence a wieldy enemy heavy machine gun which was setting up less than 50 m away from the Australians. He knew in just a few moments this heavy machine gun would be able to strafe and decimate the Australians. Kirby killed the enemy machine gun crew, rushed back, and continued to carry on handing out ammunition, moving around the entire company position, and giving out words of encouragement to the D Company soldiers.

Less than 50 m in those conditions, in that rain, with that volume of fire, less than 50 m from a crew-served heavy weapon that was about to chew through the Australian perimeter, Jack Kirby left cover and attacked alone. He killed the crew. He came back. He kept moving. Kirby noticed a wounded machine gunner, Private Webb, and ran up to the exposed position, picked up the tall soldier, and carried him back to the company aid post.

Webb’s M60 machine gun could not be retrieved, so Kirby had to put it out of action by firing a few rounds into it. Private Webb was a big man. Kirby was bigger. He ran out to the forward position, lifted a man who could not walk, and carried him back through fire to the aid post. Then, he returned to distributing ammunition.

Then, the next wounded man. Then, the ammunition again. Throughout the fierce 3-hour engagement, Warrant Officer Kirby was a mainstay of the company. Under almost continuous enemy fire, the CSM moved among the soldiers, distributing ammunition, organizing the collection and treatment of the wounded. At 5:00 p.m.

, with ammunition critically low, Smith called for a resupply. At 5:00 p.m., D Company’s commander, Major Harry Smith, radioed for ammunition resupply. Two RAAF Iroquois helicopters, which happened to be at Nui Dat to transport a concert party, were tasked and flew at treetop level into the battle area, where they successfully delivered the sorely needed boxes of ammunition.

The first chopper dived on the position, and they pushed the ammunition out, and it dropped out so accurately, almost into the lap of Kirby, that it almost killed him. He gathered that ammunition and distributed it through the perimeter while the battle continued. Relief arrived at last light as the APCs, commanded by Lieutenant Adrian Roberts, approached the battlefield.

They encountered a company of Viet Cong soldiers attempting to outflank D Company. The APCs opened fire with their .50 caliber machine guns catching the enemy by surprise and inflicting heavy casualties. The sudden appearance of the APCs and their firepower turned the tide of the battle. The Viet Cong, who had been massing for another assault on D Company, were forced to withdraw.

The grizzly task of counting the enemy bodies was eventually halted at a total of 245. The dead were buried where they lay in shallow graves. There were signs that many more had been removed by the enemy as they withdrew during the night. Some estimates place total enemy dead and seriously wounded at closer to 800.

18 Australians were killed and 24 wounded during the Battle of Long Tan. But under Smith’s command, D Company had fended off a numerically superior force with at least 245 Vietnamese confirmed as killed and another 500 believed wounded. The battle was over. The accounting was about to begin and this is where the story becomes something other than a story about heroism.

It becomes a story about what an institution does with heroism that it finds inconvenient or excessive or difficult to fit into a spreadsheet. Due to the overwhelming surprise of such a major engagement in Phuoc Toy province in August 1966 and importantly, the tragedy and shock of 18 young Australians being killed in the battle, Australian military officials gave Major Harry Smith less than 24 hours to solicit, write, and submit citations for decorations and awards for the battle.

Read that again. 18 young men dead. 3 and 1/2 hours of combat against a force 20 times his strength. 108 individual acts of endurance and courage, each deserving documentation. And the time frame he was given to capture all of it in writing to ensure each man’s actions were properly recorded for the system that would decide whether they deserved recognition was less than 24 hours.

Harry Smith sat down with his platoon commanders and his sergeant major and started writing. He knew what he had seen. He knew what each man had done. And at the top of his list for the highest award was Jack Kirby. The Victoria Cross. Smith believed Kirby’s actions met every criterion for the most senior gallantry award in the Commonwealth system.

The repeated exposure to fire, the independent act of attacking and silencing an enemy crew-served weapon, the sustained moral and physical leadership that had held the company together through 4 hours of being surrounded and systematically destroyed. During the process of submitting the citations, his superior officers, one ATF commander, Brigadier David Jackson, and commanding officer 6 RAR, Lieutenant Colonel Colin Townsend, refused to accept a Victoria Cross citation for CSM Jack Kirby.

Lieutenant Colonel Smith said he had wanted to nominate Jack Kirby for Australia’s highest military honor after the battle but was told he couldn’t. “I was told there were no Victoria Crosses awarded in Korea. This is Vietnam, not Lone Pine. I will only sign a DCM.” He said, “This is the sentence that echoes through five decades of inquiry and controversy.

