‘Never seen anything like this’: Aussies watched war from their balcony

Colonel Keith Howard and his wife Joan were in the Golan Heights on a UN post-1967 truce posting, when the sky suddenly filled with screaming jets.

Colonel Keith Howard - one of Australia’s original Blue Berets - and his wife Joan were due to go on a few days hard-earned leave in October 1973 when Syria and Egypt launched the Yom Kippur war, on October 6. 

As the officer-in-charge of the Tiberias Control Centre with command of the Golan Heights, Perth-born Colonel Howard was responsible for 43 fellow officers of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO). He immediately returned to the front line.

A photo shows him visiting one of the makeshift observation posts in the battle ground, little more than a man’s shed today. According to the Australian War Memorial (AWM): “Shells from the first artillery salvo landed on one of the observation posts under Keith’s command (leaving the camp and observation trailer) a flaming inferno”. 

“The two observers had narrowly avoided the barrage and, for the next week, maintained radio contact to report on the battle raging around them.”

Keith had served at Tobruk, El Alamein and Borneo, but Joan wrote to her two adult daughters - whom Keith had adopted - that “he says he’s never seen anything like this”.

Occasionally he would drive home from the war zone in the Golan Heights to their rented cottage at Tiberias by the Sea of Galilee to see Joan. Not one to mince words, Joan wrote to Zoe, the daughter they shared together, that Keith arrived “filthy”, “terribly tired” and smelling “of death”.

Joan - who had served in World War 2 in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) as a nurse and later became a distinguished archaeologist, born from the couple’s deep love of the Middle East - was herself barely 60km from the battlefield.