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)
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