Don Tate

Anzacs Betrayed: the Story of the 2nd D&e Platoon Don Tate

May 1969 the Vietnam War Atrocities, Curruption, Murder. The Falsification of History. Anzacs Betrayed is a companion piece to the best-selling memoir, The War Within. Don Tate now provides an in-depth analysis of one of the most sordid matters in Australian military history, the deletion of the 2nd D&E Platoon from all the histories of the Vietnam War and his 38 year battle to have it reinstated. It is a story of many parts- but at it's heart, it is a story of betrayal. Not only the betrayal of the thirty-nine Infantry Privates who formed the ad hoc, 2nd D&E Platoon in Vietnam during 1969, but a story the gatekeepers of our military heritage don't want told- the 'red hats' of the military establishment, and the historians of the Australian War Memorial. And there is good reason why- because it turns on its head the romanticised image of Anzac and the noble traditions of the Australian Defence Force. Don Tate volunteered to go to the Vietnam War as a naive, but patriotic nineteen year old boy in 1969 and served as an infantry reinforcement with three units - the 4th Battalion, the 2nd D&E Platoon, and the 9th Battalion. He was badly wounded in action on the 19th July 1969 and was hospitalised for more than two years. Many years later, he learned that not only hadn't he been recorded with the 9th Battalion, but that all trace of the 2nd D&E Platoon had been erased from the histories of the Vietnam War. Worse, that the curruptions of his service records (and those of every man who fought in the platoon) was the result of a cover-up of atrocities that reached the highest levels of the military and the government.