Transcript
I got rostered on as direct support pilot for 4RAR on the 21st of September and I did a lot of reconnaissance work during the early part of the day and it obviously became apparent, from the tracks that I'd found, and others, and even the smell of wood cutting that one of the previous visual reconnaissance pilots smelled in previous days, that something was going on. Okay. And the tracks led from south to north from one of the villages, I think it was Binh Gia, we pronounced in the Aussie way.
So it was a well-used track. Anyhow, 4RAR were in there, in particular Gary McKay's platoon, and next thing you know there's a major contact and particularly Gary McKay's platoon, he lost four guys, he was shot himself and when you talk to Gary McKay, he describes the bullets as ‘withering fire'. Every time they pop their head up they were shot at.
So they had a major, major problem, and his platoon was running out of ammunition and so Colonel Hughes got me, by now I'm flying a Kiowa, to take one of his chaps out, I think his name was Corporal Neale, and load up the back of that helicopter with bags full of ammunition and grenades, as much as we could carry, and take it to Gary McKay's platoon. And Gary, in the meantime, had put up one of these little balloon things just above the canopy so I could find him.
So I went there and hovered while this other fellow dropped all this ammunition out and I think I did it three times and so it helped them but by the time I did the third run, obviously, it was getting very hectic because I had an American Cobra Gunship doing gun runs right beside me and he was firing an automatic grenade launcher and all I can hear is this hellish noise, boom, boom, boom, boom, and each one was a grenade. Later on there was artillery and all sorts of things.
So I got the ammunition there and then I was back to the base to do whatever they wanted and I got back to my base late at night. I'd flown 11 hours and 10 minutes. So if I get a bit emotional here, it happens because we had six guys killed that day and 30 wounded which is just tragic. And Gary McKay was shot twice and he was at Scheyville with me. I didn't know him well. I knew more of him but that's as close as I got to him and he went through Hell. And even the chap there that brought in the artillery, he had to be doing it from lying down almost.
Based on memory, he had from where he was...now, they'd walked through thick scrub, forest, jungle, and he somehow worked it out and brought in artillery in very close in prompt time and pretty well saved the day. They had, apparently Viet Cong were up trees shooting at them and all sorts of things. So it was a full-on battle. By the end of that day, I think, 4RAR organized for people down at Nui Dat to load magazines with ammunition.
According to Gary McKay, in that battle, we used 140,000 rounds of ammunition and yet when I got back to Australia, the RSL, some of them said, "Oh, it wasn't a real war." Anyhow, they got through it. Poor old Gary, couldn't get him out till the next morning and they got him to Vung Tau, I think, initially and then he got sent to Germany and got rebuilt and eventually he's back in Australia, still recovering.
It took a long time for him to come good… The battle went on for a bit. They sorted it out. Colonel Hughes did a marvellous job and that was the last major battle in Vietnam for the Australians. It was well north of the province, up near Courtenay Rubber, near the border and obviously the North Vietnamese who had been fairly scared to come into Phuoc Tuy province for quite a long time because every time they did we beat them up very badly and even right back to the battle of Coral.
That was not in Phuoc Tuy but they copped it there too and we lost 26 guys in that battle over two or three weeks. But obviously, by now, we were back to two battalions because we were withdrawing and 4RAR was, obviously Colonel Hughes had decided to set up, up north, just in case and just in case happened. Okay. So it was full on.
