VETERAN REMEMBERS LONG TAN
Long Tan veteran Lindsay Morrison remembers, 52 years to the day since the famous battle unfolded
LINDSAY Morrison and the rest of his company walked through an open field in Phuoc Tuy province on a Thursday afternoon in August 1966, gunshots began to sound in the distance, and a heavy, monsoonal rain set in.
It was the start of what was to become known as the Battle of Long Tan – one of the bloodiest and largest Australianfought battles of the Vietnam War, and a name that has since been etched into the national psyche.
But at that moment, Mr Morrison and his fellow soldiers – most of them between the ages of 20 and 25 – paused in the middle of the field and listened to the steady report of rifle fire from beyond the nearby rubber plantation.
“Initially we thought, oh, they got a contact,” Mr Morrison explained.
“And then the shooting really started, and we thought, oh, they’ve got a big contact.”
It was just after four o’clock in the afternoon, and over the dull roar of the monsoon, from two kilometres away, the men of the Royal Australian Regiment’s 6th Battalion, B Company could hear the firefight clearly.
“It was continuous noise… you could hear the mortars exploding, you could hear machine guns, and you could hear rifle fire,” Mr Morrison said.
In a way, they were lucky it wasn’t themselves coming under attack.
It easily could have been. 6RAR’s new base at Nui Dat had been bombarded by mortars and recoilless rifle fire in the early hours of August 17, and B Company was sent out to try and pinpoint the firing points and withdrawal direction of the Vietnamese force.
They had patrolled in an arc around the base, and stayed out overnight, before contintween
‘‘ THE RUBBER TREES WERE ALL BLOWN TO BITS. THE ARTILLERY HAD SMASHED THEM ALL... AND IT LOOKED LIKE A PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE TRENCHES OF WORLD WAR I,”
LINDSAY MORRISON
uing the next day – August 18.
“We came to the edge of the rubber plantation and we found evidence that was one of the spots where they fired from,” Mr Morrison said.
“There was a dead horse lying there, there was a fox hole that was freshly dug, and there was a candle still burning in the tree. Seeing the candle there still burning made my hairs stand on end.
“It really hit home that hey, (the Vietnamese) had been here just a little while back.”
But Mr Morrison, a medic with B Company, didn’t think anyone worried much about the discovery because up to that point, there had been no talk of there being a large enemy force in the area.
In fact, they were all keen to head back to base to watch the Col Joye and Little Pattie concert, which they could hear wafting through the jungle.
“Anyway, we had lunch, and then we waited for Delta Company to come. And they met us there, at that spot. We handed over, and then we headed back to base on foot,” he said.
FIRST CONTACT
As D Company moved through the rubber plantation, with two platoons in front and one behind, 11 Platoon ran into a small group of Viet Cong.
The Viet Cong fled, and 11 Platoon gave chase, unaware they were about to cross paths with a huge concentration of soldiers – later estimated by Australians to number beAS 1,500 and 2,500 - from the Viet Cong’s 275th Regiment, and the 445th Battalion.
Then, just after four o’clock, 11 Platoon became pinned down under heavy fire, and D Company was suddenly in a fight for their lives.
Two kilometres away, B Company had come to a halt, and was awaiting orders from Nui Dat.
“We waited there for quite a while. The firing continued, and then the artillery started, and we could hear our artillery going in,” Mr Morrison said.
“We could hear that plainly, and they were shooting over our head... and that went on for a while.
“We found out later that the commander of the Taskforce was worried about the base being attacked, and he didn’t know whether to send us back out or send us home. And then we got the word to go back in.”
As B Company was told to reinforce D Company, they were bombarded by Viet Cong mortars, which missed.
Meanwhile, the 105 men of D Company and three New Zealanders, despite suffering heavy casualties from the battle’s outset, fought in a nightmare haze of gunsmoke, mist, and torrential rain.
With the help of near-constant artillery bombardments, and a re-supply from two daring RAAF pilots from 9 Squadron, they repelled wave after wave of advancing Viet Cong, who attempted to overrun their position over the course of three desperate hours.
Upon entering the plantation, B Company briefly came under fire, and one of their men was wounded. Mr Morrison tended to his wounds.
“We got him into Delta Company’s position and I then joined the Delta Company medic looking after the wounded, and pretty soon it got dark,” Mr Morrison said.
