Читать книгу No Need for Heroes - Sandy MacGregor - Страница 13

Three Field Troop's landing at Vung Tao could have been heroic. But it was more comic than anything.

There they were, waiting on the Sydney's decks to clamber down rope ladders to the landing craft that bobbed below them. It was seven in the morning of 28th September, 1965. The air was thick with expectation and Aussie voices but, as the sun's first rays lit Vung Tao beach, it beckoned a in way more reminiscent of Suvla Bay than Bondi. The adrenalin flowed, an electrifying undercurrent to the lame jokes and bravado.

Les Colmer, who was my batman, remembers standing in the landing craft half expecting a volley of Viet Cong bullets to spray them as they churned through the surf. The ramp crashed down, a whistle was blown and they charged, then jogged, then walked up the beach. As the final frames of halfforgotten war films flickered and faded in their minds, the illusion was then completely shattered when they caught sight of their first Vietnamese – women and children selling Pepsi Cola to the country's newest arrivals.

Vung Tao is only about 40km SouthEast of Saigon as the crow flies, and Bien Hoa is about 20km NorthEast of the city, but it had been decided to fly all the men, their essential stores and tents there. The rest was to be unloaded at the docks in Saigon and transported by road.

I decided to fly down to Vung Tao to supervise my own Troop's arrival and it's just as well that I did. The arrangements were a complete shambles and the units that were supposed to meet the troops and organise their transit to Bien Hoa didn't turn up. I ended up organising the whole operation myself, even down to getting the stores loaded on to the transport planes. I was surprised as much as relieved when the rest of our gear eventually turned up a couple of days later. Some other units lost whole pallets of stores.

We had to spend one night at Vung Tao while they found space on the transport planes to take us to Bien Hoa. And if it was frustrating for me, it was even more disorientating for the new arrivals. Mick McGrath vividly recalls the not so simple task of getting his truck from the ship to the landing craft, to the beach and then to Bien Hoa.

"I was thrown over the side in me truck and rowed ashore on one of the landing craft, shoved up the beach and a big black MP waved me down the road telling me to go down there, keep moving, keep moving," says Mick. "So you keep on moving, can't see anybody else, can't even see another Australian vehicle anywhere. I ended up finding the boys and they said you can't get anywhere until tomorrow now because the planes aren't working any more today and we were getting flown.

"Anyway we had to look after ourselves and, with the help of some Yank hospitality, we ended up with a big gut full of American beer. I don't remember eating. I slept that first night on the floor of an APC (Armoured Personnel Carrier) and the next morning loaded the truck into a Hercules transport plane, got dropped at Bien Hoa and they just pointed me in the right direction.

"They said, 'You go down there guy and you follow around there' and somehow or other I ended up finding my way to the camp and that's when the nightmare hit."

The nightmare, as Mick describes it, was that there was no camp to speak of ... and it had been raining.

Bien Hoa was the main airbase in South Vietnam. 173 Airborne Brigade, the cream of US units, was given the dual task of defending the airbase and of being the reaction force for the 3rd Corps area. This meant that if there were any enemy attacks in the 3rd Corps area anything that happened as far as enemy skirmish was concerned, the 173rd Brigade reacted to it by sending in soldiers to help the locals by dealing with the enemy. 173rd Brigade consisted of two American battalions and the Australian battalion (1RAR).

Incidentally the 3rd Corps area stretched from Cambodia in the west to South China Seas in the east and from Saigon in the south to Phuoc Long in the north. An area of approximately 25,000 square kilometres and one that we wouldn't get bored in.

Our base was 200 yards from the Engineers of 173rd Airborne Brigade. It was a scrap of land smaller than two football pitches which had to accommodate 60odd soldiers and all their earthmoving equipment. I had arranged for them to be billeted with the Americans for three days while we established ourselves. We got ourselves set up in time, but only after working 18hour days.

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An early shot of our base camp at Bien Hoa. Being very swampy, a

first task was drainage – even then the drains wouldn't hold

up without being reinforced. (AWM P1595.079)

"It was just a paddock of swamp, water everywhere and we had to just build that into a camp," says Mick McGrath. "So you put your ammo boxes down, put your stretcher up on the ammo boxes and Bob's your uncle. Except at Bien Hoa in the morning you'd still be wet because the ammo boxes just sink straight down into the quagmire."

