The Battle of Long Tan

by David W. Cameron

  Parr recalled how, because of the torrential downpour of the night before, ‘everything in the area was so clean. One VC body that has always stuck in my mind was just lying there, face down, clean black hair . . . with a triangle piece missing from the back of his skull.’12 Private Tony Stepney of 10 Platoon recalled that ‘there were bodies everywhere, bits and pieces everywhere. It was gory. We were trying to dig holes to bury them, but it just wasn’t possible . . . it was horrendous, horrendous.’13 Private Noel Grimes of 12 Platoon recalled that ‘with all of the artillery it was literally a bloody mess, with bodies and body parts and in that heat – because it always hot over there, it’s either dry or wet – it was so wet and humid overnight . . . the bodies were not good . . . The burial of the Vietnamese was gruesome. Fortunately we had shell holes from the artillery and that’s how we buried them . . . we’d drag four or five into one hole and try and cover them up . . . I could have done without it.’14 Things were no better for Corporal Laurie Drinkwater of Grimes’ section. It was his birthday, and as he dug one of his mates yelled out for all to hear: ‘Happy birthday, Drinkie!’15

  The exhausted men, especially of D Company, 6 RAR, had to continue to work among the mass of dead and now-stinking enemy bodies. Not only this, but they were also very much aware that they could be attacked at any minute. More than once a shot rang out as an enemy soldier was seen behind a tree with his weapon aimed at the advancing Australians. When the enemy soldier was approached, it became clear he had been dead for many hours – but understandably no one was taking any chances. Had the advance ‘been from a different direction and not straight back into the teeth of the previous day’s attacking enemy, the unnerving phenomenon would not have been so marked.’16

  As the mopping-up continued, Major Smith at one point saw two very much alive and armed Viet Cong less than 30 metres away from his front-line troops – but before they could fire, they were killed. Another Viet Cong was later found and shot, but whether this was an act of mercy or the result of a perceived threat remains unknown. Major Paul Greenhalgh, commanding D Company, 5 RAR, queried the incident on the radio and Townsend’s operator confirmed it was the killing of a hopelessly wounded man; he recorded it as such in the signal log.17 In all, three wounded Viet Cong were captured and given emergency medical treatment before being evacuated. One of them was found by Sergeant Bob Buick and Private Peter Dettman, who were searching for bodies. They came across a terrified teenager who had been shot in the groin. Dettman placed the muzzle of his M60 on the soldier’s forehead and called for a medic; one soon made an appearance. A bottle of iodine was poured over the boy’s wound and maggots were picked from it before it was dressed – Buick never saw the boy again and wonders to this day if he is still alive.18

  Soon after this Buick and Dettman had had enough of working among the mangled bodies and headed back towards the position of 11 Platoon’s stand. Buick walked up close to where he had been positioned during the height of the battle fought less than 24 hours before and saw an Australian near the Viet Cong wheeled heavy machine gun. He stopped and watched as the solder pushed a ‘piece of bone, a little bigger than a fifty-cent piece, back into the skull of the dead Viet Cong. The machine gunner had been killed – shot through the front of the head. The exiting round had caused a wound at the back of the skull. Every time he pushed the piece of bone back into the skull it fell out again and hung there with a flap of skin acting like a hinge. After a few minutes I left, but the digger was still there ten minutes later.’19

  Enemy bodies were found up to 500 metres south-east in front of 11 Platoon’s final position. By mid-afternoon the body count had increased to 168 and by 4.15 p.m. it was 180, with evidence that other dead and wounded had been dragged away. On most occasions the Viet Cong had been able to retrieve weapons and equipment, but clearly they had not bothered to do so during or immediately after the battle in some areas of the plantation, as vast numbers of precious weapons were recovered. They included the heavy wheeled machine gun along with a 60mm mortar, two recoilless rifles, four rocket launchers, 33 AK-47 assault rifles, assorted US carbines and other types of rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, 300 grenades,100 mortar bombs and several rockets.20

