In Good Company Page 10
Each section machine-gun would be manned continuously throughout the night by a staggered picquet. There would always be a fresh man on the gun and less likelihood of a gun picquet falling asleep. My job was to coordinate with my mortar-fire controller on what indirect fire tasks I would like to register for the evening. This was usually a simple task; but if there were no tracks in the area we picked likely enemy navigation check points—such as vegetation changes, for instance from rubber to jungle, as targets.
My mortar-fire controller was a most experienced man. Ziggie Sinclair had been a mortar-fire controller for years and knew the job backwards. Generally I would simply ask him to select some likely looking targets. He usually came up with what I would have selected anyway, and after my agreement he would register the targets. There was no actual firing onto these targets; they were ‘silently registered’ and would have to be adjusted if they were actually fired. With eight men in a section, most men would do about a two and a half hour picquet, and after a day carrying a 70 pound pack on your back in 90 degree heat it was easy to drop off at night. One of the great incentives for not falling asleep on picquet was the threat that if charged with such an offence you would not only have lost the trust of your mates but also the commanding officer would hear the charge—and on war service the punishment for this was pretty severe. Just as the guns had to be manned at night, so the radio and the platoon headquarters had to keep a set open throughout the night and answer radio checks from the company.
The operation turned out to be a single picquet: we didn’t have enough men to do a double, and I didn’t like the radio to be manned by the same gun picquet who was supposed to be watching and listening to his front. Our first night passed quietly and at first light we broke harbour in virtually the reverse order that we had occupied it the night before. We moved about 500 metres in the direction I had planned to go the next day and stopped to have breakfast, to clean weapons and issue orders for the day’s patrolling. In planning a day’s patrol I had to keep in mind where other patrols would be and where I believed the enemy could be positioned. The chances of finding the enemy in jungle are usually fairly remote as the vegetation is often so thick you can walk within ten metres of someone and not see them. Consequently I often opted for a systematic search of a grid square of jungle based on scribing a box on the ground and hoping to cross an enemy track along our route.
After we moved out of our administration harbour, the patrol pattern took the form of moving for about 50 minutes, stopping to send a locstat, a brief rest and again moving for 50 minutes. Each time we halted for more than five minutes we would do a simple halt drill where the lead section fanned out and covered from 10 to 2 o’clock, the next section in the platoon covered from 10 to 6 o’clock and the tail section covered from 6 to 2 o’clock. There was always a machine gun at 2, 6, and 10 o’clock, with a sentry about 25 metres out. We did this drill almost every time we stopped to give a locstat. There was no requirement for a single word to be spoken to get the platoon down on the ground. All I had to do was give our platoon field signal for a quick harbour and the lads would be down on the ground in a couple of minutes flat—not a word said. It was a good feeling when the platoon could go through drills so quietly and efficiently.
The area we operated in was devoid of any enemy sign. This in itself was not so bad as it was still good intelligence to us; the enemy must be operating somewhere else. Unfortunately this slant on a lack of enemy was not so easy to convey to the platoon, who wanted something more tangible for their efforts. What we did find later in the day was a small cache containing about five kilograms of rice and some small arms ammunition.
Compared to some of the huge caches of previous Australian Task Force operations, this was pretty small stuff. But the platoon was patrolling quite well and everyone was doing his job as best he could. We were still novices in reading sign left by the enemy and the patrol was frequently punctuated by halts to check out something that someone had spotted. Often it was the forward scout who would notice something. He’d call me forward to point out what he had seen. If it was obviously too old to worry about I had to be careful how I handled it, as I didn’t want my scouts to stop reporting in the belief that I would get upset at being called forward all the time.
By the third day of the patrol the area had been fairly well cleared. None of the platoons in D Company had seen anything in our area of operations. A long cryptographic message then came over the radio with orders for us to redeploy for a very large operation, one called Overlord.
Intelligence had found that two enemy units, namely 3rd Battalion, 33 North Vietnamese Army (NVA) Regiment and D445 Local Force Battalion (Viet Cong) were somewhere in the northeast of Phuoc Tuy Province. With the 3rd Brigade, 1st US Cavalry Division (Air Mobile), the 1st Australian Task Force was going to try to search for and destroy the enemy and his bases. The operation would involve thousands of men, aircraft and vehicles. The plan was to form a cordon surrounding the area where Special Air Service patrols had located the enemy and push one end of the cordon toward the other like a plunger in a pump. The success of the operation depended on the cordon being linked up rapidly in the jungle. We were to be inserted by air, as were most of the other companies. Once we were in position 3 RAR and C Squadron tanks would sweep toward us and hopefully push the enemy into our cordon. Our cordon positions were in fact a series of linear platoon ambushes on the likely escape routes out of the area.
The company regrouped. It moved to a designated pick-up zone for the helicopters and made ready to be lifted some 20 km across to the other side of the province. The choppers arrived on time, but they came from a different direction and totalled a different number from what we expected. The pad was chaotic. I had been designated last platoon out of the company pick-up zone and I was to be the pad master. My job was to make sure that people were lined up in the right places to get on the aircraft. So when I was told that there would be six choppers coming from the north I arranged the ‘sticks’ of men into what I thought would be a reasonable formation. All this turned sour when nine helicopters appeared over the top of the trees without warning and plonked down nowhere near where I had sited the different helicopter loads.
