In Good Company Page 16
The enemy were identified as being part of 274 VC Main Force Regiment; in fact we had hit the 1st Battalion of this Regiment and their headquarter element. The men in the bunker were officers and one was the battalion intelligence officer. One of my diggers remarked that for an intelligence officer he hadn’t shown much of it by not surrendering—but in the same breath he acknowledged his bravery and determination to fight to the end.
The Task Force commander, Brigadier B. A. McDonald, dropped in by helicopter to survey the scene and to talk to Jerry Taylor about the battle. It had created a lot of interest as the Task Force was supposed to be winding down its operations and not having two-hour battles against enemy regiments. He came over to talk to some of my diggers and in one ghoulish incident I nearly got into strife. I had given the sections the task of burying the dead after they had been stripped and searched and documented. They were to make sure that the graves were deep and marked. When the Task Force commander came over to speak with some of my men, I noticed he was slowly sinking into a very shallow grave one of the gun sections had dug. He was in danger of being in an awful mess. I successfully managed to steer the brigadier to where we were scattering several hundred pounds of rice around to render it useless. It was a close thing and I detailed that crew to dig the platoon latrines for the remainder of the operation as punishment. By mid-afternoon we had finished the battlefield clearance and we were on our way west to try and pick up sign of where the enemy may have gone.
The company swept west along the Song Ca but the only signs we found were where we thought the enemy may have come back on the first night to see if we were still occupying the bunker system. We continued working with the APCs and tanks and concentrated on searching along the line of the Song Ca River. After a week or so of fruitless searching we were able to relieve the monotony of patrolling by having a wash in the Song Ca. This was a small tactical exercise in itself. I secured the area by sweeping both sides of the river and then posted sentries. We bathed a section at a time and with the aid of some soap that we had borrowed from the APC crewmen we had a ball. There was no skylarking as the area wasn’t too secure; but it was so nice to lie naked in the quickly flowing river amongst the rocks and have fresh, cool, clean water cascade over our bodies. During this period of tactical toilet a Royal Thai Air Force helicopter flew overhead and then suddenly circled back and flew around us. I couldn’t speak to the chopper on the radio to tell him who we were; so I hoped that they didn’t think we were Viet Cong and shoot at us. The soldiers in the creek did their best to look friendly and stood up and waved. I wasn’t sure if they saw we were Australian or whether the sight of half a dozen lily white naked men waving at them was too much to bear; in any event they flew away and left us intact.
There were a few incidents in the next couple of days which highlighted a rather unproductive time while we were working with the armour. As we were moving along one of the cleared fire trails, a Centurion tank ran over a mine and blew off its track and damaged a road wheel. The driver was lucky to escape without major injury. As we secured the area to allow the tank crews room and time to repair the tank a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter flew overhead with smoke streaming out of the nose of the aircraft. He saw us and made a very rapid turn and landed in the middle of the fire trail. The pilot jumped out of his machine with a fire extinguisher and sprayed the contents into the area from where the smoke was billowing. This seemed to stop the smoke and he then began examining the helo to try to find out what had caused the fire. After a while he sauntered over to where the tank crewmen were working on the Centurion and asked if anyone was a mechanic. One of the tank crewmen responded and the pilot asked if he would have a look at his chopper. The crewman said he knew nothing about helos but would have a look. The pilot and the crewman then spent five minutes or so looking at the workings under the front panel of the chopper and after agreeing that they both didn’t have a clue what to do, the pilot remounted his machine. He turned the turbine over and after a minute or so when it hadn’t caught fire again he took off and headed toward Nui Dat. The crewman, who had been looking at the aircraft, said that the pilot had no instruments of any consequence working but it ‘sounded alright’ and he would try to fly back. We didn’t hear of him crashing, so we assumed he made it back safely.
By 6 August, some ten days into the operation, we were back on our feet and patrolling the hard way. The operation we were now on was called North Ward, after a suburb in Townsville, and was scheduled to continue until the middle of September. We weren’t sad to leave the tracks and tanks as we couldn’t use all our patrolling and tracking skills, and being bounced around in the back of the hot APCs had ceased to amuse us. The company was allocated an area around the Courtenay rubber plantation and close to Route 2, to clear and ambush. The Courtenay rubber plantation was quite large and covered at least twenty thousand square metres. He employed a few hundred civilians as rubber tappers and workers and it was rumoured that Courtenay paid the Viet Cong to stay away from the plantation. A bullet hole in a rubber tree can ruin and even destroy its productivity and he obviously didn’t want fire fights in the plantation.
It was cool in under the rubber as the trees were about 60 to 70 feet high and quite shady. The soil underneath the thick canopy was deep red and always damp. Patrolling through ‘clean’ rubber which was being worked was a real snap and we could cover three or four kilometres an hour with ease. Unfortunately we didn’t patrol for very long through the rubber and we were soon back into the thick jungle near the civilian access limit looking for the footpads the Viet Cong were using to come into the villages by night. The heat during the day was now increasing as the wet season seemed to intensify. I found I was having to rest the platoon for about an hour and a half in the heat of the day to keep their minds on the job and not on the insufferable heat. A lot of letters from home were starting to reach my men. These referred to an early withdrawal from Vietnam. The topic became a constant talking point whenever two or more soldiers got together to compare notes.
