In December 1965, the New Zealand Army contacted me to see if I had passed the University Entrance exam and if I was still interested in a career in the armed forces. I formally enlisted in the army on 9 February 1966 in Army Headquarters in Wellington. I made friends with Ian Glendenning because we travelled to Waiouru on the train to start our basic training course together. He was from Christchurch and was also an officer cadet. I was his best man in 1969, and we went to Singapore and then Vietnam together. Sadly he shot himself in 1980. On reaching Waiouru I commenced 12 months’ training as an infantry private soldier before I would be able to attend Officer Cadet School (OCS) in Portsea, Australia. The infantry training involved a ten-week basic soldiering course in the Army Recruit Depot in Waiouru in the centre of the North Island, followed by infantry corps training in Burnham in the middle of the South Island near Christchurch; and then an instructors’ course in Waiouru and Fiji, as well as the normal basic training. It was hard work but as a potential officer you saw the other side of soldiering and it was excellent preparation before being commissioned.
Basic soldiering was tough but enjoyable and, having been a school cadet, I had lived in similar conditions before. Stand-out memories of Basic Course are of the battle fitness tests – 10-mile runs in ill-fitting, uncomfortable fatigues held up by a safety pin which kept undoing; of hours spent on the rifle ranges; of getting 14 days confined to barracks (CB) from the Training Depot Commanding Officer for under-age drinking at the Waiouru Tavern after getting busted by the military police walking back to camp; and of chasing the Orderly Room bugle at 6am until 9pm as part of the CB punishment. When undergoing CB you were at the mercy of the orderly sergeant outside normal working hours or over the whole of a weekend. Whenever the regular bugle calls sounded we had to race to the orderly sergeant’s hut in the unit HQ dressed in whatever uniform he had previously ordered. He could also order us to report at any other time. At the weekends as well as ‘chasing the bugle’, as we called it, we would have to do fatigues around the camp such as ‘peeling spuds’ in the various cookhouses or cleaning pots and pans. CB was no fun! An 18-year-old soldier could go to war but was deemed too young to drink or vote.
After basic training in Waiouru, together with my fellow infantry colleagues, I was posted to the 1st Battalion, Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment (1 RNZIR) Depot in Burnham. We moved into a World War II-era long, cold barrack room with a useless pot-belly stove in the middle. We carried out our infantry corps training here, and at the end of our training we were awarded the coveted Red Diamond to be worn on our uniform showing we were fully trained infantrymen.
The 1st Battalion, RNZIR had been formed on 1 May 1964. It was the result of a post-war decision to abolish ten separate infantry regiments, which together had formed the Royal New Zealand Infantry Corps, and instead form a single infantry regiment with numbered battalions. At the time I joined up there were two active regular infantry battalions: the 1st and 2nd Battalions. The unit insignia of the 2nd Battalion was retained and worn on the upper left sleeve of battalion members. This red diamond was awarded to soldiers after they successfully completed their infantry corps training, and now I was finally one of them.
After receiving our red diamonds we were then permitted to move into the main barracks with the ‘real’ soldiers. We lived with a number of veterans who had served in Borneo during the Indonesian Confrontation (1962–66). Shortly after moving into these newer barracks I bought a sleeping bag from another soldier for £5. I was very happy with my new purchase which meant I did not have to use the issue blankets when we were in the field. But I was then horrified to find out that the sleeping bag had in fact been stolen from a giant of a Maori Borneo veteran called ‘Buck’ Piper. I promptly hid the sleeping bag and never used again it for the entire time I was in the army.
We did our field training in a place called Little Malaya in the foothills of the Southern Alps where the bush was always very cold and wet. We carried extremely heavy, old World War II canvas webbing and packs. We went on long runs around the Burnham area along the straight endless dirt roads of the Canterbury Plains. We also spent a lot of time in the Tekapo training area which was on the edge of the Southern Alps and generally under several feet of snow in winter. Constant training and drilling in these inhospitable conditions toughened us up considerably.
One Friday night on weekend leave I was in Christchurch with Ian Glendenning, the friend I had made when we first signed up. We bumped into an older fellow soldier called Kelly Tamarapa. To Ian’s total surprise he saw that Kelly was wearing his suit and must have broken into his wardrobe to get it. When Ian asked him what the hell he was doing he said, ‘You were in town and you can’t wear two suits at once, bro!’ This clear logic left Ian speechless.
In early 1967 I was posted to OCS Portsea for 12 months. There, I knew most of the other Kiwi cadets from basic training in New Zealand. I was to meet many of my Portsea colleagues when I was later serving in Vietnam. It was a hard 12 months. We spent six months as the junior class and six months as the senior class. There was a system of ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’ to assist the classes to settle in, that is, new cadets had ‘fathers’ from the senior class and then became ‘fathers’ in their own senior class. My ‘son’ was an Australian called Trevor Bayo whom I later met in Vietnam and we subsequently laughed together over some of the weird things we had endured at OCS. We trained hard and studied hard, interrupted by field exercises, drill, tough physical training (PT), and rugby.
There was a stone memorial near the parade ground and classrooms at OCS with the names of OCS officers who had been killed in action. When I arrived at Portsea there were just two names and when I left there were about eight. Passing this memorial each day tended to focus the mind on what this was all about.
Despite the intense pressure we all worked well together. The cadet school was located at the end of the Nepean peninsula in Melbourne. It was in a popular recreational area and in summer scores of bikini-clad women would take pleasure in water-skiing past the water-front parade ground. Woe betide any cadet who allowed his eyes to follow the water-skiers during drill movements. The other main hazard was horse flies. These monster flies would land ever so gently on exposed skin, normally a face or neck, walk about a bit, and then give you the most painful bite. It was a real test of self-discipline – you knew the bite was coming but you could do nothing about it!
The Australian bush where we carried out field exercises was totally different to what us Kiwis were used to. New Zealand wildlife is relatively benign while nearly all the creatures in the Australian bush seemed to want to kill you! We soon learned all about these ‘nasties’. The Australian cadets gleefully ‘helped’ our knowledge with colourful stories of ‘drop-bears’ and ‘hoop snakes’. The former were apparently vicious little bears that would drop on the head of any unsuspecting traveller in the bush and the latter were supposedly poisonous snakes that would wait on the top of a hill until an unsuspecting Kiwi came along and they would then put their tails in their mouths and rapidly roll down the slopes of the hill to attack their prey. We were all too ready to believe them!
At Portsea, Kiwis were, for all intents and purposes, Australian soldiers and we wore their uniforms and equipment and carried their weapons. I still proudly have my Australian infantry slouch hat, although somewhere in my travels a puppy has chewed some bits out of the brim. There was always good-natured rivalry between these two nationalities at Portsea and we also had cadets from Malaysia and Papua New Guinea thrown into the mix. I had to work hard, for as always as I was not a natural student. I graduated successfully in the top third of the class and my parents came over from New Zealand for the graduation parade and ceremony. It was nice for them to see me graduate and I hope I made them proud.
After Christmas leave in New Zealand I was posted as a second lieutenant with the Portsea graduates to Waiouru Camp on the young officers course. We linked up with other graduates from Australia’s Duntroon and the United Kingdom’s Sandhurst military academies. We Portsea graduates proudly considered ourselves as the army’s cannon fodder. The young officers course was hectic; I met some great officers and we thoroughly enjoyed mess life. At the end of the course I was posted as a platoon commander to a National Service Training Unit (NSTU) still in Waiouru. I was now in command of a platoon of national servicemen but I was taught quite a few things by some older senior non-commissioned officers (SNCO). One of them, Danny Waratini, had been on the SS Captain Cook in 1959 with us. One of my assistant officer cadets was a Fijian called Sitiveni ‘Steve’ Rambuka, who later carried out a military coup in Fiji and eventually became the prime minister. He was a powerful man and an excellent soldier. He and I have remained good friends.
Commanding the NSTU was a good learning environment and afterwards I was posted back to the 1st Battalion Depot in Burnham as a platoon commander under Major Laurie P, the company commander. He was due to take us to Vietnam. He was a bluff, congenial officer and we all enjoyed working with him. In mid-1968 I met my future wife, Cecilia, at an officers’ mess party in Christchurch. In February 1969 I went to Fiji on jungle training and, on our return, I had to admit to Cecilia that I was actually only 21, not 23. I had been hoping to impress her with my maturity! Luckily, she still agreed to marry me.
Meanwhile I continued to improve and hone my military skills. In mid-1969, I completed a basic parachute course at the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) Parachute Training and Support Unit (PTSU) at Whenuapai airbase near Auckland. Places on this course were hard to come by. It was a tough course run by Captain Albie Kiwi of the New Zealand Special Air Service (SAS). He was a hard man and for charity had once run the length of New Zealand with his dog ‘Sass’ who had to wear small custom-made leather booties on his paws. Albie did not exactly take a shine to me and made my life rather difficult. Tragically, Albie would be killed in a parachuting accident while subsequently serving with the Australian Army.
Certainly, the SAS personnel who ran the course alongside the RNZAF made sure there was a high element of PT and endurance. It was a great course, although somewhat scary, and so started my love-hate relationship with the air which continues to this day.
We parachuted from the C-47 Douglas ‘Dakota’ which we called the Para-Dak. The Dakota had, of course, seen extensive service during World War II delivering airborne troops across Europe. When I later joined the British Parachute Regiment I was proud to be able able to say that I had trained to parachute from a Dakota. The Dakota had been long gone from UK parachute training and the only reminder of this great World War II Para workhorse was the static display aircraft located outside the Depot of the Parachute Regiment and Airborne Forces in Aldershot.
The course involved a total of eight descents. We had to complete two descents by day and two by night in ‘clean fatigue’ which meant with no equipment and another two by day and two by night with equipment. Our equipment consisted of our large pack or bergen wrapped up in a container which was clipped to our waists and then lowered to the end of a suspension rope once we were hanging beneath our parachute. This equipment hit the ground before the owner and at least gave a bit of warning at night of how soon you were going land. Prior to our first parachute descent we were taken on a training flight in which we carried out all the procedures for parachuting but did not actually jump out of the aircraft. This practice flight was often undertaken in windy weather which would not have been suitable for actual parachuting. Each potential paratrooper had to stand in the open door of the aircraft with his face in the slipstream – this was certainly an experience when the aircraft was in turbulent air.
On one of my early NZ para drops I was descending towards some sheep which had wandered onto the grassy drop zone (DZ). If I had landed on one, we would both have been badly hurt so I started shouting at them. Of course, they had no idea where I was and started running around in circles directly below me. Luckily, I missed them all!
Cecilia and I were married in the small iconic stone Church of the Good Shepherd on 18 October 1969 on the shores of Lake Tekapo: a place I had passed many times on my way to and from Tekapo training camp. I was promoted to lieutenant; moreover, I had been formally posted to 1 RNZIR in Singapore and we arrived in December of that same year.
Service in Singapore
We had a house outside of military quarters and it was fascinating to be back amongst the sights, sounds and smells of the Far East. My first introduction to overseas military life was being made duty officer for the battalion over the Christmas period of 1969–70. Unsurprisingly, all the ‘new’ officers had some sort of duty over this period.
Straight after the Christmas leave had finished we spent most of the following weeks in the jungles of Malaya with our platoons carrying out pre-Vietnam training. A number of our instructors had never served in Vietnam and it puzzled me that with the high numbers of Vietnam veterans in the battalion we were being taught by NCOs whose experience of jungle fighting was against the communist insurgents or the Indonesians in Borneo – both types of opposition were quite different to the foe we were expecting to face in South Vietnam.
