Kintsugi Heroes
Terry James · 43 min
Conscripted at 20, haunted for decades, Terry James survived Vietnam's deadliest battles and a slow-burning PTSD reckoning to build a life overflowing with gratitude, community, and chosen family.
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Terry James was 20 when a conscription letter arrived in 1966, interrupting his plans to travel to England and become an archaeologist. He spent nine and a half months in Vietnam with Delta Company, based at SAS Hill, operating in the jungle for weeks at a time. At Long Tan, he killed for the first time and watched his best friend die five metres in front of him after being hit, a man due home the following week for the birth of his first child. Days later came the Battle of Binh Ba, three days of house-to-house fighting so intense that his mind shut the details away entirely. The following day was his 22nd birthday. He dragged hundreds of bodies into the central square.
Terry came home and deliberately buried it all. He worked as a bus conductor, then an accountant, married, divorced, and built a life as if Vietnam had never happened. In 2000, after his best friend Gary convinced him to seek a war service pension, the memories flooded back. At work as a financial controller for Paramount Pictures, he fell apart and had to retire. For years he saw a psychiatrist, plagued by nightmares of bayonets and the weight of survivor guilt.
He met Lynn in 1987, and her two teenage children became his own. Gary pulled him into the RSL in the mid-1990s, and through reconnecting with Army mates, speaking at schools about the cost of war, playing golf every week for 22 years, and building community with neighbours of every age in his townhouse, Terry rebuilt himself. He is grandfather to five grandchildren, stepfather to two adult children, and part of three families: blood, Army, and boarding school mates. He tells young people that war is not good, that it is started by politicians but fought by young men, and that he has been grateful every single day since coming home at 22, when many did not.
⚠️ Content advisory: this episode discusses grief & loss, which some listeners may find distressing.
If you need support, you're not alone. Help is available: • Lifeline (24/7 crisis support): 13 11 14 · lifeline.org.au • GriefLine: 1300 845 745 · griefline.org.au
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