War Service Fires Fletch
War service didn’t cause “Fletcher the Etcher” to lock himself away for size years to create his masterpiece, but it helped.
This Anzac Day, Perry Fletchers’ intricate bronze-backed etching of The Last Supper is in storage needing a suitable gallery where the public can permanently appreciate his craft, the emotion , talent and pain that went into it.
The work, which hung for two years in State Parliament’s Queens Hall, needs a permanent home.
The master etcher, poet, painter, humorist, actor and magician spent the reminder of his youth creating it from 1970 to 1976, amid the distress of community rejection many Vietnam veterans suffered.
But Mr Fletcher, 57, doesn’t believe National Service wasted his youth, far from it, and he thinks compulsory military service wouldn’t harm today’s youth.
I worked in a single room, a flat in Hawthorn, for six years to create that, and people would ask, how can you live like that’?” he said.
“After living unwashed for months in a single foxhole at a fire base, that was fine.”
Today, after winning a battle against the bottle and trauma with the help of the Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service, he look back on the Fire Base Diggers Rest with pride.
Lance Corporal Perry fletcher spend almost three months of his Vietnam……hundred other 9RAR Diggers, you men he considers heroes.
It was on of the longest, unrelieved stints of any Australian battalion in a forward position.
“Without the arm discipline drilled into us, I wouldn’t have been able to keep going to complete The Last Supper, it was crucial,” he said. “It took intense concentration for many years.”
Many of Mr Fletcher’s memories of the bizarre, comical, odd angry shots of Vietnam are like a movie, not unlike Spike Milligan’s war stories.
“We were with Americans towards the end of the stint and they were smoking dope, had their trannies to their ears and, I thought, this will be a movie one day.”
“Australians would quietly reconnoitre a hill, but Americans would go straight in, conquer it and suffer a log of deaths.”
Perry Fletcher was picked as quirky early on , assigned to 9RAR Infantry Intelligence where, at Diggers Rest, he quickly became a key man in securing the fire base.”
“I was giving 90-minute situation briefings to captains and majors, going to the perimeter to be briefed on movement there, ” he said.
“Then at night I’d write poetry or do calligraphy for the blokes replies to Dear John letters they were getting from girlfriends at home.”
Section ambush patrols overnight from NuiDat were the most nerve-racking time of his service, particularly the first contact, with VietCong.
War teaches life’s unpredictability.
As a forward fire base the night Perry Fletcher was convinced they would suffer a mass Vietnamese attack, the medic beside him nervously confided his tactic of running away if any shooting started.
“Back in Australia I saw he had been give a valour award for treating a wounded man as the enemy fired on them. He just kept doing his job saving that bloke, not facing the fire,” he said.
“So there’s all sorts of courage.”
On his way back from Vietnam, the only passengers in the Hercules were Cpl Fletcher, 9RAR mate and a few coffins.
“I tapped one of those and I said, I’ll live for you,” he said.
Now my away days are over.
And I say with a shout and a cheer.
You little bloody beauty
As I down my first draught beer.