During one pre-Vietnam training exercise in Malaya we were carrying out a typical night-time platoon patrol through a rubber plantation. I was in the centre of the formation. Suddenly the ground gave way beneath me and I started falling into a hole. Luckily, I had my self-loading rifle (SLR) across my chest and that combined with my elbows stopped me plummeting into the depths below. I was helped out of the hole by one of my NCOs. I got out my torch and peered into the hole. It was a smooth cylindrical hole about 15–20 feet deep and writhing and coiling at the bottom there must have been about 20 snakes of various varieties. It would have been a painful and unpleasant demise if I had fallen to the bottom! I suspect it had once been a well for the plantation, but had since dried up. I had more than a few sleepless nights reliving the event!
As the weeks passed my platoon became a well-trained, well-honed infantry group, comfortable with each other and ready for our imminent deployment to Vietnam. I used to receive regular letters from a fellow OCS officer, Bill Blair, who was already on a tour of duty in Vietnam. His letters were a goldmine of useful information, particularly highlighting operational mistakes, and I always shared all relevant information with my platoon.
A month or so before I deployed to Vietnam we moved to new housing in the former British Army base in Nee Soon Garrison. The housing area itself had some amusing British Army idiosyncrasies – it backed onto some thick jungle and behind the houses where the captains and majors lived there was quite a substantial wire fence. However, as the fence passed behind the first of the subalterns’ houses it shrank into a two-strand garden fence. The local monkeys would come out of the jungle, jump over this little fence and stick their arms through the window netting of the kitchen to try to steal food. They could be very aggressive if they decided to visit in a big mob. Slightly more scary was the occasional visit from a python. Our pet cat unfortunately ended up being a tasty snack for one such caller!
Operational Service in South Vietnam 1970–71
In 1970 New Zealand had a population of just 2.5 million and a small professional army consisting of one regular brigade and three Territorial Army brigades. Throughout the conflict in Vietnam, New Zealand provided a small but effective military contribution and this military contribution was, in fact, almost one third of the entire regular army. It all began with a small contingent of engineers who arrived in theatre in June 1964 to perform a non-combat role of bridge and road-building. This small unit was followed in mid-July 1965 by 161 Battery of the Royal New Zealand Artillery, the only regular artillery unit in the New Zealand Army, who deployed in support of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade, the first time Kiwi forces were deployed in a combat role in Vietnam. The first infantry unit, a reinforced company group from the 1st Battalion, arrived in Vietnam in March 1967, with a second company following in December of that year. The two initial company groups, supported by mortars and assault pioneers, were designated Victor and Whisky companies, names that would stick for the duration of the war as companies were rotated in and out of theatre. The New Zealand troops would be attached to the 1st Australian Task Force based at Nui Dat, approximately 60 miles from Saigon City, in the Phuoc Tuy Province, continuing the proud Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) tradition first begun in World War I.
The early contingents to Vietnam only stayed for six months but the majority of subsequent tours were for 365 days. The Kiwi infantry soldiers were based in Malaya or, later, Singapore prior to going to Vietnam and so they were accustomed to operating in the jungle. The Kiwi way of operating was by stealth and guile and by the time that the unit was posted to Vietnam it had worked together for a long time. Each member of the unit knew his job and could operate well as part of the team. The Kiwi infantry rightly earned themselves a reputation as formidable jungle fighters.
Once a New Zealand rifle company had completed its tour it would be replaced by another complete company and this system ensured that the unit esprit de corps was maintained. In contrast the American forces in Vietnam had a trickle reinforcement system and this made the establishment of any unit esprit de corps difficult with FNGs (fucking new guys) regularly arriving.
Each man in the eight- to ten-man section of a platoon was a specialist in one particular area. He was a rifleman, a machine gunner, a grenadier or a lead scout. But each man was also cross-trained for the other jobs in the patrol. Lead scouts were selected for their tracking ability and keen observation and were trained to an extremely high level of expertise. They were the eyes and ears of the patrol and so they had to be the best. Movement through the jungle, affectionately called the ‘J’, was slow and garden secateurs were used to snip through the undergrowth enabling patrols to move soundlessly. Garden saws were sometimes used in extremely heavy bush, while the use of the machete was restricted to emergencies only, such as creating an emergency landing zone (LZ).
The primary weapon of the New Zealand infantry soldier was the 7.62mm self-loading (SLR) FN rifle, nicknamed the ‘elephant gun’ by our American compatriots, who were used to the much lighter M16 rifle. We preferred our SLR because when we hit the enemy, he stayed down! The section automatic weapon was the US M60 machine gun. Normally we would have used the British-manufactured general purpose machine gun (GPMG). But the manufacturers had informed the New Zealand Army that if Kiwi troops used the GPMG in Vietnam then they would no longer sell the gun to us. Similarly, the manufacturers of the section anti-tank weapon used by the New Zealand Army, the 84mm Carl Gustav, also refused to allow the weapons to be used in Vietnam by using threats of stopping future supplies of spare parts or replacements. I doubt anyone in the infantry complained about that, however, as it is a heavy ‘dog’ of a weapon to carry.
Lead scouts had a choice between the SLR, which was only semi-automatic, the M16 or the M203. The M203 was an M16 rifle with an M79 grenade launcher beneath the rifle barrel. This grenade launcher had a variety of ammunition that could be used with it. The most commonly available types were the high-explosive (HE) round, the buckshot round and the very effective illumination round. If a scout carried an M203, it would generally be loaded with an HE grenade because the buckshot round was not considered particularly effective. Lead scouts preferred taking their chances with some shrapnel splashback from the HE grenade rather than allowing a Viet Cong (VC) to get away. But unquestionably the favourite weapon was the claymore directional mine containing a pound of HE and 700 ball bearings. The Kiwi infantrymen thought the claymore was ‘better than canned beer’ – a high accolade indeed from hard-drinking colonial men.
The weather in Vietnam was hot and horrible in the dry season (November to April) and worse in the wet season (May to October). Average temperatures were in the mid-30 degrees Celsius by day and only dropped to the mid-20s at night, combined with 100 per cent humidity during the wet season. In the wet season, as regular as clockwork, at 3pm, the monsoon rains would arrive in great downpours. If we were still patrolling it was too early to set up a night ambush position so we were soaked to the skin for the entire length of the operation. The normal trick of keeping a dry set of clothes in your pack for sleeping was a pointless exercise because you had immediately to man the perimeter in the event of enemy action or conduct sentry duty at night – all in the rain. The only good point of the wet season was the availability of water. In the dry season there was no water and we could only drink what we carried until resupplied after a number of days. Heat exhaustion in the dry season was a constant possibility for the heavily laden infantryman. We carried numerous water bottles with us as well as a water bag which could be rolled up when empty. Our water bags were plastic and not very robust, so we usually tried to cadge the American types which were both bigger and better. The American lightweight camouflage poncho-liners also became prized items amongst us Kiwi troops.
Operations would generally be for three weeks at a time either from the main base at Nui Dat or from firebases situated further out in the province. Each night, ambushes would be placed using a triangle formation which experience had shown was the best method of using the combined effect of the claymore, M60s and artillery support fire. Each soldier in the platoon, excluding the machine gunners and radio operators, would carry at least one claymore mine and 2 or 3 feet of detonating cord. The detonating cord enabled the claymore mines to be laid in groups along an ambush site. Claymores were sighted to fire down tracks not across them as that tended to blow the enemy into the jungle on the far side of the track out of the killing zone.
On each patrol the troops would start out with a minimum of five days’ food and water plus ammunition, claymores, spare belts of ammunition for the M60, C4 explosives and spare radio batteries. This enabled each group to be totally independent for as long as possible. Occasionally operations would be extended up to 10–14 days, but this was only in extreme cases. Long-range patrols were the task of the New Zealand and Australian SAS patrols also based at Nui Dat. The main task of the Kiwi infantry was search and destroy missions. Intelligence would be received that the local Viet Cong (the only regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA) unit in Phuoc Tuy was a small but lethal engineer unit) were operating in a particular area, and the ANZAC forces would be deployed against them. Phuoc Tuy was one of the traditional infiltration routes into Saigon and so there was always ‘work to be had’. The normal method of deployment from Nui Dat into the field was by helicopter from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) based in Vung Tau. Sometimes M113 APCs (armoured personnel carriers) would be used to move into the operational zone but they were highly vulnerable to mines and were noisy in the jungle. Troops rode on the top of the APCs to make maximum use of the ‘baffle’ provided by the hull of the vehicle in the event of it hitting a mine. The troops were more vulnerable to small arms fire when on the top of the armoured vehicle, but they feared mine explosions far more so considered it worth the risk.
Initially in a deployment a fire support base (FSB) would be established with artillery pieces flown in as necessary. From the firebases companies were deployed and established mortar firebases and from these bases half-platoon patrols would operate around the base looking for the enemy. A very large area could be covered by numerous patrols extending fanlike out from the centre.
Patrols would move in single file through the jungle. Moving first would be the pair of scouts travelling a tactical bound ahead of the rest of patrol. The lead scout would always be covered by the cover scout. Behind them would be either the M60 team or the patrol commander depending on whether contact was imminent or not.
The patrol commander would have a pace-counter taped to the pistol grip of his weapon. This little device is used in the Antipodes for counting sheep but in Vietnam it was used for counting paces. This, used in conjunction with the metal military prismatic compass, assisted the commander in navigating in the jungle with its complete absence of landmarks. Standard plastic compasses were no good as they were simply melted by the vicious insect repellent we were forced to use. Of course, accurate navigation also meant that when we called for artillery fire it didn’t land on our heads!
After the patrol commander would come the signaller, then the grenadier and then a rifle group with a ‘tail-end Charlie’ covering the back of the patrol. If the enemy was sighted and there was not enough time to establish a quick ambush, the scouts would initiate the firefight and go to either side of their route. The M60 ‘hot sauce machine’ would then move to a fire position left or right and pour in the fire. A rifle group would go to the opposite side to the M60 and in this way a firebase was rapidly established and the task of winning the firefight immediately started.
If the patrol was platoon or company size than the remainder of the platoon would form the left and right side of the triangle with the base already formed by the patrol in contact. This meant that if Viet Cong tried to roll up the position from a flank they would find another baseline waiting for them. Other platoons on the move would also form into a triangle with M60s on each point ready to fire across the front of each of the baselines with defilade fire.
The Kiwi is a natural soldier. Those of Polynesian stock are normally of great physique and strength. It was extremely common in Vietnam to see huge, grinning Maoris with layers of belted bullets slung around their shoulders. But Kiwis are not formal soldiers and this stems from their colonial outdoor heritage. Officers in theatre have to earn the respect of their soldiers and this is not given as a matter of course to go with the rank. This mutual respect between officers and enlisted men plus the fact that the New Zealand Armed Forces are very small means that each unit becomes very close-knit and effective. Vietnam was no exception to this. The kill ratio for most Victor and Whisky companies was always at least 10:1.
As in more recent conflicts the Kiwi units had a very small logistic ‘tail’. In Vietnam they were being supported by the Australian Task Force. There were not too many REMFs (Rear Echelon Mother-fuckers); almost all the Kiwis in Vietnam were out ‘humping the boonies’ looking for ‘Charlie’. I was about to become one of them.
