Читать книгу No Need for Heroes - Sandy MacGregor - Страница 15

Whatever else you can say about engineers, they work hard. After the first month, two sections of 12 men each were sent out to do brigade work, while the rest stayed in the camp, half as the duty section – manning the machine gun posts and other basic soldiering – and the others working on the camp itself.

Those who went out to work for the brigade would be involved in everything from building shower blocks, kitchens and accommodation huts, mainly for 1RAR, to clearing bush around the camp perimeter and fairly major civil engineering works. In that first couple of months we built 10 helicopter pads, two kilometres of road and one small bridge.

Then they would then return to camp after a 10hour day to help with the work on our own stuff like proper toilets and showers and road works. Even when we'd been out on operations, that's what we'd be doing when the other boys were sitting down to write letters.

Meanwhile I was trying to get used to the fairly complex radio operating procedures, the codes, the jargon and all the rest of it. I had to keep up with all this so that I'd be ready when we were actually called into action and I spent a lot of time just listening to the other operations on the radio.

I had to train my batman, Les Colmer, on all the codes and map reading, so that he could keep things moving if I was killed or wounded. I always had the utmost faith in Les, although he has recently revealed that my faith was misplaced – he used to mug his way through.

"Most of it was over my head," says Les. "I didn't even know where the bloody Cambodian border was. If you showed me a map I'd say 'Yeah' but you couldn't sit me in the jungle and say oh it's over there four clicks that way. But it didn't worry me. I just drew up some notes and they'd give us the general direction. My main worry was how many thousand yards we were going to do a day.

"Basically, I bullshitted. I just faked it. Sandy used to carry his own map and I used to carry mine and sometimes he'd give me directions and I'd go and tell Staff Sergeant Laurie Hodge where we were going and how many men we needed. I just sort of played along with it and tried to keep the job.

"I wasn't very good at radio work, either. I remember the first time I used the radio over there we were going on a big operation and I couldn't remember Sandy's codename. So I just said, 'Is Captain MacGregor there? ' and the next thing they were screaming and yelling. I was supposed to say 'Is Sunray Holdfast there? ' (Sunray = Boss; Holdfast = Engineer). I had a lot of trouble."

Our second operation – and the first in which 3 Field Troop played an active role – began on October 23rd and was called War Zone D. The battalion was on a basic search and destroy mission. It was only going to take 3 days and we went along to help with the repair and maintenance of any bridges along the way, to prepare landing zones and gun areas and to demolish any tunnels or enemy installations we might find.

There were 17 of us on that one and they kept us fairly busy although there were no great dramas. Most of the time we were classifying bridges to work out what sort of weight could go over them, probably in preparation for a bigger operation planned for a later date. We also had to classify roads in much the same way.

The benefit from our point of view was to get a chance to get used to the countryside. But one day they found some tunnels, which created a bit of excitement. I remember being called forward and standing there thinking, "There's the tunnel, boys ... what do we do now?"

We'd heard about the Viet Cong tunnels all over Vietnam but up to that point none of us had actually seen one. We didn't know what to expect and I wasn't quite sure what to do. But I did know that I wanted to find out what was down there and I wasn't prepared to ask the men to do something I wouldn't do myself.

So, just in case the boys needed to haul me out again, I got one of the blokes to tie a rope round my ankles and then they lowered me headfirst into the hole, with a torch in one hand and a bayonet in the other. I was let down the tunnel with a guy after me and I didn't know what to expect. All I could do was prod the earth with my bayonet and shine the light to see if I could find anything. It doesn't matter how small the tunnel is you never know where it's going to turn around, you don't know what's around the bend. You don't know what's in the floor, you don't know if it's abandoned, you don't know if it's booby trapped and you don't know why the tunnel is there in the first place.

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Our first ever tunnel in "War Zone D". Staff Sergeant Laurie Hodge is holding a rope tied to my ankles as I cautiously probed the floor, walls, and roof with a bayonet.

More often than not, a tunnel is just an escape run from underneath a house, ending up in a storm drain or a nearby rice paddy. This first tunnel ended up only about twenty or thirty feet away inside a house which we had already searched. But the area was not occupied with VC, so there was nothing terribly sinister about it and I got all my lads to go through the tunnel one by one. Later on we found another tunnel entrance down a well, and we were able then to figure out that there was a network of open trenches which ran into tunnels, some of which had little rooms off them. From that we deduced that the tunnels were either for personal protection or were escape routes. Most of them were not booby trapped, were not even hidden and many of them were open.

But that was our first experience and I know the reason I never ever had a problem with getting the guys to go down the tunnels was because I had led from the front. I knew it was essential that I went down the tunnels first, so I did it. And, to tell you the truth, it was interesting and I enjoyed it all.