Eventually we filled up all of the US Army choppers. They were driven by young American warrant officers about 20–23 years of age. Often the co-pilot was a sergeant or equivalent and about the same age. All of the crew doors, where the pilots sat, were painted with a black ace of spades on a white background. All of the door gunners who manned twin M60 machine-guns on the side of the helicopters were black Americans. The crew all had individually painted helmets with everything from peace symbols to stars and stripes to obscene graffiti all over them. I wasn’t enthused by their ‘gung-ho’ attitude and general air of indifference. They seemed ‘laid back’ and casual and it made me feel a little uneasy as I wondered what their reactions would be when things got sticky.
There was a remarkable difference in flying US air as opposed to RAAF air. The RAAF had officer pilots and the aircraft looked reasonably serviceable. The choppers we clambered into looked tatty and well worn. There were no seats and we sat on the floor of the Iroquois linking our arms together and praying we wouldn’t slide out where there was normally a door.
The time given to boarding was minimal and we were expected to haul ourselves and our 70 pound packs aboard by the time the skids of the chopper had settled. In five seconds the aircraft was in a nose-down, tail-up attitude and beating its way off the pad. The door gunners assisted by grabbing us by the harness of our webbing and heaving us into the chopper, like stevedores moving bales of wool. Once aboard we flew in a direct line to the landing zone but right down at tree level. This tactic was designed to nullify the enemy’s ground fire directed at aircraft and it may well have, but I couldn’t for the life of me read a map as we bucked and veered over and around trees. I wasn’t given a headset to talk to the crew and so I didn’t know if we were being dropped at the right landi
ng zone or what the tactical situation would be once we got off the helicopter.
I tried to attract the attention of the door gunner next to my side of the chopper but he couldn’t hear me yelling at him underneath his iridescent striped helmet. I wasn’t game to reach across and grab him as it would have meant letting go of someone on the floor: the way we were twisting and turning I might have been asking for a quick exit. After 20 minutes or so we slowed to make our descent onto the landing zone.
There were helicopters going everywhere. The sky seemed full of them. We passed about 30 going in the opposite direction and as we started to land I noticed six Cobra helicopter gunships circling above our landing zone. Just as we were about 50 feet off the ground, the door gunners on the choppers started blazing away at the jungle on the edge of the landing zone. This was lovely as nobody had told me the pad was ‘hot’ and that we would have to fight our way off the landing zone. The skids of the helicopter touched down and the door gunners started screaming at us: ‘Get your mother-fucking asses outa there’, hauling us off with the same care they had taken when hauling us on board. The time taken to get out seemed even shorter than getting aboard. I noticed some slower guys were jumping about five or six feet onto the ground as the choppers hurried to get off the landing zone.
On the somewhat quieter ground I listened for the sounds of gunfire but there were none. The pad wasn’t hot at all. It appeared as if our American friends were simply shooting up the bush to impress us or have a go at us. I was not amused by this as it smacked of a cowboy attitude and lacked professionalism. We moved quickly out of the open landing zone into the cover and shade of the jungle beside the pad. I had my radio operator, Paul Howkins, send the codeword that we were safe on the ground and then I gave the order to move out to our designated blocking position in the cordon. I was somewhat relieved that the landing zone wasn’t hot as it would have taken some time to gather the platoon properly to organise a decent reaction to that kind of situation.
The platoon moved to the designated grid reference we had been given in my orders. We passed 10 and 12 platoon who had arrived before us and who were setting up their own positions. Once we had arrived at where I thought we ought to be, I realised we were going to have problems. I didn’t have a definite link with the other platoons, and the bush was so thick I didn’t really have any fields of fire on which to establish an ambush. I rang up the company commander on the radio and asked if we could move closer to 12 platoon. This was refused. I was told to stay where I was and do the best I could. So we set about establishing a linear ambush position from where we could cover the jungle to our front, and about 35–40 metres back I set up a rear area where we could rest and carry out administration. It looked as if we were going to be in this position for some time so we had to make ourselves fairly secure. I sighted the machine guns on the limited fields of fire that we had, and I also had the section commanders set up our claymores in banks of six. I didn’t really know what to expect but if there were a lot of enemy in the area I didn’t want to get overrun.
Nothing happened in our area until the second night. Then we heard that 3 RAR had hit a large part of the enemy as they started to push from the north-west towards us. A situation report indicated that we had hit the 3rd Battalion, 33 NVA Regiment, which having decided to flee and fight again another day, started to withdraw before the 3 RAR and C Squadron tanks could hold them in location and destroy them. The limited action we saw was around 10.00 pm on the second night when we detected movement to our front. The dense canopy of the jungle let very little light through and you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. The platoon was stood to and we waited to see who was going to walk into our ambush. For over half an hour I was up forward, next to my main killing group in the ambush and desperately trying to detect movement. We could hear movement in the bush but it was impossible to tell exactly where it was. I was lying on the ground next to one of my machine gunners, Ralph Niblett, and we both tried to figure out how best we could hit who ever was out there in front of us.
