Stories from a minefield
Greg Lockhart investigates a case of strategic self-destruction
“Landmines may be concisely defined as mass-produced, victim-operated, explosive traps”.
Mike Croll, The History of Landmines
In May 1967 First Australian Task Force (1ATF) laid a minefield in Vietnam that epitomises
Australia's involvement in that war and, beyond that, the sense of fateful sacrifice that is
fundamental to Australian military remembrance. 1ATF commander Brigadier Stuart Graham
wanted the field, which he described as a “barrier minefield”, to shield the Vietnamese villages in
Phuoc Tuy province's south-western districts from incursions by regular units from the People's
Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the local National Liberation Front for the Southern Region
(NLF). The NLF called those south-western districts Long Dat.
The barrier also sought to cut those regular enemy forces off from the supplies and recruits they
obtained in those villages of Long Dat and from the support of the NLF's irregular village guerrilla
units there. To serve these purposes, the barrier would contain more than 21,000 powerful M16
landmines laid by 1 Field Squadron Royal Australian Engineers and run for 11 kilometres due
south from the centre of Long Dat to the coast. More than half of these mines were fitted with
anti-lifting devices in order to deter any enemy who might attempt to breach the field. About one
in four of the mines was fitted with trip wires, which provided an alternative means of detonation.
Yet this minefield defied reason. Graham laid it in an attempt to compensate for the insufficient
troops the government had given him to deal with the situation he confronted in the province. His
use of the anti-lifting devices was, in turn, an attempt to compensate for not having sufficient
troops to guard the field. But his engineer adviser, Major Brian Florence, told him in no uncertain
terms that anti-lifting devices would not secure the mines against a determined enemy. It was a
principle of mine warfare that only protection by troops posted along the entire length of the field
could do this. Graham's battalion commanders also warned him that the enemy would breach the
field, steal the mines and turn them back against 1ATF, if he went ahead with his plan. But that is
what he did
Among the first to suffer for his decision were the sappers who laid the mines. The Brigadier
wanted the minefield laid by June to prevent the rice harvest in the south-western plains from
getting cut to enemy forces in the east. As a result, the sappers were given no time to rehearse
laying drills with the ordnance, even though they were unfamiliar with it.
The anti-lifting devices were also extremely dangerous to work with, and the conditions were
unforgiving. The fierce heat and enemy action provided dangerous distractions as the mining
parties moved around the work site like clockwork planting thousands of mines in precise
clusters. Local guerrillas might ambush the route to the minefield or push buffalos and dogs into
the minefield to distract the arming parties from their dangerous work. A momentary lapse in
concentration in the task of arming the mines or moving around armed clusters could spell
disaster. Something had to give. And it did! Five sappers were killed and six wounded, some
badly, while laying the mines by the time the operation was terminated on May 30.
Jethro Thompson was severely wounded on May 9. He had been taking a break from arming the
mines and remembers one of the “hurry-ups” that kept coming down the line. This may have
unsettled him, because as he moved back into the field to resume work he almost certainly
stepped on an armed mine. There was a tremendous explosion. Two were killed and a number
wounded, including Jethro who suffered shocking injuries:
I was standing there adjusting my jacket and looking at my partner Ashley Culkin crouching over
a mine in the ground. I thought, “0h shit, he's already into it.” and that's the last thing 1
remember seeing before I was flying through the air. All the dust and crap seemed to float down
covering me in very slow motion. My hands were spewing blood and I could not feel my left leg ...
I got hit from left to right, [only] shreds at the high thigh ... attached my leg. My dick is longer
than my left leg and I'm not boasting. My left hand was a mess. Lost all but the thumb and index
finger. My right wrist had been badly gouged. My buttocks and right leg was badly lacerated. Left
eardrum was perforated. I took a penetrating abdominal wound at the base of the flak-jacket. This
opened me up exposing my intestines. I heard someone yelling out to put the pins back in the
mines near us. Then one bloke said, "We can't, Jethro's got them.. [Sergeant] Brett Nolen was
hovering over me trying to stop the flow of blood. I was hot and looking into the sun.
