Transcript
Well , every day could start mundane and change very rapidly. But, in any given week, we had three battalions there while I was there. So three army helicopters would leave the base every morning, and one each with the battalion. Okay. And the battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel, would use that for whatever he chose.
He might send us off with the artillery officer or the mortar platoon, someone on a recce prior to a patrol, whatever. Or we might sit there all day. Okay. And so, that left three little helicopters back in the base. And two of those would probably be doing visual reconnaissance work.
You'd be sent out twice in the day, to do your two-hour flight, studying an area of two kilometres by three kilometres, at treetop level, with the forward air controller, which was an Air Force fellow, in either a Bird Dog or a Cessna 337, flying at 1500 feet above you.
He would be plotting anything we saw. We're talking on the radio, I said, "Oh, I found a bunker here. I found this. I found that." He'd plot it on the map. And then, after the two hours, we'd come home, and write a report, which quite often was nil significant sighting. Other times you'd see things. And it was all part of the intelligence gathering. So you'd do the two flights in the day. And then you might play volleyball for a bit at the night.
The next day, you might be on what we used to call, a hash and trash day, which would mean you'd leave, pretty much at first light, in the morning, up early and off you go, to do a very low run up the main highway, north, south, and east, west. And when I say low, I'm talking five feet. Five feet. Because we are looking to see any disturbance on the road which might indicate that it's been tampered with, maybe mined or something like that. And that'd be the first task.
The second task was usually, to deliver the intelligence summaries and documentation things, to the outposts, which were usually manned by the, AATTV. These wonderful guys that were over there working with the villagers. And we'd usually drop these intsums in a sandbag with a weight in it, like a grenade, safe, might be in its container, and drop it into the compound or onto the veranda wherever. And once I dropped it into his water container and caused a stir.
After that, you might be sent off to work with the armoured personnel carriers, who occasionally got stuck in bamboo plantations, wild bamboo, and they couldn't find a way through it. And it stops everything. So we'd send the helicopter out there and you could always find a way from the air.
You'd simply find a way, hover, say, "Come towards the helicopter." They'd come there and we'd go another direction. And a funny story, a quick one for you, I was doing just that, and all of a sudden, one of the armoured personnel carriers came to a screaming halt. The back door flew open. All the blokes ran out the back of it and started tearing their clothes off. What the hell? And waving their fists at the helicopter.
While they were tripping along a nest of green ants dropped down the turret and was biting the hell out of them. So they weren't worried about bullets, they were worried about ants. That sort of thing happened… Occasionally I had to go out for the tanks, maybe delivering parts. Sometimes I might be sent out with the SAS to do a patrol in a long distance from the base. And occasionally a little medevac.
I did one with the SAS, one of the guys, a three-man patrol, recce patrol, one of them got bad conjunctivitis. So I got sent out there and they used a little UHF radio. So you'd fly out. We had a rough idea where they were, I'd given a grid reference, you fly high, go out there, make contact with them. They would throw a smoke grenade, we'd confirm what colour it was, then I'd drop down to treetop level, we're talking 10 feet above the trees, and I'd tactical low fly into the clearing, land.
Sit there and wait for a bit, and next thing, this guy would run out of the shrub, jump in, and we're gone. Because we were a long way for the normal Australian troops. And the next thing to contend with, he'd stink. God, the stink, because they go feral. They don't use anything out there. They were painted green and you take him home. On other occasions, on hash and trash, I got sent out with an American Marine captain, to direct ship fire for one of our Australian ships out to sea. We did that too.
