In Good Company Read online

  The wet season was in full swing and it rained every day. The rain came down in buckets and lasted for about two hours. The sky was always covered with rain-heavy cumulus clouds moving around. The temperature was averaging 93 degrees fahrenheit during the day and about 80 degrees at night but the humidity was the killer as it was hardly ever less than 70 per cent and usually higher. We all took some weeks to properly acclimatise. The mosquitoes were bad under the rubber trees and we were forced to wear our shirts all the time. With the jungle green trousers we were not exactly cool, and it didn’t take long for most men to discard their underwear. The red mud never dried out and stuck to everything. Just walking from my tent to the company quartermaster store 100 metres away would add three inches of this red gooey mud to my boots.

  One of the first operational jobs we had was familiarisation of the province by chopper. All of the platoon and section commanders were taken on a visual reconnaissance of the area for a couple of hours soon after we arrived. One of the most eye-opening things we observed was the absolutely huge American base at Long Binh in Long Khanh Province to our north. This base was 40 miles around its perimeter and was only one of many such bases in Vietnam. It brought home to me just how big the US effort was. Probably the single thing which emphasised the US effort was the helicopter support. The greatest number of Iroquois helicopters we had ever seen in one place was probably about a dozen. Now we were looking down on over a hundred choppers! Again everywhere we flew there were bomb craters full of water reflecting the sun.

  My first impressions of the Americans as soldiers were not good. They appeared undisciplined and untidy. Most of the army personnel wore only a part of their correct dress: for example, no shirt—and only a flak jacket with their bare arms showing. I cannot remember ever seeing a Yank wearing camouflage cream. This seemed to confirm the belief that the Americans used massive firepower to solve a situation as opposed to tactics and better operating methods. Whenever I saw a group of US Army soldiers inside the base, they always looked slovenly. They never seemed to march anywhere; and never as a formed body of troops. The black soldiers were even more disconcerting as they often looked sullen and totally uninterested in what was going on around them. They talked differently; they used their own slang and mannerisms and seemed mostly to communicate only amongst themselves.

  There were large tracts of cleared land forming a big arc around the province. These were about 400 metres wide and resembled dirt freeways through the jungle. They were called fire trails and went by various names such as the Brimstone Trail and the Firestone Trail. These trails had been cleared by bulldozers linked together by huge chains; once the trail had been cleared it was sprayed with defoliant to prevent the rapid jungle regrowth. Every morning the pilots from 161 Recce Flight would do a ‘bird dog patrol’ to see if the trail had been crossed during the night by the Viet Cong.

  Our pre-operational training included refresher training on artillery and mortar fire procedure. For this we went to the edge of the Nui Dat base, to what was euphemistically known as ‘the range’. In fact the range was simply a large expanse of cleared, uninhabited land facing toward Long Tan. Now the safety distances we were so conditioned to back home no longer applied; the practice gave us a real feel for what indirect fire support would be like. A group of helicopter gunship pilots from the RAAF and a forward air controller from the US Army came down to give us a brief on what air support we could expect. There was a chalk board with all the safety distances for all the different types of ordnance listed, and when one of the American Cobra gunship pilots stood to give his spiel he walked over to the board, rubbed out the 25 metre minimum safety distance for 7.62 mm mini-gun and chalked in 23 metres! Despite the fact that there was a decline in the number of forces operating in our province there was still a lot of firepower available.