Les Colmer suffered worse than most because he was on picket duty on the first night.

"I just got there and they handed me my gun and told me I was on guard duty. By the time I was ready to set up my bivvy, all the good spots had been taken and I was down at the bottom where it was all mud."

Mick was envious of the Americans' large dormitory tents.

"They were like big barrack rooms, when we only had 4-man tents. It's a bit different if you've got 40 people all to pitch in and get one tent space ready. Out of the 4 people to put up our tent there'd be only 2, because in that tent there might have been two of them out working.

"For instance Dennis (Ayoub) was probably working – he was the plant operator in our section and he'd have been up on his equipment. I was the driver for the section, so I'd have been in the truck carting stores or doing something for the troop.

"That left two guys to sort of put the tent together for the four of us. One thing about us was that we were always fullon at work. You had a job every day, whether it be mess duties, doing some road project, building a culvert, building a shower block or you were in the field."

Sparrow Christie wasn't quite so impressed with his American neighbours.

"Yeah, the first night at Bien Hoa was wet – water was running through. So everybody lined up and had a shower in a massive square with just shower roses hanging out of it. Everybody just sort of went and soaped up and you looked around and there was a big line of black and white guys soaping up – there was about 6 out of 10 coloured guys in 173rd Airborne.

"And then we got dressed and lined up with our mess tins and the Americans had those ones with little scoops all over them, you know and we just had the old square dixies, you know the big and the small.

"Mick Lee was lined up and some big boofhead of a Yank cook put a big ladle of custard all over his main meal for a joke. Mick just tipped it all out on the floor where he stood, went and washed his dixie and went and lined up again. There was custard and shit everywhere, you know, and nobody said boo."

The Americans were not, however, the enemy. The enemy were out there in the jungle somewhere. We knew because of these damn artillery guns called Long Toms that were firing over the top of us every hour, every night.

It was what we call harassing and interdiction fire with a range of about 15 to 17 kilometres and it was designed to harass the enemy and keep them on the move. We didn't get much sleep for the first week until we got used to them.

We were given three weeks, until October 20, to get our own camp ready before we had to make ourselves available to perform engineering tasks for other units, although 1RAR tried to get us working for them a week early. I had to politely decline, but it took a message from the HQ of the Australian Armed Forces Vietnam to get them to back off.

We had more than enough work to keep us busy. We had to get our kitchen up and running, get our own stores in, dig latrines and start putting up our basic camp buildings.

As a general rule when you're moving into virtually virgin territory the first thing you do is to establish your sections – we had three tents to a section, four men to a tent – and each section must dig its weapon pits. Weapon pits come before even tents since you won't need anywhere to sleep if you've just been overrun by the enemy. In our case the weapons pits proved troublesome and messy as they kept filling up with water. Still, the machine gun posts had to be established, although later they'd be put in high towers overlooking the perimeter. The machine gun posts had to be manned day and night from the first day, because we were now part of the perimeter of the main camp. This is a good example of how we were soldiers first and engineers second, a fact I'd have to impress on my superiors later in the war when they expected us to perform engineering duties fulltime but refused to allow infantry cover for us.

After that we started establishing basic facilities like toilets, which were just trenches or holes in the ground which we'd burn out fairly frequently with diesel. Then, of course there's your mess hall and the orderly room for the officers.

Because the ground was saturated, and it was a soggy, clay area, we had to put drains in. And until we put duckboards down, we had to wade through a sea of sticky mud. It took a long time for the ground to dry out, so it was very uncomfortable.

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With time our facilities grew at Bien Hoa to include better toilets and hot and cold running water. (AWM P1595.060)

We also had to put up a workshop to service all the equipment – trucks, bulldozers etc – that we'd brought with us. We had stuff bogged all the time so we had to build tracks and roads as well as the drains that we hoped would dry the land out for us.

There was a lot of work to do but you get through it fairly quickly when you've got sixty guys who are able to concentrate on it.

We had moved into an area that had been cleared as part of the defences for the whole brigade, so the bush had to be cleared back another 100 metres on the other side of the wire. That way you can see the enemy crossing that last strip of land if they decide to attack you.

We had the equipment, we had the men and we had the skill, but I soon discovered that there was a problem getting raw materials. If I had tried to go through the usual red tape to get what we needed I'd probably still be sitting in Bien Hoa waiting for it to arrive.

