The Long Hai Mine Incident.
Abstract: An offensive operation by Australian troops travelling
into the Long Hai Hills in Phuoc Tuy province goes fatally wrong.
It was a hot, dusty day and I was hot and dusty also. I was also exhausted from
too long in the field and to many sleepless nights ambushing. As we rattled
along a gravel road I had my GPMG M60 machinegun pointing out over the side
of the APC (M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier) more for the fresh air than to
provide firepower. Suddenly we turned off the road and went through a single
strand barbed wire fence up a smaller track. Instantly I went to a higher state
of alertness, I’d seen a triangular plate hanging on the fence which had something
written on it guaranteed to chill any soldier to the bone, ‘Băi Měn’ in Vietnamese
and MINES in English.
Tapping the APC commander on the shoulder I pointed this out to him. “It’s OK,
it’s a dummy minefield, we’ve been through here before” he shouted. We continued
up the track in a staggered formation with one APC in front us and one on our
front left, with a couple more behind us. We were off to the foothills of the
Long Hai hills, a small range of hills which provided a sanctuary for a number
of VC units to give them a bit of grief.
My legs got too tired to keep standing from the vibration of the tracks rattling
my knee joints and as there was the odd branch whipping by, I sat down again
on a bench inside the APC. Soon after it happened. Thor’s hammer hit the side
of our APC and made it ring like a gong. At the same time I glanced upwards
and saw the front driving sprocket wheel of the first APC whirring off into
the sky and out of sight.
Our APC slewed off the track, the ramp dropped down and we bolted out and took
up a defensive position to counter what we thought was an ambush. Apparently
it WAS normally a command-detonated ambush and some of us were very lucky, because
the VC weren’t in their pre-dug bunkers or the casualties, already high, would
have been much higher. They’d gone away, but left the main ambush device in
place and left a pressure firing device on top of it. It was a 500 pound bomb
with an anti-tank mine sitting on top of it, either of which would destroy an
APC.
The explosion ripped out a large crater, blasted the driver out of his seat,
killing him instantly, flipped the APC over, blew the back ramp clean off and
scattered the soldiers travelling in and on it around like burnt, blackened,
broken dolls. It was a catastrophe. B company had lost the best part of an understrength
platoon of men in one explosion. It got worse.
For myself, I had hit the ground, set up my M60 and clipped a couple of extra
belts on to and then I froze. There was a mine marker in the form of a brass
.50 calibre machinegun shell stuck in the ground near me. Not really wanting
to believe it, I looked around and saw more improvised markers. I shouted: “We’re
in a minefield, walk only on your own tracks or don’t move!” My Corporal came
back along the APC tracks and confirmed the joyous news that we were indeed
in a large minefield.
It now got infinitely worse because our Major called for all of his platoon
medics (and for some reason most of the other platoon’s signalmen) and ran up
to help the wounded. A brave but exceedingly foolish thing to do. It is fairly
standard minefield doctrine to place three or four anti-personnel mines around
an antitank mine and this proved to be the case. It was one of those life and
death situations where one had to be hard and ruthless and leave the wounded
where they were until you could probe a safe path out to them. This was not
done and it cost us dearly. One of his group tripped an M16 ‘Jumping Jack’ anti-personnel
mine and it bounced up to into the air and exploded sending hundreds of shrapnel
balls into the group. Now we’d lost our command element and most of our signalmen
and medics. There were dead, badly wounded, shocked and dying men everywhere.
All day we stayed there in the hot sun, probing safe spaces to lie in and move
through, and the battalion doctor, Captain Tony White, flew out by Souix helicopter
and started tending to the wounded and evacuating them as fast as possible at
considerable risk to himself. The APC near me had his HF radio tuned to some
station playing Harry Belafonte’s “Island in the Sun”. The lilting, happy, warm
tune was a jarring note in amongst all of the horror. I still get a little cold
when I hear it – and I used to like his music.
As evening drew close I realised we weren’t going to get out of the minefield
that day and no one was too keen to start digging anywhere for fear of triggering
another mine or boobytrap. Various people took up temporary jobs to fill the
gaps in the severely damaged company and we settled in for the night. It was
to be a long night of little sleep. The VC regiment in the mountains decided
it was a good time to try to attack us, and their small kerosene powered lights
and simple torches could be seen streaming down the hillsides towards us.
I was dozing fitfully on my back, sleeping next to an APC when rudely awakened
by its twin .30 calibre machineguns suddenly opened up full tilt at the hillsides
above us, spewing hot brass on top of me. All I could see as I snapped open
my eyes were tracer bullets streaming out the muzzles of his weapons. It was
joined by the heavier thumping of .50 cals on other APCs.
Immediately I assumed the worst (that the VC were assaulting us) and I thought:
“This is it, I’m probably going to die right here tonight.” I mentally sang
my death song and made peace with myself and fished extra belts of ammunition
out of my pack. We were in a relatively open spot and I had no cover except
for the APC which would be a prime target for anti-tank rockets. I decided there
and then that if I was to die I would try to make my death as costly as possible
for the VC. Luckily they couldn’t get close enough because the hillside was
flattened by our mortars, 105mm Howitzers, the big 155mm and 175mm guns at the
Task Force base and even a couple of huge shells from some American Battlewagon
out at sea. As they roared in, at first I thought they’d hit an ammunition dump
on the hillside, the flash was so enormous, like a tactical nuclear weapon going
off.
A white phosphorous shell stuck in a tree and burnt like a flare, giving an
eerie look to it all. Next morning it was time to clean up and pull out. We’d
been very badly mauled. Engineers with mine detectors cleared paths out and
we re-boarded the APCs and headed away from the Long Hais. As we left, the remnant
of the destroyed APC was filled with damaged ammunition and handgrenades from
the victim’s webbing, white phosphorous grenades and TNT and blasted to bits
after all radios and weapons had been removed. I travelled on another APC filled
with the webbing and weapons of the dead and wounded sloshing around in the
well of the APC and it made a lasting impression on me. Apparently the engineers
had discovered an anti-tank mine back along the track we’d come in on. It hadn’t
gone off because there was hard dirt or sand packed under the pressure plate
and most of our APC’s including the one I was in had driven in over it.
I was numb and my morale was flatlining. The VC had managed to hit a home run.
I went into survival mode and lowered the mental shutters. From then on, anyone
or anything that got between me and going home alive was in mortal peril. The
only satisfying thing about the whole operation was some Canberra bombers doing
superb pinpoint bombing, napalming the valley above us to discourage any parting
shots from the VC. We still had a long time to go before we left Vietnam, and
it was to prove to be a very hard year indeed and some of the surviving members
of my company had already developed 1,000 yard stares
Sherro has since passed on...Thanks for your service mate!
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