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(Roy Dodd) Binh Ba is a very big village, it’s well established,
there were nice clear roads through it, bananas growing all around.
The huts are not just your average little tin huts,
they were well established, there was something like 50 or 60 houses
in the village itself.
(Robert O’Neil) It was a French rubber plantation village;
everyone lived in little brick cottages,
laid out on a formal grid pattern.
Totally different to what you would expect for a South Vietnamese village.
There was a lovely big airstrip in the middle of the rubber plantation.
The plantation managers lived in lovely big, 1930s style houses,
with white plastered walls outside.
They had it good.
But, of course, that village, because it was the centre of economic activity
in the northern part of the province,
attracted a lot of Viet Cong influence,
and they particularly used to come and tax people
and collect rice and other things that they needed.
(Roger Wainwright) After the first cordon and search there, at Binh Ba,
Charlie Company stayed there, beside the old airstrip that was there,
just out to the – not actually inside the village
but just adjacent to the village.
And we patrolled mainly out to the north and to the west
of Binh Ba village to provide security to it.
The thing about cordon and search operations,
that’s why… it’s very difficult.
You’ll get in there and get an immediate result,
but unless you stay there and provide a continuing presence,
people from the other side are going to come back in there,
and that’s why a village like Wah Long was done so many times.
And later on, I mean, we spent a lot of time in Binh Ba
and I think we did that probably twice when we were there,
but then when 5 RAR returned on its next trip to Vietnam,
about 18-months later, two years later,
they had the Major Battle of Binh Ba,
same place where we’d lived several times.
So unless you provided that continuing presence,
you could never say that once you’d been in there,
you done a cordon and search, you’ve captured these people,
all these sympathisers, whatever, and two weeks later it can be back
to where it was.
(Colin Kahn) On the sixth of June, in 1969,
an Australian tank and a recovery vehicle was steaming up the highway
to join our 6 Battalion, which was north of the village.
Well north of the village, fighting against headquarters of 33 Regiment,
well north, you know, 20 or 30 kilometres away.
And they passed through at eight o’clock in the morning,
through the village of Binh Ba, and all of a sudden
some idiot of a North Vietnamese soldier fired an RPG rocket
and hit our tank.
Now, the big question is, and I ask it all the time, why did this happen?
They knew the minute they fired something
they were going to be hit back.
I believe it was ill-discipline on the part of a soldier,
who saw this wonderful target just passing past a house,
so he fires an RPG and hits the tank.
Knowing full well that the taskforce, just down the road,
would have to react violently to a thing like that.
Some people also say perhaps they were being very wise tactically,
with our 6th Battalion, which was fighting the headquarters
of their regiment up the road,
maybe they were doing this to divert attention
so that the headquarters could escape from 6 Battalion?
(Ray De Vere) Well, I first heard about Binh Ba when the troop was
on ready reaction duty at Nui Dat,
and we were told that some fighting had broken out up the road.
Not long after that I was called to the taskforce headquarters
and given a brief with Major Murray Blake,
who was commanding the infantry company,
and we had to meet a tank troop on the way.
And we were told, simply, that there’d been a tank fired on
and that the village had been invaded, but we didn’t know who,
how many or any real detail and not much information was forthcoming.
So we loaded up the infantry and headed up to Binh Ba
and on the way we were ambushed, but we had been prepared for that,
so we shot through the ambush and carried on.
(Colin Kahn) Then all of a sudden the Brigadier says,
there’s more up there than we think,
I want you to send another Company up and you go up and take charge
of the operation, so 6 Battalion can get on with this work
further up the road.
So I deploy my B Company and Pioneers… and another platoon…
the Tracker Platoon up to there,
and I then go up and take charge of the battle
and I land in a helicopter right on the outskirts of the village
and set up a little post on a paddy bank
and the battle now becomes the 5 Battalion Battle.
(Ray De Vere) It was a difficult operation
because we didn’t know anything about the enemy when we arrived.
We moved in under extremely heavy fire
and I had been informed there were probably civilians in the village,
and so we passed instructions that people were not to fire
unless I identified the enemy, i.e. the person shooting at you.
Now that’s a big ask in a situation like that,
particularly when there’s a lot of firing going on.
We also moved in with the infantry mounted,
because it would have been extremely risky
with the very small company that was available to go dismounted.
That further amplified the risk to us,
and again, called for very good judgement at every level.
(Brian London) Command and Control was difficult.
Trying to maintain contact with each section and each soldier
was extremely difficult.
Keeping a straight line so we wouldn’t get too far ahead of one another
was another problem.
And because we were mixed up with a highly populated area
and well-constructed houses we often got out of sight of one another.
(Roy Dodd) The Infantry had the hard job when we got in the village.
Basically, we got in and fired upon the huts
where we were being shot at from
and we moved further through the village.
The Infantry dismounted and actually went in
and cleared these houses, hand to hand, one at a time.
And there was a lot of bunkers in there and there was a lot of people,
it was a very dirty job to get in
and find exactly where they were hiding.
(Brian London) It was, it was house to house fighting.
We had to get inside the house;
we had to search the house from top to bottom.
And to do that we spilt up in to two or three men teams
and each team would look after his allocated area,
or house, or houses.