I left for Vietnam on 8 May 1970 as the platoon commander of 3 Platoon, Victor 5 Company: an appointment I held for the full 12 months of our operational tour. We landed at the 1st Australian Task Force (1 ATF) logistic base at Vung Tau. Here we were issued with live ammunition and grenades and loaded on to Australian trucks for the one-hour journey north along Highway 15 and then Route 2 to our destination. We were to be attached to the 2nd Royal Australian Regiment (2 RAR), part of the Australian Task Force located in a major firebase in Nui Dat. We sat on the trucks with our loaded rifles looking outwards with a certain amount of trepidation but a great deal of interest. We passed through small villages clustered on the sides of the road. We drove past mopeds by the score and, less frequently, bullock carts. Most of the villagers were wearing the distinctive bamboo conical hat that continues to typify Vietnam. Bridges were guarded by small Vietnamese Army soldiers wearing tight-fitting camouflage uniforms inside concrete bunkers. Many of the bunkers and bridges showed signs of damage from small arms fire. As we left the area of Vung Tau the countryside opened up and we could see the Nui Thi Vai and Nui Toc Thien Mountains to the north-west. These were nicknamed the ‘Wolvertons’ after a popular song of the time. We could also just see through the haze the dreaded Long Hai Mountains to the east. The Long Hai Mountains had by this point already caused many mine casualties to the Australians operating in them. I would have my own share of mine casualties in the Wolvertons; however, this was still to come.
We drove through the badly damaged town of Baria, which had been the scene of fierce fighting during the Tet Offensive of 1968. The Viet Cong had been finally surrounded in the town’s movie theatre and the building had been all but destroyed. Looking at these shattered buildings gave us a dramatic insight into the war so far.
I had been with my platoon for a full 18 months by this point so we knew each other well. Our officer commanding was now Major John Mc, a Duntroon graduate. My platoon sergeant was Dave ‘Pancho’ Beattie, an experienced senior non-commissioned officer (SNCO).
I took over from Lieutenant Stan Kidd of Victor 4 Company. He had been killed in action while looking for a wounded Viet Cong after a contact. When I arrived to take over his tent it only had a low line of sandbags surrounding it. I think a number of sandbags had been ‘liberated’ after the previous owner was killed. It took some prompting to get my platoon sergeant to organise the filling of extra sandbags to raise the level to the height of all the other tents. Such was the introduction to my 12-month tour.
As Victor 5 Company we completed the ANZAC Battalion consisting of the three Australian rifle companies (A, B and C) of the 2nd Royal Australian Regiment (2 RAR) and the New Zealand Whisky 3 Company who were halfway through their tour when we arrived in theatre. The Support Company was augmented by two New Zealand mortar sections, two pioneer sections, and a Kiwi major as second-in-command of the battalion. The New Zealand soldiers were all volunteers whereas almost half of the Australian soldiers were conscripts and had not volunteered for service in Vietnam.
A day after our arrival in Nui Dat we started some two weeks of ‘in-country’ training. This involved a great deal of shooting on the rifle range on the outskirts of the Task Force base as well as demonstrations of the weapons and equipment that would be available to support us, including APCs, tanks, artillery and fire support helicopters, which could be Huey gunships or the particularly awesome Cobra gunships. We also practised casualty evacuation drills with the medical evacuation (medevac) ‘dust-off’ choppers. The three platoon commanders went out on a number of heli recces over the battalion’s area of operations (AO). The contrast between the open rice fields and the thick primary jungle was most obvious and the steep mountains of the Wolvertons looked especially forbidding. The Firestone Trails cut a swathe across the countryside on the west of our AO. These were massive cleared areas which had been carved out of the jungle by enormous armoured bulldozers called ‘Rome ploughs’. These trails were 200–300 yards wide; they disrupted VC infiltration routes and allowed aerial observation of likely VC trails. They also permitted movement of armoured vehicles but were frequently mined and booby-trapped. Initially, each platoon went out on one- or two-day patrols around the perimeter of Nui Dat. These were ‘shakedown patrols’ and we used them to become familiar with the battalion’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) as well as the numerous types of reports and messages that would need to be sent to our company HQ, from contact reports and mine incident reports to resupply requests. One of my first patrols was through the rubber plantation near the hamlet of Long Tan on the outskirts of Nui Dat. This plantation was the scene of fierce fighting between soldiers of D Company, 6 RAR and some 1,500 VC from D445 Battalion and 275th Regiment on 18–21 August 1966. The Australians lost 18 killed and the VC approximately 245 killed. The trees in the plantation were still shattered from the heavy artillery support fire from Nui Dat and my compass was unreliable due to the metal in the ground from the battle.
The ANZAC Battalion’s extra rifle company was the envy of other Task Force infantry battalions until October 1970 when Whisky 3 Company left at the end of its tour and was not replaced. We in Victor 5 Company completed our tour in May 1971 and we were ultimately replaced by Victor 6 Company, which remained in Vietnam with 4 RAR to perpetuate the ANZAC Battalion for another seven months until the start of the phased withdrawal from Vietnam.
The Australian Task Force (1 ATF) committed to South Vietnam comprised the following combat and support arms: one armoured squadron equipped with Centurion main battle tanks; one armoured personnel carrier squadron equipped with M113 APCs; one field artillery regiment equipped with 105mm howitzers; one field engineer squadron; one engineer construction squadron; one signal squadron; three infantry battalions (including the five companies from the ANZAC Battalion); one SAS squadron (plus a troop of NZSAS); and one reconnaissance flight equipped with Sioux light observation helicopters and Porter fixed-wing aircraft. The Royal Australian Air Force provided transport including one helicopter squadron with UH1H ‘Huey’ helicopters and one short-range transport aircraft detachment equipped with Caribou transport aircraft.
We also had fire support available from the US consisting of one medium artillery company equipped with 155mm guns; one heavy artillery platoon equipped with 8-inch guns; and one anti-aircraft platoon equipped with twin 40mm ‘dusters’ for close protection of artillery fire units.
These dusters were based in Nui Dat and the US officer commanding the group had recently disciplined a number of his soldiers for using marijuana. The morning after, he awoke to find that there was a duster on its tracked chassis at each corner of his tent with the barrels pointing into the tent! This was certainly a variation from the threat of being ‘fragged’ by a grenade.
Working with armoured vehicles in close country was interesting, to say the least. We were familiar with the M113 APC, having worked with them in New Zealand, but we had not operated with the Australian 52-ton main battle tank, the Centurion, prior to this. Despite its large size at nearly 10 feet high, 11 feet wide and 32 feet long, it was very difficult in jungle conditions to pinpoint its exact location. Rendezvous (RV) procedures had to be well coordinated in close country and a decision made as to whether we would move to the tanks or they would come to us. If these procedures were not closely followed there was a good chance of us ‘grunts’ being squished by these monsters or blown to pieces. The first you knew where they were was when the long 20-pounder barrel parted the trees and bushes as it growled along towards you. These Australian Centurion tanks carried canister rounds as well as high-explosive shells. The canister rounds were giant shotgun shells that were ideal for clearing enemy bunker systems. They also carried .30-calibre and .50-calibre turret-mounted machine guns. A troop of four tanks could carry a platoon of infantry with a section on each vehicle and platoon HQ mounted on the troop commander’s tank.
These tanks were remarkably good at moving through close country and secondary jungle but remaining on board without getting swept off by trees and branches or getting trapped by a rotating turret had to be learned very quickly. We mainly operated with the tanks when we were patrolling out of firebases along the Firestone Trails. In these situations, it was reassuring to have them with you or on the firebase perimeter with their formidable firepower.
On one patrol I was instructed to link up with a troop of tanks in thick jungle. I advised the OC (officer commanding) that we were OK and that they were too noisy for us. Nevertheless, the link-up was carried out, slowly and carefully. As I finally linked up with the Australian troop commander on his tank, who had obviously been listening on our company radio net, he looked down at me, a lowly, smelly infantryman, and said, with a slight sneer, in his broad Aussie accent, ‘If we are too noisy for you, mate, we can always fuck off again.’
Along with the support provided to us by our own and the allocated US fire units, we could also call for gunfire support from any Australian or US naval vessel in range of the Vietnamese coast, or request sorties from US ground-attack aircraft.
The provision of good intelligence is important in any counter-insurgency warfare and the intelligence process played a significant role in all operations undertaken by the Task Force. There were various sources of information about the enemy in Phuoc Tuy but the degree of reliability of that information was widely variable. Information was obtained through physical, chemical and electronic means. Physical sources included our own unit reports, prisoners of war, surrendered enemy personnel and captured enemy documents. The main chemical means was the ‘sniffer’ aircraft. These aircraft carried devices for detecting the odours of humans and their habitation. The aircraft made low-level sweeps across suspected enemy areas. There were also several electronic devices for gaining early information of enemy movement. One was the acoustic and seismic intruder detector (SID). Aircraft dropped these detectors astride the likely enemy lines of approach. They emitted radio signals when started by either enemy sound or vibration. The Task Force intelligence unit maintained records of all reports of enemy activity and also kept a record of enemy activity in every map square in the province. This intelligence with the recent aerial photographs was available to units for study before every operation.
The province of Phuoc Tuy assumed a roughly rectangular shape, with the upper left-hand corner removed. It covered an area of about 725 square miles. Its length from west to east was approximately 39 miles and its width from north to south approximately 19 miles. The capital, Baria, was 68 miles by road from Saigon. The Task Force base at Nui Dat was some 12 miles north of Baria.
Phuoc Tuy was important to the government of Vietnam because National Route 15 provided the only land access from Saigon to the alternate port and resort centre of Vung Tau. Route 15 is the main highway linking Saigon, Baria and Vung Tau. Owing to its strategic significance it had already been the scene of considerable military activity during the First Indo-China War (1946–54). Then the beach resort had been a popular rest area for the French Army, and, it was claimed, for the Viet Minh. This situation repeated itself during the war against the Viet Cong, although now the inhabitants of the rest centres were American, Australian, New Zealand, South Korean, Thai and, most likely, some Viet Cong.
The terrain in Phuoc Tuy was typically flat, although there were three significant mountainous areas that dominated the countryside. These mountains were the Nui Thi Vai, Nui Din and Nui Toc Tien in the south-west, the Long Hai in the south and the Nui Mao Tai in the north-east. Besides these mountains there were a number of low extinct volcanic cones dotted throughout the province.
The low-lying south-western shoreline, bordering the South China Sea and the Saigon River estuary, was swampy and interlaced with waterways navigable by small watercraft. This region was known as the Rung Sat. The jungle tracks in the west, north and east of the province had many thickly vegetated gullies and ravines. Dense natural or cultivated vegetation covered most of the province except for small areas along the coastal belt where there was little or no vegetation at all. Mangrove covered the lower swampy areas of the Rung Sat. Heavy growth of trees, bamboo, shrubs, ferns and grasses covered the other areas.
Rubber plantations were scattered throughout the central and northern areas and covered some 30 square miles. The two largest plantations were the Courtenay rubber and the Binh Ba rubber. Most of the agricultural area was open to civilian access between the hours of 6am and 7pm each day. Generally, the civil access area lay astride the national and provincial highways from Phu My in the west to Xuyen Moc in the east and from Baria to the Courtenay rubber plantation in the north. The remainder of the terrain in the province was closed to civilian access and was treated by the Allies as a free fire zone. That is, fire could be opened against any person entering this area. Due care had to be taken along the boundaries of the zone because of the danger to civilians who might have strayed. The rules of engagement here and within the civilian access area at night were designed to provide protection to the innocent.
