2
The Medic of Long Tan

Phill ‘Doc’ Dobson, Medic, 6 RAR

Nui Dat, June 1966–March 1967

As he stepped into a clearing between a banana plantation and a rubber plantation 5 kilometres east of Nui Dat on 18 August 1966 and heard the first intense echoes of gunfire, Delta Company medic Phill ‘Doc’ Dobson looked around and wondered what the hell was happening. Patrolling, as usual, at the back of the company headquarters (CHQ) group, Doc and his stretcher-bearer, Geordie Richardson, were always the last to know. As often as not, they didn’t have a clue. Doc says, ‘One minute the rest of CHQ were ahead of us, and then they’d disappeared into the rubber trees.’ Suddenly mortar shells were landing and exploding just to the right of them.

Doc and Geordie took off, ducking and weaving through the grippingly hot tropical afternoon with 100 pounds’ (45 kilos) worth of gear on their backs or attached to the webbing harnesses around their bodies. Skirting along the edge of the rubber plantation, Doc spotted a slight knoll that looked a likely spot to hunker behind until everyone regrouped. When Company Sergeant Major Jack Kirby found them a few minutes later and bellowed at them to dig in, Doc and Geordie hauled out their entrenching tools and dug. Despite encountering some rock, they managed to excavate a shallow shell scrape about 2 metres long and 20 centimetres deep and wide enough for both of them. Lying there watching apprehensively for some indication of what was actually going on, all they could see was rubber trees made gloomy by gathering clouds, but the noise of the mortars and gunfire was increasing and pretty damn close.

All they could do was wait . . .

When their first casualty arrived about 4 p.m., their shell scrape became their company aid post. Doc has no idea where the soldier came from, though he thinks maybe big Jack Kirby carried him in over his shoulder. Nor does Doc remember who the soldier was because he was so stunned by the extent and seriousness of the wound it was all he could comprehend; he can still see it vividly fifty years later. ‘It was as though a surgeon had sliced his leg open right down the side. It was so deep I could see all his bones framed by bleeding flesh and the ragged edges of his trousers. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that.’

Doc’s priorities were: apply pressure to stop the bleeding, treat the shock and ease the pain. Talking as calmly as possible, he reassured the digger as he quickly injected a disposable syringe of morphine into his arm. Then, leaving the soldier’s trousers in place and working from the top of the leg down, Doc directed Geordie to hold the wound together while he layered large, thick gauze-covered dressings over it all and bound the leg back together with crepe bandages.

He’d barely secured the bindings when the next casualty came in and then the next. With the noise of the battle escalating around them, Doc dosed both soldiers with a shot of morphine, then he and Geordie dressed and bound the shrapnel wounds on one, and packed the gunshot wound in the other with shell dressings and strapped it all together with more crepe bandage. The wounded kept coming in ones and twos, many of them over the shoulder of Jack Kirby, who had no time to tell the medics any more than ‘all hell’s broken loose’. Doc gave all of them a dose of morphine and, between them, he and Geordie strapped their wounds as best they could. By late afternoon they had about a dozen wounded lying or propped around the little dugout.

Then the darkening sky turned black and it started to bucket down rain.

Phill Dobson grew up in Victoria and joined the army at Watsonia outside Melbourne in 1962 because the navy didn’t want him (he failed their medical). Three months’ rookie training at Kapooka in NSW convinced him that he definitely didn’t want to be in the infantry so, when he was asked to elect his preferences, he nominated medic as his first choice, and got it.

In September 1962, Phill was sent to the Healesville School of Army Health for six weeks of medical assistant training that included first aid, basic nursing procedures and documentation – but all geared to World War I and II diagnostics so that they were taught how to treat things like trench foot and frostbite.

Aware of the growing speculation that nuclear war might break out between the United States and Russia, as reported on the BBC and relayed to Australian news services, Phill and his mates were pretty sure they’d end up in Cuba. Fear of the threat to world peace ramped up as rumours flitted across the radio waves that a Russian ship loaded with missiles had docked in Havana, Cuba, just off the coast of Florida in the United States. By the time Phill had completed the course, the world was holding its collective breath as John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev faced off, neither prepared to back down. When Khrushchev accepted an offer from President Kennedy that averted the nuclear crisis, Phill breathed a sigh of relief; he wasn’t going off to war.