  We were given a firepower demonstration the next day by the tanks, armoured personnel carriers, the 105 and 155 mm guns, the 8 inch self-propelled guns, the Iroquois and Cobra gunships and F4 Phantom jets and A37 Super-Skymasters. It was all very impressive and gave us a great feeling of confidence to know that all we had to do was ring up and ask for it whenever the proverbial hit the fan. From the enemy briefings we were getting, the Viet Cong were becoming active again in the province and were concentrating on giving the Popular Force and Regional Force Vietnamese troops a hard time. These forces represented the militia and the reserve to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and were essential for local protection duties and the like to free the ARVN for more important tasks. The Viet Cong were abducting Regional Force and Popular Force personnel from Phuoc Tuy Province and taking them into jungle hide-outs for recruiting and training. In our first week in the country four Popular Force members were abducted not more than 15 kilometres from our base. The Viet Cong weren’t interested in the Australian Task Force base as they were trying to avoid major contacts. The main aim of the Viet Cong was to try to destroy the Regional Force and Popular Force posts which protected the small villages and hamlets. By destroying the posts the Viet Cong also hoped to destroy the credibility and organisation of the Regional Force and Popular Force.

  Before the company was sent out on its first shakedown operation we were introduced to a refresher exercise called Lifesaver. This exercise took about two hours and consisted of a series of stands where various instructors would run over the different safety procedures we used on operations. The exercise covered things such as briefing sentries, challenging procedure when entering a position, weapon states of readiness and when they were adopted, the rules of engagement or when you could fire on the enemy and weapon safety with devices such as claymore mines. Those of us taking part had to give demonstrations of the different parts of Lifesaver and answer questions by the instructors. The whole exercise was designed to make sure we didn’t get too blasé about safety with weapons, armoured vehicles, aircraft and the like.

  5

  Leeches, Mud and Viet Cong

  Five days after we had taken over from 2 RAR we were out on a shakedown operation. I didn’t enjoy this trip into the bush very much as I had a bout of dysentry. Almost everyone had had the ‘Nui Dat runs’ after a couple of days in the country, but mine came when I least wanted it. We were inserted into an area about five or six kms south-west of Nui Dat to get a feel for the bush. The area we worked in was old rice paddy fields with occasional clumps of bamboo. This bamboo was unlike anything I had seen before. It was mainly brown but instead of leafy stalks it had thorns like six-inch nails over the whole plant and was impossible to move through. The bamboo branches were incredibly tough and tanks found it difficult to penetrate them.

  We married up with a troop of APCs and got a taste of what working in a sauna was like. My recollections of all this were pretty vague as I spent most of my time on my back, weak from the dysentry. One of the more impressive things on this operation was a troop of Centurion tanks from C Squadron 1 Armoured Regiment, who gave us a demonstration of what canister ammunition from the tank main gun will do. The round is a muzzle detonating, 20 pound, 84 mm, version of a shotgun. The canister round projects hundreds of steel rods about an inch long and the effect on jungle is devastating. The troop fired together into a patch of jungle and literally defoliated the bush. What had been difficult to see through was now left bare.

  Apart from the canister demonstration we saw little else apart from a freshwater crocodile and a few deer. The area had not had any enemy activity for some time and considering the fact that I spent a lot of this short operation with my trousers around my ankles, I wasn’t too upset at the lack of action.

  We only carried two days’ rations on this operation but it was like carrying a full load back home in Australia. The difference was that we were carrying live ammunition. Everyone had at least five magazines of small arms (ten if you were carrying an Armalite (M16) rifle) plus a couple of grenades, a claymore mine and the odd smoke grenade. In addition each section was carrying extra ammunition for the machine
gun and that totalled about 800–900 rounds per gun. The heat and humidity combined with the weight we were carrying, ensured our shirts stayed wet from sweat the moment we jumped off the choppers until we climbed back on two days later to go back to Nui Dat. Back in Australia on exercise we would have got smelly from the sweat only after about five days of patrolling. I noticed when we were on the helicopters on the way back from this operation that we stank terribly after only two days.