Ten days later in hospital, Jethro, also had his right hand amputated.
Work went on. And two more sappers, ..Greg Brady and John O'Hara, were killed during the
laying on May 20. One of the NCOs who happened to notice their last movements thought that
something went wrong when the two placed the bottom of the M16 mine on the top of the
anti-lifting device. Perhaps an involuntary jerk of the hand caused by fear, a bead of sweat, or a
fly. Perhaps some dirt got between the bottom of the mine and the top of the switch during the
tamping. Whatever the reason, the device detonated, killing the men hunched over the hole.
But the tragedy of the decision to secure the mines with anti-lifting devices had barely begun.
After some 30 enemy combatants were blown to pieces during suicidal mine-lifting
experimentation in the minefield, the local guerrillas soon found a way to neutralise the devices.
The histories of Long Dat district all recount the story of how a combat engineer named Hung
Manh had an unexpected reprieve after being ceremoniously sent off (with drinks) on a likely
suicide mission to the minefield. The crucial detail – “the grenade beneath the mine did not
detonate because it was damp”. The mechanism of the anti-lifting device was revealed. Mine
lifting training was soon devised for local guerrillas and many others in the villages. The mine
lifting had begun by the night of May 28-29 when Australian records show that M16 mines, some
of them with anti-lifting devices, were lifted from the southern part of minefield. Laying was
aborted the following day after another sapper, Terry Renshaw, was killed and a number wounded
during the laying, possibly as a result of faulty ordnance.
From then on, 1ATF's lightly armed guerrilla enemy was able to turn the minefield into an
inexhaustible supply of mines to defend their vital area and population against 1ATF. The people
in the villages around the minefield referred to it as “the arsenal”. So did the Australian soldiers.
Why did Brigadier Graham proceed with such a disastrous course of action, in the face of
warnings from his subordinates? Stated baldly, because his colonial construction of Vietnamese
affairs meant he did not have a sufficiently clear idea of who or where his enemy was.
Other explanations have been offered. Some suggest his superiors ordered him to lay the field.
But there is overwhelming evidence that the idea was Graham's. Some have suggested that he was
a fool but this is untrue. He was intelligent and highly regarded by his superiors. Some have
sought to apologise for his decision, by claiming that he relied on his Vietnamese allies who said
they would guard the minefield but didn't. At some point, Graham did seem to think that the use
of allied forces to protect the minefield would be his masterstroke. There were discussions with
the local province chief but Graham's own written orders for the operation to construct his barrier
show that the allied troops were positioned exactly where the province chief told him they would
be - nowhere near where they could protect his minefield. The bottomline is that Graham designed
the minefield as an obstacle to the regular enemy main forces in the east, but was not sufficiently
aware that the field would be vulnerable to the villagers on its western side.
Why was Graham insufficiently aware that the local villagers were his enemy? The answer goes
well beyond Graham's competence to the construction of Australian strategic policy in the 1950s
and 1960s. According to the so-called “domino theory” - , which shaped that policy, something
had to be done or the countries of South-East Asia and, ultimately, Australia would fall one by
one to the downward thrust of international communism. If one believed that the communists
were “coming down”, the obvious response was to erect barriers to prevent them. Beginning with
the ANZUS alliance (1950), such barrier assumptions were then embedded in Australian treaty
arrangements.
There was, however, no communist power in the region capable of invading South-East Asia, let
alone Australia. Between 1950 and 1965, the Australian military chiefs of staff consistently said
so: “neither the Soviet, nor the Chinese communists are likely to be able to mount a seaborne
invasion of Australia-“ and “the problem of Indonesia is internal, there being no immediate threat
of external aggression” nor was there any sign of a Vietnamese Pacific armada. In fact, the
domino theory's construction of the communist menace was conceived along exactly the same
lines as the Japanese expansion that toppled the British garrison at Singapore and most Western
colonial governments in Asia by mid- 1942. The Australian government's strident anti-communist
rhetoric in the 1950s and 1960s turned out to be a surrogate assertion of the fear generated by the
process that Japanese expansion had formerly set in train in South-East Asia: decolonisation.
