The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  They entered the rubber plantation around 3.15 pm on 18 August 1966. After a small initial exchange of fire, which lured the Australians’ 11 Platoon further into the killing zone, the Viet Cong sprang their trap. As the heavens opened with a torrential tropical downpour, the Diggers were caught in a firestorm, pounded by mortars, grenades, machine-gun and rifle fire from the front and both flanks. The young Diggers dug in as best they could and returned fire, but in less than 20 minutes they’d lost a third of their number killed or wounded. Nearby, 10 Platoon tried to move up to support their beleaguered mates but were immediately pinned down by massive fire from three sides, still more than 100 metres short. The company commander, Major Harry Smith, recalled 10 Platoon to the main company position as the Diggers formed a defensive perimeter. The situation was now critical. The 108 men of D Company were surrounded by 2500 Viet Cong troops, the bulk of whom were Main Force Viet Cong soldiers rather than the provincial troops the Australians generally faced.

  Harry Smith called for an air support strike to enable his trapped forward platoon to pull back to the main group. But the driving rain prevented the American Phantom bombers from locating the target, and they headed off to a secondary target.

  Around this time, 11 Platoon’s CO, Lieutenant Gordon Sharp, a Nasho from Sydney who had recently been commissioned, was killed. His place was taken by Sergeant Bob Buick, who coolly kept his surviving men at their posts. At least half the platoon were now casualties. Bob Buick then regained radio contact, as he recalls in Lex McAuley’s The Battle of Long Tan:

  The rain was very heavy, and visibility about 100 to 150 metres, when I decided to call artillery onto my own position, knowing that with ten of us left out of 28, and no ammunition, we could not survive more than another ten or fifteen minutes.

  Captain Maury Stanley [the attached NZ artillery officer] reminded me of the rules of artillery fire when I requested the fire mission, but I told him of our situation. The fire came and landed about 50 to 100 metres to our front, and right in amongst the heaviest concentration [of the enemy].

  Lex McAuley also recounts a classic piece of black Digger humour which occurred in the midst of this cauldron:

  The constant blaring of bugles was heard from the trees as the VC units manoeuvred for their assaults. In the waterfall of sound enveloping the scene, shouted orders would easily be lost, whereas the sharper tones of the bugles pierced the noise of explosions and firing. There seemed to be no tune or melody, just blasts to signal ‘wait!’, ‘ready!’ and ‘go!’

  Brian Reilly heard someone say with dry Aussie wit, ‘All we’ve gotta do is hit the fuckin’ bugler!’

  Now 12 Platoon tried to break through to relieve Bob Buick and his men. Creeping through the blinding rain, they made it to about 75 metres away from their mates when they too were pinned down by the enemy’s firepower, which was still pouring in on three sides. The Platoon’s commander, Lieutenant David Sabben, decided the only way the men of 11 Platoon could find their way to his position was if he set off a coloured smoke bomb. Bob Buick’s survivors saw the signal and were able to sprint back through the fire to join Sabben’s men, losing another man killed in the process.

  The rain was protecting the Viet Cong from the American air strikes but miraculously two RAAF choppers, flying at treetop level, dropped desperately needed ammunition into the Aussies’ position just when the defenders were down to their last 100 rounds. George Odgers, in his 100 Years of Australians at War, quotes a D Company Digger describing the continuous Viet Cong assaults:

  A solid line of them – it looked like hundreds – would suddenly rush us. The artillery would burst right in the middle of them and there would be bodies all over the place. The survivors would dive for cover beside these bodies, wait for the next attacking line, get up and leap over the dead to resume the rush. They were inching forward all the time over their piles of dead.

  Back at Nui Dat, Task Force Commander Colonel Colin Townsend had mobilised his force. He accompanied A Company and a group from B Company out in armoured personnel carriers to relieve the trapped troops at Long Tan. All the while, the Nui Dat artillery (an Anzac combination of two Australian and one New Zealand field batteries) bombarded the Viet Cong positions with deadly accuracy, thanks to the inspired work of the Kiwi forward observer attached to D Company, Captain Maury Stanley of the NZ 161 Battery.