” “Not Lone Pine, not Korea. This is Vietnam.” As if the merit of a man’s actions could be calibrated by the name of the country his boots were standing in when he performed them. The comparison to Lone Pine, where Australian soldiers earned Victoria Crosses at Gallipoli in August 1915, was almost contemptuous in its dismissiveness.

As if the standards of gallantry were determined by the geopolitical significance of the conflict, not by what a human being was willing to risk and do in the service of his comrades. Smith reluctantly nominated Kirby for the Distinguished Conduct Medal, but had regretted it ever since. The Distinguished Conduct Medal was a second-tier gallantry award for non-commissioned officers and other ranks.

It was the award one step below the Victoria Cross for enlisted personnel under the Imperial Honors System. A very fine award, an award that acknowledged genuine distinction in the field. And in another battle for another act, it might have been appropriate. But Harry Smith had been in that plantation. He had seen Big Jack move among his men under fire that would have paralyzed most soldiers with fear, moving as if the bullets were not his concern, carrying the wounded, killing the enemy crew, holding the line.

Conferred with his platoon commanders and RSM and submitted what he regarded as the absolute minimum of decorations, anticipating they would be speedily approved. They passed up the chain of command, but what finally appeared was very different. The first thing that emerged from the chain of command was downgrading.

Smith had himself been recommended for a distinguished service order, second only to the Victoria Cross, but in the end that was downgraded to the Military Cross. The Military Cross was awarded to Harry Smith in December 1966. Downgraded by COMAFV from the original recommendations by the commanding officer of 6 RAR and the commander of the Australian Task Force of the DSO.

The Distinguished Service Order, the second highest gallantry award, downgraded to the Military Cross, the third tier. For the man who had held 108 soldiers together against 2,000 enemy troops by force of tactical competence, personal courage, and a radio call to artillery control that would become legendary.

Drop 50, danger close. For the man who had done that and been told afterwards to write his citations quickly because the politics were getting complicated. And then more things disappeared. After Harry Smith’s and his commanding officer’s citations were submitted, which included a distinguished service order for Major Harry Smith, civilian Department of Defense officials downgraded some of the recommended awards and some other citation application simply went missing. Missing.

Not rejected, not formally denied, not overruled through a documented process, simply gone. Award recommendations that men had submitted for their comrades, written in the days immediately after combat while the details were fresh and raw, had vanished into the administrative machinery of the Australian Department of Defense and not come out the other side. This was not conspiracy.

It was something in many ways more insidious than conspiracy. It was the ordinary failure of a bureaucratic system that had no particular interest in getting this right, operating under a quota structure that was structurally incapable of recognizing exceptional performance when that performance exceeded what the quota anticipated.

The scale set one decoration per 250 for decorations and one in 150 for mention in dispatches. This scale was adopted by Australia for the Vietnam War for naval and ground forces and RAAF non-air crew. One decoration per 250 men. D Company had 108 men. Mathematically, the quota system was not designed to recognize even one individual act of gallantry from an engagement that involved the entire company.

The quota had been set for the entire force across a 6-month operational period, not for a single afternoon in a rubber plantation where 108 men collectively performed perhaps the most remarkable feat of arms in the Australian Vietnam experience. In the endnotes of his historical work on Long Tan, historian Ian McNeill wrote that the system of allocation of medals by quota resulted in the number and degree of awards being little short of insulting in view of the heroism displayed.

And yet the quota system was not some minor administrative detail that could be quietly argued away. It was the governing framework for every Australian decoration in Vietnam. It was the ceiling above which no recognition could pass, regardless of what had been done below it. And it sat in the same administrative pipeline through which Jack Kirby’s Distinguished Conduct Medal, Harry Smith’s downgraded Military Cross, and the missing recommendations for a dozen other D Company soldiers all had to travel before they reached the men who

had earned them. On the 21st of December, 1966, the first official Commonwealth Gallantry Awards for Long Tan were announced. Nine contemporary awards were made to members of D Company, 6 RAR, and five awards made to members of other units involved in the battle. Nine awards for 108 men for a battle that had lasted 4 hours at 10 to 1 odds that had inflicted over 245 confirmed enemy dead that had very possibly saved the 1st Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat from a follow-on regimental assault that night.

