In Good Company Read online

  After a night out on the town the company officers and Greg Gilbert, our forward observer, decided on a classy breakfast out on the patio of the Grand Hotel the next morning. It was a meal I shall never forget. I had a terrible hangover from the American beer I had drunk the night before and I felt like death warmed up. The patio of the Grand overlooked the main seaside boulevard and was flanked by palm trees. It was an idyllic Somerset Maugham setting. Breakfast was a French affair with croissants, fruits and coffee. It was so nice to sit down and have a meal that didn’t taste as if it came out of a can or had been processed, which was the way most of our American food back in Nui Dat tasted. After breakfast I decided to go back to the Badcoe Club and take in a bit of swimming and do some shopping.

  The club water-ski boat was available and Darryl Jenkin, Graham Spinkston and the newest addition to my platoon, Cpl Dick Heatley, wanted to try out the flat surf. Graham and Dick did a quick refresher test on their boat driving licences and away we went. We had a marvellous time skiing in about a one or two foot swell and getting a really good lift when coming up over a small wave. After water-skiing all afternoon I was exhausted and spent the remainder of the day shopping for presents in the post exchange and lazing around the pool. The pool had been ironically named ‘The Harold Holt Memorial Pool’, after our 22nd Prime Minister who disappeared, presumed drowned, in December 1967.

  As the soldiers drifted back from town tales of their adventures began to circulate and no doubt to expand beyond the truth. One tale which I heard was told by the subject of the story and so I had reason to trust its authenticity. This lad had been in a bar and after consuming gallons of the lighter American beer had decided to go and relieve himself. A search around the rooms at the rear of the bar revealed no bathroom or similar convenience. Finding a small room with nothing more than an earthenware urn in the corner he urinated into the urn. Some half an hour later he had plucked up the courage and desire to ask a bar girl for her favours, and after paying the mama san 3000 piastre ($11.00 approximately), was led out to the rear of the bar. The bar girl took him into the same small room he had found before and closed the bead curtains across the doorway. She unrolled a floormat and after shedding some clothing invited the digger to join her. After he had finished the bar girl said to him ‘You finish now John, yes?’ To which he replied ‘Yes’, and she said ‘Good, I wash you now John’ and proceeded to tip the contents of the urn in the corner over his exposed private parts.

  The company paraded the next day to return to Nui Dat and we were down one man. He was in the military police compound and I was despatched to go up to the prison and fetch him. The military police detention centre had a reputation for straightening out wrong-doers and I was interested to see what it was like. The compound was surrounded by barbed wire and had small huts as cells. A gravel square with white painted rocks around the borders was a dominant feature, as was a green ship’s container known as a ‘conex’ off to one side. The conex had a door and small window and was a receptacle for those malcontents who didn’t want to play by the house rules. I was told that a short stay in the conex under the blazing tropical sun sorted most men out and that the guards didn’t have much trouble after that. I sprang our soldier from his cell and found that the military police had picked him up after the night curfew wandering around town and locked him up for his own safety for the night. No charges were to be laid, so I thanked the military police and headed back to the company who were ready to motor back to Nui Dat.

  The majority of the soldiers looked incredibly seedy but all said that they had had a great time. The trip back was uneventful save for the fishing village at Long Dien exerting its power over a few of the lads with weaker stomachs. Our return was greeted by the news that Major Jerry Taylor was to be our new company commander as Major Kudnig would be returning to Australia because of his ulcer. The other news was that the company was now on a 24-hour ready reaction force standby. Each platoon in the company would do a 24-hour stint which involved being on 15 minutes notice to move by air or road anywhere in the province.

  After getting an up-date from the task force duty officer on the current situation in the province, including who was operating where and the latest sightings and contacts, I briefed the platoon. The enemy was continuing to build up in the northernmost parts of the province. 274 VC Main Force Regiment were operating to the north-east and elements of an NVA Regiment were moving back into Phuoc Tuy Province in the north-west. The battalion was concentrating on the areas around villages in an effort to ambush and gather information. Sgt Jenkin had fully prepared the platoon by issuing fresh ammunition, rations for three days and had completed a kit check. All we had to do now was sit around and wait for the balloon to go up.