For the architects of Australia's response to decolonisation, a technicolour nightmare of the
“red” and “yellow” perils determined the perceived threat of communism. Communism was the
enemy, not the real threat, which was nationalism. Graham and his colleagues in the military
bureaucracy therefore built their battle plans on a powerful political bias. They were never
officially informed that, by encouraging US intervention in Vietnam, the role of their small task
force in Phuoc Tuy province was to suppress independent Asian nationalism. Flying blind behind
the barriers that the domino theory erected between their colonial understanding of the war and its
national dynamics, their operational assumptions would make no strategic sense.
Fixated on the imperial view that gangs of dedicated -communist cadres- had infiltrated the
villages and imposed their will on the population, Australian commanders had little idea of the
widespread political support for the war of national liberation among the villagers in Phuoc Tuy
province. This was especially in south-western Long Dat district, which contained the best rice
fields and 54 per cent of the population. The Australians did not appreciate that mobilisation of
the majority population through guerrilla activities in that vital area would require secure guerrilla
base areas in the nearby Long Hai mountains - which could not have existed without prior popular
support from the people in the plains. They did not understand that these people were the source
of the local resistance to 1ATF's presence in the province and the basis for the links between this
resistance and the main PAVN forces entering the province. Looking to fight those main forces in
the jungle, they did not even understand that Long Dat was the vital area.
Thus, in March 1966, the chief of the general staff, Lieutenant-General John Wilton, approved
the location of the 1ATF base at Nui Dat as a barrier to shield the people of Long Dat against
incoming PAVN forces from the north and east of the province. In May 1967, brigadier Graham
followed Wilton down the garden path by extending the barrier function of the I ATF base into
southern Phuoc Tuy with the construction of his barrier minefield. Graham's method of
constructing the barrier was more overtly catastrophic than Wilton's. But both men had made the
stunning strategic error of assuming the need to protect the very people in Long Dat who were
their enemy
Not only were local villagers always going to destroy Graham's minefield, no friendly forces
were ever going to protect it. Unaware that the villages of Long Dat had different political and
historical views from them, the architects of the minefield were unable to see through the walls of
their colonial enclosure. Graham and his superiors were staring at their own reflections.
M16 mines from the Australian minefield - as many as 2000 - had begun to come into the NLF's
Long Dat district committee by August and September 1967 as “mine-lifting emulation
movements” swept the villages. In 1968 and 1969 the NLF was then using its abundance of M16s
- more than 3000 were eventually lifted – “to defend the Minh Dam base” in the Long Hai
mountains and “to attack the Australians and the [Saigon government] puppets- around the
villages in the plains of Long Dat.
Operation Pinaroo (March 2-April 15, 1968), which 1ATF launched to destroy key enemy base
facilities in the Long Hai mountains, provides a good example of NLF's defensive use of M16
mines in the deliberate mine war. During the week before the March 19 assault on the central
massif by the Third Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR), B52 air strikes and naval
gunfire pounded the objective. These bombardments had virtually no impact on the countless
caves in which the enemy had long established their base installations, but only recently defended
them with M16 mines. But still, it was into a shattered moonscape of fine dust and granite
boulders that Second Lieutenant Lawrence Appelbee led 7 Platoon, 3RAR on the morning of
March 22. Prodding every inch of the track for mines and marking cleared areas with white tape,
the patrol had moved only a total of 400 metres from its base when, at about 12.30pm, Private
John Richardson stepped over a log and detonated an M16 mine.