  The carriers charged past the D Company position and into the enemy positions beyond. They then returned to the central D Company position and readied themselves for the massed attack they were certain would follow. But shortly afterwards the rain stopped and, through the mist and fast-fading light, the Diggers saw the Viet Cong troops rising and drifting away through the rubber trees.

  At first light the next day, the reason was clearer. The enemy had sustained enormous casualties. Australians moving through the battlefield counted 245 Viet Cong bodies and saw that many more had been dragged away. Private ‘Pom’ Rencher, an Englishman who had joined the Australian Army, helped to bury the VC dead, as he recalled in The Battle of Long Tan:

  It took three days to bury them, with the constant hum of flies around. Burial was for humane reasons, and for hygiene. Captured VC documents later showed respect for the Australians because they buried the dead at Long Tan. The document said: ‘They buried our dead, they are a true enemy.’ That is, we didn’t abuse them. Some Americans cut off hands or ears, or buried them with an ace of spades sticking up, that sort of stuff.

  The Diggers had lost 18 dead and 24 wounded. ‘Pom’ Rencher recalled the eerie scene that confronted him when he returned to 11 Platoon’s position:

  My mates lying in an arc, facing outwards, with rifles still at the shoulder as if they were frozen in a drill and it only needed a touch to bring them back to life again … They looked very peaceful and dignified, dying in place, doing their duty. And that’s when the tears started. I don’t suppose anyone was dry-eyed. I know I wasn’t.

  Lex McAuley reported that General Westmoreland came to lend his moral support:

  ‘Wild Bill’ Doolan created newspaper headlines when he addressed General Westmoreland in classic Digger language. The General walked up to a group of Australians digging the graves, and said: ‘You’ve done a good job, fellows, but this is the dirty part.’ Doolan replied: ‘She’ll be right, mate. We can handle it.’

  For its remarkable performance at Long Tan, D Company was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. It read:

  D Company Sixth Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, distinguished itself by extraordinary heroism while engaged in military operations against an opposing armed force in Vietnam on 18 August 1966. While searching for Viet Cong in a rubber plantation north-east of Ba Ria, Phuoc Tuy Province, Republic of Vietnam, D Company met and immediately became engaged in heavy contact. As the battle developed, it became apparent that the men of D Company were facing a numerically superior force. The platoon of D Company were surrounded and attacked on all sides by an estimated reinforced enemy battalion, using automatic weapons, small arms and mortars. Fighting courageously against a well armed and determined foe, the men of D Company maintained their formations in a common perimeter defence and inflicted heavy casualties upon the Viet Cong. The enemy maintained a continuous, intense volume of fire and attacked repeatedly from all directions. Each successive assault was repulsed by the courageous Australians. Heavy rainfall and a low ceiling prevented any friendly close air support during the battle. After three hours of savage attacks, having failed to penetrate the Australian lines, the enemy withdrew from the battlefield carrying many dead and wounded, and leaving 245 Viet Cong dead forward of the defence position of D Company. The conspicuous gallantry, intrepidity and indomitable courage of D Company were in the highest tradition of military valor and reflect great credit upon D Company, Sixth Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment and the Australian Army.

  For their vital parts in the battle, Captain Maury Stanley was awarded the MBE, Major Harry Smith won a Military Cros
s, WO2 Kirby and Corporal Carter the Distinguished Service Medal, and Sergeant Bob Buick the Military Medal.

  Perhaps the section commander of A Company, Ross Smith, best summed it up when, speaking to Lex McAuley, he recalled his image of Long Tan:

  … the comradeship, the valour and the amount of artillery; the legend of Anzac upheld.

