In Good Company Read online

  The ensuing two-week field exercise was designed to test the junior commanders and made no bones about putting the pressure on. This was a turning point in our platoon make-up. My platoon sergeant didn’t want to go back to Vietnam. Consequently, I began to depend upon the best of my corporals to help in running the platoon. Darryl Jenkin was single and 25, and without his aid I might not have survived Jungle Training Centre. The biggest lesson I had to learn whilst I was on this course was how to navigate in the jungle—where you can’t see features to do resections and all you can do is count paces and march on compass bearings.

  During all this time I was furiously trying to arrange a removal for my wife to Townsville from Sydney, and also arrange accommodation in Townsville for when we arrived. The assistant adjutant, Graham Spinkston, who was later to join our company as a platoon commander, was a great help as I tried to keep my bride informed of where she was going and how she would get there. At the end of the month-long battle efficiency course, I drove up to Brisbane and met Gay at the airport. We then drove up to Townsville and after a couple of days post exercise administration, the battalion went on Christmas leave until 11 January 1971.

  Gay and I had our belated honeymoon touring around the Atherton Tableland and Cairns area. It was my first real leave in two years. I had a crack at water skiing again: at Lake Barrine and Lake Eacham on the Tableland where the water for skiing was magnificent and too tempting. I was determined to make the most of our leave, knowing full well that when I went back to work the final months before leaving would be frantic and would be spent mostly in the bush. During this time together Gay and I discussed the problems we would face, with the heavy workload and then a year away in Vietnam. She was most understanding about it all, and even decided that she wouldn’t go home to her mother when I sailed. Instead, she would stay on with her new job in Townsville. Having only been together for such a short time since our marriage and having hardly any time to ourselves, we also postponed a family until well after my return to Australia.

  Returning to work was something I wasn’t exactly looking forward to after four weeks in the sun, but it was only months before we were due to go and there was so much to do. The platoon was by now just about stable and all of the soldiers were draft priority one. This meant that they were fully inoculated, dentally fit, medically fit and that all of their paperwork (concerning wills, next of kin, insurances, hire purchases and so on) had been squared away.

  My biggest problem was that I still had a platoon sergeant who wanted to be anywhere else but in a rifle platoon. He had asked for a transfer out of Delta Company to Support Company. After several weeks of counselling and interviews, and after he had been paraded to the Brigade Commander, he was reduced in rank to corporal and moved to the battalion Signal Platoon. This rather tumultuous upheaval then left me without a sergeant. So I moved Jenkin into the job and asked for either a new section commander or permission to promote one of my better lance corporals. I was given a corporal from the Transport Platoon called Mick Kennedy, who had done a tour of Vietnam previously. We quickly settled down to the task of training but unfortunately, for some reason, we couldn’t get Jenkin promoted to sergeant straight away; and so we had four corporals in 11 Platoon.

  By now I knew most of the key figures in the company reasonably well with the exception of the company commander. His name was Franz Kudnig and he was a veteran of several campaigns with the battalion. He was tough, fit, wiry and usually curt. He was extremely formal with all of the officers and NCOs. He knew his work well and was a stickler for procedure. He only had one standard and it was excellence. But as a man, I hardly knew him, had rarely had an off duty conversation with him and even then found it was hard to talk to the man.

  The company commander was totally dissimilar to our company second-in-command (2IC). Captain Peter Schuman was an outgoing, approachable type who kept us on the right track to avoid the wrath of the company commander. Peter was a veteran of Borneo and Vietnam and had won a Military Cross in South Vietnam whilst serving with the Special Air Service Regiment. He was the one who had the unenviable task of go-between in the company. He was kept fairly busy as most of the company would take their personal probelms to Peter instead of to the company commander.

  My fellow platoon commanders were Second Lieutenants (2Lts) Kevin Byrne, who commanded 10 Platoon and Graham Spinkston, who had just been relieved as assistant adjutant and who now had 12 Platoon. Kevin was a bachelor, an Officer Cadet School graduate from Portsea and an excellent sportsman. He could turn his hand to any sport but excelled at cricket, and as a centre or five-eighth at rugby. He was a personable and popular man both about town and in the battalion. He related very well to soldiers and his platoon loved him. Graham, on the other hand, was a recently married man like myself. He too was a Portsea graduate and a second lieutenant. He was probably the quietest of the three of us—which wasn’t saying much. However, his wife Anne had a firm contol over him and we didn’t see Graham in the mess as much as the rest of the subalterns.

  The company sergeant major was a very experienced soldier by the name of Noel Huish. He was a single man who had only one life and it was the regiment. He was not a robust looking man and gave the impression that he was always off colour. Looks can be deceiving as he proved himself as fit as the rest of us and ran the discipline of the company with a tight rein. The company quartermaster sergeant (QMS) was a nice bloke by the name of Bob Hann. Bob was young for a QMS who, normally, are notoriously old and cunning. Bob was different in that he was the only QMS in the battalion who hadn’t been to Vietnam before, having spent a lot of his time in Papua New Guinea. Most quartermasters will only give you something out of their store if you sign away your life, bequeath all of your worldly possessions and wife and then bring back whatever it was you borrowed in mint condition. However, Bob just made you sign for it. He always went out of his way to make sure the soldiers got everything they needed to make life easier, a policy which often got him into strife with the company commander on more than one occasion.

