His comrades recall a burly young platoon commander brimming with energy and exuding natural leadership skills when he arrived in Vietnam in late August 1969. An enthusiastic rugby player, he was tough, forthright and decisive, and clearly relished a physical challenge. But he also showed another deeply rooted characteristic, which flourished as he gained experience and perspective: compassion. This was perhaps his most widely respected character trait when he later came to prominence as the commander of the Interfet force in East Timor in 1999 and subsequently as the Commander in Chief of our defence forces.
On 10 October 1969, Peter Cosgrove’s platoon was out on patrol in Phuoc Tuy Province when it found an occupied enemy bunker system. Because of the proximity of Allied troops, Cosgrove could not call in artillery or aerial fire support against the bunkers. Cosgrove instinctively summed up his options and immediately led his men on a direct assault on the bunkers. They captured the position, killing and wounding at least four of the enemy without suffering any casualties.
About a week later, Cosgrove’s platoon located another bunker system occupied by an equal number of enemy troops. Again, Cosgrove went on the offensive, silently deploying his men and catching the enemy unawares and putting them to flight. They abandoned their food, stores and documents.
The next day, while in the same bunker system, Cosgrove heard shots nearby. He ran to the contact area where he found his forward scout confronting a group of Viet Cong soldiers returning to their base. Cosgrove immediately joined the fight and then took control. When the enemy withdrew they left behind two dead and their rice stores. Cosgrove was subsequently successfully recommended for a Military Cross. He has always credited the calibre of the Diggers he led:
You learn all kinds of things. You learn a lot about yourself because the Diggers mirror in their own reactions how you’re performing and perhaps the strengths and flaws of your own character.
I was on the steepest learning curve imaginable. Leaving Duntroon as one of its less promising graduates, about halfway up the class, I think I probably had some strengths which suited me for infantry. I was a pretty determined player of sport, a knockabout sort of a figure, not afraid of hard work or the sort of privations of infantry life, so I would have carried that with me but into a totally unknown environment.
I was very lucky, I had a bit of an apprenticeship as a young commander with a quite experienced and polyglot lot of soldiers in 1 RAR in Malaysia where I was a team commander for four or five months effectively before going off to Vietnam. So I was technically not too bad and I’d also had this experience with good NCOs helping me and sort of training me before I took over this bunch of hard cases in Vietnam.
All of these guys had been there a while and there was a trickle flow of reinforcements coming in and old hands moving on, but the nucleus of this mob had been together since before the battalion went on operations.
Having arrived as a ‘Reo’ (a reinforcement officer) and taking command of an existing platoon – 5 Platoon, B Company of the 9th Battalian Royal Australian Regiment – (9 RAR) – Peter Cosgrove was the new boy. Luckily, he inherited a well-trained team with skilled NCOs:
The team had its own discipline and jungle skills. These were all good. So they were quite confident in each other, they just had to find me out.
And I was pretty shy. But shy’s not quite the right term because you actually had to make decisions and give orders and go around and talk to people. But I suppose I held back a little simply so that I wouldn’t offend by coming on too strong, not in terms of the decisions but in terms of establishing rapport. That was probably reasonable.
Cosgrove joined his platoon while it was out on an operation, one which had by then become somewhat routine to his men. They knew they could handle the heat. They weren’t so sure about the new bloke. For his part, Cosgrove faced a timeless question which most men, and all Diggers, ask themselves at some time: how will I react when my turn comes to face combat? Cosgrove:
I can remember on one of the first battles – I think it might have been the first one – that the medic in the platoon was giving me a sort of idiot grin as we were moving through on what was called ‘the sweep’ – you’ve fired at the enemy, they’ve fired at you and then you start to advance on them. It’s actually an attack. And this guy glanced across at me and afterwards I said to him, ‘What were you grinning about?’ And I realised it was pure relief on his part because I was doing my job.
I was very lucky the training kicked in, all the drills you do, all the fellows were raring to go so I didn’t have to argue the toss with anybody or make an intricate one-hour plan. It was quite plain that we’d been shooting in this particular area at people who’d been shooting back. This is in deep jungle, so we just did a left hook with one of the sections and I went with the section and we killed some enemy in that battle. So, from that point of view, we’d resolved the danger to ourselves very emphatically and I’d answered some questions from myself, I’d answered some questions on their behalf I guess, and off we went.
About the only thing they were concerned about was that every platoon gets a little battle weary, especially if they’ve seen soldiers who were comrades being carted off wounded progressively during the year, or dead, so a new boy comes in full of enthusiasm.