There was a rather amusing postscript to my tunnel adventure. Les Colmer, who was also the troop's unofficial photographer, took a picture of my boots protruding from the tunnel with the rope round my ankles. A reporter took the same picture and sent it back to Australia. It eventually became Pix magazine's 'Pic Of The Week'. Now, there was no problem with that, except that the powers that be in the army were horrified to see that a troop commander was going down tunnels. I received a polite but firm directive from Brigadier Jackson, our commander in Saigon, that tunnel clearance was not a job for captains and I was expected to stay above ground.

* * *

Back in camp, life began to get a little bit more comfortable. Using a little engineering ingenuity, we installed our own hot water system which was very clever but, at the same time, very simple. You run a pipe under your hot water tank from your diesel supply. You bend it back under itself and drill a few holes in the top side of the bottom section of pipe. Once it's lit, as well as warming the water, the flame heats the section of pipe above it, which turns the

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This is the way we showered in the early days. From left to right are Brian Hay, Bob Bowtell, Keith Kermode and Geoff Guest.

Below: At Bien Hoa we had hot and cold running water. Plumbing

fittings were purchased with "casino" profits. (AWM P1595.100)

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diesel into gas, which makes the heater work even more efficiently.

Now that we had hot and cold running water, we needed to make showers, so we bought our own plumbing fittings with the proceeds from our casino.

Originally just part of the mess tent was given over to the odd game of cards, twoup and crown and anchor. But the casino came into its own with the arrival of our mess hall.

Now, since the 1RAR ration was two beers per man per day, it was not deemed necessary to give us a separate "wet" mess where supplies of alcohol could be locked away safely. But since we served two masters, I didn't see why we shouldn't choose the more advantageous of the two, in terms of alcohol supplies.

And since the army was providing us with a nice, prefabricated, secure mess hut, I didn't see why we shouldn't stick to the mess tent that we already had and put the new hut to much better use. So the mess hut was built in a hollow in the bend of a stream, a poker machine was leased from army supplies in Saigon and alcohol was bought very cheaply from our American comrades. The profits went into making our camp one of the bestequipped in Vietnam. In fact we bought many other of life's luxuries with our "Casino" money, for instance electric cable, 3-point plugs, chairs and later on spare parts that we couldn't get from the resupply system.

Keith Kermode was one of the drivers and he remembers how we got the cheap beer.

"Sandy found this Yank supplies depot on the road to Saigon and they had this weird thing that if one can in a carton of beers had burst, they'd throw the whole case out. For a few dollars you could just load the back of the truck up from this mountain of burst boxes. And there was never more than one or two bad cans in a case."

Our casino became a popular haunt for the men, and not only from our troop. Soldiers from other units would slip through the wire to drink with us and Americans – especially their black troops – became frequent visitors, despite the fact that they had their own, much more splendid casino.

"They had poker machines and a big swimming pool," recalls Mick Lee. "They used to love the Australians because a thing called 'the grip' was all the rage then. Some Australian mob had gone to Las Vegas. They had a certain way of pulling the handle and ended up getting barred.

"Being Aussies, we used to say we knew the grip and, lo and behold, we used to pull these jackpots off. But it was only sheer luck we didn't really know what we were doing.

"Anyway, one night I did it and I pulled down so hard that the handle came off in my hand. I'm standing there surrounded because I'd already pulled two jackpots and everyone had come round. I ended up throwing the handle in the swimming pool because I couldn't think of anything else to do with it."

You would have thought my quiet collusion with the men to build their wet mess would have been enough, but no. It seems that after the bar had been locked up for the night, they would tunnel their way under the boards and pass the beer out. To their credit, they always left the money, although there was another price to pay.

"I was coming past the American camp one day," recalls Keith Kermode, "and this guy comes out and says, 'Hey, Buddy. Do you know what's happened to our water? ' The Yanks took their water supply from the stream that ran past our casino, so I had a fair idea.

"I said, 'You wait here and I'll check it out. ' So I walked back up the stream and there, just inside our boundary, was the answer. The stream was blocked with beer cans – when we were drinking on the sly, we used to just throw them in the water and they'd kind of built up.

"So I went back down and told the Yank that I thought I knew what the problem was and I'd have it fixed in no time. I raced back into the camp and me and a couple of the others cleared the dam. That Yank probably still thinks I'm a great engineer."

Apart from hot water, the other great necessity of life is power, and by that I mean electricity. We had to go without for the first few weeks, until we came across this American depot for broken down equipment in the middle of which was this huge diesel driven generator, a 30 KVA – that's a lot of electricity. We weren't allowed to cannibalise one piece of equipment to fix another, but we were allowed to take anything we could fix ... and we had someone who

could fix anything.