He and his mates had requested postings in Victoria or across the border in South Australia, but most of them were sent to Queensland. Phill claims he’d never even heard of Brisbane before he was posted to the No 1 Military Hospital at Yeronga in Brisbane’s south.

Meanwhile, Australia’s attention turned to South Vietnam, where the first Australian Army training teams had joined 12 000 US military advisers giving tactical training and support to the South Vietnamese in the face of continued attacks from the Viet Cong.

Phill spent nearly three years in the wards at 1 Mil, where he became well practised in the hospital patient-care procedures that were considered appropriate for medics. ‘We made beds, carted bedpans, took temperatures and blood pressures and did whatever the nursing sisters told us to do.’

By his own admission, he wasn’t a model soldier. Phill had been up on three charges including ‘drunk and disorderly on parade’ when the commanding officer at 1 Mil announced one morning that he was looking for three medics to transfer to Enoggera Barracks, on the other side of Brisbane. Looking Phill straight in the eye, the CO added, ‘If no one volunteers, I’ll nominate them myself.’ Phill got the message and put his hand up. In September 1965, he was assigned to Delta Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. Despite his earlier wishes, he’d ended up attached to the infantry.

Like most regular army medics, Phill automatically became known as ‘Doc’. He worked in the regimental aid post at Enoggera for about eight months looking after the day-to-day medical problems of the soldiers based there until, in May 1966, Delta Coy was advised that 6 RAR was going to Vietnam.

Along with the rest of the battalion, Doc boarded a Qantas 707 at Amberley RAAF base just south-west of Brisbane and flew out, destined initially for the Australian Logistic Support Group (ALSG) at Vung Tau. As they all stepped off the plane in Saigon on 4 June, they were enveloped by a tremendously hot midsummer blanket of wet, tropical heat. Vung Tau, when they got there, wasn’t much better, even though it was near the beach.

Nothing went quite the way Doc imagined. He expected to be in Vung Tau for orientation for a few days but all they got was a training run ordered by the officer commanding, Major Harry Smith. He sent them off in the middle of the first day, in their bush fatigues with a full load in their backpacks, running along the back beaches, up through a smelly, swampy area and straight into the middle of a firing range belonging to the South Vietnamese Army. In the midst of a lot of shocked yelling to ‘Retreat, retreat’, Delta Coy got back on track and ran another mile in the stinking hot midday sun before the first of several soldiers keeled over with sunstroke. ‘I did what I could for them knowing we’d been told back home just to holler for help and it would come, but the OC was yelling at me to get them on their feet. I couldn’t work out why until I realised there was no back-up. I was it.’ Doc says it taught him to make a decision and stick with it. He told the OC, ‘The casualties are mine to worry about, sir, so butt out, sir.’ With the rest of the company hanging around waiting, all he could do was help the sick men into some shade, get their gear and their shirts off their backs to help reduce their temperatures, and give them some fluids. They eventually made it back to the ALSG in the late afternoon, but one of the soldiers spent a night in the 2nd Field Ambulance suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration. He was medivaced home on the next RAAF flight.

More than anything, the incident made Doc realise the practical implications of his responsibilities as company medic and made him question his capacity to manage as the only medic out in the field in isolation. ‘At Healesville, we’d learnt how to treat trench feet and frostbite and nothing about tropical dermatitis or how to pack a blast wound. They did show us a bottle of intravenous fluid and the tubing that goes with it but we didn’t ever give an injection, take a blood test or treat multi-casualties.’

Next day, 6 RAR was relocated to the 1st Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat, joining 5 RAR (who’d arrived first to start clearing the area) and 1 RAR (redeployed from Bien Hoa), as well as the newly arrived 1 ATF Command, 1st Armoured Personnel Carrier Squadron, New Zealand and Australian artillery units, the 1st Field Regiment, 9 Squadron RAAF and the Special Air Services Regiment (SAS). Very quickly someone realised that none of the members of 5 RAR or 6 RAR had been blood-tested to check their records were correct. Despite the fact that most of them had never done it before, Doc and fourteen other medics from the two battalions took blood tests from nearly a thousand soldiers. ‘I don’t know how the first few survived,’ he says with a rueful laugh, ‘but I got pretty proficient by the time we were done.’

