24th of May 1969. Kantum province 13 kilometers from the tri border where Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia blur into the same war. 300 Montineyard soldiers are dissolving under simultaneous assault from three directions. Mortars walk through the formation. Rockets scream. Between 1,200 and 3,000 NVA regulars are closing the trap.

 The battalion commander has pulled back. The companies have scattered into the jungle. The system has collapsed. And somewhere in that chaos, a single figure is running from position to position. Blood sheeting down his face from shrapnel buried in his scalp, throwing grenades with both hands at the advancing enemy. He does not know 40 men are still out there.

 He is about to go find them. Ingham, North Queensland, sugarcane country. A family of 13 children living through the depression while their father Henry fought the Japanese at Finchen Moroai and Balik Papan. Keith Payne was the middle child, the second son. And by the time he was 13, he could track game through Scrubland, shoot straight enough to put food on the table, and drive the family’s Model T Ford, they called it Henry, after his old man.

 The kids sold tropical fruit to American soldiers passing through. That was how you kept a family of 13 fed when your father was bleeding on a Pacific island. Henry came home wounded. Keith watched what the war did to him and joined the army anyway. He was 18. He had been apprenticed to a cabinet maker and hated every minute of it.

 One little bit of enjoyment by his own account. The citizen military forces took him first. The 31st Australian Infantry Battalion, then the regular army. August 1951. The next 18 years read like a map of Cold War conflict. Korea with the first battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. Fighting patrols on Hill 355, Little Gibralar, where Chinese soldiers opened fire at 10 yards range and platoon commanders were killed in the dark.

 Malaya with the third battalion during the emergency, tracking insurgents through jungle so thick the canopy blocked the sun. Papua New Guinea with the second Pacific Islands Regiment, fieldcraft instructor at the officer training unit, Shaville, teaching national servicemen how to survive the bush. By February 1969, warrant officer class 2.

 Keith Payne was 35 years old, married to Florence for 14 years, father of five sons, and one of the most experienced jungle soldiers in the Australian Army. He was handpicked for the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, the AATV, known simply as the team. The team was unlike any other Australian unit. Raised in 1962, it never exceeded 227 members.

 Its men operated alone or in pairs across all of South Vietnam, not with Australian battalions, but embedded with Vietnamese forces, Montineyard Hill tribesmen, and American special forces. They led patrols, called in fire support, and commanded companies of indigenous soldiers who spoke different languages and carried different loyalties.

 A federal MP called them the Expendables. Their unit badge carried a crossbow and one word, persevere. The AATV was the most decorated Australian unit of the war. Over 100 decorations, four Victoria Crosses, every one of them earned by an AATV man. the first Australian soldiers into Vietnam and the last to leave.

 In May 1969, Payne was commanding the 212th company of the first mobile strike force battalion based at Pleu. His mission, lead Montenard soldiers along NVA infiltration routes from Laos, 13 km from the tri border where Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia met. The most dangerous ground in the war, Korea, November 1952. Hill 355, Private Keith Payne, B Company, Fifth Platoon, First Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment.

 A fighting patrol moving down the forward slopes at night. The terrain was steep, frozen, and exposed. Somewhere on the same ridge line, a Chinese patrol was moving upward. They met at about 10 yards. The Chinese went to ground first and opened fire. Small arms and grenades at point blank range.

 The white trailing tape of potato masher grenades visible in the dark. Corporal Ron Porto of Second Section grabbed two men and dropped them into the blackness of a communication trench. One of those men was Private Keith Payne. The other was Private Albert Charfield. They survived the night in that trench while the hill erupted around them.

 Payne’s platoon commander, Lieutenant JL Satin, was killed the following night. On the 11th of November, Lieutenant Cenne Khan led another fighting patrol down the same slopes. A Chinese patrol opened fire at the same range. Khan was hit in the chest. Bullets punched through the zip on his flack jacket. One of the stretcher bearers who crawled out into no man’s land under fire to bring Khan back was Private Keith Payne.

 Decades later, Khan by then Brigadier Cen Khan DSO recalled the connection. I saw [snorts] Keith next in Vietnam and then by coincidence on 11184 Keith and I stood together as guests of honor speaking at the opening of the Southport RSL Vietnam Memorial. The 32 intervening years had passed quickly and Private Payne had become Keith Payne VC.

