Love under fire

Keith Payne VC is an Aussie hero, bravest of the brave, but managing the pain beyond the glory has proved a tough battle for Keith, his unfailingly supportive wife, Flo, and their five sons.

- SUSAN CHENERY

Florence Payne was making the bed when the army car pulled up outside early in the morning. Clutching the sheet, she took a deep breath. “How many men are there?” she asked her 14-year-old son, Ron. “Two,” he said. Was one of them a chaplain? “No.”

Flo slumped with relief. Her husband, Keith, had only been wounded, not killed.

It was 1969, Keith was in combat in Vietnam, and it would not be the last time the army car would arrive with bad news. She lived with the dread every day, trying not to watch the news. “You just hope and pray and every night ask the good Lord to bring him home safely,” Flo recalls.

Keith was not an easy man to be married to. Because of his army career the family was constantly moving. Flo has lost count of how many times, but in 1965 alone it was three. He was away so often, for the whole year of 1969, that she had to be both mother and father to their five sons. She could be strict, says their son Colin, “when she had to be”. And when Keith did come home, when it was all over and he was a war hero, having earned the country’s highest military honour, the bravest of the brave, he was a changed man. “I was not all there” he admits. “I couldn’t switch off from the state of vigilance I’d had to maintain in Vietnam.” He would automatically reach for a rifle, his sons learned to come in bending down low to wake him up in the morning.