  Private Peter Doyle remembered that ‘we’d sit down on a log, or sit out in the dirt, and we’d be having a bit of crap Australian 24-hour ration-pack food, and there’d be a body here, a body there and a bit of body there. We’d just stop for a feed, or boil up some water and make a tea or a coffee or something . . . Because of the humidity and the heat, things go off real quick . . . The first day wasn’t too bad, but by the time we got towards the end of it, the whole thing was getting pretty ripe. We were handling bodies with our bare hands. We didn’t have gloves. The only water we had was in our water bottles.’21 These and other soldiers’ memories are similar to reminiscences from an Australian battle 50 years before: Lone Pine, Gallipoli, August 1915.

  Doyle also recalled that after returning from the day’s burial detail, the men ‘took all of our clothes off because we were rotten, and we had all of our clothes – which was only a shirt and a pair of pants, and a pair of boots and socks – put in a big heap, covered in dieseline and burned. We had a Vietnamese well, and canvas buckets we used to lower into the well – which was full of frogs and shit anyway – and haul it up into a tree, and that was our glorious shower centre. We had a bit of a scrub-up and a feed.’22

  By 6.10 p.m. the body count had reached 188 with evidence that more would be found, with a number of drag marks and blood trails being identified. Shallow graves were still being dug and the enemy dead were buried pretty much where they had fallen.23

  The men settled down for the night, sleeping on the battlefield with around 250 dead bodies strewn around or buried – they slept not worrying too much about it. During the night the corpses stiffened due to rigor mortis and escaping gases flexed muscles and changed the posture of the dead. The next morning the Australians awoke to find that parts of the enemy dead had emerged, arms and legs protruding from the shallow graves. Before too long some joker hung a sign from a protruding arm, calling it ‘The Claw’.24

  32

  ‘They had to face that all over again’

  20 August 1966

  The Australians arose and set about continuing the grim task of burying the enemy dead. The men of D Company were on ‘automatic’ and most did not register much of what happened during that third day in the plantation. For most of the day they were assigned to the burial details, while other companies were sent out to sweep the area.

  Lieutenant David Sabben recalled that they had to ‘go through every identifiable piece of body we could find and see if there was any intelligence on it – paperwork in the pockets, diaries, wallets, everything like that. Anything that was ex-human we had to bury. Anything that was metallic we had to put in one spot – all the ammunition, all the weapons, the magazines.’1 What particularly upset him and others was coming across wallets, which invariably held photographs of families: ‘Mum and Dad and the kids and there were photographs . . . wrapped in plastic against the humidity. There were little letters, books, dried flowers pressed in the pages of a book.’2

  Private Alan Parr had a similar experience: ‘We searched a lot of the VC bodies looking for documents and collecting weapons. I found a wallet on one VC and, when I opened it there were photos of his wife and children . . . a very sobering experience.’3 Sabben recalled that while photographers were taking pictures of enemy dead and the stockpile of enemy weapons, ‘no one turned around and took a picture of a pile of notebooks, diaries, wallets, plastic envelopes of family photographs. No one took that photograph and no one will ever know how pathetic it was to see them sitting there just under a rubber tree, collected lives sitting there waiting to be disposed of. It was terrible.’4

  While there was some sense of victory over the enemy, the prevailing sense was of ‘letdown, this awful dread that we were witnessing,’ recalled Sabben. ‘Not that we had
caused it, because most of it we weren’t witnessing people that we had actually shot, we knew that artillery had fallen or someone else in the company had shot them or something. It wasn’t a personal guilt but it was just overwhelming dread of just loss. I mean, yes, they were enemy soldiers but by that stage we knew that they were like us.’5