  Australia’s involvement in Vietnam would continue for another six years. The Diggers there survived the infamous Tet offensive in early 1968, when the Viet Cong, after having made a solemn ceasefire pact for the traditional Buddhist sacred celebratory period, launched a massive attack on Saigon itself. Although the attacks were a military disaster for the Viet Cong, they hardened the already anti-war opinion in the United States and Australia. Later that year the Diggers triumphed in what the Diggers called ‘Coral’, an attack on their Fire Support Bases ‘Coral’ and ‘Balmoral’, which had been established to block enemy infiltration into Saigon. The Australians lost five killed and 19 wounded but repulsed the enemy while inflicting hundreds of casualties. Subsequent successes in major engagements at Binh Ba and Long Khanh saw the Australians maintain their reputation and respect.

  But the political will behind the war began to falter, and the US ultimately decided on a ‘Vietnamisation’ policy under which they would withdraw their troops and replace them progressively with South Vietnamese units.

  In December 1969, Australian Prime Minister John Gorton foreshadowed a reduction in our military commitment in Vietnam. On 22 April 1970 he announced he was withdrawing 8 RAR from duty without replacing it. By this time the Americans were also cutting their losses and handing the problem back to the South Vietnamese.

  Only a small group from the Australian Army Assistance Group remained when the newly elected Whitlam government ordered them home in December 1972. A ceasefire agreement was signed in Paris on 23 January 1973, and on 29 March the last planeload of US troops left Tan Son Nhut Airport. Despite the pact, hostilities continued in Vietnam, with the North Vietnamese steadily throttling the South Vietnamese. On 30 April 1975, the Republic of Vietnam unconditionally surrendered.

  For many Diggers, the Vietnam War was an extremely painful experience, and many have been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. Many have developed other illnesses and mental conditions they believe were related to their service. The prevalence of chemical weapons in the war zone opened up possibilities of more physical and psychological harm. The Americans used defoliants, like ‘Agent Orange’, to destroy forests, aiming to expose the Viet Cong they believed were using them as cover. The extent of their use in Vietnam was extraordinary and nearly 20 per cent of the forests in South Vietnam – more than three million hectares – were destroyed between 1965 and 1971. After years of lobbying and pressuring by the Vietnam Veterans’ Association, the Australian government finally established the Evatt Royal Commission to inquire into the effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals on the Diggers. The Royal Commission delivered its report in 1985 and concluded (in unusually colourful language):

  So Agent Orange is Not Guilty and the chemical agents used to defoliate battle zones in Vietnam and to protect Australians from malaria are not to blame.

  No one lost.

  This is not a matter for regret but rejoicing. Veterans and their wives are no more at risk of having abnormal offspring than anyone else. Veterans have not been poisoned. The number with general health problems is small, probably much smaller than amongst their peers in the community.

  Opinions vary on whether the Vietnam experience was harder, easier than or simply different from that of the World War I or World War II Diggers. Unlike their forebears, the Vietnam Diggers were committed to the combat zone for a limited period – usually a one-year tour of duty. The combat itself was, by turns, routine and intense, and was often conducted against an enemy who was difficult to distinguish from the general population. And much of the action was played out under the glare of media scrutiny.

  Where earlier Diggers had been part of a one-in-all-in kind of war, the Vietnam Diggers had been sent off to war while the vast majority of their contemporaries simply got on with their lives. (In World War I, 13.4 per cent of all men enlisted. In World War II the figure was 10.28 per cent. In Vietnam, 0.4 per cent of the eligible male population served.) Aside from their immediate families and friends, the community did not suffer hardship with them as it did in the earlier wars. And when the Diggers returned home, they often did so within days of being in combat, without the period of natural debriefing and cathartic comradeship experienced by veterans of the World Wars with their mates during their protracted journey home. Perhaps these were contributing factors in the angst that some Vietnam Diggers have experienced.

  Like most Diggers down the years, the Vietnam vets rarely talk of the horrors they experienced, as Dennis Ayoub confirmed:

  Blokes don’t talk about things like that. The things we talk about are the funny things. It’s some sort of block-out mechanism, some sort of denial mechanism. And we all know or can imagine what each has been through and we don’t really talk about it.