And among those nine awards, the details told a story that Harry Smith would spend decades trying to get someone in authority to read properly. Both Brigadier Oliver Jackson and Lieutenant Colonel Townsend, who were not physically present on the battlefield, received distinguished service orders then second only to the Victoria Cross as an award for gallantry for their parts in the battle.

The two officers who had not been in the plantation received distinguished service orders. Harry Smith, who had been there and held it together, received a Military Cross. Jack Kirby, who had independently attacked an enemy crew-served weapon at close range and carried wounded through open ground under fire, received the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

Second Lieutenant Gordon Sharp, the 21-year-old who had led 11 Platoon into the initial contact and was one of the first Australians killed, received nothing at all. He was dead. The junior officer Gordon Sharp received no honors even though he was one of the first to die in the firefight. Simply put, the original citations were variously amended by senior officers for reasons which may or may not have had something to do with the quota system.

Exactly by whom and why is even now unclear. But Smith points to the Generals RMC Club and notes the dubious DSO for gallantry awarded to Colonel Townsend for his part in Long Tan as an indication of how those at the top of the food chain took care of their own. There is something profoundly uncomfortable in that analysis and it sits there in the historical record resisting comfortable resolution.

Officers who had not been present on the battlefield received higher awards than officers who had been present and held it together under the most extreme pressure. And the men who had actually fought were constrained by a quota that made recognizing their actions mathematically impossible even before the institutional inclinations of senior officers were factored in.

Meanwhile, the system found other ways to fail the men of D Company. Vietnamese and US Army awards were rejected by Canberra due to an inability to accept foreign awards, although that policy was later changed after embarrassing the United States and Vietnamese governments by rejecting their awards. The South Vietnamese government had organized a ceremony to present D Company with the Cross of Gallantry as early as September 1966.

The Australian government declined. The men of D Company received cigarette cases and dolls instead. Gifts that the South Vietnamese government improvised when they were told the medals couldn’t be officially accepted. The parade was delayed until President Thieu’s advisers returned with replacement gifts for the men.

The Australians never received the South Vietnamese government awards. The photograph of those men holding their cigarette cases and dolls instead of campaign medals is one of the more quietly devastating images in the archive of Australian military history. The Americans were rejected as well initially. The United States Army wanted to award D Company a Presidential Unit Citation for extraordinary heroism.

Canberra said, “No.” While the government of the day denied medals offered by the US, a US Presidential Unit Citation for Delta Company was later accepted and approved in 1968. Two years after the battle, a Australian Prime Minister John Gorton presented the United States Presidential Unit Citation to D Company, 6 RAR, for extraordinary gallantry at the Battle of Long Tan in Townsville on August 18th, 1968.

The Americans had called it extraordinary heroism. The Australians had given the same men nine awards across 108 participants and told their commanding officer to keep it to the quota. Jack Kirby never saw any of it. On February 6th, 1967, less than 6 months after the battle that should have made him a Victoria Cross recipient, Kirby was fatally wounded by artillery fire from the 161st Battery, Royal New Zealand Artillery, when 12 105-mm rounds accidentally fell on and around the D Company headquarters.

This friendly fire incident killed four Australians, including Kirby, and wounded 13 others. Jack Kirby was hit in the chest by shrapnel and died before he could be evacuated. Kirby’s death by friendly fire stunned his comrades. Ron Eglinton, a machine gunner wounded in the action at Long Tan, later recalled, “He was a big, gruff, heavy man, a real father figure to us all, and he was dead.

” The medical officer who treated Kirby reflected that he had appeared invincible at Long Tan and had become a mixture of hero, idol, mascot, and good luck charm for the company. A man who had walked through 4 hours of everything the Viet Cong’s 275th Regiment could put into the air, who had stood upright under fire that killed 18 of his comrades, who had run out from cover to attack a machine gun crew that was about to decimate the company line, had survived Long Tan, and then been killed by artillery rounds from his own

side during a routine operation. The cruelty of that geography of fate is almost too stark to sit with. And because Kirby was dead, because he could not advocate for himself, because the initial award process had been rushed and quota constrained and filtered through a chain of command that had its own institutional interests in mind, his Victoria Cross died with him.

Or rather, it was never born. It was proposed and refused before the citation was even formally submitted, blocked at the level of his commanding officer who told Harry Smith that this was Vietnam, not Long Pine, and a DCM was all he would sign. The campaign to correct this began slowly and built for decades.

