Vietnam’s communist leadership maintained even after the war that they had won a great victory against the Australians during the Battle of Long Tan. Indeed the official history of Dong Nai Province, which includes Phuoc Tuy, states that the communist forces ‘eliminated 500 Australians and destroyed 21 tanks’ even though Australian tanks would not be present in Vietnam until 1967.27 Also, there is no mention of Vietnamese casualties – they apparently suffered none. It has only been very recently that cracks have appeared in the official government mantra, with some hesitant suggestions that the battle resulted in a major defeat of Vietnamese forces. Even so, intelligence officer Captain Bryan Wickens learnt from captured Viet Cong documents that the VC held some grudging respect for Australians as they ‘buried our dead – they are a true enemy’. That is, the Australians didn’t abuse the Viet Cong dead like many Americans, who would cut off hands or ears or bury them with an ace-of-spades card sticking up.28
The war went on. Private Noel Grimes had shared a four-man tent but now it housed three with the death of Private Paul Large. He said: ‘that empty bed space has always stuck in my mind, there were still three there but the fourth one has gone . . . some of the others, those from 11 Platoon, there was probably two or three from the one tent that wasn’t there anymore – it would have been a lot harder for them . . . That sticks in my mind pretty much.’29
It wasn’t long before the empty bunks of D Company were filled with new arrivals. Private Terry Burstall recalled that when they returned from Vung Tau, soldiers were transferred from one platoon to another and reinforcements quickly arrived.30 Private Peter Doyle recalled that the new blokes were treated like outsiders, which with hindsight he regretted: ‘I could not even tell you the name of one reinforcement. They came there not by choice; they came to replace dead or wounded blokes. I didn’t care who they were. I wasn’t interested in making friends with them. I didn’t shun them, but I wasn’t interested in knowing about them. And I think that was pretty universal. So it must’ve been hard for reinforcements. I couldn’t tell you the name of the bloke who took Gordon Sharp’s place.’31
Regimental signaller Corporal Graham Smith recalled that after their leave in Vung Tau ‘that was that; there was no counselling or anything else. We had taken on quite a few reinforcements just before Long Tan and after Long Tan we took on quite a few more. But among the soldiers there was never any debriefing of any nature that I can recall, and we just got on with the war and really Long Tan didn’t become a big thing until the 20th anniversary.’32
Indeed, the army at the time was keen to play down the action and keep it low-key among the troops of 6 RAR. It was thought that elevating one company to ‘hero’ status would lead to ill feeling among the other companies. Indeed, throughout the remainder of the tour many units took a dig at the Long Tan veterans, with comments such as ‘D Company! That mob of bastards that think they did something special’ and similar jibes.33
Private Stan Hodder recalled that there was some talk about the whole company being sent back to Australia a week or two after the battle, but the idea was quickly dropped. He, like many others, recalled that ‘knowing what they know now, they probably should have sent someone out because all we had was a church service two or three days after we came back, and to make matters worse, our 2IC arranged to have a [US] jet break the sound barrier over us the day we got back, and if you’ve ever heard someone break the sound barrier, mate, it scared the shit out of everyone. I think that’s when my nerves really went . . . They broke it right over our company area – it was supposed to be a welcome-home victory thing . . . They didn’t tell anyone and it scared the shit out of me. It was like a hydrogen bomb going off.’34
Burstall recalled with appreciation how Sergeant Major ‘Big Jack’ Kirby came into their tent one afternoon and sat down and asked his men how they were. Each provided a similar answer along the lines of ‘No worries’. Burstall can still remember Kirby just sitting there and ‘looking at us all for about a minute and then he got up quickly and said, “Yeah, OK, fellows, see you later”, and headed up the muddy path between the tents.’35
About six months later, on 6 February 1967, Kirby and the men from D Company were on patrol when they made contact with the enemy. The artillery was called in and 12 rounds were fired to help range in the artillery against the enemy position. Graham Smith, the regimental signaller, was present and remembers the incident vividly as one of the most traumatic periods of his time during the Vietnam War:
We had been patrolling in a company formation . . . with 10 [Platoon], 11 [Platoon] and an anti-tank [platoon] and we were in single-file formation on this patrol, with 10 Platoon out in front, followed up by company headquarters, anti-tank and I think 11 [Platoon]. The report came from the rear that we had enemy following us so we went to ground, pretty much each side of the track we were patrolling, and artillery was called for; they fired 12 rounds. They went over our heads and beyond and then a correction was made and I can remember the correction – it was add 200 – but when they started coming I thought, ‘Fuck, these are going to land close’ and the first one landed 15 metres away from me.