  A lot of people were against us being in Vietnam, but I thought, well, I joined the army and I was prepared to go there.

  I don’t blame it for my daughter’s epilepsy. I don’t blame it for anything, scabies, my bad temper – I’m a bad-tempered bastard anyway! Something to do with booze and cigarettes and abuse of my life probably created all those circumstances, and people not slapping me hard enough when they were trying to bring me back in line.

  I know that I became a very confident bloke after that. One of the reasons I didn’t suffer from PTSD was because I was able to capture the fact that I was one of the toughies. But the war trauma manifested itself in other ways like the alcohol abuse, the cigarette abuse, letting my marriage fail, not maintaining your obligations, living on a reputation and other things.

  Dennis ‘Arab’ Ayoub died in 2004, after patiently enduring many years of heart problems, including a period with an artificial heart.

  Our Vietnam vets laid many of their ghosts to rest after finally receiving a proper welcome home, 15 years late, on 3 October 1987, when the Welcome Home March in Sydney gave them their due as Diggers who did their duty when called on.

  CHAPTER 16

  East Timor

  Junction Point Bravo, Bobonaro Province, East Timor (near the Tactical Coordination Line), February 2003

  The moon is just a sliver of a crescent, barely enough to etch an outline around the clouds that ring it. The bush is shrouded in inky darkness. If you look up you can just make out the blurred edge of the tree tops where the earth ends and the sky begins. At ground level you can scarcely see the outline of your hand in front of your face. Crickets chant their mantra as a warm breeze rattles through the treeline. But the wind cannot combat the overpowering humidity, which draws beads of sweat from the slightest exertion.

  Corporal Brett Woodward is just metres away but blends into the darkness like a spectre. He guides his men with hand signals as he steers them through the thick scrub towards their objective.

  Section Two Three Bravo, of the 5/7th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (known here in East Timor as Ausbatt VII), is out on a covert night patrol. Its mission: to set up an observation post overlooking the border with Indonesian-controlled West Timor and to observe there, unseen, overnight for smuggling or militia incursions. The border is known as the Tactical Coordination Line – effectively a demilitarised zone – established in 1999 by the United Nations to protect the sovereignty of the world’s newest country, East Timor, in its transition to independence.

  The men of Two Three Bravo were dropped quietly in the bush, well off the main roads, around sunset. They’ve been on the move now for about an hour and, despite the darkness, the humidity is still oppressive and evident in the glow on their faces and the dark sweat stains spreading on their brown-green jungle uniforms. Corporal ‘Woody’ Woodward, his face fractured by camouflage paint, has an air of quiet confi
dence as he directs his men through the thick bush. Despite the state-of-the-art camouflage uniform, the massive pack and modern weapons, you can imagine him as a section leader at Gallipoli, Tobruk, Kokoda or Long Tan. And the Diggers he leads would not have been out of place alongside him at any of those iconic battle sites. The first thing that strikes you is how young they are, five of them are 19 or 20. But in every war most of our Diggers have been around this age.

  Despite their youth, the Diggers of Two Three Bravo know their stuff. They trained long hours in the bush around their Darwin base in preparation for this deployment. They’re keen and they’re keyed up – well aware that contact is distinctly possible, either with the militia forces still operating across the border or with smugglers trying to sneak fuel and other contraband into East Timor. The men of Two Three Bravo are also aware they’re following in illustrious footsteps. Sixty-five years ago, during World War II, the Diggers of ‘Sparrow Force’ (the 2/40th Battalion from Tasmania) fought in these hills in a remarkable guerrilla campaign against a massive Japanese force which had invaded Timor and planned to use it as a base to attack Australia. The Sparrow Force Diggers won the hearts of the Timorese. Some Timorese fought alongside the Australians. Many helped supply them and warn them of Japanese approach. Some of the Portuguese also actively supported the Australians in their fight behind enemy lines. Sadly, thousands of these patriots paid with their lives for their loyalty. Some historians claim as many as 60,000 Timorese were killed by the Japanese during their occupation.