Transcript
Colonel Church, I flew him quite a few times. He was 2RAR. A different personality. The first time I recall working with him, it just so happened that about two days before I'd been doing a reconnaissance flight to the west of Nui Dat north of the Nui Thi Vai mountains, I think they called it and I found a big group of timber workers, timber cutters, just Vietnamese guys most of whom can't read.
Anyhow, it was supposedly a non-civil access area. Next thing you know, I'm flying Colonel Church out, he wanted to look at the area before he was going to have a bit of an operation out there and I said, "Well, sir, I better show you something." So I went and showed him. I said, "These guys, they're just doing what they normally do. They're out cutting their wood." And anyhow, he cancelled the operation.
So we saved quite a few lives there I believe. Another time with him, very sad time, right up in the northwest of the province he had one of his platoons, I think one of the companies was actually a Kiwi company that was part of 2RAR, and one of the platoons had been on ambush all through the night and they'd actually triggered the ambush. They'd killed, I think, two Viet Cong guys and obviously the Colonel heard that this was happening and he wanted to go out to there.
The ambush is over and the lieutenant, platoon commander, and one other private soldiers went forward to check out the bodies. They're about to do that. I'm flying to the area, I get roughly over the site, it's timbered a bit, I couldn't see them at that point and then, this horrendous explosion, “Oh God!” And next thing on the radio, I think it was the platoon sergeant said, "Sunray is dead." Now Sunray is the code word for the leader of the group. If he's the battalion commander he's Sunray, a platoon commander, he's Sunray for that group.
He's dead. And so, what had happened was, I mean, I'd gone over the top at about 40 knots. There wasn't a breath of wind from me and I didn't even quite know I was right in the area but during the small arms fire for the ambush, they'd fire the M60 machine gun and the SLR and probably the M16,and they had Claymore mines set up, they've got 500 ball bearings that fly out of them, and what happened was, the small arms fire set off a small grass fire, the small grass fire got to the det cord, detonation cord, which promptly set off the Claymore mine and killed the platoon commander. Totally tragic… And so those sad things happen. Now, Colonel Church handled it. He was okay.