  Private Peter Doyle of 10 Platoon recalled ‘hunting around [and] when we’d find a body, we’d use a toggle rope, six or eight foot [1.8 or 2.4 metres] long. We’d tie it around a leg or an arm and pull them over, just in case they were booby-trapped. We buried about a hundred a day, and we just had little pack shovels. They were going to send a bulldozer in, but the Suoi Da Bang river was flooded, it wasn’t even possible. We couldn’t do a sterling job; no one was given a six-foot-deep grave. Basically, we dug a shell scrape and buried them the best we could. I found a body, and it was severed through the nipple line. I found the lower part. He looked like he had been cut with a sheet of corrugated iron, like a ripple effect.’6

  The other companies scoured the battlefield and surrounding region for up to 1500 metres east of the main field of combat, including Long Tan village itself and to the north beyond Nui Dat 2; they too were involved in burying the enemy dead they came across. Major Brian McFarlane recalled how one of his men, Corporal Ray Barnes of C Company, 7 Platoon, was using a toggle rope tied to the ankle of a dead enemy soldier to pull him to a shallow grave and as he did so, Barnes ‘saw that the man’s brains had spilled out and left a trail over the ground. Corporal Barnes was an experienced soldier and an excellent section commander, but I remember Corporal [Geoff] Jones, my medic, telling me of the horror that Ray felt on this occasion.’7

  Beyond the immediate battlefield area, the men from these companies found a number of tracks with telephone lines running along their side, drag marks indicating the removal of dead and wounded, and indications that the tracks had recently suffered major and heavy traffic by both oxcart and people on foot.8 Private Peter Bennett of A Company recalled seeing ‘numerous tracks, made when taking most of their dead, but there were quite a number of graves found’.9

  The men of D Company, 5 RAR swept the northern area of the plantation, moving out of the plantation and coming across a small enemy supply dump containing 27 gallons (123 litres) of kerosene, 21 gallons (95 litres) of cooking oil, 20 pick heads and clothing. They then swung west and found two large, freshly dug weapon pits that had been evacuated in a hurry as a lot of personal gear was there, including wallets, photographs and a pile of documents.10

  The men of C Company, 6 RAR moved forward through the plantation heading east and came across discarded equipment, ammunition, webbing and clothing. As they continued their advance they came across more tracks and signs of heavy enemy movement. They soon came to a track junction and it became obvious that the bulk of the enemy had used these two tracks to withdraw; one led in a northerly direction, the other in a south-westerly direction. At this junction they found a telephone cable that led back west towards the main battle site. The site was likely a key command post and as they continued to sweep the area a number of body parts were located.11

  In the afternoon there was a rapid burst of automatic fire, which probably brought many men of D Company out of the malaise that had set in. Private Terry Burstall recalled that ‘it was a strange feeling. Everyone in the area of my vision froze and I know I grabbed for my rifle and just stood listening, hardly daring to breathe. The troops all around me stayed quite still except for their hands feeling their weapons.’12 Burstall was not far from the company commanding officer, Major Harry Smith, who had his signaller with him. Smith grabbed the radio and a few seconds later said very loudly for all to hear, ‘OK, no worries, a prisoner tried to escape, and he’s now dead.’ Burstall said, ‘Everyone grinned or laughed with relief and carried on with what they were doing, but the sound of firing had shaken us all.’13

  Overnight the unburied dead had become hardier to bury as the bodies had become very stiff with rigor mortis and could not readily be pushed into a shell hole and covered; some extra digging had to be done to cover up the remains. As recalled by Burstall, it was mind-numbing work that was carried out automatically and in an off-hand manner. Private Allen May of 11 Platoon recalled seeing one soldier trying to bury a body, but every time he threw dirt on it an arm would keep popping up. After two or three attempts to get it covered, he gave up and pulled out his machete, chopped off the arm and threw it down beside the body, and was finally able to cover it all up.14

