13 . THE LAST DETAIL

Three Field Troop’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Geoff Stewart, was long overdue to lead the men on his own and Sandy MacGregor was spending a lot of time at MAC-V (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) briefing other officers on what they’d found in Cu Chi, so Geoff took the reins for Operation Silver City.

Silver City took 41 members of the troop 25 kilometres north of Bien Hoa for a total of 14 days. The troop was to provide basic engineer support for 1 RAR, which in turn was backing an assault by the American 173rd Airborne Brigade on a suspected Vietcong headquarters complex to the north and west of a sharp dogleg in the Song Be.

The Allies’ experience in Rolling Stone—that Australian jungle patrols could keep Vietcong activity to a minimum—meant that 1 RAR soon found themselves in a jungle war with the Vietcong. And the sappers were again called upon to augment their engineering skills with some basic infantry work.

One of Brian Hay’s most vivid memories of the Vietnam War was of being among those to leave Bien Hoa in the initial wave of helicopters heading to Silver City: ‘I remember the very first time I went in on the very first stick of the first chalk [group]. I recall that we left Bien Hoa and we gathered height and it was quite exciting to look back and see the sky filled with choppers as far back as the eye could see. Absolutely incredible. And then to look down on this mosaic, this patchwork of paddies and different other things, was just absolutely fantastic.

‘All the doors were open and the guys were sitting on the edge—and nobody was strapped in. Something caught my eye and I could see these little flashes and little tiny bits of smoke away in the distance, down low on the right. And I can remember seeing a bit of action going on and I’m watching for a while, I could see jets going in and they were bombing and rocketing, they were beating the shit out of this place. And I gave the bloke next to me a nudge and I said, there’s some poor bastard in trouble down there. I pointed and he looked and we watched. We could see the action coming towards you then drifting away on the right.

‘As we started to go past it, as it started to recede, we saw our gunships peel off and go in too. They started to beat the shit out of the area as well. We said, geez, shit, some poor sod is in trouble down there. And then we started to lose height and then it dawned on me that this is where we were bloody going. Anyway, we came down over the Song Be River and did a complete 180 degrees, back over the river and then onto a big open patch of ground that ran parallel to the Song Be. As we came down over the river all the door-gunners opened up on command—and remember, all rounds of ammunition fired from the air is a tracer. And you could see all this tracer and where it goes to, hitting the ground and bouncing away. We got lower and lower and eventually ceased firing and the chopper hit the ground.

‘We’d been taught that on a first wave attack, what you do is you jump off, lie on the ground, adopt a defensive position and wait for the choppers to leave. Nobody had bothered to tell our RSM. “Pig’s arse!” he shouted. “Run! Get out! Run!” We didn’t know if there was any sod out there after us or what. As we ran, the next stick hit the ground, three men ran from each side of the helicopter into the bush; the next stick hit the ground and they ran. Holy shit! It was action. The reason they fired so heavily into the area before landing was because the Vietcong were there and they knew we were coming because the choppers had landed there so many times before. I learned from that just how much I wanted to live.’

In this ‘hot insertion’, the idea was that most of the Vietcong would be driven off by the aerial pasting the helicopters and jets handed out. Before they left, the Allied troops encountered many small Vietcong units and at least one North Vietnamese regiment. Three Field Troop found themselves waterborne for the first time in Vietnam as they crossed the Song Be in search of rice caches.

‘This was the last big operation for 1 RAR before the group withdrew from Bien Hoa and Vietnam,’ says Geoff Stewart. ‘Although of course the troop stayed on and went down to Vung Tau to prepare for 1 Task Force coming in. The aim of Silver City was to move into an area where it was known the Vietcong were operating. There were large rice caches in the area. Our work wasn’t just with 1 RAR. We were also supporting a couple of companies from 1/503rd Battalion, which belonged to 173rd Airborne.

‘We had the mini-teams operating at that stage, plus of course the group at battalion headquarters, which could move out to any of the larger finds such as the rice caches. Our particular role was to make sure the booby traps were neutralised and to destroy the rice. When we started the operation, the rice was being choppered back to Bien Hoa then being distributed through the ARVN network to the Vietnamese people. But on the third day of clearing rice and salt caches, a helicopter came in and was hit whilst landing on the very tight jungle pad that we had cut earlier that day. All our noise must have attracted Vietcong attention. It was fairly obvious that the Vietcong were trying to capture the chopper and it was only artillery fire that drove them off.’

