I was with the artillery forward observer's party. We were looking forward to a simple operation without much walking. A bit of a bludge really. As it was explained to us. the objective was to cordon Dat Do Village so the engineers could build bunkers to protect the villages from the VC.

We saddled up and were taken by armored personnel carriers to the southern side of the village, arriving there about lunchtime. We decided to harbour in a grove of trees on the western side of the road. It was a lovely place with a ground cover of broad-leafed plants.

We did the usual harbour drill approaching the harbour site from the sooth- west. The forward observer's party was with company headquarters but slightly separated. We found ourselves at the center of a harbour about a hundred meters wide. There was trouble with 12 Platoon. The platoon mistakenly thought it was part of a platoon harbour and the machine guns had ended up in the wrong place. The Platoon Sergeant, Sergeant Lees, was laying out his machine guns when he stood on the mine.

1 saw the flash and the pillar of black smoke, then felt a huge hit in the stomach, which at first 1 thought was a result of the concussion. My mate Gunner Alan Johnston was next me. His first reaction was that we'd been hit by a rocket propelled grenade fired by some passer by he reckoned he'd seen on a bike. The call went up that It was mines.

Johnno told me he'd been hit in the back of the legs and wanted me to put a shell dressing on his wounds. He had two small holes, one in the back of his knee on one leg and another in the calf on the other. l tried but 1 was having trouble breathing, it was like I was winded. The wounds had stopped bleeding; they'd been cauterised by the red-hot shrapnel. l told Johnno it was unnecessary to bandage them.

I have no real memory of what was going on around us. I knew we weren't under fire and realised if it was mines we'd better sit still. My main concerns was bandaging Johnno and worrying about any follow up attack. I was kneeling down. It was then l noticed the blood on my knees. There were rings of blood on both knees about six centimeters across. Then I noticed the blood on my side. Johnno said l'd been hit in the neck but that it wasn't bleeding much. l looked under my shirt and found the small hole in my side. Then 1 saw the blood around my crotch. I guessed then and there, I was for a homer, especially given the stomach wound, tiny as it was. Basically, 1 gave up then. There was nothing 1 could do for Johnno and nothing l could do until the medics came to me. 1 knew l wasn't dying and the hospital wasn't too far away.

It soon became clear that at least two were dead, including the medic and Corporal Kennedy. Kennedy was a short Irish Catholic in his mid to late twenties with a wife and six kids at newsworthy.

The night before, the bar was to close early, the usual practice before operations. My shout was the last one in the round and as l was standing at the bar waiting to be served, Kennedy closed the bar dead on eight o'clock. l appealed to him to let me buy my shout. Then followed one of those exchanges that only happen it: the Army. He was Orderly Corporal and he had made his decision and explained that to me in that harsh digressive way some NCOs have.

The last words l had said to him was: " go F##+ yourself."

l sat with my back to the tree near the radio and could hear all the traffic. We had twenty-two wounded apart from me and there just weren't enough helicopters to get us all out. Helicopters were diverted from utility rums. I seem to remember there were nine slicks.

Medics come over to me and cut my greens open, they asked if I wanted to walk out or go on a stretcher. 1 had no idea how injured I was so I took the stretcher. I'd been a bit frightened but now I was petrified. The medics were taking me out right across the harbour. No sticking to tracks. There'd been no mine clearance done at this stage. I had a vision of the bloke in front stepping on a mine and me being blown to smithereens.

We made it to the chopper and I was loaded in with walking wounded and a couple of crates of machine gun parts. On the way to the Vung Tau Hospital, the door gunner held my hand. At Vung Tau, the Battalion Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Colin Khan was waiting on the chopper pad. He was absolutely ashen must have been standing there watching stretcher after stretcher of wounded men. This was a man who seemed to know every section commander in the battalion. I called out some encouraging words to him like: "Don't worry Sir, we'll get the c*#+l's."

Triage was absolute Bedlam. There were filthy diggers all over the place and doctors and nurses trying to work out the priorities. 1 think there were two operating theatres working at once. l was drugged and while l was still awake to save time in the theatre, the surgeon inserted a catheter into me. It was the most pain l had felt all day. l was not in need of immediate resuscitation but l was injured and bleeding internally so I was a reasonably high priority for surgery. l woke up in the middle of the night in the general ward. I was scared rigid and a called out to a passing nurse. She comforted me for a while and I went back to sleep.

The next day I was moved to Intensive Care where Sergeant Lees was. The back of his legs and buttocks were shredded and he'd broken both legs. He'd been thrown up into a tree, bounced off and probably broke his femur when he hit the ground. Other soldiers with stomach wounds were there too.

One soldier who had the back of his skull blown off died a couple of days after the incident in the US hospital at Bien Hoa where he'd been taken directly. Sergeant Lees went home on the next Medivac. I went home a couple of weeks later. We flew to Butterworth Air Force Base to overnight there in a beautiful hospital overlooking to channel to Penang Island. l had some more stitches removed and we flew to Richmond overnight drugged into oblivion.

We arrived in Richmond early on a foggy July morning and were put into a ward. We were told that the Director General of Army Nursing was visiting the Hospital that morning. When she was touring ,the ward, we were told we would have to lie to attention. l think they were serious. Next to me was a corporal from 6 RAR who had been shot across the small of his back. His platoon had secured a small clearing in the bush and his platoon commander had asked him to take his gun crew across the clearing and take up a position on the far side. It was the dry season and their greens were soaked black with sweat. They wore basic webbing and carried personal weapons. Above the moving gun crew was an RAAF Bushranger. Half way across the clearing the chopper tipped over on its side and opened fire on the gun crew, thinking its people were VC. As the Director General of Army Nursing was going through the ward surrounded by the Base Commander, 2lC and a bunch of other RAAF Officers. The ward sister was explaining each of the cases. When she came up to the 6 RAR corporal. she said he had a broken femur. Clearly that wasn't right and when she asked him what had happened he corrected her.
“1 was shot up by the RAAF, ' he said.
“Well over here we have another shrapnel wounds case “ the sister said, moving on and not missing a beat.

l was transferred the next day to Indooroopilly. l met another fellow from another Company in 5 RAR. We were sitting in the ward swapping war yarns. A nurse come up and told us to stop making noise because there was a warrant officer recovering from an operation. It turned out to be a hemorrhoids operation.

After I was discharged from hospital I was put on light duties at Northern Command Personnel Depot but the RSM refused to recognise the chit. l collapsed on the last day of a week's stint in the mess working from 5.30 am to 7.30 PM.

I left NCPD a short time later to go and train National Servicemen in Puckapunyal.

Walter Pearson

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