Eyewitness (37 page)

By now it was getting late in the afternoon and the enemy were starting to close up to where the company had reorganised after our failed assault into an ‘empty’ bunker system. Jerry Taylor gave quick orders for a withdrawal out of the area to a position about 400 metres to our south-west where it was planned that we could set up a night defensive position. The idea was that we would withdraw in single file and simply move into a large harbour and obtain security by allround defence.

10 Platoon led and for about five minutes things went fairly smoothly. Company headquarters was just in front of my platoon and as we started to move out the enemy began moving closer to our position and around our flanks. This was a tricky situation as we needed to break contact and get to our position without interference. 12 Platoon was to my rear and they resorted to fire and movement in an endeavour to get a clean break from the enemy. This worked for a little while and then without warning the N.V.A. popped up on the flank of our column right opposite company headquarters, who suddenly found themselves in contact. A few of my men and I were able to get quite a few shots in at the enemy who I believe didn’t know we were there. We dropped a couple of them and then I witnessed one of the bravest things I saw that day. An enemy soldier broke out of his cover, ran forward to where one of his comrades lay, picked him up and scuttled back to the safety of the thick jungle. All that time everyone who could see him – and there must have been five or six of us – tried to shoot him and failed. If the enemy gave away medals for courage then that N.V.A. soldier certainly earned one then.

The forward observer, Greg Gilbert, was calling down artillery fire using ‘danger close’ procedure to try and force the N.V.A. away from our flanks; but it was having little effect. It was now about 6.30 p.m.; and it was becoming confusing as the light was fading. The artillery rounds were crashing down only 150 metres or so away from our withdrawing column. Somehow, by about 7.00 p.m., we eventually managed to get away from the harassing enemy and we started to go into a harbour drill to establish our night defensive position. 10 Platoon led into the position which was in reasonably thick primary jungle with a lot of vines hanging off the trees and on the ground.

I was now at the front of my platoon column. Travelling behind me was a soldier called Bob Sims who had taken over Niblett’s machinegun. As we moved past the soldiers in 10 Platoon, one of them said, ‘Be careful, we thought we heard voices a minute or so ago.’ This was bad news indeed and so I passed the message down the line to be quiet as we moved into our position. Just as I moved around the side of a large bush I heard a loud ‘Oh no!’ from Sims behind me. I spun around and he was aiming his machine-gun at a bunch of enemy who appeared to be sitting on a mound about 25 metres from us. He started shooting from the hip and I quickly joined him. Pandemonium broke out about two minutes later. Firing was directed at us from all along our front where I was quickly trying to get my men onto the ground to link up with 12 Platoon. We had gone from the frying pan into the proverbial fire.

What we didn’t know, and what was revealed by intelligence later, was that when we withdrew from the previous bunker system we had headed off from a battalion position towards the headquarters for the N.V.A. regiment. This explained why the enemy were so keen to stop us from withdrawing and why we were now in strife.

After a couple of minutes of crawling around under a lot of green tracer rounds in the rapidly fading light, I eventually linked up most of my platoon. My next task was to try to figure out how best we could defend ourselves and have a tight defence in the dark. I started to try to co-ordinate the fire of the sections knowing that once again we were low on ammunition. I was coming under fire where I was lying behind a small tree and every time I called out an order, rounds would start thumping into the tree above my head. I couldn’t see where the firing was coming from, and so I simply fired back in the direction of where I thought the enemy was. This went on for probably three or four minutes, but I couldn’t move as there was a lack of good cover that I could make out in the gloom around me. I asked my forward observer’s assistant to bring the defensive fire in really close and he told me it was now falling only 75 metres out to our front and we would be risking it to bring it in any closer.

I asked my radio operator Barry Garratt to bring his radio over to me so I could give the company commander a situation report. He handed me the handset but as I started to speak into it I noticed that the radio was dead. I crawled over to check out the radio on his back and noticed that there were wires and bits and pieces of radio hanging out everywhere. Sometime during the fire fight Barry had been hit in the radio in his backpack but he hadn’t felt it! I told him to get our other radio and come back to me.