At that stage I was screaming ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ into my handset, which was heard in the forward patrol post but . . . they still continued to come. Anyway the company headquarters area was where the first shell impacted – surrounded in dust and smoke and so on, but as it cleared I could see Jack Kirby, he was sitting only about 5 to 6 feet from me . . . I was standing up by this time – he was clutching his chest and I could see blood coming from between his fingers and from his mouth and he just said, ‘I’m hit’, and all I can remember doing was shaking my head and my fellow signaller who was beside me, Robin ‘Pom’ Rencher, he was also hit in the neck, so I had his radio. The company commander wasn’t Harry Smith, [it was] a fellow by the name of [Captain Murray] Weaver – he had his arm almost severed. I took control for a little while – I ordered 10 Platoon to secure a landing zone so we could get the choppers in and I reported to BHQ what had happened . . . the next senior officer with us was Lieutenant Paul O’Sullivan. I called him forward to take over command of the company.
[Lieutenant] Colonel Townsend and medical officer Captain John Taske arrived. Buick came up and Jack Kirby at this stage was screaming, ‘Bob! Bob!’ Buick tried to give him some comfort and then he took off . . . he headed back down the line to perhaps investigate further . . . The doctor was the last one who had contact with Jack Kirby [who] was in [his] care, trying to give him mouth-to-mouth [resuscitation] to keep him going and I remember him coming up and he had blood all over his face, trying to breathe life into Jack Kirby . . . This is one of my recurring nightmares, this whole incident . . . We took stock of things – we had 13 wounded and four killed. We got the choppers in to take the wounded and the dead [and] they flew in Major [Owen] O’Brien to take over the company and those of us who were uninjured put our gear [back] on and continued the patrol . . . It was a horrible, horrible day and in many ways it was worse than Long Tan.36
Sergeant Major Jack Kirby, the backbone of the company, was dead. When men heard, they couldn’t comprehend that their loved and respected warrant officer, who for many had become a father figure, was gone.
Just like in the aftermath of the Battle of Long Tan, nothing was said. There was no debriefing or counselling – nothing from that day to the next. They were to get on with the war. When Graham Smith got back to Nui Dat, Harry Smith, who had been down in hospital with pneumonia during the whole incident, saw him and told his radio operator: ‘I hear you did a pretty good job out there.’ Graham Smith said, ‘I thought so’ and Major Smith told him, ‘I’m heading down to Vung Tau tomorrow – would you like to come?’ ‘And I said, “Yeah, I’d love to.” And that was it.’37
Jim Richmond, like Graham Smith and so many others who survived not only the Battle of Long Tan but the Vietnam War, is still deeply affected. He has a recurring dream:
The first day, the day I woke up in
bed at the hospital, I had a dream the night after that and all the blokes in the dream were all me friends, all me mates that were killed and I just said to them, ‘It’s only a dream and when I wake up you’ll wake up in the morning with me.’ Well, that dream has kept with me from Long Tan till now . . . I don’t know why, but the one that stays with me all the time is the young blokes – their faces are like they’re still young . . . I see their faces, Doug, Shorty, Mitch, Glenn . . . and I still tell them that when I wake up that next morning, they’ll all wake up with me. But they never do.38
Epilogue
On 17 August 1969, 6 RAR was in the middle of its second tour of Vietnam and A and D companies were preparing to launch an operation in the Long Tan plantation, two years to the day after the Battle of Long Tan. Some of the men were veterans of that battle.