Lieutenant Colonel Smith received a Military Cross for his actions at Long Tan, but was angered when few of the decorations he recommended for his men were awarded. This began a two-decade fight to have the correct medal medals presented. Harry Smith spent years building a case, gathering testimony from the survivors of D Company, documenting what had happened in the plantation, and what had happened to the citations afterwards.

He was not a man who let institutional inertia displace his own professional judgment. He had been there. He had seen what every one of those men had done, and he believed, with the conviction of a soldier who had commanded them that the system had failed them in a way that no passage of time would make acceptable.

The first major break came in 2006 when Smith met with Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Impressed by the arguments put forward by Lieutenant Colonel Harry Smith at their private meeting in August 2006, one of the last acts of the former Prime Minister before he left government was to initiate an independent panel to look into the honors and awards for the Battle of Long Tan.

On the 12th of October 2007, the Australian government appointed an independent panel to review the treatment of award recommendations stemming from the Battle of Long Tan. The Abigail panel, chaired by retired Major General Peter Abigail, conducted its review and made recommendations that the subsequent Rudd government accepted.

In 2008, the Australian government accepted the recommendations of this panel to award Lieutenant Colonel Harry Smith the Star of Gallantry, second only to the Victoria Cross. The star was previously known as the Distinguished Service Order and although Harry Smith was originally recommended for the honor for extraordinary bravery, his superiors had downgraded it to a Military Cross.

On the 14th of August 2008, after years of campaigning for better recognition of Long Tan veterans, Smith’s Military Cross was upgraded to the Star of Gallantry, the Australian honors system replacement for the Commonwealth Distinguished Service Order for Gallantry. On the same day, two others who fought at Long Tan had their bravery awards upgraded to correspond to the original nominations.

42 years. That is how long it took Harry Smith to receive the award his commanding officer had originally recommended for him. The Distinguished Service Order that became a Military Cross in 1966 became a Star of Gallantry in 2008. A 42-year administrative correction to an institutional decision that had been wrong from the moment it was made.

But the Victoria Cross for Jack Kirby remained unresolved. In April 2015, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Smith applied to the Defense Honors and Awards Appeals Tribunal for a review of a decision by the Chief of Army to refuse to recommend 13 members of the Australian Army who fought at the Battle of Long Tan for a range of gallantry awards, including a Victoria Cross for the late D Company, six RAR CSM, Warrant Officer John Jack Kirby DCM.

The 2015 application was the latest chapter in a campaign that had been building through multiple reviews and inquiries. Each time the case was made, the institutional response had some variation of the same answer. The process had been followed. The integrity of the honors system had to be maintained.

Retrospective review was not appropriate. Each answer ignored the evidence that the process had been demonstrably compromised from the moment Harry Smith was given 18 hours to write citations for a 4-hour battle that killed 18 of his men. Defense representative Jillian Heard told the Defense Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal that the Army opposed a merit review.

“We’ve done a process review, and as far as we’re concerned, there is no requirement for these awards to be reviewed any further,” she said. “That’s the Army’s position, and that’s the position the Chief of Army has taken. Army will only conduct a merit review if the process review shows maladministration.” This is the institutional voice at its most revealing.

No merit review. Process review only. Awards already made carry a presumption of correctness that can only be challenged by proving that maladministration occurred, not by demonstrating that the actions being recognized or not recognized met the threshold for higher award. The system was protecting itself, not the men it was supposedly designed to honor.

Harry Smith argued, “If he can’t be awarded the Victoria Cross on heroism, then he should be on the second criteria for extraordinary service in the performance of duty.” Many say Vietnam vets, many of them conscripts, have received scant recognition for their efforts in the war generally and the Battle of Long Tan specifically.

The tribunal convened its hearings in Queensland in March 2016. Witnesses gave evidence. Harry Smith submitted his account. The Department of Defense argued against a merit review. And in August 2016, the findings were released. The tribunal recommended Medals of Gallantry for Lieutenant Adrian Roberts, Sergeant Frank Alcorta, and Lance Corporal Barry Magnussen, and commendations for gallantry for Second Lieutenant Gordon Sharp, and Privates Neil Beckstrom, Ron Brett, Ian Campbell, William Roach, Geoffrey Peters, and Noel

Grimes. 10 men, 50 years after the battle. Some of them dead. Some of them old enough that the award ceremony would be conducted for their families, rather than for themselves. But they were recognized at last. And Jack Kirby. The tribunal did not recommend a Victoria Cross for the late Warrant Officer Class 2 Jack Kirby.

