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
3/8
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)
3/9
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