The enemy main force unit in the province was the headquarters and one company of D65 North Vietnamese Army Engineer Battalion consisting of approximately 50 members. This unit normally operated in the Nui Thi Vai hills and in the north-western section of the province. Its main area of interest was along Route 15. Its principal method of operation was to wage mine warfare against the lines of communication. Also operating in the province was the D440 Local Force battalion consisting of a headquarters and two companies, a total of around 100 members. D440 had a hard core of North Vietnamese soldiers supplemented by some Viet Cong.
On 26 May 1970 the ANZAC Battalion moved out into the jungle: Operation Capricorn. Unknown to us at the time, this would be our only battalion-wide operation of the tour. This operation was a settling-in exercise to familiarise the more recent additions to the battalion, including my own company, with reconnaissance and ambush techniques in theatre. Another key aim of the operation was to re-establish the Australian presence to the west of Route 2. This area had been the responsibility of two US infantry battalions since January. On Operation Capricorn all five rifle companies were deployed together in one general area with a single task to find and destroy the enemy within that area of operations. This area was between the Nui Thi Vai and Nui Toc Tien mountains, in the hills and on the flat ground between the two features. This area extended from Route 15 to the Hat Dich area in the north. Battalion headquarters would control and direct the operation from Firebase Nola which would be established in the initial stage of the operation. The position chosen for the firebase had to be within 105mm howitzer range of companies operating between Route 15 and the northern boundary of the area of operations. The gun position ideally needed to be on open ground. This would also make it unnecessary to clear trees to fire the guns. The ideal location was identified as an area of raised ground between the Suoi Chau Pha and the Suoi Giao Keo river complexes.
Both the D440 Viet Cong Local Force Battalion and D65 North Vietnamese Army Engineer Battalion were known to be operating in the area. But there had been no contact with either for some months prior to the start of the operation.
On the morning of 26 May 1970 we were the first company to fly in and secure the area designated for Firebase Nola. Prior to our arrival the area was prepared by ground-attack aircraft dropping bombs, then artillery preparation from 105mm howitzers, then helicopter gunships, and finally we flew in on troop ‘slicks’. But nobody had warned us that, as a matter of course, the door gunners would open fire as we descended into the landing zone. As the door gunners opened up we all got a hell of a fright and assumed that we were going into a hostile reception. However, the DZ was clear and we soon secured it and set off on our patrol tasks while the rest of the battalion flew in. With the firebase secure our goal was now to look after the northern slopes of Nui Thi Vai and Nui Toc Tien and the re-entrant between them.
After this startling introduction to our first combat helicopter insertion my platoon deployed from the LZ to cover our section of the company perimeter pushing some 20 yards into the jungle. Once the company was complete on the ground, which took about 30 minutes, each platoon deployed to its designated area of operations, leaving company HQ and a protection element in the vicinity of the LZ. 3 Platoon deployed north-west towards the slopes of the southern ‘Wolvertons’. The other platoons of the company deployed north and north-east of the insertion LZ. The jungle we were now operating in was primary with low undergrowth and we moved slowly and carefully. For the next days we continued patrolling our area coming across old tracks and several disused bunker systems containing T-shaped bunkers with small perimeter trench systems. There was no recent sign of the enemy. The atmosphere within the platoon was tense and expectant as everyone moved silently through the low scrub. There was also an element of excitement – we were finally on a combat patrol in a VC area. We had rations and water for a week or so and so our packs, with rations, ammunition, grenades and claymores weighed 60–70 pounds, more for the two radio operators, three M79 grenadiers (who also carried an SLR), and three section machine gunners. In the field we wore floppy jungle hats and green denims or ‘JGs’ as we called them. We only wore our helmets and body armour as additional protection in static fire support bases. Our progress, deliberately, was slow and methodical and we covered about a ‘click’ (a kilometre) per hour with resting and listening breaks each hour or so. If the jungle became thicker the lead scouts would use garden secateurs to silently clear their routes. We did not use machetes or ‘golloks’ as we called them, as they were too noisy. Also, two members of each section carried small bush saws. Each night we established a defensive triangular position with platoon HQ in the centre. We would dig shell scrapes, which are shallow shelters in the ground for one man to lie in protected, about 18 inches deep, and lay out claymores in front of each section. At each apex of the platoon triangle the machine gunners would prepare their arcs of fire. Thirty minutes before and after dawn and dusk we had ‘stand to’ with each pair of men alert in their own shell scrape. This was a time of particular alertness and signalled the change from day routine to night routine and vice versa. Eating and night administration was completed before evening ‘stand-to’ and eating and day preparation was completed after the morning ‘stand-to’. The various daily situation reports (SITREP) required by company HQ would be quietly transmitted just before the evening ‘stand-to’.
On 29 May the battalion faced the menace of Viet Cong mines for the first time. Two separate mine incidents caused casualties in both Whisky Company and Charlie Company. In the Whisky Company incident tripwires detonated two grenades suspended in the tree, killing one soldier and wounding another. In Charlie Company the command detonation of an enemy claymore mine killed two soldiers and injured three others.
Generally, when contacted the enemy moved rapidly away and re-established themselves in a new area. During the first two weeks of our operations there were ten contacts with the enemy and the companies and battalion headquarters learned a great deal. The presence and locations of D65 were confirmed and evidence of its intention to operate against the government pacification programme and disrupt the civilian and military lines of communication along Route 15 was obtained from captured documents. While D440 remained elusive we soon found evidence of Chau Duc Local Force headquarters, which had a long history of operations in the province and was well known to 2 RAR veterans of their first tour in Vietnam (1967–68).
In early June 1970 elections were to be held throughout South Vietnam and the danger that orderly voting would be disrupted by Viet Cong military activities or terrorism brought a change in the concept of the Task Force operations. This was reflected in the new operation, Chung Chung, meaning ‘Togetherness’, which gave the battalion new tasks of preventing the enemy gaining access to the principal villages along Route 15. Rifle companies moved to areas astride and adjacent to Route 15. Battalion headquarters moved to a newly established Firebase Tess beside Route 15 and on the edge of the mangrove swamps of the Rung Sat. At the end of June most of the battalion returned to Nui Dat for two weeks of retraining and consolidation of lessons learned: lessons such as the effective use of artillery fire support and helicopter gunships; mine detection revision; medical evacuation procedures; major trauma and gunshot wound first aid; working with armoured vehicles; and for officers and SNCOs’ revision on the use of the battalion report aide-memoire.
By mid-July when the unit was again ready to redeploy, the wet season had arrived in full and Firebase Tess had all but disappeared under the mud. With the clear identification of the area east of Phu My and Route 15 as an enemy base, resupply area and courier route the Task Force commander decided to conduct engineer land-clearing operations.
A detachment from 17 Construction Squadron, Royal Australian Engineers trained in the operation of heavy plant machinery would carry out the clearing. Four giant Rome ploughs would push over the vegetation and collect it into long windrows which could then be burned off in the next dry season when the wood had dried out. A troop of tanks and a section of APCs with this group would provide close protection for the land clearing team (LCT) and a rifle company would patrol the area around the worksite and also establish defensive positions at night.
The land-clearing operation was a tremendous task that would take several months to complete. The aim of the operation was to clear a large tract of land 12 square miles to the east of Phu My. The key purpose of clearing this forest was to deprive D65, North Vietnamese Engineer Battalion, of the use of an area in which it had operated in the past and in which it was beginning to show some interest again. The enemy, no longer protected and camouflaged by the thick jungle, would become vulnerable to observation when moving between his bases and his sources of supply. Also, once the conflict was over the local people could open up the area for farming and it would become beneficial to the economy of the province.
Our company was deployed east of Phu My off Route 15 in the low scrub and jungle around the foothills of the Wolverton Mountains. Highway 15 went from Saigon in the north-west to Vung Tau in the south about 60 miles away. We had been operating in the area for approximately ten days and our task was to intercept Viet Cong moving from the mountains into the villages along the highway. We had been in-country only about four weeks and this was our first time in this particular area. We were operating in platoon-sized patrols of about 30 men, which would then operate in ten-man squads. We had not had any contacts so far, so we were anxious to be blooded ourselves having been fed a diet of war stories ever since we stepped off our C-130 Hercules at Vung Tau.
We patrolled slowly with our trained lead scouts well forward. We had all been together for nearly a year and so our drills were well honed. We operated differently to the American, South Vietnamese, Thai and Korean forces, who would go and find the Viet Cong and once they found them would ‘pile on’. Due to our reduced numbers, our techniques, like the Australians’, were more subtle.
We knew that with our superior firepower, as at least three of my guys carried the M79 grenade launcher, or ‘duck gun’, we could easily take on the Viet Cong if contact was made. What really worried us was the threat of mines that we knew were scattered liberally throughout this particular area.
We had been issued with maps of the area, and each mine incident was well marked. In some areas on the map you simply couldn’t see the ground features for the number of spots denoting a mine incident. We knew the D65 North Vietnamese sappers were experts at laying mines and booby-traps. Whenever possible we never moved on tracks, which were the obvious place to put mines, but sometimes this was unavoidable due to the terrain or the noise that we made beating through the jungle. If we had to move on or near a track, then we would keenly search for the mine signs that the Viet Cong left for their own men.
There was a real art to carrying your equipment, ammunition, rations, bedding and water as well as always ensuring that your personal weapon was ready to fire. As a platoon commander I also carried a strobe light for night identification for aircraft, and the navigation equipment such as maps and a compass and pace-counter, as well as a small plastic-covered aide-memoire notebook containing the various radio formats for reporting a contact, mines, enemy sighting, bunkers or anything else of significance. We also each carried a shell dressing, a big bandage in a water-proof wrapper, taped on the butt of our weapons or on the bipod leg of the section machine guns. From experience we had learned that this was the best place to have the dressing, not in a pouch or a pocket, because if a man was shot or blown up it was easier to quickly locate the dressing as the weapon was normally lying near to the casualty. As well as the eight magazines in my ammunition pouches I carried two 20-round magazines on my M16 taped side-by-side. We did not have any 30-round magazines and anyway, the smaller magazines allowed me to get closer to the ground when returning fire in a contact. The second round in each magazine was a tracer round for target indication and the last two or three rounds were also tracer to remind you it was getting time to reload!
I personally carried an A-frame bergen rucksack with a large piece of brown foam rubber, liberated from a camp mattress, cushioning the pack on my back. Unfortunately, towards the end of my tour this pack finally rotted and fell apart. After that I had to try to fit everything into a much smaller issue pack.
We mainly carried New Zealand or Australian ration packs and these had a number of tins. Prior to each operation or after a resupply in the field we would go through all the ration packs we were issued and only keep the essential items. We carried out our rubbish whenever we could so that the enemy was not able to use any of it, such as empty tins, to make into booby-traps. The VC frequently used red Japanese mackerel tins filled with explosive as anti-personnel mines activated by bicycle batteries! Occasionally, we were issued with American rations which were very generous but far too big and we could only use a small amount of the contents. However, the US long range patrol (LRRP) rations were very light as they were dehydrated but we could only use them in the wet season when it rained heavily each day because they required lots of water to reconstitute the meals. Most of my soldiers would purchase instant noodles to take on patrol as these were light, tasty and filling and seasoned by small bottles of chilli sauce.