  Sergeant Bob Buick had become seemingly immune to the smell of the dead, having lived side by side with them for almost three days. One of his mates from A Company, 6 RAR, Sergeant Jim ‘Snow’ Curtis, came across Buick and they sat down on a fallen rubber-tree trunk and shared a cigarette and a mug of coffee. As they sat there, Curtis said, ‘There is something dead around here!’ Buick thought he was making a bad joke and let out a loud laugh. Curtis had been away to the east of the main part of the battlefield and had become unaccustomed to the ongoing stench of death and decaying mangled corpses from the ‘perfumed garden of rotting bodies’, recalled Buick. Earlier Buick and others had cleared the area of any bodies and body parts they could find; even so, there were still many bodies surrounding them that needed to be buried. Buick recalled that he had ‘missed the four bodies under the foliage of the tree [where] we sat. The horror on [Curtis’s] face must have prompted some smart remark from me because Snow did not stay too long afterwards. He went back to his company muttering, “Buick, you’re bloody mad”.’15

  The enemy dead were finally tallied at 245. However, this was a gross underestimate as weeks later patrols would come across decomposing bodies, other areas that had not been searched were found to contain remains from the Anzac barrage of 18–19 August, and other parts of the battlefield had been cleared by the Viet Cong before the Australians reoccupied the plantation during the morning of 19 August. The degree to which the Viet Cong were able to clear the battlefield is attested to by the fact that they left only three wounded behind (one from D445 VC Battalion and two from 275 VC Regiment) to be captured by the Australians.16 A diary of a senior Vietnamese commander of the battle was later discovered by US troops and it stated that the 5th VC Infantry Division during the battle for Long Tan had suffered over 500 killed and 1000 wounded, while other captured documents, including some from enemy hospital units, placed the casualties for the battle at over 800 killed and 1800 wounded.17

  That night, C Company set up a harbour position to the east of the battle site, but had to request a helicopter to evacuate one of their men. It was later learnt that close by there had been a Viet Cong field hospital, likely Company Commander Chin Phuong’s medical unit, that until then had not been aware of the closeness of the Australians; the helicopter alerted them and the Viet Cong were able to clear out undetected. Even from C Company’s advanced position, the dead bodies could be smelt and somewhere to the east a number of bugles were heard. Sergeant Neil Rankin of D Company, 6 RAR, located at the main battle site, recalled how the sound of the bugles on the still night air, even given the great distance they were at, was enough to make the hair stand up on the back of his neck.18 The men of D Company, 5 RAR had set up a harbour position north of the battlefield area and they too smelt the decaying bodies and heard the bugles.

  As the men tried to sleep in the graveyard of the main battle site, movement was heard: it was wild dogs and pigs scrimmaging around the shallow graves, attracted by the smell.

  Early on 21 August the veterans of D Company, 6 RAR were relieved and sent back to Nui Dat; from there they would head out for two days’ R&R at Vung Tau. Not long after they left the plantation, it was the turn of those from D Company, 5 RAR to leave for Nui Dat to rejoin their brother companies of the battalion. Meanwhile, the remainder of 6 RAR, including a now up-to-strength B Company, continued on with Operation Smithfield. These men came across another track that led east between Suoi Mon River and the eastern arm of the Suoi Da Bang. T
he company moved north from this position and came across a large camp that had only recently been evacuated; it was assessed to have contained around 300 individuals. At about 11.30 a.m. they found what was obviously the main crossing point of the withdrawing enemy force across the eastern branch of the Suoi Da Bang. Several hundred metres further on they discovered a fortified enemy position that had been held by a delaying force to keep back any attempt by the Australians to pursue their retreat. It was assessed that the enemy had only left the night before, leaving behind clothing and equipment.19

  The main Viet Cong evacuation track leading east through the plantation and the areas in the immediate vicinity were the focus of the operation. The men of A Company, in their sweep further south, found a number of recently evacuated defensive positions, likely constructed to help hinder any Australian advance against the fleeing main force. An additional bunker system of about 40 weapons pits, constructed long before the battle, was also found, but there was evidence it had only recently been evacuated.20 They found evidence as well of a large force moving towards the eastern tributary of Suoi Mon River – an additional track leading to the river was also gouged deep into the mud and like previous tracks all of the tree trunks were marked with mud and bloody handprints, while used bandages and torn clothing littered the area.21