Australian Vietnam vets have come a long way since the Battle of Long Tan 50 years ago

These days, Vietnam is best known as a popular holiday destination, but within living memory it was a war zone.

Veterans day, on Thursday, August 18, will also commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan in 1966.

The actual battle lasted a few hours and came to symbolise Australia’s 10-year involvement in the Vietnam conflict.

But cavalry to the rescue? Well, armoured cavalry, really. Aussies riding in squat armoured personnel carriers (or APCs) armed with .50 calibre machineguns trying to relieve 108 soldiers under attack from three sides, outnumbered 23-to-one by a force of heavily armed Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army regulars.

Actually, it was far more complicated. The besieged Australian Army soldiers were caught in a torrential downpour, lying amid red mud, whizzing bullets and shattered trees of the Long Tan rubber plantation, in Phuoc Tuy Province, South Vietnam, about 110 kilometres east of Saigon.

To prevent being over run by waves of the attacking enemy blowing bugles in the gloom, the isolated soldiers were helped by a ring of exploding steel.

Artillery fire from Australian, New Zealand and American howitzers at the Australian base at Nui Dat, five kilometres away, was called in, raining at least 3500 shells around them, all exploding dangerous close.

One Hunter Valley survivor of the Long Tan Battle was former private Peter Doyle who told me some years ago: “Without our artillery support they would have whipped us something fierce.”

American air support was called in but they couldn’t see the area because of the rain.

Eighteen Australians died and 24 were wounded in the battle. The Viet Cong enemy, estimated to be a force of 2500 soldiers, had walked into the right flank of Delta (D) Company, 6RAR while on patrol.

The fierce engagement looked like being a Australian military disaster, but some 245 enemy bodies were buried with an estimated 350 enemy wounded. Since then, documents have indicated more than 500 enemy killed with 800 wounded.

As  Doyle told me in 2004: “ Many of the dead enemy soldiers had gone into battle with cane straps tied to their ankles to enable their bodies to be dragged out quickly.”

Commanding officer of D Company 6RAR, Harry Smith, now 83 years old, wrote last year of some people comparing Long Tan with Rorke’s Drift in 1879 in Africa. That’s when 170 British soldiers held off 3000 Zulus, except that in Vietnam, the suicidal, charging enemy carried modern AK47s.

Smith believed the enemy dead  “were mostly brainwashed young soldiers willing to die blindly for the Communist cause”. It took two days to bury the dead and the conflict still remains a sensitive one in Vietnam.

Medals for the action by the Aussies were denied by Canberra and they were given Vietnamese kewpie dolls and cigar boxes instead. Smith is still fighting for proper war decorations for his men.

Peter Doyle, Harry Esler and Ian Savage, all Newcastle survivors from Long Tan, later contributed to a 1986 book on the battle by author Lex McAulay. Former lieutenant Savage, who later went to Queensland, was once a young second-in-command of a relief column of 10 Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCS) rumbling in to rescue the heavily besieged Australians at Long Tan.

Contributing to the book meant he could at last purge himself of his graphic memories and bottled up emotions, he told me years ago.

For 20 years after 1966 Savage declined to talk about his “small role” in how D Company’s outnumbered force repulsed a disciplined enemy estimated at 2500 strong.

“I had the monkey on my back about that because the story of Long Tan back then was not given much publicity. We were also sort of hated people when we came back from Vietnam,” Savage told me.

For although the war officially ended in 1975, the long overdue ‘Welcome Home’ parade for Vietnam vets didn’t occur until 1987.

Savage was also uncomfortable with the thought he and others needed any recognition, feeling D Company fully deserved all the kudos for its heroic stand.

“I was then a young second lieutenant and as scared as everybody else” he said.

Earlier, his unit’s armoured corps (A Squadron 3rd Cavalry regiment RAAC) had left an afternoon concert under strength to cross a swollen river, then form into an extended line to charge forward as D company braced itself for a probable final, and for them likely fatal, Vietcong assault.

But en route, the carriers had to run through a deadly gauntlet – an artillery barrage from their own gunners behind.

“It was pretty frightening stuff. To this day I can see those grey, brown bursts in the trees and on the ground. Then we found the enemy (marching) ahead.”

But in the heavy monsoon rain, Savage thought they were the Australians they were supposed to rescue.

“Our first contact was with the Viet Cong D445 Batallion who were dressed in jungle greens with their weapons over their shoulders,’ he said, recalling peering through the evening downpour.

“The enemy didn’t hear us coming because with the pouring rain our engines were muffled. They were coming around from the south to try and completely cut off D Company.

“Our vehicles stopped … then someone cried, ‘no, they’re enemy’. They spun their weapons onto us and we also opened fire. It sent them scurrying.”

After the firefight came the quick rescue of the Australian soldiers and their wounded, a hasty retreat and a tense overnight wait before motoring back at daybreak to the battlefield to locate any more survivors. The whole area was devastated, trees shredded by shrapnel.

“At Long Tan, our APCs got there towards the end, like the old American cavalry, coming to the rescue with our .50 calibres. The real heroes were D Company holding out. “They had one ammunition resupply (by helicopter), otherwise they would have run out. The RAAF went in dropping the ammunition wrapped in blankets to cushion the fall,” he said.

“ When the (1986) book was written it took the monkey off my back. At least people knew at last that though it was a political war and was politically lost, I think we would have lost even if we had been allowed to fight the war militarily.

“We as soldiers were over there doing exactly what our government had told us what to do and I’m very proud of the way all Australians fought over there; in Coral, Balmoral, the Tet Offensive. No matter whatever else was said, Australians acquitted themselves well in battle,” Savage said.