The Battle of Long Tan: As featured in The Vietnam Years by Michael Caulfield

Author:Michael Caulfield [Caulfield, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780733633072
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Published: 2014-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

They started to take us on in a big way and they just used the human wave assault and they would line up and then roll into us. We would mow them down – and I have to say that. Our machine guns and fire from our rifles just mowed them down in their front echelons, in their front lines, and their bodies just fell on top of each other and almost mounds of bodies. They would then get up and form up again and come on again over the top of the bodies and keep on pushing on …

There was a continuous volume of machine-gun and rifle fire and coming at us like millions of fireflies. Red ones, green ones and white ones as these tracers just came towards us, over our heads in most cases, although I remember looking in front of me and Jack Thompson, my mortar fire controller, was lying behind a rubber tree. It wasn’t great cover because the rubber trees are that long and his head was that wide so it really wasn’t of much use but it was psychological protection and … I remember looking at Jack and looking over him towards the enemy and seeing the tree just above his head being peppered by tracer rounds just going straight through it.

You know it’s all very well to look back on it now and think about it, but at the time there was an awful lot of noise, rain, smoke, machine guns, you name it. But I don’t think anybody really was frightened. Somebody said to me once was I frightened and I said no, I was too busy to become frightened. All I was doing, in fact, was doing what I had been trained to do.

HARRY SMITH

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.