  Most of the NCOs in the rifle platoons and support section had Vietnam experience. This was a tremendous advantage for those of us who hadn’t been and gave us great depth of knowledge in the company. Amongst my private rank soldiers I had only a handful who had been to Vietnam before but they had experienced corporals as their leaders and this was reassuring. Where I had a section with a commander who hadn’t been to Vietnam, I tried to have a soldier in that section who had.

  My platoon headquarters was almost all nashos. My signallers who each carried a ‘25 set’ VHF radio were Paul Howkins, a fitter and turner from Bororen near Gympie in Queensland, and Barry Garratt, an insurance clerk who had trained mentally handicapped kids before being drafted. My platoon medic or more properly titled, stretcher-bearer, was a ceramic tiler from Tasmania called Frank Wessing. I got to know these men really well as we worked together, shared meals, tent spaces and everything else for months at a time. It was important that I knew everything about all of my soldiers so I would know how they would react to the different situations we would have to face. The platoon had a real mixed bag of personalities—from Pte Bob Faustmann, who hailed from Austria and claimed to be a student of agriculture, to L Cpl Jim McClymont, who had been a boundary rider and jackeroo before he was drafted, to yet another—a regular who confided that his previous occupation had been ‘prisoner’.

  There was lots of training to do. We hadn’t been back at work for too long before Delta Company started to make a name for itself—by walking back to our lines in Lavarack Barracks from the Mount Stuart range complex 16 kilometres away. This wasn’t much fun with all our gear on in the January heat of Townsville. Then we did live-firing attacks, practised fire and movement drills and laid ambushes against targets on pulleys to test our ambush springing techniques and firing at night. Most of our training was done up in the High Range training area some 100 km from Townsville, up along the Hervey Range road. It was a big training are
a, the terrain varying from savannah grassland to rocky, scrub-covered bush. It was usually hot up on High Range and in the wet season it didn’t cool down much at night.

  If we weren’t at High Range then we were at Mount Spec, a heavily rain forested training area about 160 km north of Townsville. Since that time I have been in jungles in Vietnam, Malaya, Brunei and Fiji—but Mount Spec is pretty close to the worst I was ever in. It was almost always raining; and if it wasn’t raining, then it was about to. The terrain was mountainous, thick and in some places impenetrable. There was always the chance that deadfall from the rotting upper branches would crash down; and the jungle also stank. There were some charming inhabitants: probably the one we hated most beside the blood sucking leeches was the Mount Spec bush rat. It was a big rat. I saw some specimens that looked like they belonged on a leash. Most of them were about a foot long excluding the tail, and they all moved like greased lightning. They adored our ration packs and had a penchant for dropping in for a midnight snack with you if you hadn’t put your pack away and off the ground. Some soldiers used to hang their packs up in trees but this was in no way a guarantee that your pack wouldn’t be attacked. Quite often we had the bush rats run over us as we slept. I can still remember waking one night thinking I was being summoned to the radio: as I turned on my penlight torch I looked straight into a beady pair of eyes not more than a foot from my face. It wasn’t so bad that these rats ate your food, but the problem was they would eat only a bit of everything. So the inside of the pack would have sugar all through it and biscuit and jam and anything that made a mess.

  As long as one carried out preventative measures on clothing we weren’t troubled too much by mosquitoes or mites. The leeches, however, used to drink the repellant we used. They were a problem. It wasn’t so much the fact that they took your blood; but the sore that developed after they had gorged themselves and fallen off. It would become infected in the tropical heat and dirt and take months to heal. It was always interesting to see the different techniques the diggers came up with for dispatching leeches: some liked to drop salt on the leech, something which drove these freshwater worms crazy; others preferred a match or cigarette, and some others used the concentrated repellant. The more inventive ones got a stick or match and pushed it into the end of the leech to turn them inside out. I didn’t fancy any particular method as long as they fell off.

  Most of our exercises were umpired to assess how we were going and to give us feedback on where we could improve our techniques. The umpires were often allocated on the ratio of one captain per platoon headquarters and one sergeant for the platoon sections. As these umpires were often combat veterans themselves, we appreciated their advice. On my last exercise before we left for Vietnam, my platoon had as umpire a young captain who had just come back. Steve Sainsbury gave me a piece of advice I was never to forget. ‘Whatever you do when you are operating in the jungle,’ he said, ‘never, ever let your security drop. There’s no front or flanks, the enemy are all around you and will hit you when you least expect it and from the direction you least expect’. He went on: ‘You must always make sure you have security at the halt by having sentries posted, and if it is a short halt have everyone looking out. Security is the key to survival and coming back alive’. I have never heard truer words spoken about patrolling on foot in the jungle.