At best, 1 ATF was a very crude tent settlement that expanded as each unit arrived. Doc and Geordie set up their company aid post, or CAP, in the tent they lived in. Before they’d left Vung Tau, they’d picked up all their medical supplies, which included cartons of dressings and gauze bandages from the Australian Army and a large selection of fantastic new medical supplies that the US forces provided: brand-new crepe bandages, morphine for pain relief, penicillin and tetracycline for antibiotic treatment. Used to mixing their own penicillin in sterile water, Doc was stoked to find the US supplies came in disposable syringes – boxes and boxes of them. He couldn’t understand why they were given so many antibiotic syringes until he discovered that the medics were expected to treat the venereal diseases that ran rampant through the military after soldiers had been on R&R. With a grin he says it always amused him that the diggers got VD but the officers got NSU (non-specific urethritis). ‘I never did learn how the bugs knew to differentiate between the ranks!’

Out on patrol, every Australian soldier carried a wound dressing in his backpack and the medics carried heaps, all of which were WWII shell dressings. They were okay, Doc says, although he doubted their sterility so many years after they were originally packaged. ‘The rolls of gauze bandaging were so frayed at the ends we had to cut the edges off to use them, otherwise they got tangled up as they unrolled.’ Whenever they went out on patrol, he and Geordie stuffed as many of the Americans’ beautiful crepe bandages into their packs as they could fit.

Like everyone else they carried all their water and rations for several days, a steel mug, a small stove, hexamine fuel tablets for cooking, shaving gear (they had to shave every day), a machete, shelter, a lightweight blanket, a hammock, spare socks, plus their weapons, ammunition, a grenade, flares for guiding dustoff (emergency evacuation) choppers and a torch, plus all the medical supplies they could squeeze in. ‘You have to understand we went out for days, sometimes weeks. We had to take everything we might need because we couldn’t be sure when we’d be resupplied out on patrol.’

During their first few weeks at Nui Dat, Delta Coy went out on short patrols. Doc heard his first shots fired in live contact and saw his first enemy killed in action, a middle-aged Viet Cong woman. This brought home to him, more than anything, the grim consequences of war.

As the only trained medic in the company, he taught each of the three platoon medics some basic first aid techniques. He talked to them and Geordie about the problems they might encounter out on patrol, although he was mostly guessing because he had no more bush experience than they did.

Day to day, Doc dealt with the kind of problems that plagued anyone living rough. He and Geordie quickly got into the routine of a daily CAP session in the front of their tent whenever they were at the base. Soldiers regularly came in with rotten feet because they rarely had their boots off out on patrol; they couldn’t risk being attacked without their boots on. In fact, they lived and fought and slept – when they got the chance – fully dressed for the duration of the patrol. They might go for days or even weeks in the same clothes, slogging through the tropical heat, sloshing through mud and slush when it rained, sleeping on the ground in shell scrapes, building up layers of filthy, clinging muck on their bodies.

Back at base, they’d get cleaned up as soon as possible and spend as much time as they could drying out and clearing up whatever ailments they suffered. Every day, Doc would treat fungal rashes and skin infections, aches and pains, constipation thanks to the very ordinary diet and limited water rations, small cuts and big ones that needed to be treated properly in the tropical climate. He dealt with everything he could, and sent anything he couldn’t over to the regimental medical officer at the main battalion headquarters.

By the time 16 August, 1966, came around, the promise of a Col Joye/Little Pattie concert in a couple of days’ time had lightened everyone’s spirits; they all looked forward to an afternoon off listening to some good old Aussie rock’n’roll. The men from 5 RAR were out patrolling in the jungle north of the base trying to locate an enemy identified by intelligence reports but rarely seen. A Coy, 6 RAR were also out, in the east and north-east of Nui Dat, but reported little contact with the Viet Cong, having killed two and captured only one.

At 2.45 a.m. on 17 August, 1 ATF came under direct attack from mortars and rifle fire. More than twenty Australians were wounded. The artillery returned fire and steadily the attack diminished and stopped. In the light of the new day, B Coy was sent out to find the source of the mortar attacks. Patrolling east and north-east of the base, B Coy found the baseplates from the mortar attack but no sign of any large threat to 1 ATF. A Coy sighted several small groups but, again, nothing to indicate a large force in the vicinity.