We cooked on small solid-fuel cookers, using hexamine blocks. Unfortunately, these gave off a slight odour and so we could only use them in certain tactical situations. If we could not use them, then we would eat our rations cold. We also learned the trick of quickly making a brew of tea or heating up a tin of food by using some of the US C4 plastic explosive we all carried. A small pellet of this malleable white explosive, like plasticine, would burn fiercely with little smell. I would place a small amount inside the ‘V’ of my detachable M16 bipod which was an ideal stove.
We generally all carried a pound of C4 in order to blow any unexploded shells or bombs we came across so that the Viet Cong could not extract the explosives from them to make into mines and booby-traps. We obviously only disposed of this ordnance if the situation permitted it – otherwise I would send a ‘Mine Rep’ (mine report) or ‘Bomb Rep’ (bomb report) to the company headquarters and at some time in the future the engineers could destroy it.
On 18 June the company had its first major action – a bloody introduction to the Vietnam War. 2 Platoon under my friend Ian Glendenning came across an enemy bunker system. While they were investigating the outskirts of the complex they were engaged by small arms fire and then a booby-trapped 155mm shell was detonated which killed two New Zealanders and wounded five others. Ian withdrew and called in fire support from armed helicopters. The Viet Cong group, which was about platoon strength, also withdrew. From this action, two soldiers in Ian’s platoon were awarded Military Medals.
My platoon was nearby and later that day we proceeded to clear the enemy camp. We moved extremely cautiously into the camp area with two sections ‘up’ and one in reserve and I was behind the lead sections. We passed the bloodstained and disturbed ground from the initial contact and the area still smelt of cordite and explosives. The mini-gun fire from the helicopter gunships had stripped all the leaves from the trees and they lay on the ground like a carpet. There was a well in the centre of the camp complex into which I had the satisfaction of dropping a grenade in case there were any VC hiding there.
At one stage my signaller, Mike Anderson, and I realised that we were alone in the middle of the enemy camp – the two lead sections were sweeping forward and the reserve section was clearing the rear of the camp. The bush in the camp had silently absorbed some 30 Kiwi soldiers.
There were in fact two camps. One was 150 metres by 150 metres with five grass huts as well as over seven 2-metre by 2-metre bunkers, each with 1 metre of overhead protection. Nearby was another camp 100 metres by 100 metres with a 2-foot deep crawl trench around the perimeter. Both camps were protected by 105mm shells which could be command detonated. Each bunker had its own cooking area and bamboo dining table plus a tin containing chopsticks, toothbrushes and spoons. The bunkers also contained hammocks. In the centre of the camp on one of the bamboo tables were pots of cooked bamboo shoots – a smell which I have never forgotten – and on another table were seven M79 grenade rounds in the process of being made into booby-traps. We also found four 5-pound blocks of Chicom (Chinese communist) explosives.
1 Platoon under Roger M also had a contact shortly after this incident, on the evening of 28 June. However, to the amusement of the rest of the battalion the ‘enemy’ turned out to be two cows. Incidents like this at least kept our spirits up especially after we had suffered our first casualties.
The next operation we participated in was Operation Nathan from 13 July to 2 August. This new operation was a fourfold mission and saw the battalion becoming responsible for the security of the entire province to the west of and including Route 15; interdiction of enemy routes to the villages near Route 2; protection of engineer road reconstruction parties; protection of the LCT east of Route 15; and destruction of D65 Engineer Battalion. The Victor Company task was to take responsibility for base defence until July 17 and then begin reconnaissance and ambush operations in the surrounding area.
On 21 July I had my own very real, very personal introduction to the reality of war in Vietnam. We had been patrolling the jungle for about two days, slowly moving through the wet clawing bush paralleling a large sandy track that we knew was being used for infiltration by the enemy. The lead scouts indicated by hand sign that we had reached a large track junction. As it was getting late in the day I decided that this would be a suitable position to lay a night ambush. Every night on patrol we would set up a triangle harbour or defensive position. Each man except the gunners and radio operators would carry a claymore directional anti-personnel mine. We would position these mines to fire along any tracks we found.
The mines were placed to fire down the tracks so that maximum use was made of their 700 ball bearings. The platoon took up positions of all-round defence and one of the lead scouts and I went to check any likely approach routes from the mountains. We had only gone about 150 yards when the silence was torn by the distinctive sound of an M60 machine gun firing a long burst closely followed by the thudding of an SLR. There was an extremely brief return of fire from an AK-47 and then silence.
My immediate thought was that I had missed out on the platoon’s first firefight so the scout and I sprinted back to the position, warning the sentry in a loud whisper that we were on our way back in. The body of one very dead Viet Cong lay in the bushes beside the track. There was also an AK-47 and an SKS rifle on the ground. My troop sergeant had organised a sweep of the area to ensure we had not missed anybody and I sent a contact report to the company commander back at headquarters in FSB Tess with the details of the contact. The clearing patrol came back and told me about two heavy blood trails they had found leading off towards the dark shape of the mountains. I quickly sent an artillery fire mission to our artillery support base, which was near the main highway. It was getting too dark for a follow-up so I ordered in some 105mm shells in the direction of the enemy’s likely withdrawal route. A few minutes later the shells came whistling over our heads to land with a frightening crump in the jungle about 500 yards away. We all cringed, automatically glad that we were not on the receiving end of the tearing, ripping shrapnel from the artillery rounds.
We searched the body and removed items of intelligence value. He had been carrying a crude little medal presumably for bravery. He had also been carrying a small plastic pouch of cooked rice and bamboo shoots, in addition to extra magazines for his weapon in canvas chest webbing and a small medical kit containing ampoules of vitamin B. There was no sign of their normal sleeping gear of hammocks and plastic ponchos so we knew their base could not be more than 6–9 miles away.
It was too late to bury the corpse so we dug shell scrapes and established our night routine. This involved sentries at each of the machine gun positions which changed over every two hours. It was one of the scariest nights I have ever spent. We had the three sentry locations, one on each corner of our triangle position. One of these was only about 10 feet from the dead body. There was a slight moon, just enough to cause shadows on the white sandy track in front. We did sentry duty in staggered pairs and when I was silently woken I took my place in the shell scrape beside the machine gun and the claymore firing devices known as ‘clackers’. I could not keep my eyes from straying back to the stiffening figure. But as I looked the body seemed to move and I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rising. I nudged my companion and pointed slowly. I need not have bothered. His eyes were riveted on the body too. We both knew he was dead, really dead, but still, the body was definitely moving. I slid one of the fragmentation grenades into my hand and prepared to pull the pin. We would not fire the M60 just yet as we needed to conceal its location for as long as possible. But what were we firing at – a moving corpse? Then out from underneath the body, moving slowly and awkwardly, came a huge iguana lizard. This one had obviously been doing some exploring. My hand, which had been gripping the gunner’s arm in a vice-like grip to tell him when to fire, relaxed. We exchanged sheepish grins, and without a word passing between us we both knew that this was to be our little secret. Nobody would believe just how frightened we had been, and we weren’t about to tell them.
At first light, a Sioux helicopter flew above our position to lower down a Polaroid camera to photograph the body and to take back the equipment and documents to the intelligence section at Nui Dat. We took the required ‘mugshot’ as quickly as possible, dismissed the chopper, buried the late Viet Cong and set off along the valley towards the centre of the Wolvertons. This was where the blood trails and drag marks had led.
If anything, movement was even more cautious than before the contact. We were following wounded men and every hollow in the ground, thick bush or rock was a potential ambush site. The tracks were leading us further and further into those forbidding mountains. My map, which showed locations of previous mine incidents, was covered in red dots along the area we were travelling. Suddenly, the lead scout froze and pointed to the left of the track. In the branch of a small tree about 6 inches above the ground was a small piece of torn yellow cloth, invisible to the eye of the untrained. It was a mine sign! Passing right beside the cloth the trails of slowly drying blood carried on up the steepening slope towards large, dark grey boulders crouching in the thickening jungle.
‘Mines,’ the urgent whisper came down the column. ‘Sign on the left!’ Walking as if on eggshells, eyes scanning every inch of the ground the platoon moved painfully slowly forward. The lead scouts had the doubly difficult task of following the blood trails and also looking for likely enemy positions. We were slowly being drawn into the heart of the dark forbidding Wolverton Mountains.
We came to where there was a larger blood trail and we saw that the wounded or one of the wounded had given themselves an injection of vitamin B. We pushed on for several days. The terrain was now much narrower by this point and the blood trail was following a stony dry stream bed that weaved in between the rocks and the trees. We were moving in single file, but with two men on each side to cover our flanks. I had moved an M60 machine gun behind the scouts so that they would have immediate rapid-fire support if we were attacked. At intervals we would silently adopt a defensive position and while half of the group watched the perimeter the other half opened cans of C rations and packets of military biscuits. There was no question of heating the food on our little hexamine stoves or even boiling water for a ‘brew’. This was ‘Indian country’ and even the faint odour of the burning dry fuel blocks ran the risk of giving away our present location. After each break I gave the signal and we would quietly slip our packs on our shoulders and move off following the trail of blood as it went up the hill. The threat of mines on the riverbed was slim because of the difficulty of concealment, but tripwires were a source of concern. The lead scout held a small stick between the fingers of his left hand at knee height. If the twig hit a tripwire it was not large enough to break the wire and detonate a booby-trap but it would alert the scout to the danger. Progress was incredibly slow, but we knew the skilful reputation of our sapper enemy.
The burst of fire on the trail above caught us by surprise and every man flung himself to the ground throwing off his main pack. The shooting was an M16, ours, and was followed by the distinctive cracking explosions of an M79 grenade. The lead scout of the point section, Bill T, was in action! The thumping of the cover scout’s SLR added to the din echoing around the rocks and trees. The words ‘Contact front – two enemy!’ were passed down the column. A third weapon fired and the characteristic rattle of an AK-47 sent bullets cracking through the trees above our heads. The warning that the enemy was throwing grenades was made unnecessary by the explosions around us. The Viet Cong were on a small plateau in the rocks above us and we could hear their urgent chatter.
The platoon had automatically moved into fire positions covering front and to the flanks. I clearly remember noticing, as we were sorting out our fire positions, that a number of my soldiers were smoking. Smoking in the jungle was always strictly controlled because the smell could alert any nearby enemy. I was annoyed by it then, immediately, I knew the ridiculousness of my thoughts: the enemy knew where we were – they were shooting at us!
The lead section was exchanging fire with the hidden enemy who had us at a territorial disadvantage. As I crawled forward, to find out the situation, the lead scout, Bill T, who was attached to my platoon from the NZSAS troop in Nui Dat, crawled back to brief me. ‘This is the camp, boss, and there are two sentries. I think I hit one. There is a massive boulder behind them, and I saw more movement there.’
At this moment there was a lull in the battle and I became very aware that all my soldiers near me were looking directly at me. I was the leader – this was what it was all about – all the months I had spent being taught and practising being an officer now had to be put into action.
I briefed the artillery officer, located at the company headquarters, on my radio and requested an immediate fire mission and gunship support. I knew we were right on the edge of the enemy camp and would have to bring the artillery shells in ‘danger close’. If we moved back down the hill the Viet Cong would escape to the north. ‘Shot over!’ came the gunner’s response. The shells were on their way from the 105mm howitzers located in the FSB beside Highway 15 to the east of our location.
Then our world exploded! We were thrown into the air by the explosions. Shrapnel, stones, debris flew everywhere. It was the loudest noise I had ever heard. A salvo of three shells had smashed into the rocks just in front of us. ‘Check firing! Check firing!’ I screamed into the radio. I knew another salvo was about to arrive and we would not survive that. I explained the situation to the gunner officer, and he said that the howitzers were at the maximum angle due to the steepness of the valley we were in and could not be adjusted further.
