Letters and Commentary
TO THE EDITORS
We were surprised and disappointed that Brigadier David Buring, in his review of Greg Lockhart’s The Minefield – An Australian Tragedy in Vietnam, misunderstands the book’s central point.
The book addresses the question that has angered and intrigued Vietnam veterans since the war: ‘How could Brigadier Graham, an intelligent, capable and experienced army officer, make what is probably the greatest Australian military blunder since World War Two?’
Brigadier Graham was the Commander, 1st Australian Task Force. He was under pressure. He had too few troops for the job at hand. His solution was to lay a minefield so as to separate and thus protect the province’s main populated and rice growing area from the Viet Cong. The minefield would substitute for the troops he did not have.
He was not universally supported in his solution. His battalion commanders, both wary of the two-edged nature of minefields because of their Korean War experience, warned against it. So did the Graham’s engineer advisor.
But he gave the order and the minefield was laid.
That Graham was in error soon became apparent. Before the laying was completed, the Viet Cong were lifting mines and soon re-laying them in the path of Australian patrols and in places Australian troops might rest or seek cover.
In time, thousands of mines were lifted and re-laid as the Viet Cong’s primary strike weapon and as weapons defending their base areas. Over five hundred Australians, Americans, New Zealanders and South Vietnamese were killed or wounded on these re-laid mines. There were long periods between 1969–70 when some 50 per cent of task force casualties were caused by mines from the minefield, with the figures probably peaking at 80 per cent at some points.
One important result was that the area around the minefield, which included the Viet Cong base area of the Long Hai Hills, was avoided by some Australian commanders who thought it too dangerous for their troops to operate in. So ironically, the minefield came to protect the Viet Cong against our incursions into their base areas even to the extent that, during the eventual lifting, Viet Cong bunkers were discovered in the middle of the minefield.
Over the years, there has been much speculation about how Brigadier Graham could have made such a disastrous mistake. Some accuse him of an ignorance of guerrilla warfare; others accuse him of arrogance in ignoring expert advice; some suggest ideological blindness; yet others suggest it was really not Graham’s fault but the fault of South Vietnamese troops breaking their promise to protect the minefield.
Greg Lockhart finds all these explanations at least partly wanting. Without absolving the Task Force Commander of personal responsibility, the author successfully argues that Brigadier Graham’s decision must be viewed in the context of the flawed strategic thinking of the whole military hierarchy. It was that flawed strategic thinking that blinded Graham to the main danger in laying a minefield to keep the enemy out of the province’s main population and rice growing area. He believed the enemy was on only one side of the wire. In other words, he assumed the people in the ‘protected’ villages, by and large, were not Viet Cong.
This assumption was wildly wrong.
The Viet Cong who lifted the M16 mines for re-laying in the path of Australian soldiers were villagers. Platoons of Saigon Government troops recruited to defend their own villages routinely failed to prevent Viet Cong entering, often to visit their families. Viet Cong political rallies using public address systems were held at one end of village while the village defence platoons stayed in their bunkers at the other. Villagers continually passed intelligence to the Viet Cong military units about Australian movements.
There is the instructive case of 8 RAR telling a Vietnamese district office it was withdrawing ambushes from round a village knowing the word would get to the local guerrilla unit. The 8 RAR ambushes moved only slightly and caught the inflow of the misadvised Viet Cong.
Brigadier Buring, in claiming that it was ‘deficiencies in ... execution’ that turned the minefield into a disaster, has missed the book’s central point. That point being that flawed strategic thinking blinded the Task Force Commander as to who and where his enemy was, condemning him to the ridiculous action of laying a minefield with the enemy on both sides.
Infantry soldiers on patrols were not the only Australian victims of our own M16 jumping jack mines; five Army engineers were killed and six wounded in three separate incidents while laying them.
A government press release claimed that the first two incidents had been caused by ‘momentary lack of concentration and attention to detail by an individual....’ A similar claim was made for the third incident with the qualification that it was just possible a mine malfunction could have been the cause.
Greg Lockhart’s careful analysis shows two of these claims to be untrue or at least misleading. The second explosion may have been human error but the cause could not actually be determined, while the third explosion may either have been a fuze malfunction or human error. He also shows that the government was aware of this uncertainty.