  When we returned from this operation, D Company was put on ‘ready reaction’ duty. This meant we had to be fully booted and spurred and ready to go at a moment’s notice. The 1st Battalion of 274 Viet Cong (VC) Main Force Regiment, which was about 180 strong, had been identified as being back in the province. Our Kiwi company, Victor Company, was out in the area of operations looking for them; we were standing by to assist. Each platoon had a different degree of notice to move, varying from fifteen minutes to half an hour. Kev Byrne’s platoon was on the shortest notice. He had to be briefed at the battalion command post, give quick deployment orders and be down at the chopper pad. We timed this platoon on what turned out to be a practice run and the lads took thirteen minutes. This made our company commander quite happy.

  That night we were allowed to have more than the normal ration of beer, which was two thirteen-ounce cans per day. Often described as ‘two cans per day perhaps’, it was well received as our company was the only one where all ranks had been limited to two cans when they were off duty. The beer we drank was Australian. It came in and was ordered by its colour: blue for Fosters, green for Victoria Bitter, yellow for Castlemaine Fourex and white for Carlton. I found that after my bout of dysentry I had lost my appetite for the extremely rich American rations we were getting and for any great quantity of beer. I switched to Bacardi rum which was still cheap as we only paid $1.40 for a 40-ounce bottle. Coca Cola was still the dearest thing one could drink.

  ‘Murphy’s Law’ prevailed the first night we had more than two beers available to us. That night the Task Force had stand to emergency drill and we had to get into our fighting gear and man the base defences. Each platoon had several machine-gun bunkers, which were always manned by the duty company, and also rifle pits, flanking the gun pits. There was a central platoon headquarter bunker where we had our claymore mine firing devices hooked up and a telephone to the three machine-gun bunkers and to the company command post. Each bunker carried spare ammunition for the section, grenades and flares. By the time the stand to drill was over, it was after 2200 hours and time for lights out. So much for a night on the beer.

  It was at this time that I noticed that Peter Schuman looked really off-colour; he was being worked fairly hard by the company commander. When he walked in for dinner one night he was not a pretty sight. He wasn’t the only one to change appearance. A lot of us had begun to grow moustaches (to aid facial camouflage) and had lost a little weight. I had lost seven pounds in only two weeks. I was looking around for some padding to put on the inside of my webbing belt to stop it rubbing the skin off my hips.

  The first real operation the company deployed on was called Bhowani Junction. We went through all the normal battle procedure just like it was an exercise with test firing weapons, kit checks and patrol orders to the diggers. We weren’t to have a spectacular helicopter insertion for this operation as we were going in by truck. The operation was designed to clear an area around where the battalion was going to establish a fire support base. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but this initial deployment was a prelude to a very large operation involving about a brigade’s worth of men. We had been warned not to talk about the operation to anyone outside the company as security was vital to its success. There were quite a few Vietnamese locals who worked inside the Australian Task Force base and who were supposedly security cleared. The Vietnamese worked as labourers around the base, keeping the place clean and the vegetation under control. Quite a few others worked in the PX, general store and barber shop. However, 3 RAR had had a contact with a patrol in the southern part of the province and one of the enemy killed was later identified as one of the barbers who worked in the Australian Logistic Support Group base at Vung Tau.

  We got quite a shock when the trucks turned up to take us out on our first large-scale operation. These vehicles only had side seating. Any road movement which we had ever practised on exercise was always on trucks with centre seating so that everyone was facing out and could fire his weapon without endangering his own troops. In the case of vehicle ambush it was essential to have centre seating to be able to return fire, and also be able to get out and onto the ground and find cover. When I asked the Royal Australian Army Service Corps drivers to fix up the centre seating I was told they couldn’t because the trucks were needed for a cargo task straight after our insertion. Besides they didn’t have all the necessary pins and most of the seats were rusted in anyway! After all the insistence on doing everything by the book, of always watching your arse and never letting your guard down, all I could think was that these guys were just typical ‘pogos’ (Personnel On Garrison Operations—or base camp types), who didn’t give a damn about the infantry on the back of their precious bloody trucks. I was not amused at all.