The cavalry was coming – the gunships I had requested were on their way and they would sort out these ‘Charlies’. ‘Hello India Four-Three, this is Albatross Zero One. I have rockets and mini-guns where you want them?’ Let me tell you there is nothing quite as reassuring as the sound of gunships rolling in and ‘brassing up’ the jungle. The three gunships, a heavy fire team, took it in turns to fly towards the mountains, just below the mist, firing everything they had before pulling up with inches to spare. Bits of rocket crashed through the canopy above our heads and red-hot cartridge cases rained down among us. For 20 minutes these flying dragons spewed flame and destruction into the rocks above us. The canopy was stripped bare and the pungent stink of cordite was everywhere. Then the choppers wheeled away. While the gunships were strafing the area ahead of us, I was kneeling beside a large rock, controlling proceedings, and the rifle sections waited in all-round defence. The rest of my platoon HQ was in cover behind other boulders. Almost in slow motion I watched a grenade thrown by the VC above me sail over the rock and land with a plop on the ground about 10 feet away from me. I stared at it horrified and then forced myself as deep into the ground as possible. Nothing happened! I studied the grenade and saw it was a US M67 ‘egg-shaped’ fragmentation grenade and it was tightly wrapped in black tape – which is why it did not explode. I mentally thanked the US GI who had lost that grenade for covering it with black tape – as was their habit.
The artillery shells had landed very near to us and, as well as enemy grenade fragments several of my soldiers had received minor shrapnel wounds and damaged eardrums from the artillery blasts. The enemy was silent and we could no longer detect any movement so I arranged for the medical evacuation ‘dust-off’ helicopters to come and winch these men, including Bill T, out of the jungle.
Once the choppers departed there was an eerie silence. Cautiously, I moved towards the lead section. Each man tucked into a rocky crevice. A quick word to the commander and they adjusted positions to cover the reserve section moving through them as we moved into the camp area amongst small caves. We came across a scene of desolation – there was nothing left standing. All the undergrowth had been stripped away by rockets and mini-gun fire, some of it only 20 feet in front of our positions. Leaves covered the ground and a thick brown carpet of branches and wood splinters lay everywhere. In the centre was a clump of grey boulders chipped and splintered. We continued upwards, and in the middle of a small clearing saw what had once been a kitchen area. Pots and pans and bamboo lay scattered on the ground. A steel container of rice had been hit by a cannon shell and was lying leaking on its side. The rice was still warm. At that stage during this contact we had been supported by 105mm howitzers from Phu My and US 8-inch guns from Nui Dat; and, to my surprise a Centurion tank moving along the Firestone Trail on the flat land below us contacted me and assisted by firing shells into the hillside above us. I never found out where that tank came from or where it was going to!
We had not found any enemy casualties in the camp and so we hoped to continue to follow their trail. But it suddenly became clear that this would not be an option. The camp itself was mined! We were literally standing in the middle of a minefield. The impersonal booby-trap or mine that killed or horribly mutilated victims was something we all feared. A firefight was different – you took your chances and so did the enemy – but mines … In the words of Field Marshal Sir William Slim: ‘Everything that is shot or thrown at you, or dropped on you in war is most unpleasant, but of all the horrible devices the most terrifying … is the landmine.’
Only a unit with the expertise of these North Vietnamese sappers would consider mining the interior of their own camp. The first mine that exploded seriously injured three men. The mine had been located where I had been standing just minutes before. To this day I do not know how I did not tread on it! But before I could do anything a second mine exploded. This second mine seriously damaged the lower legs of one soldier and injured several others. The third explosion was shielded by rocks and thankfully only stunned people. To make matters worse, the wounds caused were made even more horrific because the mines, in individual mackerel tins, had been surrounded by glass bottles. Glass is difficult to identify on X-rays, making the surgeon’s job even more challenging. But first I had to get my injured men out of the minefield and onto the surgeon’s operating table.
Being inside a minefield is a nightmare experience and your instinct is to just freeze – every footstep you take may be your last before you die in a violent explosion. But when you have your dazed and bloodied soldiers around you badly needing life-saving first aid you have to override your fear. I spoke firmly to those near me and ordered them to stand on rocks, not on the naked earth. Hopping from rock to rock I quickly went to one of the badly injured, Ruka H, lying motionless on the rocky ground, moaning quietly. His legs were badly mutilated and he was losing a lot of blood through his wounds. I made a tourniquet out of my sweat rag, tied it around his thigh and tightened it using a small wooden branch to twist the rag. I can still clearly remember the squishing sound the damaged flesh made as I tightened the tourniquet. Sergeant Beattie was attending to one of the other serious casualties. I had already requested another ‘dust-off’ helicopter and it was soon hovering above us.
Those not involved in the casualty evacuation moved cautiously into fire positions to ensure that the North Vietnamese could not fire at the vulnerable ‘dust-off’ helicopter. There was no suitable landing zone so the helicopter had to hover some distance away from the cliff face we were now on. A Stokes litter was lowered and we gently placed one casualty in it. This litter is like a stretcher and the casualty is laid inside it and strapped in, after which the winch cable is connected to the top end of the stretcher. I assisted the litter as it was winched from the big rock on which some of us were positioned but eventually I had to let go and the casualty swung out over the treacherous drop below us before being safely hauled on board. We did the same for the next casualty but when I released him I had to watch horrified as he swung straight into the trunk of a tree opposite us. He was vertical in his stretcher and I could see his face clearly as he hit the tree – his expression never changed but his bloodied foot turned almost completely around. He swung away from the tree and was quickly winched into the helicopter, as were the other casualties, and they were flown straight to the main evacuation hospital at Vung Tau. The remainder of us, only two thirds of the original platoon, now moved slowly, very slowly back down the mountain and established a night harbour in a rocky stream bed, just over a mile away from the contact area. We carried the equipment of the medevaced wounded with us so the enemy could not retrieve it. Our casualties survived and some returned to the platoon but Ruka H had both legs amputated and ‘Doc’ Takuta had one leg removed. Very soon, once they were stabilised, they were evacuated back to their families in New Zealand.
Those of us who remained carried on with our tour but now with even greater purpose. Over the next few weeks we moved back to the same cave system near the camp we had attacked but this time approached from the high ground above. A heavy bombing raid was delivered onto the area of the caves before we entered it and we lay huddled amongst the massive rocks on the top of the mountain as the jets screamed on their bombing runs just above our heads. The earth shuddered as the bombs exploded and we were hammered by the over-pressure of the blasts.
When the jets had left, the air stank of explosives. The rocks in the area of the caves were smashed and battered. As we moved closer we came across the pathetic sight of a large monkey, undamaged but quite dead, hanging above us by one arm from one of the few remaining trees. We checked the area as best we could and then withdrew. The enemy had long gone.
In the subsequent weeks I was patrolling with my platoon to the west of Route 2. I was covering the southern part of our platoon patrol area and Sergeant Beattie had moved to the northern area. On 28 September he had a very successful ambush which accounted for five enemy dead and one wounded. His half-platoon patrol identified some fresh tracks, laid an ambush and engaged some ten enemy dressed in black clothing. The initial engagement counted for five dead and a clearing sweep located a wounded enemy. Gunships were called and engaged further enemy nearby but no further enemy casualties were located. I was extremely anxious to try to contact the VC fleeing from this ambush and moved north as quickly as possible to link up with the rest of my platoon. However, we did not have any contacts on the way. Undoubtedly, we were competitive amongst ourselves regarding the number of successful contacts. After all, this was what we were here to do. It is hard to describe the adrenalin rush of combat to the uninitiated.
Throughout 1–2 October we were cautiously following a very well defined enemy track through the jungle east towards Route 2. At approximately 10.30am on 2 October, we came across a large and recently occupied bunker complex. We had earlier come across felled trees with the stumps covered in mud to hide them from aerial observation. The trees were used for overhead protection of individual bunkers. There was also the smell of a latrine. This substantial defensive area could easily house at least 40 enemy combatants and it had clearly been in use in the past few days. Clearing that camp was probably one of the most unsettling periods of my entire tour in Vietnam. My skin prickled and I was expecting to be ambushed at any time.
We had thoroughly investigated the camp and continued in an eastwards direction towards Route 2 when we heard the sound of chopping. We crept forward and saw some locals, who were cutting fruit, talking to a group of men. We challenged them and suddenly saw that one had an M1 carbine which he pointed directly at us. We quickly spread out into line-abreast and put an immediate sweep line through the area. We knew we had wounded at least one by the clearly evident blood trail but they were all able to escape except the M1 carbine. As we were moving the sweep line I was beside the machine gunner, Harry E, and to his irritation I kept asking him to make sure that he had enough ammunition left. His M60 machine gun was called the ‘Baron’. I was still very concerned that we would bump into the large group that I believed could still be in the area and we needed to have enough ammunition for a sustained battle. The enemy who escaped this initial contact ran straight past our last ambush position where my base was still located but, to my anger, my soldiers were not alert and did not open fire. Later, when we had re-formed back in the night ambush position, a woman came creeping down the track. The sentry on duty blew the claymore beside the track. Although totally stunned she was almost entirely uninjured thanks to her closeness to the claymore when it was fired. While we were giving her first aid we discovered a bag with a wig in it together with a substantial amount of money. She was evacuated with these items to Nui Dat by helicopter. Battalion intelligence later confirmed that she was a courier and that the others operating in the area were from the Chau Duc Viet Cong District headquarters.
The company moved back into the south-west area of the province and commenced patrolling. This was an area with which we were becoming familiar. On 31 October a half-platoon patrol from 1 Platoon, led by Lieutenant Roger M, was crossing the Suoi Cha Pha River. One of the patrol NCOs had an accidental discharge, killed one of their own and wounded two others. One was shot in the leg several times and one was shot in the jaw. These tragic events can and do happen in war, but Lieutenant M chose to conceal the events. When he returned to base some weeks later he wrote a false contact report complete with a map stating that they had been attacked, returned fire and followed a blood trail. His soldiers had to carry this secret with them for so many years at a huge mental cost to themselves. The family of the soldier who was killed never knew he had been accidentally killed by his own men until many years later. This was a tragic blue-on-blue incident.
The company was still operating in the enemy infiltration route area east of Phu My and on 4 November my platoon had another contact. We had established an ambush position beside a sandy track which looked as though it had been used fairly recently. The sentry position had to be close to the track because of the limited visibility in the thick bush beside the track. It also meant we had to be close to our claymores. At about midday the claymores exploded with a great roar as two Viet Cong had cautiously approached up the track. We quickly took up our stand-to positions. I crawled to the sentry team who were covered in dirt from the nearest claymore and somewhat deafened. The air reeked of burnt plastic – the distinctive smell when claymores are fired. The M60 let rip and I called up support from helicopter gunships. They soon arrived and opened fire up and down the track.
Afterwards we swept the area and located one dead Viet Cong and a blood trail from the other. We then spent a considerable amount of time looking for the wounded Viet Cong in the thick bush. We kept trying to get him to give up by shouting at him in Vietnamese to surrender – ‘lai dai!’ But no such luck. Eventually we were compelled to throw grenades into the area to force him out.