According to Dennis Ayoub, that was the second time the troop had been fired on at that rice cache.

‘We knew they [the Vietcong] were there,’ says Dennis. ‘The first time was when “Tuggy” Tugwell was clearing the top of a salt and rice cache using a mine detector. We had ghosted around the cache and cleaned all the booby traps from ground level upwards. It was a particularly well-defended cache, with an intricate network of trip-wires. As soon as the shooting started, we hit the ground and got ready to help our infantry protection who were already returning fire. Tuggy was still on top of the rice and I saw him lift his earpiece to get a better idea of the sound he thought he was hearing from his mine detector. In fact, what he was hearing was the sound of machine-gun fire.

‘He was on top of six bags of rice that were already on a platform 2 feet off the ground, so he made a good target. It didn’t take him long to get down when he realised the sounds were shooting and most of it was aimed at him.’

From then on, all the rice was destroyed where it was found, either by blowing it up or sprinkling CS gas crystals through it.

It wasn’t just choppers that were the target when Geoff and the lads tried getting the rice out to a safe landing area. ‘The Americans had provided four mechanical mules—light self-propelled wagons—and we would load them with rice and cart it back to a helicopter pad that had been secured by Bravo Company down by the river,’ recalls Geoff Stewart. ‘Being plant operators and drivers, Doc Livingstone, Mick McGrath, John Peters and Dennis Ayoub all wanted to drive them.

‘It was on one of those trips that my batman [Doc Livingstone] was hit with a DH-10 mine—similar to our Claymore mine—when we were bringing these mules back down the track. So that practice also ceased after that.’ Brian Hay was there to witness it all: ‘Everybody hit the deck and got up afterwards, except for Doc,’ says Brian. ‘He was lucky. The only thing that saved Doc was the fact that he was wearing the radio. He was sitting up on the rice bags and the radio and its webbing took most of the impact. He’s still picking bits of radio out of his back today.’

After the mine went off, the troop was under fire from Vietcong hidden in the surrounding jungle until infantry drove them off.

‘When the mine went off, it knocked the mule over but the rice bags acted as protection,’ says Geoff Stewart, who had been driving one of the mules. ‘There were three other mules and the blokes just dropped down behind them and returned fire. The fire was coming from down the track on our left-hand side—the direction we’d been heading—and the platoon that had been protecting us all day were heading back to camp as this was the last trip of the day. But they were only about two to five minutes behind us, moving back down the track. So they came back down the track as soon as they heard the firing. And the enemy moved out. A couple of those Vietcong were killed when they accidentally ran into another platoon further away.’

According to Dennis Ayoub, Doc Livingstone had a premonition that they were going to be hit, but it was more based on logic and experience than any sixth sense.

‘We broke all the rules,’ says Dennis. ‘We went in to a location three times without securing the location and without proper protection. We had an infantry section that looked after eight engineers who were doing the work, so it was a one-to-one ratio instead of a three- or even five-to-one ratio like it should have been. There was a contact further out on the second day, then closer to the rice caches on the third day. Later on we walked into the ambush. Doc Livingstone was badly knocked about, Johnny Peters got hit in the leg and one of the infantry guys was hit. I drove through that ambush. I was going too fast and these were assault troops that hit us. They showed good control. They let me through then hit the slower-moving vehicles behind me. There were four of us and they hit the middle one of the three behind me.

‘The explosions had occurred and I was about 30 metres away. I stopped the mule and I and the two guys that were with me ran back to the way we thought they were coming. When we got back to the site there was chaos. The blast had blown the middle mule over and there were ruptured bags everywhere. There were blokes moaning and groaning and leaves falling down everywhere and smoke and dust and all the things that you’d expect in a contact.’