The mine failed to jump. It went off in the ground causing Richardson to lose his left leg below
the knee and the front of his right foot. A very painful burst eardrum and compound fractures of
both arms added to his injuries. Corporal Graham Fox, who was some metres behind Richardson,
suffered wounds that later resulted in the loss of a leg. Appelbee told his riflemen to get onto
rocks and watch their arcs of fire. Sapper Murray Walker, who was allocated to 7 Platoon that
day, began to prod across the saddle with a bayonet to clear a path to get to Richardson and Fox.
Appelbee also prodded. At some point Private Kevin Coles moved off his rock. Perhaps he
intended to cover Appelbee and Walker in the saddle. But Coles stepped on an M16 that jumped,
instantly killed him, lightly wounded Appelbee, and blew Walker to the ground.
Once they had collected themselves and realised that nothing could be done for Coles, whose
smouldering body later flickered into flames, Walker and Appelbee reached Richardson and Fox.
Meantime, the burning body of Coles caused some concern that it might generate enough heat to
detonate the grenades and ammunition attached to it. At some point, Walker, carrying a fire
extinguisher that had been lowered from an RAAF Iroquois helicopter, bravely crossed a stretch
of uncleared ground to extinguish the burning body. Appelbee placed a tourniquet on Richardson's
torn leg. 3RAR medical officer Captain Richard Lippet also lowered himself and his medical kit
into the area from a hovering helicopter.
The company commander, Major lan Hands, called out
from the base 400 metres away that he would send two engineer reinforcements with an infantry
escort from 9 Platoon to help Walker. Inexplicably, these four went around the left, uncleared
side, rather than the right, cleared side of a big rock on the path down the slope. One of the four
detonated another M16 mine. Both of the escorts were seriously wounded and the two engineers
were killed. Hands managed the extraction of the four casualties nearest the base. Appelbee, who
was “very pissed off” with a cameraman taking Super Eight footage of the carnage from the
RAAF evacuation helicopter hovering above, organised the winching of Richardson, Fox and
Coles into the aircraft from maximum height. This was because of the danger that the powerful
down-draught from its rotor blades would detonate more mines. Four hours after Richardson
detonated the first mine the platoon got back in the base. And as the survivors ate their field
rations that night “no one spoke”.
This gives some idea of the leadership, courage and staying power with which 1ATF patrols
kept up their protracted probing of mined NLF defences -Appelbee's platoon went on patrolling
the next day. Yet we also see how, with no heavy weapons and no air power, the guerrilla forces
of Long Dat district achieved the remarkable military feat of defending their key base area against
1ATF with M16 mines from the Australian minefield.
The NL17's offensive use of M16 mines was even more remarkable because it implies the
radical use of mines as strike weapons - with something like the impact of artillery. To use mines
in this way, which meant to plant, lift and replant mines in the paths of Australian patrols, the
local guerrillas required wrap-around surveillance of 1ATF's activities by the local population.
Such a broadly based mining offensive was new to Australians who were accustomed to mining in
abstract geometric patterns in fixed fenced and managed fields. By 1969, the NLF’s M16 mining
offensive had also brought into shocking realisation how completely “the minefield” had armed
the lightly armed guerrillas of Long Dat with nothing less than their No 1 strike weapons.
Drawing Australian patrols into mined areas was one of the NLF's offensive options. In late June
1969, for example, local guerrilla forces fired on 5 RAR patrols in the foothills of the Long Hai
mountains. The patrols reacted as their enemy anticipated they would. On July 4, a 7 Platoon night
ambush patrol led by Second Lieutenant David Mead was moving to a position about 500 metres
from the area of the earlier patrol contacts and at 9.07pm one of its machine-gunners placed his
gun on an M16 mine. One member of the platoon was killed and many others were wounded,
including Mead who suffered serious shrapnel wounds in his back. A second mine was detonated
at 10.05pm after someone moved just outside one of the safe lanes that had been cleared from the
detonation area to the helicopter-landing zone. Records indicate a total of three were killed and 14
wounded.
