It's a 105mm gun – more like a small cannon than a big rifle – and they used it to blow the top out of every tree they saw until they stopped the sniper. You'd pay big dollars to go and see it now.
"Anyway that was just the start of the fun. Continuing on we came to this part of the road where the Viet Cong had come in during the night and they'd chopped all the road up to make it impassable. So they asked Geoff (Beau) Guest to take the TD15 off and start dozing the road, just fill in all the holes with the dozer.
"I suggested to Wilfie that we could go round and start working back and he reckoned that was a good idea because there were good banks on the side of the road further on from where Guestie was working. On this other side Wilfie could go up there with the bucket and just dig into the bank, dig out a couple of bucketfuls of dirt, fill that hole, go and get some more and work his way back down towards the dozer.
"So we got all this worked out and we didn't bother telling the Yanks where we were, I just drove off the road and down round through the scrub and came out the other side of where the road was cut. I said to Wilf that we'd better check this place out before we started so we went and checked two or three huts that were nearby and they were all right. There were no signs of activity, they hadn't been lived in for a while and I couldn't see any bunker systems.
"So Wilfie takes the loader off and I'm just sort of standing there and a bloke comes up the road on a push bike and Wilfie, who was backing up, looked over his shoulder and saw me give the bloke a smack up the side of his head with my rifle butt.
"Wilf stopped the loader and jumped off and says 'What did you do that for? ' and I said 'He's got grenades in this fruit' – you could see where they were cut to hide the grenades. So the Vietnamese was in a bit of a flat spin on the side of the road and we tied him up and that's when the Yanks got brave and followed my wheel tracks through the scrub.
"Anyway this colonel pulls up in this jeep and says 'What's the story here, Oz? ' and I said, 'I've just checked out those huts and it looks pretty clear to me. I caught this silly bastard here coming down the road on that push bike there and he's got grenades in the fruit. '
"So he got on the radio and he said 'The Australians have cleared the road to my position, we are now going to proceed'. By this time there's about half a dozen vehicles had pulled up behind him and they had a couple of those 13 hundredweight utes with all the sandbags and machine guns and everything all bristling.
"But they'd only got up the road about 40 metres when the VC set off a mine. They let the jeep with the officer through and another jeep with a machine gun on it pass, then the next one which was all bristling with guns was the one they picked. The blast just picked it up and flipped it right over and all you could hear was people screaming. Then Charlie (the VC) opened up from the scrub.
"So I told Wilf to look after the bloke we'd captured and I'd go and see how Beau was. I ran down there, because I was protected by this big bank that we were going to dig out of, and there's Guestie still working away with the dozer. He couldn't hear a thing because he had his earmuffs on.
"There were bullets screaming around the place everywhere and I'm waving trying to draw his attention and throwing rocks at the dozer. Then he looked up and took the ear muffs off and heard it all. He nearly shit himself. It was funny, even though it was pretty serious at the time.
"Anyway Wilfie and I found a safe spot behind this bank and watched the Yanks really putting it on the Viet Cong. They didn't hesitate to call the planes in and two of them arrived, just strafing, and this other one came in later had the two big napalm bombs underneath.
"So I said to Wilf, 'Have a look at this, this will be a good one'. Anyway as he came in he's dropped the first one and its nose snagged and the tail went sideways. So, when he dropped the second one, the nose of the second one hit the tail of the first one and dislodged it. But the jolt ignited the second bomb and these two napalm bombs just exploded right above our heads. It was just like a gigantic thunder clap and our ears just screamed and we couldn't breathe 'cause there was no air.
"Just about the same time this little Viet Cong had started to come to after I'd given him the tap. He looked up but he couldn’t breathe – he must have thought he was dead. I looked at Wilfie and he was struggling but it passed pretty quick and we were all right.
4/13
Notice one helicopter gunship up in the air to protect the slick of helicopters coming to get a load of Aussies on the Plain of Reeds. The operation near the Cambodian border has just
finished and we are now going to "Operation Crimp".
But I'll never forget the look of terror on that little bloke's face."
While we Aussies marvelled at the Americans' fire power, as I've said, they respected our abilities as jungle fighters, even to the extent of using men from 3 Field Troop as forward scouts – which definitely isn't an engineering role – and, in one case when there were no engineering jobs to do, forming the sappers into an extra infantry patrol.
For Sandy Saunders, being stuck out in front was preferable to being tail-end Charlie when the Americans had already gone crashing through the jungle.
"I remember on one operation I was on an ambush patrol by night and this VC force that intended to attack a Yankee engineering unit stumbled into us. The Viet Cong didn't know we were in front of them. They were just getting ready to prepare to line up to attack the Americans and then we opened up on them. We had a completely different system to the Americans and that must have confused them.
"The Yanks acted as if they were still fighting in Europe, whereas we were jungle trained. Most of our tactics came out of New Guinea, Malaya and Borneo, so it was just what we'd been doing for years. The tactics weren't any different as far as we were concerned.
"I didn't mind it when they used us as forward scouts. I'd rather be up there on our own rather than back with the bulk of them with their noise, so we were probably better off."
Most of the men had closer contacts with the Americans socially than they did in the field. Our little canteen – with its cheap beer and "strange" gambling games like two-up and crown & anchor – was a real magnet to the Americans. That was especially true of the black Americans who found the Aussies a lot less racist than their own white comrades. It was a situation that Sparrow Christie exploited to the full.
"I used to go over the wire into the American compound where the sergeant that used to run the workshop was a big black guy called Crow. I guess because my nickname was Sparrow, I got on all right with him. He got me an American uniform and I'd slip over to him, dress up in it and drive his jeep into town."
Sparrow and Crow were obviously not supposed to be going anywhere. But the guards on the gate would always assume that Crow was an officer, simply because he was being driven around in a jeep.
"When we used to pull up at the Provos you know he'd poke shit at me being a white man driving a blackfella around and we'd get through," says Sparrow. "But I couldn't drink too much because I had to drive back. So we'd go and get our rocks off come back and then I'd just drink his booze in his fridge. He had everything in that workshop."
Americans and Australians were natural allies, and fought well together, despite our ups and downs. Judging by the way Sparrow and Crow conspired to get to the brothels of Bien Hoa, they played well together too.
Конец