As well as unequivocally blaming the sappers, the press release failed to mention the difficulty under which they worked. They had not trained using the mine before arriving in Vietnam. The need to finish the minefield before the harvest led to hurried and inadequate in-country training. It also led to the inclusion of untrained sappers in laying parties and an unrealistically ambitious laying rate. The use of sensitive anti-lifting devices greatly increased the danger of laying the mines. Some mine mechanisms were also found to be faulty in the testing process. All this plus the stress of stifling heat and the constant threat of enemy action inevitably led to casualties.
Not only did the press release fail to mention these circumstances, it also made the false claims that sappers had received relevant basic training in Australia and that they underwent ‘further intensive training and rehearsals’ just prior to the laying.
Worse still, the press release unfairly claimed that ‘more rigid control by Non Commissioned Officers [may] have resulted in fewer casualties’.
In short, the government press release was a betrayal of the sappers who, far from bearing responsibility for the accidents, were doing a remarkable job under the most adverse of conditions.
Brigadier Buring justifies this betrayal saying: ‘...high profile public and political argument about mine casualties would have handed the enemy a major propaganda victory’. More likely, we feel, was the government’s fear that argument about the reliability of the mines and the adequacy of the sappers’ training might damage it electorally.
If, however, Buring is correct, the question must be asked why, after Australia’s participation in the war ended, was the record not corrected; why were those so unfairly blamed not briefed on the need for the sacrifice of their reputations for the national good. One of these non-commissioned officers interviewed by the author was troubled by that unfair accusation for nearly forty years; he is no doubt not alone.
The Minefield is, we believe, the most important book about Australia’s participation in the Vietnam war published so far. It has not only given many, many soldiers a believable context into which to understand their individual experiences, but also explores issues of vital importance to the prosecution of current conflicts.
Yours sincerely,
Tim McCombe, OAM
National President
Vietnam Veterans’ Federation
29 July 2008
TO THE EDITORS
I write to address a number of issues arising from the two articles submitted by Infantry officers in the Autumn 2008 edition of the Australian Army Journal and a number of subsequent comments, spoken and written, responding to these articles. As such, I wish to deal with a number of issues: the official response to these officers’ comments, the ramifications for debate and discussion within professional circles, and the long-term consequences of the rise of Special Forces in Australia.
The Canadians and Americans, and most importantly, the past masters of counterinsurgency warfare, the British, have all deployed conventional infantry on high intensity operations in the Krulakian environment of nation-building and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, the ultimate irony is that our Special Forces have conducted much lauded conventional actions in this supposedly changed environment. So what is being argued here? If warfare has changed so much, what have our allies been doing all this time? More to the point, what have our own Special Forces being doing? It seems that our Special Forces get to fight on the ‘Third Block’, but do not have to conduct the more mundane operations on the other two blocks—that is handled by the conventional Infantry.
This is not a repudiation of the principles argued by Smith in The Utility of Force or by Caldwell, Galula, Nagl et al. Nor am I arguing that soft skills such as empathy for the enemy (which is equally useful across the entire spectrum of conflict) should not be central in modern training regimens. The regular battalions have been acting on these principles and have been developing these skills in the Solomon Islands, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. Most serving infantrymen could navigate the labyrinthine streets of Dili blindfolded and point out every internally displaced person camp, non-government organisation office and United Nations Police station; but what they cannot do is conduct a quick attack in a built-up area, conducting sustained city block clearances in contact. Why? It is because we have neither trained for this, have tested Urban Operations TTPs in place nor even the organic logistics framework present for sustained combat. Put simply, our battalions’ warfighting skills have atrophied, not because combat has disappeared from conflict—it clearly has not and will not—but because they have been deliberately excluded from combat. Moreover, they do not have time to train for conventional warfighting due to the dysfunctional rotation system. The Infantry have a right to be confused and angry. The Army itself sends mixed messages. For example, infantrymen are told to develop the ‘soft skills’ yet they have witnessed the Army purchase of one of the heaviest main battle tanks in the world, the Abrams; they are told that Infantry cannot expect to see ‘traditional’ conflicts but read about their brethren in the British, American and Canadian armies in action.
