Australia Vietnam Veteran Searches for "Wondering Souls"

David Bradbury films Vietnam veteran’s search for 42 Vietnamese soldiers buried during the battle of Coral-Balmoral
NEWS CORP AUSTRALIA
IAN MCPHEDRAN
NATIONAL DEFENCE WRITER
MARCH 15, 2014

ONE of Australia’s leading filmmakers and a damaged Vietnam War veteran are making a documentary about the man’s search for 42 Vietnamese soldiers killed and buried in a mass grave after one of the war’s biggest battles.

Filmmaker David Bradbury and Vietnam vet Brian Cleaver are on location at the site of the battle of Coral-Balmoral where hundreds of enemies and 27 Australians died in May-June 1968.

Coral-Balmoral was a much bigger engagement than Long Tan, but it ran over several days and is much less known than the iconic 1966 firefight in the Long Tan rubber plantation where 18 Australians died.

Brian Cleaver was a raw 20-year-old national serviceman and Perth surfer when he went to war.

On May 26 he was in a weapons pit at Balmoral about 40km north of Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) with his mates from the 3rd Battalion about 20 metres behind the line of barbed wire that stood between the Diggers and hundreds of seasoned enemy troops from the North Vietnamese Army’s 7th Division.

When the smoke cleared 42 enemy dead lay on the battle field and Mr Cleaver and his mates were ordered to deal with prisoners and to help with the mass burial in a bomb crater.

“The missing dead are known as the ‘Wandering Souls’ in Vietnamese culture,” Mr Cleaver said.
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