The tribunal found the Distinguished Conduct Medal awarded to Kirby in 1966 was the appropriate award to recognize his distinguished conduct and leadership in the field during the battle. No Victoria Cross. The DCM. The award that Harry Smith had been pressured into substituting for the Victoria Cross citation he had originally intended to submit.

The award that existed because Kirby’s superior officers had refused to let Smith write the citation he believed was warranted, was declared to be appropriate. The outcome of the corrupted process was being used to validate the corrupted process. If the DCM had not been appropriate, it would not have been awarded.

Since it was awarded, it was appropriate. The circularity of this logic is visible to anyone willing to examine it. The lack of a recommendation for a posthumous Victoria Cross to D Company, 6 RAR CSM Jack Kirby, is just staggering based on what he did during the Battle of Long Tan. Harry Smith, the man who had been there, agreed.

He had been saying so for 50 years, and the argument was not merely sentimental. Not a single Victoria Cross was awarded to any soldier in the First Australian Task Force, despite 500 men being killed in action. 500 dead Australians across 5 years of sustained combat operations, zero Victoria Crosses. The Victoria Cross for Australia, the nation’s highest military decoration, was instituted in 1991 to replace the Imperial Victoria Cross, and the first recipient was a soldier from the Gulf War.

The entire Vietnam War, in which Australia sustained 521 killed and 3,000 wounded, produced not a single Victoria Cross. That statistical absence is not a statement about the courage of the men who served in Vietnam. It is a statement about the institutional culture that processed their service. Immediately after the battle, Harry Smith was only given 18 hours to write and submit all of the citations for his men.

Harry did suggest to 6 RAR Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel Colin Townsend that Kirby should have got a Victoria Cross, but Townsend said he would only sign a DCM citation. The word only. Townsend would only sign a DCM citation. Not this does not meet the standard or the evidence does not support it or even I disagree with your assessment.

Just I will only sign a DCM. A personal decision made by one officer in one moment that foreclosed the Victoria Cross process for Jack Kirby before it ever formally began. There was no panel. There was no review board. There was no consideration of the evidence against the criteria. There was a commanding officer telling his subordinate what level of award he was prepared to endorse, and the subordinate had no avenue of appeal because he had 18 hours and 17 other citations to write. Jack Kirby’s Victoria Cross was

blocked in a phone call. Not a review board, not a formal rejection, not a considered administrative process. A late-night call to a major who was still processing the worst day of his professional life followed by a directive. I will only sign a DCM. The American military, looking at the same battle from the outside, reached a different conclusion.

D Company distinguished itself by extraordinary heroism while engaged in military operations against an opposing armed force in Vietnam on August 18th, 1966. While searching for Viet Cong in a rubber plantation northeast of Baria, Phuoc Tuy province, D Company met and immediately became engaged in heavy contact.

As the battle developed, it became apparent that the men of D Company were facing a numerically superior force. The platoons of D Company were surrounded and attacked on all sides by an estimated reinforced enemy battalion using automatic weapons, small arms, and mortars. Fighting courageously against a well-armed and determined foe, the men of D Company maintained their formations in a common perimeter defense and inflicted heavy casualties upon the Viet Cong.

The enemy maintained a continuous, intense volume of fire and attacked repeatedly from all directions. Extraordinary heroism. Those are the words in the citation language for the Presidential Unit Citation. The Americans read what happened at Long Tan and reached for their highest unit-level recognition. The Australian system read the same events and worked out how many decorations the quota allowed for a 6-month period and a force that size.

Harry Smith outlived almost all of the institutional processes that had failed his men. Lieutenant Colonel Harry Smith, the national serviceman turned career soldier, died on August 20th at the Sunshine Coast aged 90, 2 days after the battle’s 57th anniversary. He had lived to see his own award upgraded and to see most of his surviving men finally recognized with the decorations they had earned 50 years before.

He had not lived to see a Victoria Cross for Jack Kirby and by 2023, that recommendation had been formally and finally declined. There is a photograph in the Australian War Memorial Collection. Two men standing together in October 1966 test-firing a Soviet-made Chinese Communist heavy machine gun they had captured at Long Tan.

