LIFE & DEATH
Plaque in National Arboretum procedure: once a team reaches a rendezvous (RV) or LUP, they’ll box round it, clearing the area immediately to the north, south, east and west of their position, so they know they’ve got four square kilometres of safe ground around them.
Once that area is cleared, the patrol can then move forward and set up another LUP, before sending out another team to do an area recce of that site.
After advancing around 300 metres, Lillico and his men hit a patch of bamboo. Moving cautiously, Thomson, as lead scout, manoeuvred around the bamboo and stumbled upon what appeared to be an abandoned enemy camp.
The men recced the site for a while but with the light fading they had to return to the LUP. They briefed the rest of the patrol and a decision was made to carry out another recce of the camp the next day.
At first light, Lillico set off again with Thomson and two other troopers, leaving behind the rest of the patrol.
Before setting off, Lillico designated the LUP as the team’s emergency RV.
The four-man patrol made their way back towards the abandoned camp, with Thomson as lead scout and Lillico several metres behind him as patrol commander.
As Thomson moved around the clump of bamboo, everything went noisy. An enemy patrol opened up with a barrage of automatic fire. One round struck Thomson in the left thigh, severing his femoral artery.
Lillico realised what was happening and
GEORDIE LILLICO STUCK BEHIND ENEMY LINES shifted to the right, ready to put down rounds on the enemy. Instead he found himself stepping into the line of sight of the Indonesian lead scout, who had taken up an immediate ambush position directly ahead.
Before Lillico could depress the trigger on his self-loading rifle, the Indonesian nailed him through the left hip, badly wounding the SAS sergeant.
In the next second Thomson snatched up his rifle and emptied a savage burst into the Indonesian soldier who had just shot Lillico, stitching him with bullets.
Amid the noise and confusion, the third and fourth members of the patrol had bugged out to the emergency RV, following the procedure they had been taught.
Lillico and Thomson were now by themselves on the wrong side of the border, severely wounded and with an unknown number of hostiles ahead of them. In spite of their injuries they both returned fire, dropping two more soldiers and killing at least one of them. That sent the rest of the Indonesians scrambling and the two sides settled down to exchange sporadic bursts of gunfire through the jungle.
Both men were in rag order. Lillico was bleeding heavily and couldn’t stand up. Thomson’s left femur had been shattered and he had stemmed the loss of blood with a makeshift tourniquet.
A severed femoral artery is a lifethreatening wound – in most cases, the victim will bleed out in a matter of minutes.
Getting a tourniquet on it had saved his life but Thomson still needed immediate medical attention.
Despite his injury, Thomson reckoned he could make it back to the emergency RV, so Lillico sent him off up the hill, the lead scout crawling along on his elbows and knees while his patrol commander stayed behind, letting rip at anything that moved.
Lillico now took up a concealed position in a patch of bamboo a short distance from the enemy camp and considered his situation. It looked grim. He couldn’t walk, he had lost a lot of blood and, unless he received urgent treatment, there was no way he was going to survive.
About the only bit of good news was that he was in possession of the patrol search and rescue beacon (SARBE).
In those days only one rescue beacon was issued per patrol and as the commander, Lillico had been carrying it when everything had gone noisy. Without the SARBE, there would have been no way for any search party to locate him.
Realising that he couldn’t make it to the emergency RV on foot, Lillico tended to his wound with a shell syrette of morphine a for several hours. He drated but not in a gr
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The Indonesians w through the area agai
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As dusk fell, he foun in a water-filled pig-h tree trunk, crawled int night. He woke the enemy patrol scourin
During the search, a
The effects of morphine & blood loss left him in a state of near-bliss