That was the pattern. In Korea, Payne carried wounded men out of fire. In Malaya, he tracked insurgents through jungle where visibility dropped to arms length. In Papua New Guinea, he led indigenous soldiers through terrain that would break a compass. Every posting, the same instinct, move toward the danger, bring people back.

 The AATV advisory role distilled all of it into one lethal problem. An Australian warrant officer commanding a company of Montineyard irregulars, brave men, but unevenly trained, against Envi, irregulars who had been fighting for years. If the Montineyards held, the system worked. If they broke under fire, the adviser was alone, not outnumbered, alone.

 A single westerner in enemy jungle with no flanks, no reserves, and no Australian mates within earshot. 18 days before Payne’s defining night, a fellow AATV warrant officer faced the same problem. Warrant Officer Class 2, Rain Ray Simpson, VC DCM, Cantum Province, May 6th and 11th, 1969. Simpson rescued a wounded comrade under direct fire, assaulted an enemy position alone, and fought single-handedly to cover the evacuation of casualties.

 Two separate actions, one Victoria Cross. The AATV’s third. Two Australians, same unit, same province, same month, same impossible equation. One man against the jungle and everything in it. On the 24th of May, it was Payne’s turn to solve it. Kantum Province 24th of May 1969 near Ben Head Special Forces Camp 15 km west of Dakto 13 km from the border where three countries blurred into the same war.

 Warrant Officer Payne’s 212th company and the 213th company under his friend Sergeant Anastasio Montes of the US special forces were moving through NVA held jungle. About 300 Montineyard soldiers between them. A handful of Australian and American advisers. Somewhere in the canopy around them, between 1,200 and 3,000 North Vietnamese regulars were waiting.

 The NVA hit both leading companies simultaneously. Mortars first, the hollow thump of tubes followed by the crack of detonations walking through the formation. Then rockets, then infantry assault from three directions at once. There was no rear. There was fire from the left, the front, and the right. The Montineyard troops fought, then wavered, then broke.

They fell back, scattered into the jungle in the failing light. The battalion commander and several advisers pulled back with a small group. The system collapsed. Payne’s company dissolved around him. He did not leave. Directly exposed to enemy fire, Payne ran from position to position, firing his Armalite, collecting grenades wherever he found them, throwing them at the advancing NVA.

 One man, alternating between a rifle and handfuls of grenades, trying to hold a line that no longer existed. The wounds came fast. A rocket-propelled grenade detonated against a nearby tree and drove a large splinter into his scalp. Blood sheetated down his face. He did not touch the top of his head. Later, he explained why.

 If he did not know what was going on up there, he did not need to worry about it. Shrapnel struck his hands, his arms, his hip. four fragments of rocket shrapnel, one piece of mortar shrapnel, a mortar blast knocked him off his feet. He got up. A chunk of steel lodged in the magazine housing of his rifle and jammed it dead.

 He threw the weapon away, picked up another from the ground, and kept firing. He ran across open terrain under heavy fire to halt the disorderly withdrawal. He threw grenades behind him to slow the NVA follow-up. When darkness came, he organized what remained of his force into a defensive perimeter. Then came the part that earned the Victoria Cross, alone, wounded, blood still running down his face.

 Keith Payne went back into the jungle. For three hours, he moved through enemy-held terrain in total darkness, crawling, listening, following the sounds. A groan, a whispered call, the ragged breathing of a wounded man trying not to be found by the wrong side. He located groups of scattered Montineyard soldiers, about 40 men, most of them wounded.

 Some he carried on his own back. Some he guided to those who could still walk. Some he organized into relay teams, the less wounded dragging the more wounded. 3 hours alone in the dark through NVA controlled jungle where a snapped branch or a misplaced step meant discovery and death. He brought them all back to the perimeter he had established. The perimeter was empty.

The rest of the battalion had withdrawn to base. They had left without him. He was now behind enemy lines with 40 wounded men, no battalion support, and a seriously wounded American adviser who could not walk. Payne did not stop. He personally helped the American adviser to his feet, organized the 40 men into a column, and led them through enemy dominated terrain in the darkness.

 They reached the battalion base at approximately 3 in the morning. Why did it work? Because the NVA expected the battle to be over. They had taken the position and were consolidating. They were not sweeping the jungle for a single wounded man crawling through the undergrowth. Payne moved through the gaps in their lines because he could read terrain in darkness the same way he had read the Queensland bush at 13, hunting to feed a family of 13.