On 18 August, just as they were getting seriously revved up about the concert, Delta Coy was ordered out to relieve B Coy. They had no reason to expect trouble, which just made them more pissed off about missing the fun. They passed B Coy coming back in at about 1 p.m. Lucky buggers, thought Doc.

Delta Coy continued to head east towards Long Tan. When the track divided, the OC, Harry Smith, sent 10 Platoon to the left and 11 Platoon to the right, with 12 Platoon following CHQ in the centre.

At 3.40 p.m. six Viet Cong literally walked into 11 Platoon, who opened fire wounding two. As the VC retreated dragging their wounded, 11 Platoon gave chase.

They followed their tracks for about twenty minutes until they reached a clearing in the plantation. Heavy firing broke out to their left. As 11 Platoon returned fire, their commander radioed CHQ reporting a platoon-sized enemy.

At the same time, mortars began falling near CHQ, 10 Platoon and 12 Platoon. Harry Smith ordered 11 Platoon to withdraw, but suddenly they were outflanked and all hell broke loose.

Dug in behind the knoll a couple of hundred metres away, Doc was wondering, What the fuck is happening? Doc says he’s not usually a swearing man, but the circumstances were special that day and he lashed out with a torrent of abuse that would make a bullocky blush.

The deafening noise of mortar blasts, heavy artillery fire and gunshots from the enemy, mingled with return fire from Delta Coy and artillery fire coming from the Royal New Zealand Artillery who were attached to Delta Coy, got louder and closer as the afternoon wore on. And then the torrential rain added misery to the terror.

The wounded soldiers had all come in without their backpacks, so they had no ponchos, no blankets and no way of keeping the rain off.

‘Shit, mate, whadda we do now?’ Doc asked Geordie desperately.

‘Fuckin’ hell, Doc, you’re the medic,’ snapped Geordie. ‘What do you reckon we should do?’

They kept on doing what they were doing. Doc let the wounded lie however they thought they were most comfortable, and he and Geordie continually propped their heads up as best they could to keep their faces out of the water and the mud. Doc says he did a whole lot of things he was trained not to do that day. If they wanted to drink, he gave them a drink. If they wanted a smoke, he lit it for them. He lied to them about their wounds if he could get away with it, because knowing in those circumstances was too distressing. ‘They had enough to worry about wondering if any of us would get out alive.’

Doc moved steadily among the casualties, checking each one had a pulse and a clear airway and reassuring them that they’d be okay. He checked that the wet, bloody bandages were keeping the pressure on their wounds and thanked his lucky stars he’d not had a blast injury to deal with. The ones he had were complicated enough. One soldier had a gunshot wound to his upper arm. There was no exit wound and Doc worried about nerve or muscle damage. He gave him morphine, splinted the arm and tried to block out the soldier’s screaming voice as he kept telling Doc his arm was burning up. Doc couldn’t have known that he’d been hit by a tracer bullet and the phosphorous didn’t ignite until the bullet hit bone.

They had one young soldier who’d fallen to pieces with the terror of it all. Doc propped him up against a tree and, whenever the firing started coming from a different direction, he or Geordie pulled him around so he was still protected. There was nothing they could do for his emotional pain. ‘He was sitting against the tree, rain pouring down over him, staring into space, shaking and crying. I felt bad that there was no time to stop and chat with him, not that he’d have heard anyway.’

Out of the blue, around 6 p.m., a couple of soldiers skidded into their muddy CAP with armfuls of blankets, one of them yelling to Doc that they’d come wrapped around a resupply of ammunition boxes. Doc was just grateful they’d arrived, even though they were quickly wet through in the appalling conditions. The casualties continued to come in, a couple of them crawling.

One arrived with gunshot wounds to his left arm and left side and shrapnel wounds in his abdomen. Doc learnt later he’d been shot three times trying to save a mate. Another mate again had been killed trying to save him. Doc gave the soldier one of his precious remaining doses of morphine, checked for any other wounds as best he could, dressed the ones he could see and bound them with crepe bandages. And still the rain came down.

The running water washed the blood away but soaked every­thing in mud. Frustrated by the conditions and terrified he might let the wounded down by not doing enough for them, Doc says he had moments of pure panic.