  It was pretty boring sitting around fully booted and spurred for 24 hours, so I did a tour of the lines and found that like me, most of the lads were writing letters home. The rains were still incredibly heavy every day. On one occasion while writing to my wife, I couldn’t hear the radio four feet from me, as the noise of the rain was so great. The rains were now lasting for up to three hours and it was quite impossible to see through them sometimes. It was a good time to be dry under a tent and writing home.

  Our new company commander had been the company commander of Administration Company in the battalion and was well liked. He was an ex-British Army officer who had seen service in Cyprus with the Cheshire Regiment and had done a previous tour of South Vietnam. The morale of the company took a sharp rise the moment his appointment was announced and we were all looking forward to working for him. His only contact with our company had been with one of my soldiers, who had been sent back from the operation to sort out a problem with his mother. This digger was continually getting letters of woe from his mum who kept reminding her son that his dad was a permanently incapacitated pensioner and that he could end up like him. This wasn’t helping her son at all. He was one of my forward scouts and he needed to have his mind on the job and not on anything else. I sent him out on a chopper about a week before the operation finished and he didn’t come back out on the last resupply. I didn’t worry about it at the time as I figured he had been grabbed by someone back in Nui Dat for duties of some kind.

  When this soldier had arrived back in Nui Dat he saw the padre and sorted out his personal problems by ringing his mother. Things looked OK. However, he found himself at a loose end and he got stuck into the beer one night and there the trouble started. A krait snake was a frequent visitor to his tent. He didn’t like it and he threatened to shoot the animal if it ever came back into his lines. After he had been on the grog for a fair while, he went off to bed, the snake came back to his tent and he shot it, about 20 times. Then he shot his floor, his wardrobe, the walls of the tent and anything else that took his fancy. The Task Force was stood to when they heard all the shooting from the direction of D Company. Jerry Taylor, who was on duty, came running up to our lines to see what was going on.

  He entered the digger’s tent to be met by a self-loading rifle, the barrel touching his stomach. A very tense half hour or more passed while he talked the soldier into putting the safety catch on the rifle and pointing it somewhere else. Eventually he succeeded in calming the digger down, and the latter was taken off to the cells. I next saw the soldier after he had done a period of detention in the cells at Vung Tau. He came back to the battalion to collect his things before returning to Australia, discharged out of the army. He was a regular soldier and as it turned out he was probably better off not being in with his paranoid mum continually telling him he was going to get wounded or worse.

  Jerry Taylor was a completely different kettle of fish to Major Kudnig. He called the officers in the company by their first names and had an easygoing attitude to our work and wasn’t tense at all. He demanded high standards and complete honesty and he trusted the platoon commanders to do their job. One of the few social functions we had in the company was the night that Major Taylor took over as the new company commander. The
corporals were invited up to the officers’ and sergeants’ mess for drinks after dinner. We played darts against the junior NCOs and mainly stood around and ‘told lies’. It was a good night and an excellent way to catch up with the men who had one of the hardest jobs in the battalion.

  While the company was in its week rotation of ready reaction force duty a concert party came to Nui Dat to entertain the Task Force soldiers. The concert was held down near the airfield in a natural amphitheatre called Luscombe Bowl, and there were hundreds of diggers sitting on stools, ration boxes and on top of APCs. There was a comedian who acted as compere and introduced several singers both male and female. The concert was well received especially when some of the female entertainers came on stage in the shortest mini-skirts ever made. For about two hours we all were treated to a heavy dose of nostalgia and reminded that there were people back in Australia who cared whether we lived or died.