By this time it was dark and the battalion headquarters was demanding that we capture this enemy. An easy instruction to give when you are sitting on your fat arse in a deep dug-out. I requested artillery illumination, but this was denied, apparently because of the proximity to civilian habitation. Eventually a Pilatus Porter aircraft dropped flares to assist us, and two of my NCOs, Sandy Sandford and Johnnie Bluett, crept into the bush and located the Viet Cong who was lying on his hammock holding his AK-47. He was taken out by helicopter the next day with two or three M16 bullet wounds in his back from the original contact.
This was a hazardous task at night and I was unimpressed by the lack of artillery illumination support. I believed my soldiers had been placed at unnecessary risk.
A few days later we were in the same vicinity when we sited an ambush position beside one of these open areas with a track running through it. We saw movement down the track and waited expectantly. We soon realised that it was a 2 Platoon patrol moving very slowly down the track. I did not know why they were in our area. We let them come closer before we planned to make our presence known in case they suddenly opened fire. Their lead scout was directly in front of us when he must have seen a portion of one of the claymores covering the track – he froze and turned as white as a sheet. We quickly and quietly let him know we were there.
This incident emphasised how important accurate navigation was on any operation. Except in the open paddy fields or near the major roads, all navigation was conducted in thick jungle. It was almost impossible to locate any distinctive terrain features in the jungle. Map reading had to be excellent as we attempted to match up the contours with the surrounding geography. This was many years before the introduction of the GPS which makes navigation a breeze for today’s soldiers. Combined with the map we used the robust and accurate military prismatic compass and the pace-counters taped onto our rifles. Most platoon commanders and platoon sergeants and many of the section commanders had pace-counters. Pace-counters were extremely useful for counting and recording distance walked by clicking the device on every second step – this was about one yard, depending upon the terrain. Accurate navigation undoubtedly helped keep my platoon and me alive.
The Australian battalion commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel JC, always wore sunglasses and smoked big cigars. We all thought he had watched too many John Wayne films. On 9 November he was shot down while flying over the Rung Sat swamp area on the edge of our area of operations. He received a minor wound but guaranteed himself a Distinguished Service Order (DSO). Getting shot down but receiving only a minor injury (embarrassingly in his backside) must have been the answer to his prayers.
He and our OC, John Mc, did not seem to get on too well. I believe he felt John Mc was too laid back; he wrote in his book Second to None, ‘I visited John Mc in his headquarters on the summit of Nui Toc Tien. I found him to be his usual laconic self ...’. Lieutenant Colonel JC made a point of visiting companies in the field on a regular basis using ‘his’ Sioux helicopter. I think he felt these visits were good for morale but we found them a pain in the arse. He would be more worried about whether troops had shaved than about the tactical situation. Moreover, his bloody helicopter made sure that our locations were obvious to any nearby Viet Cong. Whenever there was a contact and he was in the air he would appear above the area and make a total nuisance of himself!
He was highly critical of the use of artillery as cut-offs after a contact to engage likely enemy withdrawal routes and cause further casualties to them. He believed that this was a waste of resources. We soldiers on the ground disagreed but he criticised Victor 5 on more than one occasion for using artillery in this way after a contact. We firmly believed this was an effective method of engaging fleeing enemy soldiers. Also, in his book Second to None, he criticises me for bringing in artillery too close during my contact in the Nui Thi Vai Mountains – he was obviously unaware that the guns were on extreme elevation and that I had made a fully thought-out decision before requesting their fire support. I was the man on the ground!
There was even a lingering rumour that he was shot down by Kiwi troops who were exasperated by his constant meddling. It isn’t true, of course, but we did share a few wry grins when it happened.
We were all allocated two periods of five-day leave during our 12-month tour. In December 1970 I was allocated a leave period and was due to join Cecilia in Singapore. I had come out of the field on a resupply chopper and I was in Nui Dat in our base area sitting in the officers’ and senior NCOs’ dining room on Christmas Day. I was to depart for my leave the following day. Suddenly, the silence of the evening was shattered by rifle fire coming from about 50 yards away from the building I was in. I quickly grabbed my rifle, turned off the light and crept towards the door. I thought that a Viet Cong sapper group had entered the camp. There was no more firing. Near our location inside the Nui Dat base was the sergeants’ mess of the Royal Australian Army Service Corps (RAASC). The firing had come from this building. I went to assist and soon established that it had not been an enemy attack but that, after an all-day drinking session, an Australian private soldier, Ferriday, had taken his SLR, loaded a full magazine of live rounds and commenced to shoot, indiscriminately, into the RAASC sergeants’ mess building. Two sergeants were killed, and one seriously wounded. The incident was especially tragic because those who were shot were due to return to Australia the following day after the completion of their 12-month service in Vietnam. Ferriday was later convicted on two counts of manslaughter and one of assault with a weapon and served eight years of a ten-year sentence. My Christmas leave had certainly started off in a dramatic fashion. Thankfully the rest of my leave was much calmer and quieter but it was over all too soon and Cecilia and I were faced with another difficult goodbye.
In February 1971 my company was located in the area around Firebase Garth in the north of the province and patrolling the area east of Route 2. This was not an area we were familiar with and it was very dense bush. Patrolling was exceptionally slow and cautious. We had to try to move as silently as possible through thick secondary jungle and large patches of bamboo. Bamboo is particularly noisy and physically difficult to get through and for this reason the Viet Cong often dug bunker systems around and in bamboo patches. Generally the company patrolled in platoon or half-platoon groups. Company HQ would move separately and was protected by a rotated half-platoon from one of the rifle platoons. If company HQ was static they would sometimes have a pair of 81mm mortars attached for fire support if we were out of the reach of artillery. I was part of the company headquarters protection during this operation with half of my platoon. I really resented being stuck with company headquarters and wanted to be out on the ground with my platoon. It was not a pleasant few weeks. The rest of my platoon under Sergeant Beattie had several contacts and that frustrated me even more. One such contact involved an RPG 2 round landing directly in front of one of the patrol machine gun positions. It blew the gun clean in half. The gunner himself was unwounded but more than a little startled! I was more than happy to get back out on the ground with my soldiers once my duties at company headquarters were complete.
When you are living in the jungle for long periods of time moving silently through the bush you are privileged to see a great deal of wildlife up close. There were the noisy hornbills who flew in the canopy above us but whose landing techniques were singularly unglamorous. They would literally crash into the foliage of trees, hang on tightly, and then sort out their feathers and get tidy again rather like embarrassed little old ladies who had taken a tumble. Mouse deer were my favourites. These were toy-sized deer stepping delicately through the bushes and, if you sat perfectly still, they would trot past within feet of you. The gibbon monkeys would ‘whoop’ as they moved through the trees swinging from branch to branch. They did cause us a few anxious moments. One night, at ‘stand-to’, we heard what sounded like an enemy ‘sweep line’ moving straight for our position and extending some distance on either side as it moved towards us. We awaited the onslaught, weapons with safety catches off, claymore safety bales lowered, grenades ready and getting as low as we could in our shell scrapes with just our noses poking out! The noise came closer and closer, but we couldn’t see anything. Then suddenly the noise carried on over the top of us! It was a huge troop of monkeys moving determinedly through the treetops. We gave a collective silent sigh of relief and relaxed our tensed muscles.
The ‘fuck you!’ lizard was an interesting night companion. This lizard grew to about 3 feet long and at dusk would start its call which sounded just like someone saying, ‘fuck you!’ We grew used to this noise because it meant that there was no one around us. If the lizards heard movement they went quiet. We were always aware of snakes, but they were usually desperately trying to get away from us.
At night, lying on the ground you would frequently hear termites digging and scratching beneath the piece of plastic you lay on. If you were unlucky and lay on a termite nest chunks of your plastic sheeting would be eaten by the morning. They also gave a very painful nip. Normally we would pour insect repellent or powder around the outside of the sleeping position to deter these vicious creepy crawlies. That piece of plastic was all we had for a peaceful night’s sleep. We were issued with small blow-up mattresses, but these were too noisy to use out in the field and were only ever used inside large firebases. Some of the other platoon commanders permitted the use of hammocks but I wouldn’t allow them in my platoon. In a contact, particularly at night, most soldiers fire high. If you are lying in a hammock and not on the ground, you are very vulnerable to incoming fire. Also, I found that night defensive positions tended to focus around suitable hammock trees and not on tactical security. I wanted to keep my soldiers alive and not shot, rather than comfortable at night.
We began to operate west of Firebase Garth, on the edge of the Courtenay rubber plantation, at the end of February. I liked this area. It was a popular infiltration route for the Viet Cong so contact with the enemy was always likely. On one day we were in a harbour position in some old rubber trees and secondary scrub. There was a single shot and then silence. We took cover and I tried to work out if we were in contact or not. There was no further shooting. I soon established that one of the two Australian engineers who were attached to my platoon had shot himself in the foot. I had to arrange for a dust-off helicopter to come and evacuate him.
While I was carrying out first aid on the soldier’s gunshot wound he was in shock and kept mentioning his wife. I tried to reassure him that his wife would be contacted as soon as possible. This seemed to make him more and more agitated. It was only after he had been evacuated that I realised he had been asking me NOT to tell his wife!
On the night of 5 March, I established an ambush position with some of my platoon on the edge of the Viet Cuong rubber plantation, part of the huge Courtenay rubber plantation, with another ambush position from the platoon located some 2½ miles further to the east. Late in the evening we spotted movement coming from the west passing our position and continuing past some small derelict huts towards another village. Our position was too far away from the enemy route to be effective, so I instructed the patrol to disconnect their claymore firing devices and we moved out in light patrol order towards the enemy movement.
I had been carrying a US white phosphorous fragmentation grenade which I had managed to get my hands on. The rest of our grenades were basic fragmentation M26 grenades. When we were close to where we had seen movement, I whispered to the section commander to throw my grenade into the area where we thought the enemy was hiding to get them moving so we could see and shoot them. Corporal Johnnie Bluett was a big man and I knew he could hurl this particular grenade a long distance. At the same time one man in the patrol saw movement close to him and opened fire. The firing carried on punctuated by the impressive and lethal explosion of the white phosphorous grenade.
A light appeared in one of the huts nearby, so we engaged that with machine gun fire. We swept the area as best we could in the dark but did not find anything. A short time later we heard firing as my other ambush opened fire. We waited in the contact area and then made our way cautiously back to our original position. The next day a sweep revealed one dead Viet Cong together with his weapon and a small pack. The other ambush patrol had killed another Viet Cong.
Some years later at a company reunion, Jay Seymour, one of my soldiers from that ambush, confided in me that when he had seen the Viet Cong he had quickly advised his section commander. The section commander, Bluett, immediately told him, ‘Don’t tell the Boss – he will make us go after them!’ He had to break the news that he had already told me and that, yes, we were going after them!
Patrolling did not always involve contact with the enemy and for some of our time in the jungle we did not come across any enemy or even any sign of the enemy. A lot of time was simply spent in ambushing any tracks or likely sign that we did find. It is difficult to ensure that there is no noise in an ambush that may go on for days. The soldiers would take paperback novels to read; Westerns, ‘Yippees’ as they were known, were very popular, but to cut down on weight each book would be torn into three or four sections. These bits would be randomly distributed amongst each section so that you could end up receiving any part of a book to read which was then swapped for another part.
I also permitted one or two small portable radios in each rifle section and on these we could listen to the US Armed Forces Radio (AFVN) using little earphones. The aim of these diversions was to keep the noise of whispering or any movement down to an absolute minimum.