I returned to trying to sort out the fire fight which had been going now for over 30 minutes and didn’t seem to be abating. I started to yell out to everyone to watch their ammunition supply when an incredibly loud explosion rocked me. I thought for a minute that a rocketpropelled grenade round had detonated against the tree I was sheltering behind until I felt a pain in my left shoulder. I had been pushed backwards along the ground a couple of inches when a burst of AK-47 fire caught my back and left shoulder which had been protruding from behind my cover. The impact felt like someone with a steel-capped boot had given me a full-blooded kick right where my arm and shoulder joined. My arm felt like a dead weight; and when I tried to pick up my S.L.R. I discovered it wouldn’t move. I wriggled my fingers and thought to myself that they were all functional so it couldn’t be too bad. I then poked around with my good hand to find out where I had been hit and found I could stick my finger in a hole right on the corner of my shoulder joint.

My radio operator had returned by this time and I told him to tell the company commander that I had been hit. At this time I still didn’t know I had been hit by bullets as I thought the bang that I had heard had been a rocket-propelled grenade round going off. In fact the ‘bang’ was the shock and impact of the bullets hitting me. Barry Garratt passed on the news and while he was doing that I put my head down on the back of my hands and wondered what I was going to do next. I can remember saying to myself, ‘Well McKay, what the hell are you going to do now?’

My platoon sergeant had been evacuated earlier; I had lost four killed including two of my machine-gunners; and now we were apparently flanked on three sides by a large number of N.V.A., and I was wounded. I was feeling low. I dragged my pack from where I had dropped it earlier to give me a bit more protection but it was a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Still it made me feel better. Frank Wessing arrived and asked how I was going and I told him I was going to need a hand but first I had to sort out the perimeter and hand the platoon over to someone. This took a little time to organise and while I was doing that we found out that the enemy who had been engaging me was up in a tree. He was about 25 metres away and I think it was Sims who exacted revenge for me and knocked the enemy soldier off his perch.

*

After I had sorted out what had to be done to keep the platoon intact I asked Frank to give me a hand to get back behind some better cover and he crawled forward. The bullets from the enemy were still passing only a metre or less over our heads and Frank found it hard to drag me across all the vines on the ground. Mick O’Sullivan arrived and between the two of them they were able to drag me by the shoulder harness of my webbing back to the centre of the position and company headquarters.

Mick took off my webbing and began to check out my shoulder wound. He treated that with little difficulty. I remarked to him that I must be sweating a lot because the waistband of my trousers felt really wet. He lifted up the back of my shirt and in a voice I’m sure I wasn’t meant to hear, he said, ‘Oh fuck!’ The statement did very little for my morale at the time. Apparently the enemy soldier up the tree who had shot me also had an elevation advantage, and one of the bullets that hit me had dug a great hole along the line of my shoulder blade running down my back. It left a jagged tear about six inches long and about an inch and a half wide and it was bleeding quite badly. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel a great deal of pain although I wasn’t feeling too great either. Shock was taking care of the hurt element and I believe I was operating on nervous energy by this time. Mick was desperately trying to stem the flow of blood and we went through a whole series of positions from lying on my stomach to sitting up to stop the bleeding. Eventually the only way we could stop the flow of blood to an acceptable level was for me to sit leaning against a tree with Mick sitting behind me pressing shell dressings into the wound. This was not as easy as it sounds as the enemy were still shooting an awful lot of rounds into our perimeter and it was far from safe to be sitting up.

Jerry Taylor and Kevin Byrne were in the middle of the company position trying desperately to sort out the defence of our perimeter; they both stopped by as they were going past, to cheer me up and reassure me. The company commander said, quite unnecessarily, that he wouldn’t be able to get me out by chopper until everything was back under control; all I had to do was hang on. From the amount of trouble we had been in, bouncing from one bunker system to another, I felt that it was going to be a long wait for a helicopter ride. Still, Jerry Taylor retained his cool. I overheard him give a situation report to the commanding officer on the radio in his typically English voice … ‘10 Platoon is in contact to the east, 11 Platoon is in contact to the west, 12 Platoon is in contact to the south. So, it would appear that the nasties are all around us!’ I could tell by the way Mick was going through shell dressings that he still wasn’t happy with the amount of blood I was losing – and at one stage during the night I heard the company commander talking on the radio to Paul Trevillian, the regimental medical officer back in Nui Dat, about the possibility of a blood transfusion. It was out of the question – but it demonstrated how desperate things were becoming.

