Remembered & written by: Private Ross Johnson 2789547, 7th platoon, Charlie company, 4RAR.

This memory and story is as true as I can recollect after thirty years or so. I don't mean to demean any of our brave and resourceful digs. It was just a moment in time wasn't it?
Outside and somewhere in the vicinity of Bienhoa air base (which was 20 miles North West of Saigon) in early 1969 our company was dug in and defending the large American air base. It was the same old shit, patrols heat and dirt and the ever-present fear of attack and counter attack.
We had been there several days when overnight the Noggies bombarded the base with the ever-popular 120mm rockets, which they were firing across our camp and into the air base. The yanks were soon retaliating back at their enemies launch sites with salvo after salvo of their artillery probably 155mm-175mm. So it was a like a modern day light and sound show…………glowing trains of missile trails crossing our dug in positions and the roaring of massed artillery shells making their way across us seeking their tormentors further in the jungle. If you haven't been under those shells let me tell you it is like the rushing of ghosts in the night or the passing of freight trains with the rushing of air and noise. I was so mesmerized by it all that fear was only an only a passing idea. It was mainly the wonder of it all and sheer bloody amazement of its qualities!
Of course next morning we were fortunately picked (pulled) from amongst our stand-to positions in our company lines and formed into a search & destroy platoon. We set forth to find if possible the launch sites of the offending racketeers. I mean rocketeers!
Well we found much to all our surprise the rocket sites deep in the jungle. This was achieved after several hours of constant leapfrogging with our silent approach through the jungle. There were no bodies or signs of enemy presence other than the ramps that the noggies had built out of bamboo and angled toward Bienhoa air base. They had cleared the jungle tops for their rockets and time delayed their ignition. This meant they were long gone when the Americans were doing their retaliatory fire and keeping us all awake. I thought this very clever of them at the time and thought back to our Diggers using the similar tactic in the evacuation of our troops in Gallipoli in the First World War. I was truly becoming a digger with these thoughts.
What all this is all leading to is my involvement in a very serious and disturbing period for me in the defense of Bienhoa. It didn't involve many deaths, nor did it become a memorable battle like some, but for me and others like me it was a day to remember…forever.
I shall call it a flash in the night, but it still lingers brightly in my memory, and I still don't know to this day what to think of it all.
The brains behind our battle tactics and deployments decided that a larger response was needed. So in Battalion strength we set out to further deploy into the donga and set up our usual ambushes, splitting up into company & platoon strength.
Had I mentioned that I was only a few weeks in country? I had joined 4RAR as a rifleman and a replacement from ARU. My initiation was to be short and brutal. I was a snotty nosed replacement for one of the good guys who were no longer with them. The CSM when issuing my SLR (That was our standard infantry rifle then a 7.62 semi auto weapon…big bullets like the ww2 lee Enfield) back at Nui Dat had wished me well, hoping that I would do better with it than my predecessor who had shot himself through the shoulder. Hinting that it was self inflicted I suppose.
So we set forth. Journeying with us was a War correspondent come photojournalist employed to capture the spirit of our task in this fine adventure. Capture us he did when he took heaps of photos of our ambush and assaults on 35mm film.
We arrived at a track or a jungle road heavily vegetated with bamboo. Our Platoon silently reconnoited the site of our planned ambush and slowly but surely we set up our triangulated ambush site. Our three M60 belt fed machine guns were deployed in classic positions at both ends of the road. The third gun with yours truly as number 2 covering the rear, facing the way we had entered the site. Our boss and sigs were protected in the centre of this triangulated defense site with the rest of the boys dispersed equally between the gun positions and surrounding the centre.
Finally having picked our positions and clearing leaf debris etc. from our fighting positions we got permission to brew up, as it was still early afternoon. It had been a difficult haul and the approach to this site had been long and exhausting with a lot of crawling under dense vegetation and 'wait a minute' bramble bushes ready to hinder our progress with their thorny embrace.