  We left the Task Force base with our side-seated trucks but I posted extra men to watch our flanks and had a soldier with a grenade launcher sit right at the rear of the truck with a high explosive grenade up the barrel just in case. Our destination was an area near the Courtney rubber plantation to the west of the main north-south road in Phuoc Tuy Province, called Route 2. As we drove up the road we saw the countryside at close quarters for the first time. Our shakedown operation had been away from villages and hamlets but now we were driving right past and in some cases through them.

  The peasant villages were best described as hovels with livestock sharing the same quarters as the occupants and no sanitation to speak of. Their smell was quite strong and far from pleasant. It was noticeable that men were not doing too many jobs and the only male I saw working was driving a buffalo-drawn plough in a rice field. As we passed through a village called Ap Ngai Giao (pronounced ‘ny jow’) I saw a man in black ‘pyjama’ dress with the trouser leg rolled up to his crotch, apparently urinating on the wall of a hut. Every village our convoy passed through had children between two and twelve years waving and holding up their hands in the ‘V’ sign and yelling for cigarettes or sweets. One of the diggers threw a ration can of luncheon meat to a youngster who immediately recognised this almost inedible gastronomic disaster. The kid hurled the can back in our general direction with a single digit salute screaming, ‘Number fucking ten, Cheap Charlie!’

  By the time we arrived close to the province border, we had had our eyes opened on several counts—including how slack the Regional Force and Popular Force soldiers appeared in their posts as we drove past. No-one seemed alert and the state of the various field defences was quite shoddy Once the platoon was off the side of the road we moved into the bush about two or three hundred metres and I signalled for a quick halt. I wanted to make sure exactly where I was before we started and to ensure I had good communications with the company before we set off.

  This operation would be fairly typical of those we would go on. The platoons were given areas to clear and worked independently of company headquarters. Every hour I would send in an encoded location state (locstat) telling company headquarters and the other two platoons in the company where I was and in what direction I was heading. If I was stationary for any length of time I would make sure people knew where my platoon was and would do a radio check to make sure no-one was trying to reach us on the set.

  On this operation I had been given several 1000 metre grid squares of the map to search and clear. The jungle wasn’t too bad and a lot of my area was rubber plantation. We started patrolling in single file through the bush and we were moving at about one kilometre per hour. This was considered to be a good patrol pace for the jungle as we could move fairly quietly and therefore maintain our security. A
ny faster meant that the soldiers were not too worried about where they were putting their feet and not worrying about searching their arcs of vision. It also became apparent that any faster meant we became tired quicker and our alertness suffered.

  The platoon patrolled uneventfully for the remainder of the day: we had searched a couple of grid squares without finding any sign of the enemy. Because last light was around 1800 hours I wanted to be in a ‘harbour’, or defensive position, for the night by about 1700 hours. I didn’t like the idea of harbouring and eating in the same location, as cooking smells hung in the jungle air and I didn’t want someone hitting us with a nasty surprise like an ambush or mortar attack. So we had to cease patrolling around 1600 hours to let everyone eat, clean weapons and so on.

  Once our administration was out of the way we patrolled on for another 500 metres or so then broke off our track into the scrub for 100 metres and patrolled for another 100 metres. Using our direction of travel as a start point we then harboured in a circle ensuring we had a machine-gun covering the track we had come in on. Once the platoon was down on the ground, and all the sections had linked and the perimeter was complete, we stood to while a small half-section patrol quietly circled outside the perimeter to make sure there were no signs of the enemy. Once this clearing patrol was back inside the perimeter we posted sentries in front of each gun to give early warning if the enemy were approaching. While this was being done the section commanders set up the claymore mines on any approaches to our position or if none, as was usually the case, in an arc to their front. We had devised a system whereby we could fire our claymores in banks of three or six. For harbours in thick jungle I opted for claymores in groups of three as it gave more flexibility in firing and we could cover more areas. The section second-in-commands meanwhile were busy drawing up a gun picquet for the night in the sections.