One of the last to come in was a digger wounded through both ankles by 61-millimetre mortar fragments. When Doc went to take his boots off, he bailed up and insisted, ‘If I’m going, I’m going with my fuckin’ boots on!’ Knowing that he’d served for about twenty years, including in Korea and Malaya, and that he was a sergeant, Doc took him at his word and applied shell dressings either side of each ankle with extra ones in between, and pressure-bandaged his feet together as tightly as he could, over the top of his boots, hoping like hell that he didn’t have any hidden injuries.

As the rain stopped and the gloomy light began to fade, Doc ran out of morphine and shell dressings. He heard Harry Smith give the order to shrink the perimeter. The men who were left alive in Delta Coy had closed in and formed a semicircle about 20 metres in front of the CAP and the wounded to protect and defend them to the end. Delta Coy diggers were counting the last of their bullets as the Viet Cong moved in closer, their machine guns splintering the rubber trees so badly they were crashing to the ground, adding to the echoing, hammering cacophony. ‘We could see Charlie coming. They just kept coming. I don’t know what I was really thinking at that time but we were surrounded. Harry Smith reckoned we had about ten minutes left but I think he was being very optimistic.

‘And then someone was yelling that the APCs were coming . . .’

Reinforcements arrived in the nick of time, B Coy moving in from the west and A Coy rumbling across in front of Delta Coy in armoured personnel carriers (APCs) that fired their 50-calibre machine guns into the enemy as they came. The Viet Cong evaporated back into the plantation and were gone.

Three and a half long and vicious hours after it started, the Battle of Long Tan was over.

The silence was resounding. ‘It was eerie and amazing,’ Doc murmurs.

Doc and Geordie still had little idea what had happened outside their CAP and no time to worry about it with twenty-two wounded soldiers in their care, many of them unconscious and several of them with life-threatening injuries, all of them lying in muddy, bloody slush.

The first priority with the onset of the cold jungle night was getting the wounded out.

They loaded them into the APCs and trundled 750 metres to a suitable landing zone for the dustoff choppers. John Robbins from 11 Platoon had been shot through the right elbow and had shrapnel wounds to his right hand. He doesn’t know how long it took to get himself back to the CAP and he only vaguely recalls Doc Dobson giving him a needle, probably morphine, but he remembers Doc was still working on someone in the back of the APC on the way to the landing zone.

The APC crews formed a perimeter and, chorused by the thump-thump-thump-thump of the incoming dustoffs, opened the tops of their vehicles so that their lights marked out the landing area.

It was after midnight by the time Doc saw the last of the wounded take off on their way to the 36th Evacuation Hospital at Vung Tau. The last chopper carried four dead.

In the dark after the choppers left, with the APCs still holding the perimeters, they tried to work out who was still alive and who was missing. There were fifteen members of Delta Coy unaccounted for.

Doc bunked down for the night between Jack Kirby and Geordie, all of them bloodstained, mud-soaked and shocked. They tried despairingly to sleep.

In the first light of the new day, Doc and the remaining men of Delta Coy quietly breakfasted on cold tinned rations washed down with hot coffee as they readied themselves to return to the battlefield to recover their mates.

Reinforcements arrived to share the task. When C Company medic Corporal Geoff Jones found Doc, he was struck by his appearance. He chatted with Doc for a few minutes and says, ‘He was unshaven and unkempt, his clothing was plastered in mud, blood and sweat, he was physically exhausted and he was now preparing to go through hell, yet again. I remember still how his face lit up in a weary smile as he made light of the gruelling experience he had somehow survived. Phill was ready for the assault on the battlefield and now, with a medical resupply, he knew if he had to, he could do it all again.’

It was 8.45 a.m. before the advance moved in. Harry Smith insisted that Delta Coy lead the charge.

There were dead bodies and parts of dead bodies strewn everywhere among the decimated rubber trees.

They found most of the dead Australians lying on the ground, still facing the enemy with their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. Delta Coy’s radio operator lay with one arm over his radio, the other holding his headset to his ear.

Just when it seemed there was little hope of finding anyone alive, they found Barry ‘Custard’ Mellor slouched against a rubber tree, shot through the arm and mouth, but still able to swear.

