Major Peter John Badcoe VC, Australian Army Training Team Vietnam - part 1
Australian War MemorialPeter Badcoe was born on 11 January 1934 in Adelaide, the second child of Leslie and Gladys Badcock. His main ambition was to be a soldier, and most of his hobbies, games, and interests centred on the military.
He was educated at Adelaide Technical High School, leaving school at 15.
In 1952, he did seven weeks’ service in a National Service Training Battalion. With his father’s reluctant consent, he enlisted in the Australian Regular Army at the age of 18. One month later, he entered the Officer Cadet School at Portsea, Victoria. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Australian Artillery.
The young officer was stocky, solidly built, and robust. His commanding officers commended his tireless enthusiasm, professional capabilities, and dedication, unencumbered by his poor eyesight and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles.
In 1956, aged 22, he married 17-year-old Denise Maureen MacMahon in Sydney. Over the next five years, the couple had three daughters. Badcoe was a devoted father; his letters home often addressed to “My Darling Girls”, saying how much he loved and missed them all.
Promoted to temporary captain in December 1958, he worked as a general staff officer at Army Headquarters in Canberra. He then served in Terendak, Malaya from 1961-1963 as battery captain with 103 Field Battery, accompanied by his family during one of the happiest periods of their lives together.
In November 1962, Badcoe visited South Vietnam as a military observer. He joined operations and was impressed with the role of US Army advisers in training and leading Republic of Vietnam soldiers. He was inspired to apply for posting to the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam.
After attending adviser courses at the Intelligence Centre and Canungra, he arrived in Saigon in August 1966 to fulfil his ambition of joining “The Team”, already regarded as an elite unit.
Badcoe was initially allotted as sub-sector adviser to Nam Hoa district of Thua Thien province, where the war was almost constant and intense. His role was to train and lead two companies of South Vietnamese territorial soldiers. In December he became operations officer, responsible for operations in the entire province.
To his colleagues, Badcoe was a quiet but friendly officer with a dry sense of humour. He was an intensely private man whose wife remained his sole confidante. He neither drank alcohol nor smoked. Bored by boisterous mess activities, he preferred the company of a book on small arms or military history. In action, he seemed invincible, at the forefront of his troops, conspicuous in his red paratrooper beret.
Badcoe quickly acquired an understanding of the Vietnamese people, and an affectionate regard for the soldiers he trained and led. He traded spirits and souvenirs from the Australian canteen with American Marines in Danang in order to obtain equipment for his poorly provisioned troops. He also acquired food and supplies which he donated to a local orphanage.
- Australian War Memorial https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C2278410