This was the start…I began brewing up my specialty from my three-day ration pack. A half pint of gorgeous sweet but energy building hot chocolate with extra condensed milk from a tube (something I had been looking forward to for 3 days). Even though South Vietnam was very wet drinking liquid was at a premium with an Infantry soldier only drinking what he could carry. Just starting to simmer I remember, when Fuck our machine guns opened up and a heavy burst of bullets ripped through our foliage. I knocked over my untouched brew. The gunner and I clawed at the ground, the gun, and my rifle trying to do something that made sense in this impenetrable jungle battlefield. We saw nothing the gunner and I, he was as green as me, in experience I mean. We were probably green in colour as well if the truth be known but we were covered in sweat, and discoloured by the dirt and debris of the jungle floor.
We really hadn't set up our position very well we discovered, but we made the best of it. We lay our machine gun and sited into the rear doing our best to give rearguard protection incase of assault from our ambush's rear end. The gunfire increased in intensity and the firing was mainly behind us and toward the ambush sited machine guns. There was shouting; loud vulgar " get that cunt" "cover me." "Shoot him again." More bursts of gunfire more yelling shouting and the noise of men attacking and shooting.
It was only a contact I was told. Two or three NVA engineers carrying blocks of TNT had walked into our primitive ambush site. One body down but blood trails and the gunners story that he had got others but no bodies. A section leapfrogged their way in the kill zone and brought back one body. How do I know? Me back at the rear gun site!
I am called forward some time after, the photographer is still lying prone where he has attempted to record it all on his 35mm, and they're crazy. The boss in his wisdom tells me and another new bloke to bury this newly dead, young Vietcong soldier. Why? I think. Why don't you just leave this awful thing, dead in the jungle? We must be blooded. No one is very helpful, no one tells us about the action either, they just point at this poor dead creature. "Bury him." "But where?" "Across the track." Some how cradling our rifles (no slings allowed in 4RAR) we managed to carry this dead soldier across, we didn't think to drag him by his arms or feet as he was still human to us, unbloodied reo's. There we scraped a shallow grave and before we could inter him, other Diggers ambled across and removed belts and clothing (his watch was already gone) from his corpse as we tried to cover him up…it was repulsive. We certainly dehumanized quickly that day! The body finally covered by jungle dirt and debris we went back to our respective gun and rifle pits in our hidden jungle theatre.
We had gained an insight into the earlier contact from our souveniring comrades and were much impressed with their bravery and skill under fire. So upon returning to my earlier gun position we sited our M60 in a much better position and ran out the wiring for our one and only Claymore mine that the section commander had left with us. The foliage was so dense and seemingly impenetrable that we had trouble sighting the Claymore. There was no obvious route too us for the enemy to assault our gun position. The rest of the mines we all carried were laid out and camouflaged in the killing zones in front of the two remaining machine guns. This was the main ambush site.
We carried on with the house cleaning of our ambush site. Clearing the fallen leaves and twigs and laying a cleared trail between all fighting pits and the main machine gun positions. Removing any branches or thorn bushes that may have caused any noise or obstructions. Also a lanyard was tied paralleling this cleared trail so a hand could follow it, too and from the gun positions in the full darkness of night.
So the night begun and we fell-to an hour before sunset and lay in readiness for two hours in our sleeping/fighting pits for the nights gun pickets. There was of course to be no smoking, eating or talking for the rest of the evening, as this was now an active night ambush. After the first two hours of approaching night we normally stood down and each man completed two, two-hour pickets on the machine guns. The times on and off were given to each man before stand-to.
Well of course we never completed this stand down because as we lay silently in our jungle isolation with just the barest minimum vision of the next rifle pit, my gunner mate and I were transfixed with the noise of something or someone moving as silently as possible in front of our rearguard gun position. He was so close…we could feel his every movement. We couldn't see him, it was darkening rapidly, but he was so close. Could we dare open fire with our gun and give our position away or discharge our only Claymore mine? He seemed to be on top of us, and in between us and the rear of our poorly laid mine defense. Had he turned our mine? Reversed it so that if we fired our Clacker (Dynamo electrical device for firing the detonator) it would hurl its deadly ball-bearing shrapnel at us in our open firing positions.
