Gary Polglase above, aged 20 in Vietnam in 1968,
he was a tracker dog handler
38763 Private Gary Robert Polglase, 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment Age 20. A dog handler and tracker he was killed accidentally on 13th April 1968 at Nui Dat. Buried Springvale Cemetery Victoria. Garry & his parents Horry (Dec 2006) & Agnes (Pat) Polglase (Dec 2009) were good friends of my Grandparents Dick & Norma Stewart as well as my father and mother. I spent time with Garry in Bacchus Marsh before he went off to Vietnam & was killed. I was only six years old.
Garry Polglase above. as a young innocent man, killed in the Vietnam war accidentally, he was a friend of the Stewart & Dunen families
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The Long Hai Hills
This entry was written on by a Vietnam Veteran named Lachlan Murdoch, it appears on his web page.
"On this page, in the coming days or weeks, I will write about Operation Pinnaroo. This operation was conducted by 3RAR and supporting units in the Long Hai Hills, in Phuoc Tuy Province, in March and April 1968.
The operation involved searching among minefields and tunnels. The battalion suffered heavy casualties, as did the other units who supported us. As for myself, on this one operation, I lost a close friend, I took part in an ambush that killed an unarmed man, I personally sent in a false report claiming he had been armed, I witnessed at close quarters two separate fatal aeroplane crashes within a few days of each other, and I was bitten by a giant centipede, two ticks, two spiders, and countless ants and sandflies".
Garry Polglase was a tracker dog handler in 3rar anti-tank platoon. My family were good friends of the Polglase family, Pat and Horrie, we saw Garry off when he went to Vietnam. there was always a doubt about how he was killed. It is alleged he threw a gun on a card table and it went off, now we know that it is not true, the truth should come out for the sake of Gary and his family and all involved. the army should investigate this.
Mre from another web page on vietnam-
The family of Garry Polglase, the handler of Julian, had a similar experience. PoIglase was accidentally killed in Vietnam in April 1968, and his mother applied to have the dog brought home soon after her son’s death. After questions were raised in Parliament, and the family had conducted a public campaign that raised enough money to pay the quarantine costs of all the tracker dogs, the Army confirmed its policy on the fate of the dogs and refused the request.
These refusals might have been easier to bear had the handlers been told one apparent reason for them. An Army veterinary report noted that large numbers of American tracker dogs in Vietnam had died from a tropical disease, thought (but not confirmed) to be transmitted by ticks. The disease, which very quickly caused massive haemorrhaging in all major organs, was hard to detect and could be carried by the dogs without symptoms for some time. The report strongly recommended that no tracker dogs be allowed back into Australia, “even under strict quarantine”, until the mode of transmission of the disease was discovered. By the end of 1972 the majority of Australian troops, including the dog handlers, were home from Vietnam. Most got on with their lives, more or less successfully, but their dogs were never far from their thoughts.