"Waxy" Rayner was on detachment to us from the Electrical

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The vertical bomb cases mark the entrance of our base camp four months after we had been at Bien Hoa. (AWM P1595.092)

and Mechanical Engineers (RAEME) and there wasn't a machine made that he couldn't repair. The men used to take him their watches – this was before digital watches and microchips – and he'd have them working in no time.

Corporal Rod Goater, who was the RAEME detachment commander, helped to get the engine going and Waxy worked out that it would be fine as long as we didn't stop it. He then devised a way of doing a complete oil change while the generator was still running, which meant it never stopped from the day he got it going to the day it blew itself to oblivion ... but that's another story.

That generator was nicknamed Bhudda – it was driven by a Budanova engine – and became something of a mascot for the troop.

Bhudda was spitting out enough power to light the whole airbase, let alone our little corner, but it served another purpose, one which I only found out about fairly recently.

"We used to have some funny incidents around that old big Bhudda," says Mick Lee. "We used to have little seats all around there, it was like a little garden setting. We'd sit around and sing and yell out and talk and crack jokes and the noise from Bhudda used to drown it all out."

Our other mascot was the 3 Field Troop dog, Smedley. And he too provided entertainment for the lads. Every so often the men would capture rats and, when they got a break, they'd put the rats and Smedley inside a huge water tank then take bets on how long it took him to kill them.

Cruelty to animals doesn't count for much in the middle of a war zone. For my part, I worked the men damned hard, so they were entitled to play hard too.

* * *

On November 5, I led a small detachment of 16 men on Operation Hump, which took us to an area slightly north of where we'd been during the previous outing. Again it was a basic search and destroy mission, with the focus on any villages we might find.

It must have been around this time that I began to realise that the army wasn't as well organised as it might have been.

We had been told that once we had been dropped off by helicopter, we should rendezvous with B Company's headquarters staff who would tell us where we should be deployed. But when we got there, they weren't where they were supposed to be and we wasted a lot of time chasing after them.

When we finally did find out where to go, we were called forward to help search a village. It turned out that firstly, the village was abandoned and, secondly, they hadn't given us enough time to complete the search and we had to be pulled out anyway.

When I say the village was abandoned, you have to understand that the policy was that all areas under military control had to be cleared of civilians. The local population was relocated and rehoused in safe areas and, in fact, 3 Field Troop did a lot of work building houses and establishing services for relocated Vietnamese civilians.

After an area was cleared in that way, anyone in it who wasn't in the army was deemed to be the enemy. The reason we were being used for searches was that even an abandoned village could be full of hidden dangers. Every door, or cupboard or tunnel entrance could conceal a booby trap. It wasn't very clever to go crashing around knocking doors down like they do in the movies. We preferred to have engineers painstakingly check everything while the infantry boys watched our backs.

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We built our own practice tunnel system at Bien Hoa. All the soldiers from 3 Field Troop went through the tunnel with tear gas – sometimes it was worse than the real thing. (AWM P1595.004)

The village in question was called Xom Cay Xoai and consisted of about 150 huts and small buildings. Almost all the huts had some form of air raid shelter or bunker, either inside or attached to the outside.

We went back to it the next day and some documents, clothes, magazines and booby trap switches were found, suggesting that Viet

Cong troops had at least passed through. We also found about 20 tunnels between 6 and 15 feet long, and two bigger ones – 20 feet

and 35 feet long, which we demolished.

The next day we were supposed to be resupplied with explosives so we could demolish two 32ft wells. But the helicopter carrying the explosives didn't arrive until too late and we didn't have enough time to do the job properly.

We finished off the job the next day and on the day after that – the final day – we blew up a few mortar blinds. Then the choppers arrived to take us back to camp.

I was beginning to realise that we were pretty much feeling our way in these operations and it was up to me to make sure anyone who came after us didn't make the same mistakes or suffer similar delays to us. Because of that, my reports began to be quite specific about what should and should not be done.

From 3 Field Troop's point of view, we were fortunate the way it was working out, we were gradually being weaned on to this new kind of warfare rather than being dropped into the middle of it. But we'd be in the thick of it soon enough.

In the meantime, the following observations, which I made in my written report on the operation:

Much experience was gained from the operation mainly in the form of sappers familiarising themselves with battle noises, village search, tunnels (although small) and demolitions of several types. The helicopter assaults and extractions were also valuable experience.

This unit was not able or had no need to use the Mighty Mite machine with tear gas. It is felt that if any tunnels in a relatively friendly area are known to exist then very valuable experience would be gained by the troop practising searching, employing the use of tear gas.

In the end, we built our own tunnel for practising in. And the only reason I think there never was one before was that noone ever went down tunnels before we did. We were the first. We were the original Tunnel Rats and everyone else only followed our lead.