Over the past 18 months the centre of Australian activity in Phuoc Tuy Province had shifted further north and few had visited the old battlefield, which lay just 5 kilometres to the east of the Task Force base. The men arrived via chopper and made their way to the site of 11 Platoon’s stand against the human waves of Viet Cong. They swept the battlefield area, securing it, and with night approaching set up a defensive perimeter and waited for the arrival of the battalion’s assault pioneers, who were due at first light the next day – 18 August.
Early the next morning the pioneers arrived and with the help of the infantry the immediate area was cleared of trees. A 3-metre-high concrete cross with a brass plaque attached, constructed by the pioneers, was flown in, suspended from an RAAF Iroquois chopper. The inscription on the plaque read:
In memory of those
members of D Coy and
3 Tp 1 APC Sqn who gave
their lives near this
spot during the battle
of Long Tan on 18th August 1966
Erected by 6RAR/NZ
(ANZAC) Bn 18 Aug 69
With the cross erected and a defence perimeter established, a number of APCs moved forward and formed a hollow square around the immediate area of the cross. Ten veterans of the battle (nine from D Company and one from 3 Troop) flanked the cross in an honour guard while two pipers played a lament and a chaplain conducted a dedication. The ceremony was completed by midday, with D Company the last to leave.
Very few Australians from the Task Force visited the area during the remaining two years of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, except as part of the odd patrol.1 One person, however, who made a number of patrols within and around the plantation was Warrant Officer Kevin ‘Chicko’ Miller, who had been in 12 Platoon during the battle. He was now part of the AATTV, commanding Cambodian troops, in his second tour of duty in 1971–72 and recalled going to Long Tan several times during this tour:
I used to take my Cambodian [troops] out there to the cross that the battalion had erected on their second tour . . . and I took photos of it. The cross was there, but it didn’t have the brass plate on it, and the chains that they’d put around it – it [originally] had four posts and a chain around it – the chains had been stolen, they were gone, and they taken the brass plate. The cross was still there, but the grass and the bush was growing up right around it – it was overgrown, so I got the Cambodians to clean it up while I was out there. Just after we left there we had a contact about 300 metres from the cross and killed one VC that day. We operated all through that area on my second tour, while I was with the training team. But all of the other Australians had gone home – it was only us left there . . . all of the [Australian] battalion units had gone home. We were on our own, training Vietnamese or Cambodian troops.2
With the conclusion of the war, the cross was removed and used by local villagers as a ‘headstone’ for a local Catholic priest, Nguyen Van Minh, whose name was engraved on it. About ten years later the cross was removed by the Dong Nai Museum in Bien Hoa city, where it was put on display with a number of other artefacts relating to the Vietnam War. In 1989, Terry Burstall revisited Vietnam and saw the cross in the museum. It had been ‘broken off from the concrete that had been poured around the base to hold it in place and there was a large fracture about 30 centimetres from the bottom. Two pieces of round reinforcing rod protruded from the end.’3 In late 1989, the Dat District People’s Committee erected a replica of the cross in the plantation with a new plaque, which read:
Socialist Republic of Vietnam
The Ministry of Culture
Recognises: Historic Place
Battlefield: D445 of Ba Ria – Long Khanh
Province
Contacted 6th Battalion of
The Royal Australian Army
Near Long Tan village on 18-8-1966
In April 2002, the Australian Vietnam Veterans Reconstruction Group with permission from the Vietnamese government completed the restoration of the replica cross and constructed a low-key memorial site. Many Australians today visit the memorial* and it remains one of only two foreign memorials relating to the Indochina Wars permitted on Vietnamese soil; the other is the French memorial at Dien Bien Phu.4 The original Long Tan cross, with its plaque reattached, was loaned to the Australian War Memorial in mid-2012 and placed on display. It has since been returned to Vietnam.
