No Need for Heroes. Sandy MacGregor
no time. I raced back into the camp and me and a couple of the others cleared the dam. That Yank probably still thinks I'm a great engineer."
Apart from hot water, the other great necessity of life is power, and by that I mean electricity. We had to go without for the first few weeks, until we came across this American depot for broken down equipment in the middle of which was this huge diesel driven generator, a 30 KVA – that's a lot of electricity. We weren't allowed to cannibalise one piece of equipment to fix another, but we were allowed to take anything we could fix ... and we had someone who
could fix anything.
"Waxy" Rayner was on detachment to us from the Electrical
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The vertical bomb cases mark the entrance of our base camp four months after we had been at Bien Hoa. (AWM P1595.092)
and Mechanical Engineers (RAEME) and there wasn't a machine made that he couldn't repair. The men used to take him their watches – this was before digital watches and microchips – and he'd have them working in no time.
Corporal Rod Goater, who was the RAEME detachment commander, helped to get the engine going and Waxy worked out that it would be fine as long as we didn't stop it. He then devised a way of doing a complete oil change while the generator was still running, which meant it never stopped from the day he got it going to the day it blew itself to oblivion ... but that's another story.
That generator was nicknamed Bhudda – it was driven by a Budanova engine – and became something of a mascot for the troop.
Bhudda was spitting out enough power to light the whole airbase, let alone our little corner, but it served another purpose, one which I only found out about fairly recently.
"We used to have some funny incidents around that old big Bhudda," says Mick Lee. "We used to have little seats all around there, it was like a little garden setting. We'd sit around and sing and yell out and talk and crack jokes and the noise from Bhudda used to drown it all out."
Our other mascot was the 3 Field Troop dog, Smedley. And he too provided entertainment for the lads. Every so often the men would capture rats and, when they got a break, they'd put the rats and Smedley inside a huge water tank then take bets on how long it took him to kill them.
Cruelty to animals doesn't count for much in the middle of a war zone. For my part, I worked the men damned hard, so they were entitled to play hard too.
* * *
On November 5, I led a small detachment of 16 men on Operation Hump, which took us to an area slightly north of where we'd been during the previous outing. Again it was a basic search and destroy mission, with the focus on any villages we might find.
It must have been around this time that I began to realise that the army wasn't as well organised as it might have been.
We had been told that once we had been dropped off by helicopter, we should rendezvous with B Company's headquarters staff who would tell us where we should be deployed. But when we got there, they weren't where they were supposed to be and we wasted a lot of time chasing after them.
When we finally did find out where to go, we were called forward to help search a village. It turned out that firstly, the village was abandoned and, secondly, they hadn't given us enough time to complete the search and we had to be pulled out anyway.
When I say the village was abandoned, you have to understand that the policy was that all areas under military control had to be cleared of civilians. The local population was relocated and rehoused in safe areas and, in fact, 3 Field Troop did a lot of work building houses and establishing services for relocated Vietnamese civilians.
After an area was cleared in that way, anyone in it who wasn't in the army was deemed to be the enemy. The reason we were being used for searches was that even an abandoned village could be full of hidden dangers. Every door, or cupboard or tunnel entrance could conceal a booby trap. It wasn't very clever to go crashing around knocking doors down like they do in the movies. We preferred to have engineers painstakingly check everything while the infantry boys watched our backs.
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We built our own practice tunnel system at Bien Hoa. All the soldiers from 3 Field Troop went through the tunnel with tear gas – sometimes it was worse than the real thing. (AWM P1595.004)
The village in question was called Xom Cay Xoai and consisted of about 150 huts and small buildings. Almost all the huts had some form of air raid shelter or bunker, either inside or attached to the outside.
We went back to it the next day and some documents, clothes, magazines and booby trap switches were found, suggesting that Viet
Cong troops had at least passed through. We also found about 20 tunnels between 6 and 15 feet long, and two bigger ones – 20 feet
and 35 feet long, which we demolished.
The next day we were supposed to be resupplied with explosives so we could demolish two 32ft wells. But the helicopter carrying the explosives didn't arrive until too late and we didn't have enough time to do the job properly.
We finished off the job the next day and on the day after that – the final day – we blew up a few mortar blinds. Then the choppers arrived to take us back to camp.
I was beginning to realise that we were pretty much feeling our way in these operations and it was up to me to make sure anyone who came after us didn't make the same mistakes or suffer similar delays to us. Because of that, my reports began to be quite specific about what should and should not be done.
From 3 Field Troop's point of view, we were fortunate the way it was working out, we were gradually being weaned on to this new kind of warfare rather than being dropped into the middle of it. But we'd be in the thick of it soon enough.
In the meantime, the following observations, which I made in my written report on the operation:
Much experience was gained from the operation mainly in the form of sappers familiarising themselves with battle noises, village search, tunnels (although small) and demolitions of several types. The helicopter assaults and extractions were also valuable experience.
This unit was not able or had no need to use the Mighty Mite machine with tear gas. It is felt that if any tunnels in a relatively friendly area are known to exist then very valuable experience would be gained by the troop practising searching, employing the use of tear gas.
In the end, we built our own tunnel for practising in. And the only reason I think there never was one before was that noone ever went down tunnels before we did. We were the first. We were the original Tunnel Rats and everyone else only followed our lead.
4
THE AIRBORNE AMERICANS
I had never been keen on the idea of fighting alongside Americans, and I probably have my father to blame for that. Dad had the British Army perspective – that the Yanks always waited too long before they pitched in, and then took all the credit when they did.
Maybe so, but my first impressions, which I recorded on that illfated initial report, were well off the mark. The Americans were different, sure. But they weren't inferior. I don't think I've ever seen more bravery than was displayed by the men of E Troop 17 Cavalry Regiment.
All they had were jeeps with 50 calibre machine guns mounted on the back. You see they had to be air portable and air droppable to be in 173 Airborne Brigade. Each had a crew of four: gunner, his offsider who fed the ammunition, a radio operator and a driver. If the gunner got shot – and there was no protection – the man feeding