Kicking A Ball Under The Gun

The Sunday Age

Sunday December 31, 2006

Steve Strevens

In the shadow of the Vietnam War, sport provided an escape for Steve Strevens.

SUMMER was different in 1965. At sea off Vietnam, it was extraordinarily hot, the humidity at times made you gag and living in a metal box 100 metres long meant there was no escaping it. Our ship, the destroyer HMAS Vendetta, was escorting troops to Vung Tau harbour.

That duty completed, and as part of the fleet involved in what was known as the "Indonesian Confrontation", we sailed off to make sure a couple of Russian ships didn't get too close to our friends.

On the way, we confiscated a number of fishing boats running guns to insurgents. It was, as Bill Lawry would say many years later, all happening.

Among the sounds of helicopter blades and the slap of the ocean on the ship's sides, we'd think about home. About barbecues and beaches, about cricket and tennis. And the feel of the hot north wind.

Not that there was much of it, but sport tended to take your mind off things. Radio Australia provided a scratchy, though welcome, coverage of Doug Walters hitting centuries in his first two Tests, and on occasions, we'd play quoits on the deck near the torpedo tubes.

Darts on a board hung near a 4.5-inch gun was always popular, while tug-of-war up one side of the deck and down the other was an occasional diversion.

One morning, the captain told us we were heading to Tawau in British North Borneo, a welcome announcement as sport was usually organised when we entered a port.

A regiment of the British Army's Scots Guards was stationed near the Indonesian border and it signalled us, proposing a game of soccer.

As it was summer, we asked for cricket but they replied they hadn't got a pitch, nor any gear. We had none either, so soccer it was. Not that many - or indeed any - of us had played much soccer.

We had a Dutch bloke who we made captain and a couple of others with English heritage who reckoned they could play. A few like me decided that a game of soccer was better than spending time either on board trying to keep out of the heat or wandering around the dusty streets of this place no one had heard of.

An hour or so after we docked, a large army truck pulled up at the end of the wharf, and after passing a machine-gun post where two soldiers eyed us suspiciously, we jumped in the back.

The truck rumbled its way through the jungle, the uniformed soldiers with guns over their shoulders. We wore shorts, sandshoes and no shirts. Sweating profusely, we arrived at the garrison and made our way to the ground, hewn out of the jungle that encroached to about three metres from the sidelines.

Spectators were few but soldiers patrolling the touchlines with machine guns at the ready yelled out occasionally. Every now and again, they would disappear into the jungle, from where, in the distance, we could hear gunfire.

The Scots Guards beat us handsomely. I lost count after they'd scored about 20 times. Not being able to play was just one hindrance; concentration was another.

The Dutchman turned out to be a dud, as did the English blokes. And the Guards didn't take to kindly to being hip-and-shouldered by the rest of us. As the score mounted, we could hardly move. The heat, the mozzies and the sound of guns were all very off-putting.

Afterwards, we spent a convivial few hours in the Guards' canteen and, late at night, after the truck took us back to the ship, we felt that even though it was not cricket, it had been a welcome distraction before we sailed again to places where we would rather not have been.

© 2006 The Sunday Age

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