The style of operation was now taking the form where Major Taylor would allocate several grid squares (thousand metre squares) to each of the platoons and tell us to clear it. This was in total contrast to our previous company commander who had dictated what and how we would search. As platoon commanders we liked this new arrangement as it gave us a lot more flexibility and allowed the man on the ground to plan his search.
My platoon went through a lean spell again at this time as far as contact with the enemy was concerned. Several times we were targetted against enemy resupply columns or rendezvous spots—only to be hampered by thick jungle which was extremely heavy going. On one occasion we were given an agent report that a squad of Viet Cong would be moving through an area a couple of kilometres away. We set off to find the track the enemy would be using and hit incredibly thick jungle and scrub. To make matters worse it had been hit by air strikes and there was deadfall everywhere. We made the best speed we could but were beaten by the failing light. The next morning we set off to find the track and there, 300 metres from where we had harboured, was a footpad with recent signs that eight to ten enemy had moved along some time before. It wasn’t all sour grapes though: as their sign led through thorny bamboo we concluded that unless they were using torches, the footpad would have been negotiated in daylight.
This meant that the most likely destination was a nearby village; and so after doing a reconnaissance of the area we set up an ambush in an overgrown coffee plantation about two kilometres from the village. We were certain we would nab some enemy here as their signs led right through the plantation. We laid out a claymore ambush with about eighteen claymores in three banks covering the intersection of four tracks. We were in the thick coffee trees firing out into reasonably clean rubber in the other three quadrants of the intersection. After three days of literally roasting in the coffee we moved out to take a resupply several kilometres away in the rubber. This resupply was delivered by APC and I hoped that anyone
in the area would think we were leaving, and so after dark I moved back to where we had been ambushing in the hope of catching the enemy by surprise.
Nothing happened for almost 36 hours. I became suspicious that we had been seen relocating back into our old position. That night we stood to when a couple of men with torches were spotted heading toward the rear of our ambush location. They didn’t come close enough for us to engage them with our claymores; and so, deciding that the game was up, we left at first light the next morning and swept through the village on our way north. The hamlet contained nothing but dozens of kids, old ladies and young women and innumerable chickens and pigs. The houses could best be described as hovels and sanitation appeared unheard of. As we moved out of the village we passed through a large open area scattered with uncovered faeces—an outdoor toilet. The stench was overpowering but it gave us a good idea of how many people actually belonged to that hamlet.
The only exciting things happening were in the other two platoons. 12 platoon had found a body without a head on it and 10 platoon had found a cache of about 50 kilograms of rice and pumpkins. They set up an ambush on the cache but before Kev Byrne was able to spring it, he was evacuated from the field with an ear infection. An insect of some kind had laid eggs in his ear overnight and he was unable to walk the next day. After Kevin had been taken out, his platoon maintained their ambush; and at 7.30 pm three enemy came in and the platoon killed two and the third escaped but was believed wounded. We heard all this news sitting on an island in the middle of the wettest valley we had come across.
The platoon was having incredibly bad luck with the weather and the ground. Every time I said ‘move’, we were drenched by a tropical downpour or ran into flooded creeks or valleys. We spent several days on end trudging through water up to our groins and had difficulty finding a dry place to sit and cook a meal. We were really quite miserable as everywhere we went we saw little sign of the enemy and lots of water. The day that 10 Platoon had their ambush I had literally patrolled all day through water and the only thing that happened was that one of the diggers was bitten on the back of the calf by what we suspected was a turtle.
On 19 August we heard on the American Forces Vietnam Network radio that the battalion would be returned to Australia three to five months earlier than anticipated. It was hard to stop the buzz of conversation which swept around the platoon and given the recent miserable couple of wet, unproductive weeks we had just had, I couldn’t blame them. This news meant that the battalion would most likely be home by Christmas or February 1972. For some of the men that wasn’t soon enough. My own wife wrote how happy she was that we were coming home earlier. I took the news with mixed emotions. I missed my wife terribly, but at the same time I wanted to see as much action as I could.
The company came in from operation North Ward on 23 August having been out on patrol for some four weeks. It was given six days off before we were due to go out on another long operation. The day we arrived back off the choppers in Nui Dat, we were told that the battalion was going to return to Australia at Christmas; but we in Delta Company would return in February 1972—we were to protect the Australian Logistic Support Group complex in Vung Tau until the withdrawal of all Australian forces was complete.
The company went through the normal post-patrol routine. Then we went down to the rest centre at Vung Tau for two days. The town was off-limits as elections were being held. A yellow alert was in force. This meant that Viet Cong activity was expected and that convoys needed protection and that road movement by night was to be avoided. We had a great company party down at the Badcoe Club and really enjoyed the sun and water despite some giant hangovers. Our next stint out bush would be into an area known as the Hat Dich, (pronounced ‘hut zick’), not far from where we had patrolled with our first company commander on our first operation. But now the area was inundated and the standing joke was to ask for flippers and snorkels every time someone mentioned where we were headed.
