fullon at work. You had a job every day, whether it be mess duties, doing some road project, building a culvert, building a shower block or you were in the field."
Sparrow Christie wasn't quite so impressed with his American neighbours.
"Yeah, the first night at Bien Hoa was wet – water was running through. So everybody lined up and had a shower in a massive square with just shower roses hanging out of it. Everybody just sort of went and soaped up and you looked around and there was a big line of black and white guys soaping up – there was about 6 out of 10 coloured guys in 173rd Airborne.
"And then we got dressed and lined up with our mess tins and the Americans had those ones with little scoops all over them, you know and we just had the old square dixies, you know the big and the small.
"Mick Lee was lined up and some big boofhead of a Yank cook put a big ladle of custard all over his main meal for a joke. Mick just tipped it all out on the floor where he stood, went and washed his dixie and went and lined up again. There was custard and shit everywhere, you know, and nobody said boo."
The Americans were not, however, the enemy. The enemy were out there in the jungle somewhere. We knew because of these damn artillery guns called Long Toms that were firing over the top of us every hour, every night.
It was what we call harassing and interdiction fire with a range of about 15 to 17 kilometres and it was designed to harass the enemy and keep them on the move. We didn't get much sleep for the first week until we got used to them.
We were given three weeks, until October 20, to get our own camp ready before we had to make ourselves available to perform engineering tasks for other units, although 1RAR tried to get us working for them a week early. I had to politely decline, but it took a message from the HQ of the Australian Armed Forces Vietnam to get them to back off.
We had more than enough work to keep us busy. We had to get our kitchen up and running, get our own stores in, dig latrines and start putting up our basic camp buildings.
As a general rule when you're moving into virtually virgin territory the first thing you do is to establish your sections – we had three tents to a section, four men to a tent – and each section must dig its weapon pits. Weapon pits come before even tents since you won't need anywhere to sleep if you've just been overrun by the enemy. In our case the weapons pits proved troublesome and messy as they kept filling up with water. Still, the machine gun posts had to be established, although later they'd be put in high towers overlooking the perimeter. The machine gun posts had to be manned day and night from the first day, because we were now part of the perimeter of the main camp. This is a good example of how we were soldiers first and engineers second, a fact I'd have to impress on my superiors later in the war when they expected us to perform engineering duties fulltime but refused to allow infantry cover for us.
After that we started establishing basic facilities like toilets, which were just trenches or holes in the ground which we'd burn out fairly frequently with diesel. Then, of course there's your mess hall and the orderly room for the officers.
Because the ground was saturated, and it was a soggy, clay area, we had to put drains in. And until we put duckboards down, we had to wade through a sea of sticky mud. It took a long time for the ground to dry out, so it was very uncomfortable.
2/4
With time our facilities grew at Bien Hoa to include better toilets and hot and cold running water. (AWM P1595.060)
We also had to put up a workshop to service all the equipment – trucks, bulldozers etc – that we'd brought with us. We had stuff bogged all the time so we had to build tracks and roads as well as the drains that we hoped would dry the land out for us.
There was a lot of work to do but you get through it fairly quickly when you've got sixty guys who are able to concentrate on it.
We had moved into an area that had been cleared as part of the defences for the whole brigade, so the bush had to be cleared back another 100 metres on the other side of the wire. That way you can see the enemy crossing that last strip of land if they decide to attack you.
We had the equipment, we had the men and we had the skill, but I soon discovered that there was a problem getting raw materials. If I had tried to go through the usual red tape to get what we needed I'd probably still be sitting in Bien Hoa waiting for it to arrive.
2/5
This was our workshop with the frame built out of 2 inch piping
that we purchased from our "casino" winnings. Next to it was a
vehicle ramp built from "acquired" timber. (AWM P1595.061)
This may sound ridiculous, but 1RAR were on a very tight budget. I wrote in a report that we were having problems getting the very basic supplies and said that we were fortunate that we had our own transport as that allowed us to "beg, borrow or otherwise acquire" essential materials.
For "otherwise acquire" read "steal from" or trade with the Yanks.
The Americans seemed to have mountains of everything, so when I needed timber, I took a couple of trucks down to the dock at Saigon and just loaded it up. Realising that we wouldn't be able to unload it at the other end, I got one of the lads to drive the forklift on to the back of our truck and took that too. I just signed for it and took it away, as simple as that.
Mick McGrath, who was driving one of the trucks, says he was stopped at the gate by a South Vietnamese guard who asked him for some documentation. The only thing he had on him, says Mick, was the certificate they'd all been given when they crossed the equator on the HMAS Sydney, so he handed that over and was allowed to pass. Mick reckons that anybody who turned up after that who hadn't been across the equator on a ship wouldn't have got through!
2/6
This was my office built from some of the timber taken from the Saigon wharves. It was the last building to go up at Bien Hoa and I guess I worked in it for less than 10 days. (AWM P1595.107)
I wonder if the chief engineer ever imagined how his advice to "just do what engineers do" would be interpreted. Our unofficial saying is "Work hard – play hard". Well, we worked bloody hard in those first few weeks and we'd play hard too when we got the chance. But before that we had to go out on our first operation. It came only a week after we arrived and, I have to say, it left me wondering what all the fuss was about.
* * *
On October 8, myself and five NCOs went on our first mission as observers. I think it would be fair to say that we were all gripped by a mixture of fear and excitement but were glad to get out of camp and into the field and away from the noise of the Long Toms. What a disappointment it turned out to be.
Operation Ben Cat II in the Iron Triangle was a search and destroy mission into an area only 25 kilometres north of Saigon which was thought to have large Viet Cong supply, maintenance and medical facilities and possibly as much as