We lined up in a battle formation and commenced the assault.
We’d only just commenced and there were six enemy soldiers
entrenched in one house.
They fired from that house
and struck one of my soldiers through the neck.
He died instantly.
(Ray De Vere) The main difficulty in a situation like
the village of Binh Bah was identifying, positively, the enemy.
In some cases it was very simple,
those dressed in North Vietnamese regular Army,
including the pith helmets with the red star,
which they wore, and the brown leather webbing
and the heavy machine guns on wheels
and things like that were certainly not the accoutrements
of the normal peasant, so they could be engaged freely.
In other circumstances,
towards the end of the battle in particular,
the North Vietnamese were coming out wearing civilian attire
and so they certainly were very difficult to determine
as enemy at that stage.
So the orders were given, again,
don’t fire unless fired on, or, positively identified as enemy.
(Roy Dodd) I could see through my sight
the people coming out of the village were North Vietnamese regulars,
they had the uniform, the webbing, they were carrying the…
they were well armed, and I hadn’t seen any civilians at that stage.
I don’t know where the local people were;
I think they were hiding in their houses.
The people that we were firing upon were the North Vietnamese soldiers
who had been in the village and at that stage
they were being forced out by the Infantry coming through
from the front, and we were shooting at the first lot to withdraw.
We only fired upon the houses being fired at,
and we only fired two or three,
and then we were ordered through the village to the back,
because people had started withdrawing,
and as we drove through the village,
an RPG was fired at us and struck the side of the tank
and wounded the turret crew.
My crew commander was very badly wounded;
he took the majority of the force of the rocket in his leg.
My Operator had his headsets off and was loading
and he had a lot of shrapnel wounds to his arms and face
and he was deafened by the noise of the blast.
Luckily, I was shielded by the gun
and I only had slight wounds to my face.
After we’d been hit my gun started traversing
around to the left and I had no control
and I thought the gunnery gear had been completely shot away,
and then I heard the command, “Fire!”
and I realised that my crew commander had seen the person
who’d fired at us and I fired into the hut that he was looking straight at
and he had the presence of mind to do all this before he passed out,
and he passed out not long after.
I had to stop firing so we could open a field dressing
and bandage his leg, he was bleeding everywhere,
he had a very large hole in his leg.
I took my Crew Commander and Operator;
we abandoned the tank and left it,
moved out to a point where a chopper would fly in to take us out.
I didn’t get on the chopper at that stage;
I told my wife I had a nice safe job in Nui Dat
and as soon as you get on a chopper
there’s a Wounded Nation Telegram sent, and
she was worried enough without getting something like that.
(Ray De Vere) There were over a 120-odd enemy killed,
and I understand there were some civilians killed and wounded,
but I don’t really know the numbers.
(Kevin Barker) Dead bodies had been brought back to camp,
identified by the medicals, checked to make sure they’re all dead,
in body bags and they’d try and identify them
to find out what areas they come from, what villages and that they come from.
We spent a few day, a day or two there carting them back,
‘cause they’re all… they’re not in bags when you bring ‘em back,
just chucked in the back of truck.
That rattles your nerves, it shakes you up, you never forget it.
(Brian London) Unfortunately, some of the houses had to be destroyed,
when the enemy action occurred in a house, if we couldn’t clear the house,
then we had to have the house destroyed by tank fire
or even our own anti-tank rockets we carried ourselves, we’d use those.
So yes, there were a lot houses damaged in the village,
and what happened after the battle was over,
that we tried to repair the villages as much as we possibly could.
And that’s when the Civil Affairs Units moved in
to start reconstruction.
(Douglas MacLennan) Well, Civil Affairs representatives,
including myself, went into the village of Binh Ba
the day after the battle, we arrived there about eight in the morning
to inspect the village to see what damage had been done.
The majority of buildings in the villages
had been substantially damaged,
some with gaping holes in the walls from tank gun fire,
roofs destroyed.
We made an assessment of the damage with a view to determining
what sort of materials and what sort of work was necessary
to make the buildings habitual again.
(Barry Smith) There was food and furniture distribution.
So on those occasions the trucks would be loaded up
and we would go up and we went up and did the food distribution.
That was somewhere around about probably late June,
25th of June, something like that.
If the village didn’t have a medical dispensary,
if the village had a school but it had no text books
there were the, just any number of projects that you can think of,
we might build depending on where and when,
but we might put sports equipment into playgrounds,
we might put a windmill in for a water supply.
But the job was to go out and see how the village could benefit
if we could supply the wherewithal.
(Ray De Vere) Binh Ba was probably the major action
during my time in Vietnam, in 1969.
I think it demonstrated the difficulty of operating
against an irregular enemy and a regular enemy,
where both moved freely around the country.
It also demonstrated the difficulty in identifying enemy
from friendly people, or innocent civilians.
It was important, too, because the North Vietnamese
had moved in to there and stated they were going to stay there
for three days and the Australians would not be able to move them,
so it was a direct challenge to the Australian authority
in the area, and the first challenge since the Battle of Long Tan in 1966.
It was also important, I believe,
that we reacted as quickly as we did
and we moved them out as quickly as we did.
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