Mick McGrath was there too. ‘I was carrying the M-60 and I’d been riding mules out along that track, sitting on top of the rice and the salt caches,’ recalls Mick. ‘I’d done probably six or eight trips. It was going to be the last trip of the day and everybody was coming back in before dark and I said to Doc, “You’ve been on the mine detector all day; you take the radio back and I’ll get it off you back at the river. I’ll carry the mine detector back in for you.” Because, you know, he was a pretty fair lump of a bloke even then, and it was pretty hot. He wasn’t a bad bloke because we’d hutchied together several times, even though we were in different sections.

‘So off he went down the road and he’d only gone about 300 metres from where we were doing this rice cache and up it went. Well, it could quite easily have been me sitting on it and it would have killed me, because Doc was such a heavily set bloke, and the radio had helped to absorb the shock, so what hit him would have gone straight through me and I’d have just bled to death before they could have done anything. When I got to Doc his arm was mangled and he was losing a lot of blood and Johnny Peters was sort of more in shock than anything else. He was obviously hurt but he was more in shock.

‘One of the Americans that were driving the mules was a black guy. He had a bit of a wound to him but he was carrying on something stupid, screaming out “Lord, I’m coming to meet you”, and all this. And this big American sergeant—he was a coloured bloke too—walked up and slapped him across the face said “Shut up, boy, you ain’t nothing hurt as bad as what you will be if you don’t shut up.”’

At the time it looked as if Doc wasn’t going to make it home. But he did. ‘Doc was very badly hit and was evacuated,’ says Geoff Stewart. ‘In fact, we had to bring him back on one of the mules to the pad that was used for the rice near Bravo Company.’

The next day Bill Unmeopa and Tex Cotter were blown up—with no lasting damage—when they were delousing rice bags and one of the hidden grenades went off. ‘That happened quite often,’ says Geoff. ‘And the only thing was that a lot of rice got spread around.’

At the end of Silver City, Geoff and Dennis Ayoub stayed behind to deal with a 1000-pound aerial bomb that had been dropped near the river but hadn’t exploded.

‘Colonel Preece had told me to blow it up on our withdrawal,’ says Geoff. ‘Of course, we couldn’t blow it till all our troops and the choppers had gone, so the last chopper went some distance away from us while we set the fuses on it—we had to dig down beside it to set the charges. Then we hightailed it across to the chopper and made off before it went up. The bomb made a fair racket when it went up.’

This wasn’t the first time Geoff Stewart had come a bit close. Back at the end of Operation New Life, he was helping to transport a bulldozer back to Bien Hoa, as part of an American convoy, when one of the transporter’s bogies snapped.

‘The American commander wanted to blow the dozer up and leave it. But being an Aussie I said we couldn’t afford to do things like that, so I brought that dozer back down while the rest of the convoy kept going,’ says Geoff. ‘In fact I drove that dozer while Doc Livingstone drove our Land Rover with a machine gun on the back. We brought it home after dark and we came under fire then. The dozers did five-and-a-half miles an hour flat-out in reverse, so it was a long trip. We were very lucky to get it back in because we literally walked it back to camp.’ It was a productive trip—Geoff Stewart found the Willys jeep on the same operation.

Silver City was the last big operation 3 Field Troop undertook with 1 RAR, although the work they did at Vung Tau and the initial work at Nui Dat was done when they were still known as 3 Field Troop. Within weeks the task force would be arriving from Australia and they’d lose ‘field’ from their title as they were absorbed into the main body of engineers. For the first time they’d be fighting alongside national servicemen, and for the first time in Vietnam Sandy MacGregor would have an engineer as his commanding officer.

The last 3 Field Troop operation, Abilene, could hardly have been smaller. Corporal Ross Thorburn led four sappers who went along with 1 RAR into Phuoc Tuy province where they hoped to find and destroy two North Vietnamese regiments. As Ross reported, there wasn’t much there for engineers to do. But they learned a lot about infantry work and on one occasion a sapper was used as forward scout to lead an American company into its cordon position at night.

The reason they could only spare five men for Abilene was because it started on 30 March. On 31 March the majority of the troop moved from Bien Hoa to Vung Tau to prepare it for the arrival of the Australian task force, while the remainder had the unenviable task of pulling down their base camp at Bien Hoa and salvaging as much as possible. It wasn’t the end of their adventures—far from it—but it was definitely the end of an era.