  But before we knew it, the concert was over and we went back to our duties. Then the depression sank in. I went through a real low about a day after the concert, and while I was sitting around Nui Dat on and off ready reaction duty I must have written three or four letters to my wife to try and stem the frustration of missing her and home.

  After several frustrating days, when we were warned out to go on operations and then stood down at the last minute, we were finally ordered out bush. It hadn’t come soon enough for most of us. Whilst Nui Dat was nice and safe it was also depressing: there was little to do and all day to do it in. Most of my platoon conceded they would rather be out bush and being shot at rather than sitting on their bums, bored stiff and with little to do but think of home and get depressed. The flurry of speculative press reports concerning the withdrawal of Australian troops from South Vietnam at this time was considerable and was at the root of continual rumours. The soldiers were being sent newspapers from home saying we would be home by March 1972; some even said February 1972. When a newspaper said Christmas 1971, the rumours increased tenfold. I didn’t want to go home early, as this was our only chance of operational service for some time. And if the reports of the anti-war and anti-national service swing were to be believed, then we as an army were not likely to be committed to action again for a while.

  I had another reason for wanting to go bush again. I couldn’t handle the rich food we were served in the mess in Nui Dat. I wasn’t able to eat a lot of it and the stuff I did eat made me feel bilious. After every meal I would feel queasy and off-colour. My weight was down to 12 and a half stone (79 kilograms) and represented a fairly substantial loss of weight as at my fittest I normally weighed 14 stone (about 89 kilograms).

  Another big operation was planned for the north-west sector of the province and was to be similar to the one we had conducted with 3 RAR earlier in the year. The operation was described as a ‘hammer and anvil’ type; but this time 3 RAR would do the blocking and we would do the sweeping.

  7

  Search and Destroy

  It was our first mounted operation—a bit of a novelty after foot-slogging around the bush. But it didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off as travelling in the back of the carriers was not nice. It was noisy and we could no longer search for sign on the ground. If we were going to meet the Viet Cong it was going to be a situation where they had the advantage of hearing us before we could see them. I wasn’t too keen on patrolling in the APCs even if it meant we didn’t have to walk and carry our packs.

  The heat inside the cars was stifling. The combination of the tropical sun and humidity, plus the heat generated by the diesel motor of the APC, was quite stupefying. We were forced to get out of the tracked carriers if we were operating out in the open or along the cleared, defoliated fire trails for any length of time. The men were shaken around, disoriented unless they stuck their heads out of the hatch at the back, and subjected to incredible heat. Our ability to react quickly and efficiently after jolting around in the back of the APCs was something I was glad we didn’t have to test.

  It didn’t take long for the operation to start yielding results. C Company located an aggressively defended Viet Cong bunker system on the afternoon of 29 July. 7 Platoon was following a track when they made contact with the enemy. Several Viet Cong were shot. The Viet Cong fired rocket propelled grenades, machine-guns and claymore mines which were located in the trees. Contact was maintained for over an hour before the platoon could be extracted.

  The bunker system was along the line of the Suoi Ca River close to the Long Khanh and Phuoc Tuy Province borders. The bunkers were hit with considerable artillery and aerial bombardment as C Company manoeuvred to attack. Nightfall beat their attempts, and when C Company moved against the position at first light the next morning the Viet Cong had withdrawn.

  Our company was hastily regrouped with the tanks and then moved from its area to assist C Company; we really busted a gut to reach them, despite the incredibly thick jungle and broken terrain. We spent that morning searching the bunker system, and then destroying it. The tanks either crushed the bunkers or the Assault Pioneer Platoon blew them up. Afterwards, the commanding officer decided to clear down the line of the river in a south-westerly direction, with C Company on the southern bank and D Company on the northern bank.

  Around three o’clock in the afternoon we started to move out along the line of the river. Our armoured personnel carriers and tanks were sent off to refuel as we made our way along the side of the river through very thick jungle with huge trees and interminable vines hanging everywhere. Because of the numbers of enemy we were expected to encounter, we were moving as a whole company for the first time—and it was a slow process indeed. The thick vegetation had forced us to move in single file and whilst it was easy to control it was pretty boring for those stuck at the tail end of the column.

