Into Vietnam. Shaun Clarke

been a long five days,’ Shagger said.

      ‘Too bloody long,’ Red replied. ‘And made no better by the fact that we’re doing the whole thing on a shoestring. Piss-poor, if you ask me.’

      Shagger grinned. ‘The lower ranks’ whinge. How do you, a no-hoper corporal, know this was done on a shoestring?’

      ‘Well, no RAAF support, for a start. Just that bloody Ansett-MAL Caribou that was completely unreliable…’

      ‘Serviceability problems,’ Shagger interjected, still grinning. ‘But the Trans Australian Airlines DC3s and the Crowley Airlines G13 choppers were reliable. They made up for the lack of RAAF support, didn’t they?’

      ‘You’re joking. Those fucking G13s had no winch and little lift capability. They were as useless as lead balloons.’

      ‘That’s true,’ Shagger murmured, recalling the cumbersome helicopters hovering over the canopy of the trees, whipping up dust and leaves, as they dropped supplies or lifted men out. He fell silent, never once removing his searching gaze from the darkening path that led from the jungle to the edge of the swamp. Then he said, ‘They were piss-poor for resups and lift-offs – that’s true enough. But the DC3s were OK.’

      Red sighed loudly, as if short of breath. ‘That’s my whole point. This was supposed to be an important exercise, preparing us for ’Nam, and yet we didn’t even get RAAF support. Those bastards in Canberra are playing silly buggers and wasting our time.’

      ‘No,’ Shagger replied firmly. ‘We didn’t waste our time. They might have fucked up, but we’ve learnt an awful lot in these five days and I think it’ll stand us in good stead once we go in-country.’

      ‘Let’s hope so, Sarge.’

      ‘Anyway, it’s no good farting against thunder, so you might as well forget it. If we pull off this ambush we’ll have won, then it’s spine-bashing time. We can…’

      Suddenly Shagger raised his right hand to silence Red. At first he thought he was mistaken, but then, when he listened more intently, he heard what he assumed was the distant snapping of twigs and large, hardened leaves as a body of men advanced along the jungle path, heading for the swamp.

      Using a hand signal, Shagger indicated to Red that he should adapt the firing position. When Red had done so, Shagger signalled that they should aim their fire in opposite directions, forming a triangular arc that would put a line of bullets through the front and rear of the file of enemy troops when it extended into the swamp from its muddy edge at the end of the path.

      As they lay there waiting, squinting along their rifle sights, their biggest problems were ignoring the sweat that dripped from their foreheads into their eyes, and the insects that whined and buzzed about them, driven into a feeding frenzy by the smell of the sweat. In short, the most difficult thing was remaining dead still to ensure that they were not detected by their quarry.

      Luckily, just as both of them were thinking that they might be driven mad by the insects, the first of the enemy appeared around the bend in the darkening path. They were marching in the classic single-file formation, with one man out ahead on ‘point’ as the lead scout, covering an arc of fire immediately in front of the patrol, and the others strung out behind him, covering arcs to the left and right.

      When all the members of the patrol had come into view around the bed in the path, with ‘Tail-end Charlie’ well behind the others, covering an arc of fire to the rear, Shagger counted a total of eight men: two four-man patrols combined. All of them were wearing olive-green, long-sleeved cotton shirts; matching trousers with a drawcord waist; soft jungle hats with a sweat-band around the forehead; and rubber-soled canvas boots. Like Shagger and Red, they were armed with 7.62mm L1A1 SLRs and had 9mm Browning High Power pistols and machetes strung from their waist belts.

      In short, the ‘enemy’ was a patrol of Australian troops.

      ‘Got the buggers!’ Shagger whispered, then aimed at the head of the single file as Red was taking aim at its rear. When the last man had stepped into the water, Shagger and Red both opened fire with their SLRs.

      Having switched to automatic they stitched lines of spurting water across the front and rear of the patrol. Shocked, but quickly realizing that they were boxed in, the men under attack bawled panicky, conflicting instructions at one another, then split into two groups. These started heading off in opposite directions: one directly towards the islet, the other away from it.

      Instantly, Shagger and Red jumped up to lob American M26 hand-grenades, one out in front of the men wading away from the islet, the other in front of the men wading towards it. Both grenades exploded with a muffled roar that threw up spiralling columns of water and rotting vegetation which then rained back down on the fleeing soldiers. Turning back towards one another, the two groups hesitated, then tried to head back to the jungle. They had only managed a few steps when Shagger and Red riddled the shore with the awesome automatic fire of their combined SLRs, tearing the foliage to shreds and showering the fleeing troops with flying branches and dangerously sharp palm leaves.

      When the ‘enemy’ bunched up again, hesitating, Shagger and Bannerman stopped firing.

      ‘Drop your weapons and put your hands in the air!’ Shagger bawled at them. ‘We’ll take that as surrender.’

      The men in the water were silent for some time, glancing indecisively at one another; but eventually a sergeant, obviously the platoon leader, cried out: ‘Bloody hell!’ Then he dropped his SLR into the water and raised both hands. ‘Got us fair and square,’ he said to the rest of his men. ‘We’re all prisoners of war. So drop your weapons and put up your hands, you happy wankers. We’ve lost. Those bastards have won.’

      ‘Too right, we have,’ Shagger and Red said simultaneously, with big, cheesy grins.

      They had other reasons for smiling. This was the final action in the month-long training exercise ‘Traiim Nau’, conducted by Australian troops in the jungles and swamps of New Guinea in the spring of 1966.

      In June that year, after they had returned to their headquarters in Swanbourne, and enjoyed two weeks’ leave, the men of 3 Squadron SAS embarked by boat and plane from Perth to help set up a Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Phuoc Tuy province, Vietnam.

       2

      In a small, relatively barren room in ‘the Kremlin’, the Operations Planning and Intelligence section, at Bradbury Lines, Hereford, the Commanding Officer of D Squadron, SAS, Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick ‘Paddy’ Callaghan, was conducting a most unusual briefing – unusual because there were only two other men present: Sergeants Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Ashman and Richard ‘Dead-eye Dick’ Parker.

      Ashman was an old hand who had served with the Regiment since it was formed in North Africa in 1941, fought with it as recently as 1964, in Aden, and now, in his mid-forties, was being given his next-to-last active role before being transferred to the Training Wing as a member of the Directing Staff. Parker had previously fought with the SAS in Malaya and Borneo and alongside Ashman in Aden. Jimbo was one of the most experienced and popular men in the Regiment, while Dead-eye, as he was usually known, was one of the most admired and feared. By his own choice, he had very few friends.

      Lieutenant-Colonel Callaghan knew them both well, particularly Jimbo, with whom he went back as far as 1941 when they had both taken part in the Regiment’s first forays against the Germans with the Long Range Desert Group. Under normal circumstances officers could remain with the Regiment for no more than three years at a time. However, they could return for a similar period after a break, and Callaghan, who was devoted to the SAS, had been tenacious in doing just that. For this reason, he had an illustrious reputation based on unparalleled experience with the Regiment. At the end of the war, when the SAS was disbanded, Callaghan had returned to his original regiment, 3 Commando. But when he heard that the SAS was being reformed to deal with the Emergency in Malaya, he applied immediately and was accepted,