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by Boomert - Well Done, Those Men by Barry Heard 12 Jan 2010
Well Done, Those Men (Barry Heard, Scribe, $29.95 tpb, ISBN 1920769269, April) HHH

Barry Heard’s quiet life on a remote Victorian farm was interrupted by ‘a very official letter in a brown envelope’ that turned up one day in 1964. He had been called up for National Service, or ‘Nasho’. A lucky brush with German measles kept him out of the army the first time around, but by February 1966 21-year-old Heard was off to the Puckapunyal army base. For a naïve country boy the army training was an adventure full of blokey bonhomie, but one that suddenly became very serious once he was stationed with a regular regiment, the 7RAR, that was about to be deployed in Vietnam. Heard’s recounting of his Vietnam tour is chilling. But it is the last third of the book that really hits home. In less than 100 pages, Heard describes 30 years of hell, a hell that was only recognised as chronic post-traumatic stress disorder when he suffered a massive breakdown in 1995. This book isn’t an easy read on a number of levels: not only the gruelling subject matter but also the rather distant tone can only hint at the enormous effort it took Heard to write all this down. Nonetheless, this is an important book on a still-hidden topic, and one that deserves a wide audience.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2005, Thorpe-Bowker

Author Biography: Barry Heard
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