About 9.00 p.m. the amount of enemy fire coming into the position eased and it seemed that things had settled down. For the remainder of the night, Mick and I passed a long weary time watching the clock slowly turn around until about 6.00 a.m. when first light broke. I could tell Mick was exhausted from applying pressure on my back all night. When he stood up to relieve himself he looked awful. He had put a sleeping-bag silk around my shoulders during the night as it had got a little cool. We had been awake now for over 24 hours and I hadn’t had a thing to eat for at least 18 of them. Someone gave me a can of pineapple bits out of an American ration pack and it tasted just terrific.

Jerry Taylor came over and checked on me. He said that a pink team would be coming out within an hour or so to reconnoitre the area to see what the picture was. He was pretty sure the enemy had withdrawn. Time was now beginning to drag slowly and moving was becoming painful. Mick said he had very little left in his medical kit that he could give me as he had used most of it the day before on all of our casualties. He didn’t want to give me any morphine as he reckoned that I would be in need of surgery fairly quickly once I got back to the field hospital.

Around 7.00 a.m. the pink team arrived and flew around our position for what seemed like ages. They reported considerable sign that the enemy had withdrawn north and north-east and had stretchered out their casualties. Once the pink team gave the ‘all clear’, a dust-off chopper from 9 Squadron R.A.A.F. was requested. I was soon to be on my way. Kev Byrne was sitting talking to me while we waited for the chopper and helped me through the last and worst of my 14-hour wait.

About 8.30 a.m. the helicopter arrived and lowered a jungle penetrator. The winch point was too small to get a Stokes litter wire basket down through the heavy canopy. This was the last thing I needed as I could only use one hand; it meant I was going to be winched up through the 60-feet-high canopy, hanging on with one arm. Mick had put my arm in a sling as it hurt like hell when it just hung by my side, and he had pinned the silk around me as my shirt was in tatters. Kev Byrne helped me onto the jungle penetrator and did his best to make sure I wasn’t going to fall off. He was looking a bit upset: for Kevin this was out of character as he was generally regarded as a pretty cool sort of customer. I was slowly winched up from the jungle floor and everything was going well until I was slammed into a tree about 40 feet up. No further damage was done apart from my eyes watering, and I then felt the hands of the dust-off crew hauling me on board the chopper.

The flight sergeant crewman asked me how I felt. I gave him a thumbs up as he wouldn’t have heard my reply over the din of the rotor blades. He then asked if I felt strong enough to hang on while they made a quick detour to pick up some more wounded men from another company on our way back. I said I felt fine and we headed off. I hadn’t been aware that another company had got into a contact the day before and the news was a bit of a surprise, but considering what we had been up to anything could have happened. We hovered over a patch of jungle about three kilometres away from our location and the jungle penetrator was sent down. I couldn’t believe my eyes when a slightly balding head appeared over the skid of the chopper and a fellow platoon commander from B Company, Dan McDaniel, was dragged on board. I asked him in short shouts what had happened. He told me his platoon had had running contacts the day before with some enemy and eventually his platoon had been mortared with 60 mm mortars. Fifteen of his platoon had been wounded! The 21st of September had been a big day for 4 R.A.R.

*

Within half an hour the helicopter was landing at ‘Vampire’ pad at the 1
^st
Australian Field Hospital at the Australian Logistic Support Group base in Vung Tau. As we landed, medics came out to the pad along a concrete footpath with stretchers. I was feeling OK and still hadn’t lost consciousness; and I even mistakenly thought that I would be fit enough to walk into the casualty reception area of the hospital. However as I sat with my backside on the floor of the chopper and started to drape my legs over the side and onto the aircraft skids I felt a hand on my shoulder; the flight sergeant told me to wait until the stretcher arrived. As the medics came alongside I stood to show them that I was fine, but as my legs took my weight I felt quite light-headed and suddenly very tired. Strong arms lowered me onto the stretcher.