  All of the exercises were centred around the same theme—counter revolutionary warfare. We were inserted into the exercise area either by truck, in an armoured personnel carrier (APC) or, most often, by Iroquois helicopter (Huey). The battalion mortars and our direct support field artillery battery would be deployed into a fire support base and each company would search its allocated area of operations. This was known as ‘search and clear’ or ‘search and destroy’ operations and was our bread and butter. The searching was usually done on foot just as it would be done in South Vietnam. We would search for any evidence or sign of the ‘enemy’ in the area, and we would then track them down or else ambush their more frequently used routes. I liked to search around creeks and rivers as the enemy always needed water. Peter Schuman, the company 2IC, always maintained that it was a tactic guaranteed to give good results. In Vietnam the Special Air Services Squadron even used water tables to determine where they would search, as no self-respecting Viet Cong would dig a well for water any deeper than he needed to.

  This searching or patrolling was hard work. We had to carry about five days’ hard rations, a minimum of four water bottles, our ammunition (including spare ammo for the M60 machine gun, grenades, smoke grenades, anti-personnel claymore mines, light anti-tank weapons and our personal weapon) and also sleeping gear. Thankfully in the tropics all we really needed for the latter was our hootchie, a nylon mattress cover, mosquito net and a ‘silk’ to sleep in when it was cool. This entire kit weighed between 70 and 80 pounds, depending on whether you carried the 5.56 mm M16 Armalite rifle or the heavier 7.62 mm SLR. Some lads had to carry spare batteries for the platoon radios and others had to transport first aid medical kits. The end result was always the same: we had a lot to carry. With the heat and humidity we were real lean packhorses. What was worse, we were called ‘light infantry’.

  Often towards the end of an exercise we would practise larger scale attacks at company level; on a full battalion exercise we would practise what was known as ‘cordon and search’. This involved moving the whole battalion, usually at night, into a cordon around a ‘village’ in the bush representing a typical Vietnamese hamlet. Once the cordon was inserted and complete we would wait until first light and after thinning out the cordon, one or two of the companies would conduct a systematic search of the village. Inside there would be booby traps, hidden tunnels, arms and food caches, false walls, mines and several of the ‘villagers’ would try to break the cordon. It was a time consuming job and a detailed search could take 12 hours.

  When we were back in camp we continued with our draft priority one preparation and packing and preparing stores to go with us on the HMAS Sydney to Vietnam. By now we had been warned for active service and we knew the date we would probably be leaving. The HMAS Sydney was a converted aircraft carrier, now a troopship and training vessel for the RAN. As the weeks passed by the training became more and more centred on the nitty gritty of what we would be doing, where we would be going and the battle situation. Officer and senior non-commissioned officer training became aimed at the operational side of what was occurring in our area of operations. The intelligence officer, Capt Bob Sayce, would give the latest contact reports and situation reports from the 1st Australian Task Force base in Nui Dat in Phuoc Tuy Province. This added a note of realism and urgency to the training and we started to study the enemy units operating in our area of operations with greater concern.

  Gay was asking more and more what I would actually be doing as a platoon commander. I tried to reassure her that a platoon commander was never right in the thick of fighting but usually back a little and directing what was occurring. But the 3rd Battalion, RAR, had gone to Vietnam a couple of months before us and they were having a few contacts which were making the newspapers in Townsville. So the unfortunate deaths of two platoon commanders in 3 RAR just before we sailed in April didn’t lift Gay’s morale too much.

  We discussed the likelihood of my being hit and the chances of getting killed. The odds were not too bad considering previous wars, and in the last couple of battalions to tour Vietnam, the units were losing about 25–30 men out of 900 in 12 months. The odds were roughly the same for the officers. I think what frightened me more than anything was the danger from mines. I had known two platoon commanders in 2 RAR, Bill Rolfe and Pat Cameron; Pat had lost a leg and Bill had lost both. Mines were a real bastard and you could never tell where or when you would hit them. All I hoped was that we never would.

  The day prior to sailing, Gay took the day off from work. We spent time going over what to do if I was wounded or worse, and if she needed help we discussed to whom she could turn. We were lucky in that w
e had a great friend in my rugby coach, Father John Tinkler. Neither of us was Roman Catholic, but that was of little consequence to Father John. He was a padre who enjoyed tremendous respect and popularity amongst the soldiers, to an extent that when we had padre training hours they packed his house out and left the Church of England and other Protestant denomination padres wondering where had all the christians gone. Just as Gay and I were preparing to open a couple of cold cans before dinner we had a visit from the local Townsville newspaper which wanted to run a story on the departure of the battalion and the ladies it was leaving behind. We had been discussing exactly what the reporter wanted to know just before he arrived and so in about fifteen-minutes flat he had his story and was on his way. After dinner I went out onto our porch and had a long hard look at the beautiful sunset that one gets in the tropics and in that cool evening air I wondered what was in store for me in the months ahead.

  It was exciting and somehow sobering at the same time. Yet underneath it all was an urge to get it started and under way.

  4

  365 and a Wakey

  The day finally arrived. I was awake and ready to go at first light. I hadn’t slept all that well: I had woken every hour or so to check the time. After a fairly quiet breakfast at home, Gay drove me out to Lavarack Barracks at about 5.30 am. We had a hurried goodbye in the officers’ mess carpark. There was very little left to do but call the platoon roll, load our worldly possessions onto the trucks and head off for Townsville.