Rather than give away our position by firing wildly into the darkness, I decided to fire a mortar target to our front and walk it in towards us to stir up whoever was out there. All this succeeded in doing was closing the enemy right up to us. From the increased movement we heard, I believed that the Viet Cong were now inside our claymore mines. This was the wrong side for us. We could do very little in that situation but give the enemy a headache. I crawled quietly back to Ralph Niblett and tried to come up with a plan of action. Ralph turned to me and asked in a whispered voice if I could smell anything. I could. It was the same smell I had noticed when we were travelling through the villages several days before. What we could smell was the enemy. I told him to put a twenty round burst where I thought I had last heard movement. Ralph opened fire and straight away there were increased movements and voices.
The enemy started withdrawing from our position, heading towards Graham Spinkston’s 12 Platoon. We couldn’t fire at the retreating enemy as our rounds would have landed amongst Graham’s men. So we stood to at 100 per cent alert for the remainder of the night with eyes as big as saucers and ears like elephants. However, nothing else eventuated that night. I went out with the clearing patrol the next morning and had a look at the area where the enemy had been. There were indications that about a dozen enemy had been crawling towards our position, about 20 feet out in front. They had been inside our claymores. I was now regretting that I hadn’t set up a trip flare across the position to get a better early warning than our eyes and ears could give.
3 RAR had found a huge 300-bunker complex as they swept through the NVA position. The enemy had vacated the position without too much loss but now he had been forced to relocate his position and move out of the province. We were therefore tasked to link up with an American infantry unit on our right flank near the Suoi Nhac River and prevent enemy withdrawal along the river and its banks.
By mid-morning I had made radio contact with the American platoon that was to be across the river from us, and so I arranged a rendezvous to tie up who was going to fire where and so on. We waited for hours for this platoon to arrive at the rendezvous. They finally turned up approaching our position from the opposite direction from where I expected them and they were a sight to see. They were wearing a variety of gear. Some were in shirts and flak jackets, some had shirts on with short or no sleeves and some had no shirt but were wearing a flak jacket. They were all wearing helmets with a cluster of various odds and ends on them, from cigarette packs and chewing gum to plastic C ration spoons, held on by a large wide rubber band. As they approached our position I stood up to get a good look at the first US Army soldiers I would meet. I was hoping they would be more professional than the US Army soldiers I had seen around the Nui Dat base.
The point man or forward scout came into view carrying an M 16 rifle with a 30-round magazine on it and a small compass in his other hand. Behind him came the squad leader who had a carbine and compass as well. The next man into view was the machine-gunner who had his M 60 slung over his shoulder and one hand in his pocket. His second-in-command on the gun was behind him: he had a carbine slung upside down across his back and was carrying two metal ammunition liners, which were the boxes for the linked machine-gun ammunition. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Not one man was capable of firing in the direction his eyes were looking, and most of the remainder of the platoon were in a similar—if not worse—state of readiness. Probably the most striking thing of all was that these soldiers were not wearing camouflage cream on their faces. Because of the tropical heat it was uncomfortable to put over your skin, but it did cut down the shine on your face in the jungle immensely. It was one of the things that my platoon prided itself on: we would be constantly re-applying cam during the day as the sweat removed it.
I showed the platoon commander where to put his men on the ground and set about discussing the finer details of the position. The first question I asked was if he thought I
was in the right spot as he had taken so long to find me. He answered ‘Hell no. The goddam track we were following went all over the place and we got a little lost!’ I had heard that the Americans were not as well trained as we may have been, but to walk along tracks in an area where the enemy was known to be operating was just asking for trouble.
It was decided that because it was so late in the day it would take the Americans too long to get across the river and set up their position before nightfall. So they would harbour to our rear and add depth to our somewhat linear position. This also kept them away from us as we weren’t too keen on these guys being up front and drawing unwarranted attention. They had no noise discipline to speak of. They spoke out loud. If a soldier wanted to speak to someone 20 metres away he didn’t go over and talk quietly to him, he simply yelled out. My men were getting a bit twitchy about all the noise coming from the Americans and asked me to go back to their platoon position and speak to their platoon commander. I wandered back toward the American platoon and as I was about half way back I realised I hadn’t told them that I was coming back into their position. Hoping I wasn’t about to get shot by a trigger-happy soldier, I gingerly made my way toward the Americans. I needn’t have worried. Not only did they not have a sentry, but the gun was unmanned and most of the platoon had their backs to the perimeter and were preparing their evening meal. I spoke to the platoon commander who had his first sergeant with him. When I asked if his platoon could ‘rig for silent running’ I received a couple of stares as if I was a creature from outer space. As far as they were concerned they had no problems because my platoon was in front of them and therefore there was no need for great security on their part. I asked the platoon commander if he would come up to where my men were lying in what was virtually an ambush position and listen to the noise coming from his men. He realised I was serious about all this and told his first sergeant to quieten the men down. This he did immediately by screaming out to the whole platoon to ‘put a sock in it you guys, you’re making too much goddam noise’.