“But the enemy withdrew because A Company arrived about the same time we did, but they were in Armoured Personnel Carriers. As soon as the APCs arrived, the enemy went, they pulled out.”
Nothing could have prepared Mr Morrison for the scene that greeted him when he arrived at D Company’s position. To this day, he remembers it vividly.
“The rubber trees were all blown to bits. The artillery had smashed them all. I could hear the firing ease off, and then the artillery eased off, and there was just the occasional artillery shell coming in, and it looked like a photograph from the trenches of World War I,” he said. Mr Morrison busied himself with the wounded, checking their dressings, talking to them, and handing out cigarettes.
“We treated the worst ones first, and the ones that were only slightly wounded actually were helping themselves or helping their mate,” Mr Morrison said.
“There was the odd joke and one or two of them said they’d got the ‘million dollar wound’, which meant they were going home and still alive.
“Others were saying ‘I saw me mate get hit between the eyes, you know, and he’s dead but I got away’ and all this sort of stuff.”
One man in particular stuck in Mr Morrison’s mind.
“I don’t smoke now, but I smoked then, and this fellow asked me – you got a smoke? And I said yes, so I showed him the packet, and he said: Would you get it out for me? And I said yes, and I got it out,” Mr Morrison recounted.
“And he said: Would you put it in my mouth? And I said, what do you want me to do, smoke it for you? And the man said: I can’t, and held up his arms to show he was shot in both hands.
“I seen some people with some pretty severe wounds, but that one about the cigarette stuck in my mind.”
With the battle over, the remaining men helped put the wounded and the dead into the APCs, which drove out of the plantation to a clearing in the west, where helicopters came to take them away.
B and A Companies departed the plantation on foot.
Mr Morrison remembered it being so dark he couldn’t see.
“Everybody who was walking grabbed the pack of the man in front of them and we just walked out like that.
“And the next morning we went back in, and Delta Company led us back in, finishing the job.”
THE AFTERMATH
It was early in the morning on August 19 when A, B, and D companies returned to the battlefield.
“I’ve never seen such devastation. The trees were sheared off, it looked like… well, I couldn’t describe it,” Mr Morrison said.
Equipment littered the ground, and all over there were craters, burned areas, and the smell of blood.
“There were bodies everywhere, but they were in groups. There’d be 25-30 bodies here, and there would be 25-30 bodies over there. There was about 250 or something, all together, enemy bodies,” he said.
“There were some of our men there, still, that we hadn’t recovered the night before. There were a couple that were wounded and they stayed there overnight and they got rescued the next day. There were some dead, and they got taken out the next day too.
“And we stayed there for about three or four days, burying the dead… and then after that we had to patrol out, following the tracks of the Viet Cong, but we never re-engaged them.”
It wasn’t until days later, sitting at the bar (or “boozer”, as it was called) in Nui Dat, that the enormity of what had occurred at Long Tan set in.
“You’d get to the boozer and you’d start talking about it, and that’s when it all sinks in,” Mr Morrison said.
“It just dawned on us later how big it was. At the time you only see your little area, you know, but it’s something I’ll never forget.”
Mention the words Long Tan today, and it invokes the same sort of imagery as Gallipoli, Kapyong, or Kokoda.
Australia lost 18 dead and 24 wounded at Long Tan, and that number could have been much higher, given D Company was estimated to be outnumbered nearly 10-1.
According to the Australian Army, Long Tan is now remembered “as an exemplar of Australian soldiers channelling the same attributes of bravery, teamwork and endurance that their forbears displayed in earlier conflicts”.
For Mr Morrison, who will be paying his respects at a Vietnam Veterans Day service in Toowoomba today, held each year on the anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan, it’s a day he holds dearer than Anzac Day.
“Up until that point, the soldiers were saying, ‘I hope I’m as good as my father’,” he said.
“And after Long Tan, they said, ‘we are as good’. Proud of it, you know? I think it proved a point that we were as good as the soldiers in the Second World War. That’s what I thought, anyway.
“The people that were there, sort of formed a bond between each other… like a coming of age.”
‘‘ UP UNTIL THAT POINT, THE SOLDIERS WERE SAYING, ‘I HOPE I’M AS GOOD AS MY FATHER’,”
LINDSAY MORRISON