The ‘new boy’ remembers clearly his baptism of fire. His platoon had stopped advancing up a track because they’d received a radio message ordering them to pause while HQ made inquiries to ensure there were no friendly forces in their path:
It was a track that looked like it had had a lot of use, so we stopped with a section across the track, the other two sections from the edge of it all the way round to the back. We put a machine gun facing up the track and I put a sentry at the front of the machine gun and we settled back quietly to wait for them while we sorted out further permission to continue up the track.
Although they’d seen signs of a Viet Cong bunker system nearby, the Aussies weren’t aware that it was, in fact, within striking distance of them and the occupants had already detected their arrival in the area:
Maybe they smelt us. Maybe they heard some movement in the bush. Anyway, they came sneaking out of the camp along the same track to see what it was that had occurred and our sentry saw them coming and fired at them and then came zooming back into our position.
We engaged the area and then we attacked the area where we’d seen them and we killed them – killed two and one went away about a zillion miles an hour and we knew he was wounded.
I remember when the first shots rang out and I rushed forward to the machine gun about the same time that our man was zooming back in. As soon as he was safe with us, we fired into the area. The only inertia was that I was firing into the area and the officer really ought to be thinking, ‘OK, good, you’re all fine, that’s good.’
Then one of my corporals said, ‘I’ve closed up on the left’ and I said, ‘Good. We’ll do the sweep from the left.’ I supposed there was five seconds or so when I was shooting like a soldier would be shooting instead of thinking like an officer should be thinking. There are times when you think and times when you shoot.
Like a footballer after he makes his first tackle in the game, Peter Cosgrove was then able to relax sufficiently to allow his training to kick in as a reflex action:
I went from not having a clue what combat’s like to saying, well, that’s what it’s like, and the transition was instantaneous. I suppose I’d been carrying around a certain sense of anxious expectation from when I was warned to go to Vietnam. Back in Malaya I got told you’re going to go to be a reinforcement and then you’ll go on to be an infantry platoon commander in Vietnam.
Probably from that time somewhere back then must have been this sense of anxious anticipation or expectation and it probably reflected itself in checking things all the time and being almost paranoid about the accuracy of navigation and that sort of thing. All the things – where, when – and if the moment arrives you want to make sure that you
’ve done all you can in preparation.
I felt sorry that my men had to break in a new officer, where their anxieties were heightened on the fact that I had in my hands and in my brain, so to speak, the authority and opportunity to put them in much more danger than was reasonable. I could do so by getting it wrong, that’s obvious. I could even do so by being very right but being very aggressive.
One of Peter Cosgrove’s main concerns was the responsibility he had as a platoon commander for the safety of his men. He developed a compelling devotion to maintaining his vigilance.
I didn’t want to entertain the remotest whiff of slackness because the moment you take your eye off the ball, that’s when you get hurt. I remember late in my tour when I was commanding a different platoon, my soldiers suffered the only casualties that my various platoons suffered while I was the boss.
Cosgrove had sent out half his platoon on patrol to check on a suspicious area. He knew that to get from their overnight camp to this area involved heading down what he called a ‘geographic jug point’:
…a tall hill with a spur line leading off it, a brief flat part and then a swamp … The swamp was just the edge of a little canal where sampans and fishing boats ply their trade.
It seemed to me that this little jug point – the little flat part – was a good spot to get ambushed. So I said to the fellow I put in charge of this half platoon, ‘Mate, remember, don’t use that. Go up the hill a bit.’ And we settled down. I was staying round this little jungle base I’d set up on this day and they’d been gone for about twenty minutes when, boom! They got hit by a claymore mine – knocked over the first three guys.
They’d used the flat part and the enemy had thought, ‘Oh, we’ve seen those guys use the flat part a bit.’ So they set up a mine, blew up the first three blokes. The mob I had back at the base and I ran forward and I thought my heart was going to burst, we ran about a kilometre and a half through ankle-deep soft sand in our webbing and rifles.
When we got there we found that they were in a bit of disarray. They’d sort of recovered to the point of being ready to defend themselves. But the blokes who’d hit them with the mine had shot through very smartly. We made an error and it was because we took the soft option.
Vietnam once again brought out the ingenuity in the Digger. One of the most outstanding examples was the way our engineers reacted to the discovery of what turned out to be an extensive labyrinth of tunnels from which the Viet Cong were waging war. From the start of their tour, the engineer unit of 1 RAR, under Major Sandy McGregor, found themselves delousing all manner of booby traps and unexploded bombs. In early 1966, during ‘Operation Crimp’, the Australian battalion was with the Americans in the Ho Bo Woods, about 20 kilometres north of Cu Chi in the Binh Duong Province, when it stumbled on an underground bunker system. Sandy McGregor’s mob was called in. He recalled that before he left Australia he’d been primed to expect anything:
I’ll always remember when were about to leave, I asked my commander, ‘Precisely what do we do over there? What’s our main task?’ He said, ‘McGregor, go and do what engineers do!’ You know, I only realised later how wonderful that was: do whatever you need to do.