  It didn’t stay boring for very long. My platoon, which was at the tail, had not moved when all hell broke loose at the point. We had hit another bunker system even though we had not even travelled 200 metres out of the one we had just destroyed. 10 and 12 Platoon were both shaken out into a formation where they could ascertain how big this system was. From the amount of small arms fire we could hear, there was no shortage of enemy or ammunition in there. Major Taylor decided to push forward as a company and see what we were up against. The tanks were given a call on the radio and told to get back to join us as quick as they could. This would be no mean feat as scrub-bashing in this type of thick jungle in a Centurion was close to impossible. Reconnaissance by Kevin Byrne and Graham Spinkston showed that we were up against a reasonably sized system and that the enemy was not about to withdraw.

  C Company were tasked to cover our southern flank and, when the tanks joined us, we were going to assault the bunkers. It was going to be tricky, as we had never trained or practised fighting with the tanks in jungle. So it was going to be another case of ‘suck it and see’. I gave my orders to the platoon and had to hide my disappointment: 11 Platoon was tasked as the depth platoon in the assault and we would not be given a chance to fight unless the two forward platoons got bogged down or we needed to punch through on a flank. Somehow the Centurions from C Squadron 1 Armoured Regiment had managed to find their way through the jungle to join us. The company would be assaulting with two platoons forward, each with two sections in assault formation with a tank central with each platoon. Company headquarters would be travelling in the centre just behind the assault sections and my platoon would be centre-rear.

  The forward observer started adjusting artillery fire as close as we could get it and the plan was that we would keep the artillery falling just in front of the assault to keep any enemy in depth to our assault line from interfering with our attack. This proved more difficult than anyone had imagined: as the trees were so tall they were catching the odd shell, and we took a few minor casualties from our own artillery fire. The wounds were not too bad—mainly shrapnel wounds to the backs of the legs.

  The attack started in earnest. Before long the battle was in full cry.
The sections were crawling forward and clearing about five or ten metres in front of the tanks, which would then drive slowly forward and come just past the men lying on the jungle floor. The Centurions would then engage any bunkers they could see and hit them with high explosive shell and machine gun fire. If they couldn’t see anything to their front they let rip with a canister round to clear the vegetation. The tank troop commander was Lt Bruce Cameron and he had done this sort of thing before on operation Overlord with 3 RAR and he had his act together. Jerry Taylor was coordinating the assault and trying to keep the platoons level so we didn’t expose a flank to the enemy in the fire fight.

  It was extremely slow going. Fire and movement had to be done on our stomachs all the way as to stand up in the assault line was asking for trouble. 10 Platoon had their first casualty when one of their riflemen, Pte Bernie Pengilly, stood up to get out of the way of a tank. He was hit in the chest by a large calibre machine-gun bullet which knocked him backwards about a metre. I was forward, carrying an ammunition resupply to the forward platoons, who by now had been fighting through the bunkers for over half an hour. I grabbed my medic Frank Wessing and got him to go forward to where Pengilly had been hit to see what he could do. Frank crawled forward and reached Pengilly. He was in a bad way. I wasn’t sure if he had been killed instantly but he was hit pretty badly. I didn’t hold too much hope for him. While Frank was treating the wounded Pengilly, he put his rifle down on the track. A Centurion passed and then another tank, probably Cameron’s, came past and ran over his rifle. It was a mess; the woodwork was completely shattered and the barrel was bent almost at right angles. Pengilly was now dead and Frank was preparing to put him in a collapsible stretcher to move him out of the battle area. He came back to where I was watching the fire fight. He was shaken by Pengilly’s death and was concerned at what had happened to his SLR. I told him to take Pengilly’s rifle.