Like other soldiers, engineers can kill and they can die. But when the killing stops, they pick up their tools and work. Engineers have no time to be heroes, they're too busy for that.
But comes the hour, comes the man. And if you must have heroics, try crawling through a tunnel that's too narrow to turn around in, when the only sound is your own heartbeat pounding in your ears, not knowing if the next corner will bring you face to face with any one of a dozen kinds of death. Try to imagine feeling around in a rice bag for the slender length of fishing line that is attached to a pin, which is attached to a bomb which someone has put there with the sole intention of killing you and your mates.
It's a different kind of death that you face as a sapper, and it's one you cannot turn and run from, or hide until it goes away. It is your ingenuity against your enemy's, your brain willing your fingers not to fumble, your pores not to sweat, your heart to slow down.
P/A
The unofficial badge of the Royal Australian Engineers.
It's time it was official – most soldiers believe
it expresses best what we do.
And if you get it wrong you're just as dead as if you'd charged into a hundred blazing guns.
Every soldier thinks his regiment is special, but engineers, or sappers as they're known, have qualities no others possess. When, like other soldiers, they lay down their arms at the end of their patrol, engineers pick up their tools and build and dig and create and repair. What's more, the work engineers do in peacetime is often the same as what they do at war.
They are different. They are special.
And I'm going to take that one stage further and say that the engineers of 3 Field Troop, the first unit of Australian Engineers to serve in Vietnam – and the only one on "our" side made up entirely of regular volunteers – had different qualities again. Better? Perhaps. Special? Of that there is no doubt. All conscripts that went to Vietnam volunteered. The difference was we didn't have conscripts or national servicemen, and the other troops of regulars weren't volunteers.
I came away from Vietnam with a Military Cross, one of Australia's highest honours, as reward for what we achieved there. But more valuable than that, I returned home with memories of a small slice of history: a time when ordinary Aussie blokes became extraordinary; when boys became men; when those I led became leaders themselves.
Like so many other Australians, I wear my medals on Anzac Day with pride, but perhaps the greatest honour I've ever had was to be chosen to lead the first Tunnel Rats – the men of 3 Field Troop.
I suppose we were the right men in the right place. But at the time it seemed nothing could have been further from the truth. On the other hand, there's nowhere I would rather have been ...
* * *
I am from a military family – the Army was my history and my destiny. I was born in 1940 in India when my father was in the Indian Army. I guess when he gave me his name, Alexander Hugh, he also passed on a taste for life in uniform.
Dad had joined the British Army Engineers as a bugle boy when he was 15, then went back and forth between India and England until he finally returned to spend his last days of service under Indian colours. Dad was a fantastic sportsman representing the army in India in every major sport.
I don't remember my grandparents at all, but both my grandfathers were in the Army. My mother's father was a major in the British Army and Dad's father, Christopher Duncan MacGregor, was in the Corps of Engineers.
I wish I had known him because the family stories about him were fantastic. He served in India and under Kitchener in Omdurman and Khartoum. He was also very inventive and, as is so often the case with Army Engineers, made a considerable mark without any great credit.
Apparently, on one of Kitchener's operations they needed a moveable heavy gun, so he invented a mortar mounted on a trailer – the first of its kind in the world.
Another idea of his, back in 191418, was barrage balloons, big balloons full of hydrogen on the end of long ropes or wires. They were put up above cities in the First World War so that Zeppelins and lowflying planes would be blown up if they hit them. They were used even more in the Second World War, so much so that they are almost a symbol of London during the Battle of Britain.
He was also a very good shot with a rifle and was the champion shot of all India. One year, in the AllIndia combined services shoot, he was doing much better than anyone else on a very windy day. Two Navy officers came up behind Grandad and they could see him fiddling around with the rear sight of his Lee Enfield rifle.
They asked him what he was doing and he showed them the adjustable back sight he had made for himself. The homemade sight not only compensated for distance, but moved from side to side so he could adjust for the wind.
Before too long every 303 rifle in the British forces was fitted with this adjustable sight to aim off for wind – with the patent owned by the two naval officers.
My father rose through the ranks and reached Major by the time the war ended and India gained her independence. He wrote back to his brother Bob in England to ask what conditions were like there. The news was not good. Uncle Bob reported back that the UK hadn't much to offer at the time – and especially not for children – but Australia looked like the land of milk and honey and he strongly recommended that Dad should bring us here.
So, trading on his organisational experience, he took a job running the stores for International Canners in Ulverstone in Tasmania. He later moved on to a better job with Australian Pulp and Paper Mills in Burnie.
It must have been March, 1948, when we first set foot in Australia, because I had just turned eight. It was an exciting time for me and a challenging period for my father as this was his first ever civilian job. But it must have been a real culture shock for my Mum.
My mother, Beryl, was nine years younger than Dad so she can barely have been 30 when she arrived in Australia. But it wasn't just a change of country for her, it was a complete change of lifestyle. As an Army daughter then Army wife, she would have been used to a different kind of life to her contemporaries anyway. But having spent most of her married life in India, at a time when Army life represented the last remnants of the Raj, the change could not have been greater.
Living as an officer and a gentleman in India was a very, very privileged existence. We must have had four or five servants, including a cook, an ayah to look after the children, a gardener and a bearer who was in charge of all the others. So Mum's life in India was one of not having to do any work whatsoever, apart from looking after us. When we left India, my sister Margaret was 5 and my brother Chris was 3.
So when Mum arrived in this new country – in both senses of the phrase – if she knew how to sew it would only be because she'd been taught at school. If she knew how to cook it was still something she hadn't done for 10 years. In short, she went from being a rather pampered Memsahib to being a housewife with 3 kids, and with no friends to offer advice or support.
I can say all that with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time it was fine for us kids. And despite the dramatic changes in lifestyle, it was a loving household. Mum and Dad were always there when we needed them.
I went to school in