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This was our workshop with the frame built out of 2 inch piping

that we purchased from our "casino" winnings. Next to it was a

vehicle ramp built from "acquired" timber. (AWM P1595.061)

This may sound ridiculous, but 1RAR were on a very tight budget. I wrote in a report that we were having problems getting the very basic supplies and said that we were fortunate that we had our own transport as that allowed us to "beg, borrow or otherwise acquire" essential materials.

For "otherwise acquire" read "steal from" or trade with the Yanks.

The Americans seemed to have mountains of everything, so when I needed timber, I took a couple of trucks down to the dock at Saigon and just loaded it up. Realising that we wouldn't be able to unload it at the other end, I got one of the lads to drive the forklift on to the back of our truck and took that too. I just signed for it and took it away, as simple as that.

Mick McGrath, who was driving one of the trucks, says he was stopped at the gate by a South Vietnamese guard who asked him for some documentation. The only thing he had on him, says Mick, was the certificate they'd all been given when they crossed the equator on the HMAS Sydney, so he handed that over and was allowed to pass. Mick reckons that anybody who turned up after that who hadn't been across the equator on a ship wouldn't have got through!

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This was my office built from some of the timber taken from the Saigon wharves. It was the last building to go up at Bien Hoa and I guess I worked in it for less than 10 days. (AWM P1595.107)

I wonder if the chief engineer ever imagined how his advice to "just do what engineers do" would be interpreted. Our unofficial saying is "Work hard – play hard". Well, we worked bloody hard in those first few weeks and we'd play hard too when we got the chance. But before that we had to go out on our first operation. It came only a week after we arrived and, I have to say, it left me wondering what all the fuss was about.

* * *

On October 8, myself and five NCOs went on our first mission as observers. I think it would be fair to say that we were all gripped by a mixture of fear and excitement but were glad to get out of camp and into the field and away from the noise of the Long Toms. What a disappointment it turned out to be.

Operation Ben Cat II in the Iron Triangle was a search and destroy mission into an area only 25 kilometres north of Saigon which was thought to have large Viet Cong supply, maintenance and medical facilities and possibly as much as two regiments hidden somewhere in the jungle.

The area had been pounded by B52 bombers but it was thought that the Viet Cong had returned. With the benefit of hindsight, it's almost certain that they had, since this is the area where we later found the tunnel complex that made 3 Field Troop famous.

But this early operation was a nonevent. We found a few booby traps and cleared a couple of villages. But we were all left with the feeling that if this was the war, we could handle it – the boredom was the worst of it.

It was then that I made my first observations on the calibre of the American troops we were supposed to be fighting alongside. My remarks, in an official Army report, were as unwelcome as they were misguided. This is what I said:

... The Australian soldier, compared to his US counterpart, is a long way ahead but the Australian Engineer is even further ahead than the US field engineer. This can mainly be attributed to the standard of training achieved by the Australian Army. There seems to be little or no discipline in the lower ranks and certainly no initiative is shown by anybody below the rank of sergeant ... One glaring example of lack of common sense occurred when a US engineer was found trying to pump up a wheelbarrow wheel with the air outlet forced over the grease nipple.

Some of the men of 3 Field Troop, when asked what their first impressions of me were, have said I was an "arrogant prick" – or variations thereof – in those early days. Well, I suppose the arrogance is there for all to read. In my innocence, I blithely sent off 15 copies of the report, with every Australian Engineer unit receiving a copy and six going to Army HQ. Little did I realise that copies may be passed on to our American allies.

The result was that all the copies were retrieved from their various recipients and I was given a dressing down about who I was allowed to send reports to and the topics I should be covering in those reports.

I am glad to say I would later revise my opinion of the American troops. And despite this first tangle with authority, I began to realise what a fortunate position I was in.

Because I had to serve two masters – 1RAR and 173rd Airborne Brigade – it ironically meant I had more, rather than less, control over what we did. And since we were establishing new operating procedures as we went, I had a degree of autonomy unheard of for someone of my rank in the field.

That meant that I could make sure 3 Field Troop were much more actively involved than engineers would normally have been. I wanted to be in the thick of it, as did most of the men. And what we did then changed the way engineers operate to this day.

In fact, it could have changed the course of the whole war.