 The jungle that trapped his soldiers protected him. He belonged in it. The NVA did not expect anyone to come back. The citation called it conspicuous gallantry in the highest traditions of the Australian Army. The American Distinguished Service Crossitation contained a single sentence that said more.

 Upon returning to the defensive perimeter, he found that his battalion had left. Three nations decorated Keith Payne for the same night. The Victoria Cross from the Commonwealth, the last Imperial VC ever awarded to an Australian. The Distinguished Service Cross from the United States. The Silver Star also from the United States. The Cross of Gallantry with Bronze Star from the Republic of Vietnam. One Action.

Four of the highest gallantry awards the Western world could give. On the 13th of April 1970, Queen Elizabeth II presented Payne with the Victoria Cross aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia in Brisbane Harbor. Florence was there. So were all five sons, Ronald, Gregory, Colin, Ian, and Derek.

 He was made freeman of the city of Brisbane, Freeman of the Shire of Hinchenbrook, where Ingam sits. A park in Stafford, where the family lived, was named Keith Payne Park. His photograph went up in the Hall of Heroes at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was posted to Dunrun as an instructor. Later, the 42nd Battalion, Royal Queensland Regiment.

 He retired from the Australian army on the 31st of March 1975. And because Keith Payne could not stop being a soldier, he flew to Oman and fought as a captain with the Sultan’s army against communist insurgents in the DAR war. Australia did not send him, he went on his own. Then the war he thought he had left behind caught up with him.

Heavy drinking, a temper that erupted without warning, jobs he could not hold, a body breaking down in his 40s. The symptoms had no name in the 1970s, not officially. Florence Payne, the woman who had waited through Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, and Omen, reached her limit. She told him, “Do something about it or I am gone.

” Their son, Derek, working in the mental health ward of a Sydney hospital, recognized what his father could not. He sent the information home. Keith Payne, the man who crawled through three hours of enemy fire to save 40 soldiers, had to fight the Department of Veterans Affairs for years to have his condition recognized as what it was, post-traumatic stress disorder.

Eventually, he used the only leverage that worked, the letters VC after his name. He turned that fight into a cause. Decades of counseling returned soldiers. Lobbying for First Nation service personnel, pushing governments to fund veteran health care. The mental health ward at Green Slopes Private Hospital in Brisbane opened in 1996. 30 beds.

 They named it the Keith Pain unit for a man who understood the wound because he carried it. General Sir Peter Cosgrove, himself a Vietnam veteran, later Governor General of Australia, wrote of Payne, “I first met Keith Payne in Vietnam, and was in awe of this understated hero whose life-saving actions in combat became a treasured Australian legend.

 Years after Ben Het, someone asked Keith Payne whether he had been afraid that night. He answered simply, “My god, yes, yes, I was.” Then came the question that mattered more why he went back. You have a responsibility and my responsibility was I was the company commander and it was my responsibility to look after my soldiers.

 And basically that’s all that happened. But it happened under very arduous circumstances. You either accept the responsibility or you bloody well don’t. In 2007 Payne sold his medals. The Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star. all of them to the Mary Burough Military and Colonial Museum in Queensland. An undisclosed sum to provide for Flo, his five sons, his 14 grandchildren.

 The RSL defended him publicly. A man who saved 40 lives in one night should not have had to sell the proof of it to feed his family. But he did. In 2021, Keith Payne published his memoir. He called it No One Left Behind. He is 92 years old now. He lives in Mai, Queensland with Flo, married more than 70 years to the woman who saved him the way he saved those 40 men by refusing to leave.

 He is the last living Australian recipient of the original Imperial Victoria Cross, the oldest living VC recipient in the world. In 2022, he attended the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth, the same Queen who had pinned the cross to his chest aboard the Bratannia 52 years earlier. In 2023, he represented Victoria Crossholders at the coronation.

 He was never indestructible. The shrapnel proved that. The drinking proved that. The decades of nightmares proved that. What Keith Payne was, what he remains, is something harder to name and harder to break. On the 24th of May, 1969, a wounded man crawled alone through enemy jungle in the dark to find his soldiers. He found 40 of them.

 He carried the ones who could not walk. He led them home. And when he discovered that his own side had left without him, he led them home anyway. He arrived at 3:00 in the morning. The title of his book tells you why no one left behind.