Warrant Officer II John William Jack Kirby, Company Sergeant Major D Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment of Windsor, Brisbane and Major Harry Smith of Ashgrove, Brisbane, Officer Commanding D Company, 6 RAR. Smith and Kirby distinguished themselves at the Battle of Long Tan on August 18th, 1966. Smith was awarded the Military Cross and Kirby the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

Two men who had been in the plantation together. Two men who had held 108 soldiers against a force 20 times their number. One would spend the next 57 years fighting for proper recognition of what had happened there. The other would be dead within 6 months. Killed by his own side’s artillery on a routine operation.

Never knowing that the Victoria Cross Harry Smith had wanted to submit for him had been stopped before it reached a single review board. He died thinking a DCM was the system’s final word on what he had done at Long Tan. The system that produced that outcome was not designed by malice. It was designed by bureaucratic convenience, by a quota structure optimized for average conditions rather than exceptional ones.

By a chain of command in which the personal views of individual officers could permanently foreclose options that should have been available above them. When Lieutenant Colonel Townsend said he would only sign a DCM, that should not have been the end of the conversation. The Victoria Cross process in the Commonwealth system is supposed to allow recommendations to bypass immediate commanding officers in circumstances where those officers may have institutional reasons to resist the recommendation.

But that mechanism requires someone to use it. Requires a junior officer to escalate past his commanding officer in a command culture that made such escalation professionally dangerous. Harry Smith, given 18 hours and 17 other citations to write, and the pressure of a late night phone call from his CO, did not have the space to fight that battle and write those citations at the same time.

It’s sobering to realize that in fact only four medals were awarded for the Battle of Long Tan. The politicians and the senior military didn’t recognize it as a great event, possibly because there might have been more of them at the time. This is the institutional truth that sits at the center of the Long Tan recognition failure.

The battle became iconic because veterans and the public made it iconic because the numbers were too stark to dismiss in definitely because Harry Smith refused to let the institutional silence stand. But in 1966, to the system that processed it, Long Tan was a single afternoon’s engagement in a war it was already having trouble explaining to the Australian public.

Recognizing it as something exceptional would have required the system to acknowledge that something exceptional had been allowed to happen to 108 men who had been sent out without warning of the force they would encounter. Institutional reluctance to recognize Long Tan as it deserved to be recognized was in part institutional reluctance to acknowledge the failures of intelligence sharing and force protection that had put D Company in that plantation against a regiment without knowing a the was there.

Jack Kirby’s name is on the roll of honor at the Australian War Memorial. He is remembered on Vietnam Veterans Day, which Australia observes on the anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan. The Distinguished Conduct Medal awarded to him in December 1966 sits in whatever collection holds his effects.

A second-tier decoration for a first-tier act. The permanent residue of a commanding officer’s midnight decision that this was Vietnam, not Lone Pine, and a DCM was all he would sign. The recommendation that this was a review board that blocked could not, in the end, even be called a review board’s decision. There was no board.

There was a man on a phone and a quota, and an institutional culture that processed the most heroic afternoon in the Australian Vietnam War as a statistical event in a 6-month decoration cycle. Harry Smith knew what Jack Kirby had done. The men of D Company knew. The enemy knew, in whatever sense the enemy’s subsequent avoidance of Australian forces in Phuoc Tuy Province constituted acknowledgement.

The Americans knew, in the language of their presidential unit citation. And somewhere, buried in the administrative record of the Australian Department of Defense, there is the ghost of a Victoria Cross citation that was never formally submitted because one officer said no, and the process had no mechanism for a major with 18 dead men to take it any further.

Ron Eglinton recalled, “He was a big, gruff, heavy man, [snorts] a real father figure to us all, and he was dead. He was dead and his decoration was filed and the system moved on. But the system never quite got away from Long Tan. It chased that debt through 50 years of reviews and tribunals and government inquiries and partial corrections.

It came close a couple of times to facing the full weight of what it had done in 1966. And then it declined once more in 2016 in formal language to recommend the Victoria Cross that should have been submitted within 24 hours of the guns falling silent. The question of what Jack Kirby deserved is not ambiguous to anyone who reads the accounts of what he did in that plantation.

The question of what the system gave him is not ambiguous either. The distance between those two things is the measure of the failure. And the failure has a name and the name is institutional preference dressed up as process wearing the vocabulary of integrity to protect decisions that were made for reasons that had nothing to do with integrity.

Not Lone Pine, not Korea. This is Vietnam. As if the mud were different mud. As if the bullets made different wounds. As if a man’s courage was worth more or less depending on the war his country chose to send him to fight it in.