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!
2/6
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.
3
WORK HARD … PLAY HARD
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