On 10 March 1971, my good friend Lieutenant John Winton of 1 Platoon sadly died of injuries he received when a claymore detonated while he was sweeping a contact area. He had replaced Lieutenant M, who had been posted to the US base, Bearcat, north of Phuoc Tuy.
This was 1 Platoon’s first successful enemy contact in ten months on operations. The sentry in the platoon ambush position had killed an approaching Viet Cong. John and two others had gone into the contact area to sweep for further enemy casualties. But the firing of the machine gun during the initial contact had set the dry grass ablaze. This in turn ignited the detonating cord which connected the claymore banks. A claymore detonated and John was caught in the blast. Another member of the patrol was also wounded. With the ‘black humour’ that soldiers in combat always have, 1 Platoon were called the ‘Lovers’ by the rest of the Company, not as a compliment about their more amorous activities in the flesh-pots of Vung Tau, but because they supposedly ‘loved’ the Viet Cong so much they did not want to kill them. Maybe 1 Platoon would have been more successful on operations if John Winton had not been killed – who knows!
After this latest operation we had our four-day rest-in-country at the Task Force leave centre in Vung Tau. I was sad about the death of John Winton, whose company I normally enjoyed when we were on leave in Vung Tau. I got ‘wrecked’ one night in the bars in Vung Tau town centre. This inevitably resulted in a confrontation with the obnoxious Australian military police (MP) at curfew time. I ended up being arrested, handcuffed and taken to the cells in Vung Tau base. I was gamely assisted by a number of my platoon who took exception to my arrest. At the resulting disciplinary hearing some weeks later in Nui Dat I had to defend my actions to the Task Force brigadier against the accusations of no fewer than nine MPs who had obviously made it their mission to get me into trouble. In Vietnam, most of the Australian MPs were policemen in normal life with no real understanding of the pressures of operational life in the field. The brigadier was very lenient when he realised the circumstances that had led to my behaviour.
I am not particularly proud of my actions that night and I suspect it cost me a Military Cross, but I still cannot stop a chuckle or two when I read the lengthy charge sheet against me. It includes me saying things to the MPs like: ‘Fuck off you POGO bastards!’ POGO is a highly derisory term given by a combat soldier to someone who does not go out on operations into the jungle, i.e. ‘permitted on garrison only’.
The day of 20 March found us once again patrolling south-east of Firebase Garth in two separate patrol groups. I was in thick primary jungle and the other patrol was in part of the overgrown rubber plantation that was the huge Courtenay rubber complex. I received a radio call from the other patrol commander, a junior NCO, informing me that a body of Viet Cong was moving past his position. He thought there were at least 12. He finally opened fire on them but did not follow up. In the meantime, my patrol moved as quickly as possible towards the contact area, hoping to cut off this enemy group. We could not move through the bush very easily and so we did not see them at all. The other patrol received a minor casualty, most likely simply a ricochet from one of their own weapons. I was most unimpressed by the lack of aggression from this particular NCO.
On 22 April my platoon made its final kill when a Viet Cong trying to get past the platoon as we were moving at the rear of the company column was shot and killed by Mike ‘Gwan Gwan’ August, one of my scouts.
On 30 April the company returned to Nui Dat for the final time. We knew our return home was looming because we had been ordered to take our ‘happy pills’ for the previous two weeks. Malaria was endemic in Vietnam and we were required to take paludrine on a daily basis. As platoon commander it was my responsibility to ensure that we took our daily dose. I had to maintain a notebook on operations in which the names of all my soldiers were recorded and beside which I had to sign to say that each soldier had taken his paludrine. During our tour we were also given dapsone, a more powerful anti-malaria drug. The so-called ‘happy pills’ were designed to rid our bodies of the common types of malaria which had been suppressed by the regular paludrine pills. The ‘happy pills’ were chloroquine (a large pink pill) and primaquine (a small brown pill). They were called ‘happy pills’ because we were going home! This final cocktail of drugs really knocked us all about and, even though we were still on operations, some of my soldiers were not in a fit state for combat. One of the soldiers in my patrol, Bryce ‘the man from Marble Mountain’ Newlove, had carried an M72 portable rocket launcher on operation for many weeks. While we were waiting at the LZ for that final helicopter ride back into Nui Dat I told him to fire the launcher at a tree in the surrounding jungle. This he did with great pleasure. It was the final act of aggression by 3 Platoon, Victor 5 Company in Vietnam. I suppose I could always blame the ‘happy pills’ if reprimanded.
I had found operational soldiering exciting and challenging. Vietnam had provided me with the opportunity to command men under fire for the very first time and I had discovered that I was able to control my own fear when under fire. Jungle warfare without the sophistication of technology is one of the rawest operational environments in which to fight. As described by the legendary World War II Malaya jungle veteran Freddie Spencer Chapman DSO and Bar, the jungle is in essence neutral; it can be both your friend and your enemy, and acceptance of this is key to survival. In Vietnam all the officer and leadership training I had received up until this point had had to be put into play. During that first firefight in the Nui Thi Vai Mountains I had felt the stares of my men on me. The jungle presents a multitude of places to hide, but there was nowhere to hide from the gaze of the men I commanded – even if I had wanted to! In my platoon we suffered wounds and injuries but we all made it home alive – a fact that I am incredibly proud of.
I respected our enemy there in Vietnam, as I have generally always respected my enemy. (This was not the case when I served in Northern Ireland – I loathed and despised the IRA and their ilk and I still do.) However, I have noticed that there is a move afoot to get together with former enemy soldiers from our combat days in Vietnam. This initiative seems to have originated amongst Australian Vietnam veterans. I have no interest whatsoever in making friends with former NVA and Viet Cong against whom I was fighting. I am just rather disappointed that my platoon and I were not able to kill more than we did. They were trying to maim or kill us and we were trying to do the same to them. In our particular case – we just did it better!
Such is war. I make no apologies for being an aggressive soldier. For me there is no point being a combat soldier without some level of aggression. I was given the epithet ‘Warry Mac’ by my soldiers in Vietnam and it is a nickname that I carry with great pride – and a certain amount of embarrassment.
The New Zealand infantry is extremely proud of the part it played in South Vietnam and even though the New Zealand contribution was small in terms of manpower, it was big in terms of operational efficiency.
Return to Singapore
I returned with the company to Singapore in May 1971 and was then posted to the Support Company as the battalion signals officer. I had completed a basic officers’ signals course in NZ, though I was never much of a signaller and persevered mainly by bluffing my way. My biggest problem was operating the huge combination lock on the bloody great safe in battalion headquarters where the communication codes were secured.
Before we left Vietnam our Victor 5 Company second-in-command, Captain Alvin Clement, had discreetly told me I had been recommended for a Military Cross (MC). Several months after I had returned to Singapore I was called in to see the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Rob W (later to become Chief of the New Zealand General Staff, 1981–84). He congratulated me and told me I had been awarded a Mention in Dispatches (MiD) for gallantry during my tour in South Vietnam. This was a great honour and I was very proud, but I have to admit some disappointment that my award was not an MC. Many years later I wrote to our company commander from our Vietnam days, John Mc, and asked him if he had indeed recommended me for an MC. He wrote back and confirmed that he had but that it had been downgraded by the Australians because there were limitations on how many could be issued – two Australian officers from our ANZAC Battalion were awarded MCs.
Naturally my father found the situation ironic considering he had been in a very similar position during World War II. He was also recommended for an MC and despite receiving three MiDs his commanding officer told him that ‘his’ MC was to be given to a regular officer not a battlefield commission like my father – but he was sure my father would understand!
I was more disturbed by my active service in Vietnam than I realised, and I became very distant from Cecilia who had been waiting so long for me to safely return from Vietnam. She could not understand why I was so different and she was very hurt. Quite simply I just wanted to be with the men I served with. I gather my state of mind was a common syndrome. I had been working closely with my men through thick and thin for some 12 months. I found settling back into domestic life as well as routine barrack life very difficult.
We did not receive any counselling when we returned from Vietnam, or the offer of any, but I suspect I would not have been willing to accept any support even if it had been available.
Leaving the New Zealand Army 1973
We returned to New Zealand in December 1971 and I was promoted to captain and posted to the 1st Battalion Depot in Burnham Camp as a company second-in-command. Here I got to know most of the new infantry subalterns who were training at the depot before being posted to Singapore. This was now a peacetime posting as New Zealand no longer had any troops serving in Vietnam. They were an interesting group – somewhat overconfident and cocky but I made sure the exercises I ran for them were sufficiently testing to challenge some of those traits.
Soon after returning to New Zealand I was sent on a lieutenant-to-captain promotion course for several weeks in Waiouru, which was not particularly enjoyable although I easily passed. Surprisingly, one of the instructors was one of my own former OCS classmates who up to this point had had exactly the same military experience as I had. I was highly embarrassed when the course leader failed my Fijian friend from NSTU days, the future prime minister of Fiji, Steve Rambuka, an excellent officer, from the Fijian Armed Forces, yet passed a New Zealand Legal Corps officer, who was pleasant enough but a military and tactical nightmare. It was incidents like these that caused me to lose a little faith in the traditional hierarchy of the army.
Our darling daughter Juliette was born on 15 September 1972 and, regarding home life, things could not have been better. But in terms of my military career I was getting increasingly itchy feet. I decided to apply for the New Zealand Special Air Service selection course in Auckland. I was dissuaded by my commanding officer at the time who informed me that I would have to pay for my own move to Auckland – an entirely inaccurate piece of information. But, in a way, it was the best thing he could have done because it forced me to look for another challenge elsewhere.
One of the company commanders in the 1st Battalion Depot was Huia W, who was an ex-New Zealand SAS soldier and an ex-British Army education officer with 22 SAS before he returned to New Zealand. He could see I was dissatisfied and persuaded me to follow my dreams. I wrote to then Brigadier Mike Walsh, DSO (later Major General Walsh CB, CBE, DSO) who had been the brigade commander of 28th Commonwealth Brigade, which included 1 RNZIR, in Singapore from 1971–72. I had met him a few times after I had returned from Vietnam. He advised me to contact the regimental colonel at the headquarters of the famed Parachute Regiment in Aldershot. This was Colonel John ‘Joe’ Starling, MC. I received a very positive reply from him; he was, I can confirm after later meeting him in person, a true gentleman. However, Colonel Starling informed me that I could only formally apply to join the Paras once I had resigned from the New Zealand Army to avoid any accusations of ‘poaching’. Never one to shy away from risk, I did exactly this. Cecilia and I moved in with her parents and I got a job as a builder’s labourer.
One of my jobs at the building site was to light a fire at 6am using off-cuts of timber in a 44-gallon drum so that the proper builders could warm their hands before starting work in the bitter, icy Canterbury mornings. I would go to work in my army boots and wearing green denims. One of the other workmen asked me if I had been in the military. When I said I had he asked me what rank I had been, ‘A captain,’ I replied. ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘What did you do wrong?!’
One of my other duties was to clean out the general latrine area (thankfully not the contents themselves), but this just reminded me of my days as a new recruit in the army, so I simply knuckled down and got on with it. We stayed with Cecilia’s generous parents for some three months and each day I would get home from the building site and enquire if a letter had arrived from the British Army. For the first month I asked Cecilia to show me the letter as soon as I got back from work. At the start of the second month I asked her to come at lunch-time with the letter. In the third month I told her to come straight to work with the letter! Eventually, after three long months I received an official letter from the headquarters of the Parachute Regiment offering me a commission in the Paras – which I swiftly accepted.