Up to that stage, when the Americans discovered a tunnel they had dropped a smoke grenade down it, blown air through it to locate the other entrances by observing where the smoke emerged, then blown the tunnel up. They, and their commanders, had regarded it as being beneath them to actually chase the Viet Cong down the tunnels. Sandy McGregor’s mob saw things differently:
We decided the best thing to do was to go into them. I had assumed that the Americans were also going into them. My theory was that if the enemy was living and working down there, that there had to be one hell of a lot of intelligence down there, number one: weapons, ammunition and that sort of thing; but the second thing is that darkness is a great leveller.
Out in the bush Australians became second to none. They’re bloody good bush soldiers and, in the darkness, they took them on. In tunnels, it was the same thing. It’s a great leveller. They’re scared that we’re coming in. We’re scared of them. That’s OK. What we found, generally speaking, was that as we came in, they went back. And we found a lot of intelligence.
Dennis ‘Arab’ Ayoub was a sapper (a private in the engineers), and part of McGregor’s team. Although he would later win a commission and retire a major, he never forgot the terrifying experience of being a ‘tunnel rat’:
Have you ever snorkelled? You know the rasping sound when you breathe and you can hear nothing else? Well, that’s all you can hear when you’re in the tunnel. You can hear the air going down your airways and you can hear this thump, thump, thump as your heart beats. And you’re trying to make your heart quieter because you fear that someone can hear that. Your senses are absolutely acute.
It’s very hard to control your fear. I think if I’d gone down on my own – well, I’d probably have done it then, but I wouldn’t do it now. I knew that it had to be done. What really concerned me was that if anything happened they’d never get my body. That was the only thing that really worried me. It wasn’t the fact that I might get killed – because I knew I wouldn’t, that’s the invincibility of the Australian soldier.
A firefight’s a bit like you’re driving across the Harbour Bridge and someone cuts you off and you skid and then regain control and think: ‘Shit! I could have been killed!’ But you could reasonably expect it to occur because you’re driving. The actions I was in you could reasonably expect to occur because you were in that place. But the tunnels were a different thing altogether. You had to summon up enough guts to go down there again and again.
Dennis Ayoub was one of many Diggers struck by the experience of the Australian contingent just before he arrived in Vietnam. The Diggers lost two soldiers on a patrol. Their bodies were never recovered. It broke one of the basic tenets of the Digger in combat – that they always bring back their wounded and dead:
They think they were shot from tunnels and the bodies disappeared. It’s silly to say I wouldn’t have minded being killed but I would rather have had the normal courtesies accorded to me. And I think the Viet Cong were the same. They had to get the bodies back for the proper burial.
You didn’t do stupid things but you just knew it wasn’t going to happen to you. I just was always worried: how will they be able to explain it? Where’s Dennis? Oh, he’s in a hole somewhere.
Working down the tunnels was a process of trial and error. There was no training that prepared the Diggers for the work. Sandy McGregor took the lead:
It was scary going down the tunnels but the very first tunnel we discovered I went down it. I got my staff sergeant to hold a rope around my legs. I could trust him. I was lowered down with a torch in one hand and a bayonet and a pistol. You’ve only got two hands, so it was push the torch, fiddle on the ground with the bayonet, then push the torch, a metre at a time.
Dennis Ayoub helped to refine the technique:
You’d sneak the gun around first, then put your head around, then flash the torch on trying to get your eyes accustomed to the light. Then you’d immediately turn the torch off and see if you could remember the picture. If there was nothing there, then you’d move on.
But you knew if the light was shining and there was another angled tunnel, up or down, you would have been seen. So they were backing off as you were moving forward.
Most of us had a bit of a whinge, or had a bit of fear or your guts were churning. There were certain areas in the tunnels where when you got there you just knew you were in deep shit.
Most tunnel shafts were circular and presented the Diggers with two options: they could go down head first or feet first. Dennis Ayoub always believed if he went down feet first he’d have a tendency to drop, his arms would lock and he wouldn’t react quickly.
The best thing to do was to get someone to tie a rope around your legs, and we used to get a pistol and a torch and slide down, perhaps two metres. You’d put your weapon aro
und, your torch around and then you wriggle to let the bloke holding your rope know, then you’d flick on the torch and if it was okay you’d let him drop you down.
The Spirit of the Digger Page 30