Another incident was no less destructive but it had a more layered history. On July 15, 1969 A
Company 6RAR had two contacts with a three-man enemy reconnaissance party some distance to
the east of the minefield. In one of the contacts, 3 Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Peter Hines,
killed two of the enemy in a bunker, where an M16 mine and M26 grenade, almost definitely from
the minefield, were found. The third enemy survived and fled west. Six days later, 3 Platoon was
cut down by an M16 mine located about 10 metres off the track it was following west.
Hines had stopped the platoon for a morning break. It was carrying a small transistor radio and
Hines had been alerted to a momentous event to occur that morning, July 21, 1969. US Armed
Forces Radio Vietnam was about to announce that man has landed on the moon. Thus, at 9.40am,
with the distant rumble of the B52 bombers putting in an air strike on the Long Hai mountains,
there may have been some bunching in the area as Hines went around informing his men about the
Apollo moon landing. He returned to his headquarters where many feet, including his own had
trod that morning. But there, just beside his pack, in a space other feet had tended to avoid, one of
his own landed on an M16 mine.
Hines lost his legs and died within five minutes. Eighteen others were wounded, many with
severe leg and stomach injuries. Corporal John Needs was the only unscathed NCO. “It was
horrible, like a charnel house," observed one of the survivors. But then Needs was killed when a
second mine was detonated. This explosion also blinded medical officer Captain Trevor
Anderson, seriously wounded the CO, Lieutenant-Colonel David Butler, and injured a further
three soldiers. Within four hours on July 21 yet another platoon had been badly hit - two had been
killed and 23 wounded, many grievously - without firing a shot.
As the NLF defended its vital area in this way, Australian patrols went on in all the horror.
How? Leadership, the mutual geeing-up of the soldiers, and, 1 think, a fear worse than death - that
of the shame of letting one's mates down. Yet with three, 20-man platoons in a company and a
mere 13 rifle companies in 1ATF at its peak, the impact of the detonation of eight or 10 “well
placed” M16 mines on such a small force was far-reaching. A conservative estimate is that
between May 1967 and November 1971 55 1ATF soldiers including five New Zealanders were
killed and some 250 dismembered and wounded on M16s from the “barrier minefield”. 1ATF
records also indicate that a further 42 allied soldiers and civilians - overwhelmingly Vietnamese
but some Americans - were killed and 172 were injured, many seriously, in the same period.
The 1ATF M16 mine casualty figures alone represent about 10 per cent of all Australian
casualties in the war between 1962 and 1972 - 501 killed and 3131 wounded. Yet the strategic
suicide encapsulated in these figures was far more shattering than the mean figure may suggest.
Total casualties include those, from navy, air force and other army units operating outside Phuoc
Tuy province. Also the minefield was not laid until mid- 1967. For the protracted period from
May 1969 to May 1970, the M16 mine casualties rose to over 50 per cent of 1ATF's total
casualties. During the attempted pacification operations in Long Dat in mid- 1969, the figures
probably spiked at 80 per, cent. The discrepancy between Australian and US experience of mine
warfare in Vietnam is also telling. Whereas historian Mike Croll indicates that some 16 per cent
of US mine and booby-trap casualties were caused by US ordnance, a conservative calculation is
that some 45 per cent of Australian casualties from mines and booby-traps were caused by “our
own M16 mines”.
This tragedy of strategic self-destruction stemmed from a calamitous command decision. Yet
that decision was conditioned by an imperial world view that blinded Australian commanders to
the political as well as the military dynamics of the battlefield on which they found themselves
fighting. In fact, the story of the minefield cuts 1ATF history with the double-edged sword of the
Anzac tradition: heroic pathos in the face of high command bungles. It is worth remembering that
the story of the minefield is emblematic of more than Australia's involvement in the Vietnam
War.
Greg Lockhart is honorary historian of the Vietnam Veterans' Federation of Australia. His book,
The Minefield, will be published by Alien & Unwin in 2007.This is an edited version of a longer
essay in the current issue of HEAT magazine, Ten Years (HEAT 12, new series).
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