The plot for the next operation was that we were to sweep north from the south of the province through the Suoi Chau Pha Valley (again) and clear any local Viet Cong units out of the area. In a straight line, that amounted to something like 25 kilometres; but on the ground it was a whole lot more. We were going to be flown into an area which had had helicopter landing zones prepared for our choppers by big 500 pound bombs known as ‘daisy cutters’. These massive bombs were designed to detonate just above the ground and blow everything away for about a ten metre radius, hence their name. The insertion went quite smoothly and D Company set off once again in pursuit of the dreaded Chau Duc guerillas.
The Suoi Chau Pha Valley was a completely different piece of ground now that the wet season had hit. We were unable to recognise landmarks or find tracks that we knew should be there. Every day and usually toward the evening, we were getting pelted with incredibly heavy downpours of monsoonal rain. Patrolling was more like swimming. In one day we were only able to make 3000 metres as the going was so difficult. I tried to manoeuvre around the obvious areas which would be carrying water but found no respite. We also found no bloody Chau Duc! Any self-respecting enemy would have been miles from where we were treading water and the complete lack of sign indicated I was right. The big events on this patrol up the western side of the province seemed to centre around wildlife.
The first incident occurred as we were wading through waist deep water and then into water only shin deep. I had felt an itch in the region of my genitals and when it persisted I halted the platoon for a quick smoke so I could check out the cause of my discomfort. I opened the fly of my trousers and, much to my horror, there on the head of my circumcised penis was a big fat leech. It had one of its feet or suckers on my glans penis and the other foot down inside the urethra tube out of where one normally pees. The discovery of this blood sucking worm caused great interest amongst the more sadistic in the platoon who came up with a variety of methods to remove the leech. Solutions varied from putting insect repellent or salt onto the leech, to burning it off, and one unfunny suggestion of short arm amputation. Eventually we decided to heat a needle and hit the leech with it. As leeches hated intense heat it would instantly let go and I would be freed of the offending beast. This proved to be a success but my problems had only just begun. Leeches use an anti-coagulant to assist their feeding and after we had removed the leech and washed my bruised penis with fresh water, I started to bleed. This brought out some very unkind remarks about what sex the platoon commander really was, with many allusions to my ‘monthly problems’ to confirm their suspicions. Despite wrapping my penis in bandages and later even resorting to a shell dressing to try to stem the flow of blood, I continued to bleed. The only recourse was for me to lie down with my body flat and hope that would work. After about half an hour it did. So, complete with a huge bloodstain circling my groin, we continued our patrol.
A couple of very soggy days later we had bad incidents with hornets. I sent Cpl Mick Kennedy out on a reconnaissance to do a navigation check as the ground we were moving through was so thick and difficult it was not easy to determine our exact location. I expected he would be gone for about half an hour at most as he only had about a 400 metre trip. After an hour had passed and he hadn’t returned with his section I was becoming concerned. We hadn’t heard any gunfire. I kept hoping he hadn’t run into a large enemy group and couldn’t get back to our position. I learnt a very valuable lesson here: I had two radios available and I could easily have given Mick one if I had thought of it. What happened was his section had found the river line I was hoping he would find, and just as they were about to return a swarm of hornets descended on Mick and stung him quite badly. His section tried to treat him as best they could but his stings were so numerous that he was in a state of shock and unable to move. He was quite a big fellow—around 15 stone plus—and carrying him back on a field stretcher would have taken ages. So they decided to bathe his stings and treat him for shock. He was in so much agony he had to have a sweat rag stuck in his mou
th to quieten him down. His eyes had closed over from the numerous stings he had taken to his face and head and things looked bad for his section. Eventually Mick recovered enough for his section to lead him back to my location where my medic was able to sedate him and treat his stings with cream. He was in no condition to move and as it was only an hour or so to dark, I harboured where we were for the night.
Within two days we had more medical problems as the constant patrolling through the swamp, flooded paddies and marshy ground took its toll on some of the soldiers. We had one particularly bad stretch of weather when it was quite cool during the nights when it rained. The soldiers on gun picquet got soaked to the skin and chilled through by the wind accompanying the rain. Three of my men started to cough quite badly and were feeling more than just off-colour. Frank Wessing suggested we chopper them out as they had high temperatures. It turned out to be good advice as two had severe bronchitis and one was developing pneumonia.
Another of the more memorable beasties that kept us on our toes were ‘chomper’ ants. These large red meat-eating ants were capable of giving a very painful bite and were to be avoided at all costs. They would eat through most fabric to get at their quarry and I found the only way to combat their advance upon my person was to sleep on one of the bright pink luminous helicopter marker panels that I carried. For some reason the chomper ants would burrow away underneath the marker panel and chomp around but would not bite through the plastic covered material. If my arm came off the area of the marker panel I was vulnerable to being bitten, and so I learnt to sleep without moving around too much.