We couldn't fire nor could we hurl grenades, as the canopy was too thick to give us a survivable distance from our own grenade shrapnel. We finally observed our nearest rifle pit trying to give us the silent hand signal for stand-down, which we rapidly hand signaled back that an enemy was in front and contact was imminent. Slowly but surely he crossed our front and gently his movements diminished into the night. We finally gave the all clear and made ready to experience the rest of the evening's unpleasant events.
Surely you would think that this was enough to experience, but the evening's last gun picket for me was to bring unimagined terror and lingering nightmares.
My last two-hour picket on the gun site was to be from 1am to 3am. So at the appointed time of 1am a firm hand shook me awake in my sleeping position on the jungle floor and a voice whispered in my ear " Johnson your on." These spoken words were the first I had heard in maybe 18 hours. Slowly and as quietly as possible I stood up and gathered my rifle and put on my ammunition pouches. The waiting soldier then placed my hand on the lanyard trail guide and led me silently to the waiting gun and its offsider. Again he placed my hand on the ground and let me feel the positions of the Claymore clackers, the machine gun and its belts. Amazingly to some, he led my hand to the small transistor radio taped to the machine guns butt to which an ear plug protruded. Here we listened to Radio Vietnam and so kept our sanity in the middle of this amazing nightmare. So one ear cocked to the enemy front the other inputting "Hello Vietnam lets rock!"
The offsider doing the later half of the shift normally took the radio and the fresh guy kept fully alert. The guy who led you there would then make his way back to his sleeping fighting position.
All was well till 2am when my offsider had completed his two-hour piquet and went off silently into the night to fetch his replacement. There I was all alone lying exposed flat on the ground staring sightlessly into the direction of the mined road. Senses fully alert after a harrowing day, I waited for my offsider to appear and give me some confidence and backup in this ambush.
It happened…a light switched on to my front right. No more than twenty metres, or so I thought in this impenetrable darkness. Did it waver like a firefly or did it move like a blackened out Vietcong flashlight? I don't know any more, I have thought about it and worked on this problem for years now. All alone. Waiting and watching this light source as it finally made its way directly towards me. I made a decision. Don't use the Claymores as the light was inside the Claymores position and don't use the gun. Reason? At the time, don't give away our position with the machine guns tracer rounds. So I unloaded twenty to thirty rounds rapid fire from my SLR. The light immediately extinguished and there was the recognizable sound of rapid footsteps down and away the dirt road.

Had I mentioned the sound of the jungle at night? Well there is no sound! Only the gentle noise of insects and the rustling of small animal movements on the forest floor.
But now the silence…it was like lying in a vacuum after discharging my weapon. No noise, nothing after the fading echo of my gunfire. Also no help! No comrade in arms shouting shoot them, fuck them, nothing! There I lay watching my front trying to see into the blackness. What happened? A long time went by, and then Snoopy! Have you heard of him? Do you remember? A night flying slow moving Transport plane of some sort made his way in the night sky above me and unloaded parachute after parachute flare. Night turned into day and shadows and light moved constantly around me and on me. Turn them off I screamed in my mind, don't drop any more. I can see fuck all and I'm sticking out like dogs balls on open killing ground. Can they see me? Did they bring in our perimeter shelling? Time seemed to stand still but I think it was over an hour before our Platoon commander crawled his way on his belly to my position asking for and receiving my report. I was scared and I was a mess but somehow I held together. I was told next day that some of the platoon were give tranquilizer relief to help them get through the rest of the night!
Next day a search party leapfrogged again through the track…no bodies, no blood trails. Surprisingly there were no recriminations for firing at shadows or had I seen a flash in the night.
Not surprisingly I was made a part of the patrol that investigated the noises I had heard earlier that previous evening. Soon after entering the area of our claymores position I spotted a heavy blood trail and came upon the resting place of a wounded & departed Vietcong who had been shot on the previous days ambush.
His discarded shoe was in evidence with the sole torn in two, heavily saturated with blood and an empty combat bandage on the ground. He had been badly shot in the foot and had lain doggo within metres of my mate and I. He had managed to bandage himself to stop his bleeding. He had then waited till darkness and crawled his way to safety. Did he know we were so close?

Does he still remember that night? I know I always will.

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