After the war, the Vietnamese dead buried by the Australians immediately after the Battle of Long Tan were reinterred in a war cemetery in Hoa Long.
The No. 2 signaller from 6 RAR, D Company, Private Bill Akell, who bravely ran the gauntlet from CHQ to Lieutenant Geoff Kendall with the spare radio during the height of the battle, recently recalled his mixed emotions of that day, which likely apply to other veterans of the battle:
Firstly, there was the normal ‘We’re just going on a patrol’. I won’t say we were casual about it – once you moved outside the wire, nobody was casual. You looked ahead, you looked to your left and right, you looked up the trees, and you looked at the ground for booby traps. Your mind was active. Then there was in the first contact the excitement – we had made contact with the Viet Cong! And then there was the apprehension once the battle started about what had we got ourselves into. There was the feeling of ‘I’m going to die’ and that’s a real feeling when they were lining up for their final assault. Then there was the exhilaration, excitement when the armoured personnel carriers arrived; then there was the complete exhaustion right throughout that night; and then the total sadness when we came across the bodies of our soldiers, mainly from 11 Platoon, that were lying there. So you can imagine in [less than] 24 hours you had that entire mixed emotion. The two things that stand out to me are the bugle calls and the artillery – I’ll never forget it.5
* The site is desolate, with the trees of the plantation having recently been removed. It is hoped that the plantation will be re-established.
Sergeant Major Jack Kirby and Major Harry Smith, who commanded D Company, test firing a Viet Cong heavy machinegun captured on the Long Tan battlefield. Many veterans of the battle believe that Jack Kirby should have been awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions.
Young National Service Officer Lieutenant Gordon Sharp commanded 11 Platoon, D Company. During the opening hour of battle he was killed in action, while risking his life to call in artillery to protect his men.
Lieutenant Adrian Roberts, commanding 3 APC Troop; Lieutenant David Sabben, commanding 12 Platoon, D Company; and Lieutenant Geoff Kendall, commanding 10 Platoon, D Company: all were in the thick of the fighting at Long Tan, and showed true leadership during the chaos and horror of battle.
New Zealand Forward Observation Officer Captain Maury Stanley provided critical direction to the Australian and New Zealand batteries during the battle of Long Tan.
Sergeant James ‘Paddy’ Todd (12 Platoon, D Company) went off on his own when wounded, to not remove any men from the firing line, and somehow made it back to D Company HQ.
Lance Corporal Geordie Richardson (D Company HQ) and Sergeant Bob Buick (11 Platoon, D Company), who commanded 11 Platoon after Lieutenant Sharp was killed, attend to Priva
te Jim Richmond (11 Platoon, D Company) the day after the battle. Wounded, Richmond had remained on the battlefield overnight, the Viet Cong all around him.
The fatherly figure of 10 Platoon, D Company, Sergeant Neil Rankin with one of his men, Private Don Montgomery, during quieter times.
Lieutenant Colonel Townsend, who commanded 6 RAR at the time of the battle.
Brigadier David Jackson, commanding 1 Australian Task Force at Nui Dat.
Helicopter Flight Lieutenants Frank Riley (left) and Cliff Dohle (right), both of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) No. 9 Squadron, dropped ammunition supplies to the stranded D Company at tree-top level while the battle raged 10 metres below – a near suicide mission.
Artillery offering fire support from Task Force base during an unknown operation. During the battle the toxic fumes around the guns made many gunners sick – but they all stayed beside their guns throughout the action.
The destruction of Long Phuoc Village in early June 1966 was meant to clear out the Viet Cong from the immediate area of the Australian Task Force base at Nui Dat.
The Battle of Long Tan Page 34