And then 11 Platoon Sergeant Bob Buick heard a faint voice calling, ‘Sergeant, Sergeant Buick . . .’

Against the odds, Jimmy Richmond had also survived. He’d been shot through the chest. He’d rolled himself in the mud to pack the hole in his back and had lain through the night waiting for dawn, hoping he wouldn’t die of thirst.

Calling the dustoff in to evacuate two more survivors in the face of such devastation was a glorious moment in an otherwise horrifying aftermath. Once they’d retrieved their own dead and evacuated them to Vung Tau for the return home, the Australians buried the dead Viet Cong, officially 245 of them although they had no way of knowing how many of their dead and wounded the enemy had taken with them when they left.

As he helped in the search for survivors, Doc found two Viet Cong alive. The first one was about twenty and had a deep gash to his leg and shrapnel wounds to his body. Doc’s initial reaction was to leave him, but then his training kicked in and he cleaned and treated the prisoner’s wounds before he was picked up and taken away. The second VC was just a boy, about sixteen, Doc thinks. ‘He was absolutely terrified and shivering with fear.’ He appeared not to be wounded at first, but when Doc laid him down he found a large, perfectly circle-shaped wound in his groin. Someone had pressed a small wad of gauze bandage into it. When Doc removed it, he found the wound was completely flyblown. There were hundreds of maggots crawling in it. Doc says he froze. He was thinking and talking but his hands wouldn’t work. ‘It was as if they were paralysed. I felt panicked. Thankfully Shortie [Peter Short, the A Coy medic] came by and he talked me through it.’ Doc cleaned the wound and dressed it and the boy was moved out.

Haunted by a plethora of grim memories, he says, ‘Until we went back next morning, I don’t think any of us understood the enormity of what happened that day.’

The battlefield was only small, about the size of two football fields. One hundred and eight members of Delta Coy including three New Zealanders had fought off a rolling wave of attack from an estimated 2500 Viet Cong.

Eighteen Australians died. Twenty-four were officially wounded, although Doc knows better than most that the true list is much longer than that.

Doc says he himself came through Long Tan okay. It was the death of Jack Kirby a few months later that fractured his spirit. ‘It’s tough being the medic among people who are your mates. I just wanted to do the best I could for all of them. At Long Tan, I did my job even though it wasn’t quite the way I was trained to do it. I just did what I had to do to get them through and I was pretty desperate some of the time but, contrary to what some say about me, I never safety-pinned anyone’s tongue to their bottom lip to stop them swallowing it.’

Although he wasn’t involved in the battle himself, fellow medic Geoff Jones says, ‘I knew almost immediately what Phill had achieved as the casualty numbers swept through the battalion like wildfire. To withstand the conditions, the uncertainty of the battle’s outcome, and to treat and sustain a score and more of wounded, many critical, was a superhuman effort on Phill’s part. Listening to the nearby battle sounds from my vantage point at C Coy headquarters and sheltering from the torrential rain I could only imagine how Phill was coping. His performance at the battle of Long Tan was outstanding. I was in awe of his steadiness and skill and my admiration for him has not diminished over the years.’

Doc was Mentioned in Dispatches (MID). Parts of his citation read:

Although the area was being swept with intense enemy fire and under adverse conditions of mud and rain, Corporal Dobson moved around and tended to the wounded.

He organised and treated the wounded for three hours of daylight and five hours of darkness until the casualties were evacuated.

But for his selfless devotion to duty and his disregard for his own personal safety, some of the many wounded treated by Corporal Dobson would have died.

Fifty years on, he says he still doesn’t know how they survived. To the men of Delta Coy, he’s a legend and a hero. Doc never did become a model soldier, but it didn’t matter. He just wanted to be a good medic. He grins as he admits he actually lost his rifle during the battle at Long Tan. He says Harry Smith said it best when he yelled at him one day for being too slow.

‘Doc, it’s just as well you’re a bloody good medic because, as a soldier, you’re fucking hopeless.’

(L-R) Brigadier OD Jackson presenting medic Phill Dobson with his Vietnam Campaign ribbon and oak leaf after he was Mentioned in Despatches (MID) following the Battle of Long Tan, 1966. Courtesy Phill Dobson.

Phill Dobson outside his tent at Nui Dat, 1966. Courtesy Phill Dobson.