I feel the second ad hominem attack was both more disappointing and far more serious in terms of the Army’s intellectual standing. The editorial in the Autumn AAJ rebuked Hammett and Colton for raising their issues because they somehow did not understand Smith’s thesis in The Utility of Force. A brief look at their respective operational careers would suggest that they do in fact understand and have implemented Smith’s dictums. The point here is that no amount of sophistry or word-play can hide the fact that the ‘face of warfare’ experienced by our conventional battalions vis-à-vis the Special Forces has been vastly different. The type of war Hammett and Colton referred does, and will continue to, exist. To make matters worse, the editorial noted that it would include, grudgingly it seems, the two articles ‘in a spirit of professional debate’. Why would the editors deem it necessary to add that remark? Surely it is a given that articles are included to curry debate? It should be noted that when Brigadier Essex-Clark raised the almost identical concerns about the use of ‘niche forces’ in the June 2003 edition of the AAJ, no such opinion was expressed by the editorial. The AAJ must be more than just a repository for essays earnestly regurgitating the latest vogue in military theory. Officers who challenge the orthodoxy should not be derided but actively encouraged. We will not develop and learn if we accept and only produce uncritical submissions in our professional journals. In a journal of ideas on warfare, no one person’s word should be the last word.
Special Forces in Australia have done very well in the last few years. It now has an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy headed by no less than a major general; it has guaranteed lifeblood with the SFDR Scheme, which allows civilians off the street to enter the Special Forces without ever having served in the wider Army; and it has earned a cachet due to its exposure to combat operations (the same type of operations that do not exist anymore supposedly). This should raise real concerns for a number of reasons, the least of all being what role the Infantry has in the future. The Army should also be extremely concerned with the lack of morale in the battalions and the flight to the Special Forces. The vast majority of Infantry soldiers do not apply for the Special Forces because they want to be SF soldiers per se, but because they want an opportunity to ply their trade. If their battalions were conducting conventional operations, these soldiers would, for the most part, opt to serve with their own proud battalions.
Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the rise of Special Forces in Australia has been the introduction and use of the term ‘direct action’—a catch-all phrase that seems to cover all tactical tasks that a cynic might suggest have the common element of deliberate contact with enemy combatants. One of the main types of ‘direct action’—the ‘raid’—is, in the most basic tactical terms, a ‘destroy’ mission that does not seek to hold ground. How is this task the sole preserve of the Special Forces? If only the Special Forces can execute ‘direct actions’, one assumes therefore that the regular battalions are deemed fit to handle only ‘indirect actions’—whatever they may be. I hazard a guess they look a lot like the type of operations relegated to the conventional battalions recently. We are told that the Commandos fill a capability gap between the conventional battalions and the SAS; it is absolutely clear by the type of operations conducted by our infantry brothers in other armies and the well-documented actions of the Commandos, that this ‘gap’ is an artificial construct. If the conventional battalions were given the same operational opportunities, their ‘capability’ would be demonstrated and the ‘gap’ erased.
In essence, the history of the post-Second World War Australian Army was about the struggle of the Regular Army for ascendancy over the ‘brilliant amateurs’ of the Citizen Military Forces and Army Reserve. The narrative of the Australian Army in the first half of the twenty-first century seems to be shaping up to be about another struggle for ascendancy—this time between conventional Infantry and the Special Forces. It was the CMF’s inability to deliver highly trained units for short notice Cold War tasks that forced it to cede primacy to the ARA. No such charge could be levelled at the conventional battalions today, as anyone who has suffered through endless pre-deployment checks or Ready Company Group leave restrictions can testify.
Instead the canard of a ‘new type of warfare’ will be used, along with the preferment of ‘niche capabilities’ to undermine, emasculate and degrade the conventional battalions. Warfare’s character and face evolves but its nature is unchanging. To argue that only a ‘niche’ capability can operate in future conflict is nonsense. Capability, in its basest form, is a function of good training realised with operational opportunity. Infantry officers and their men do understand that finesse, discretion, empathy, compassion and intelligence are to be valued as much as raw martial ability. They understand the need to work with police forces and civilian agencies in a whole-of-government approach. They understand it so well because they have been doing so in a number of operations overseas. But currently, the battalions are not getting opportunities to train in high-end warfighting and they are not getting the combat exposure enjoyed by the Special Forces community. This creates a vicious circle of skill degradation, plummeting morale and soldiers leaving en masse. The Infantry battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment, the custodians of the battle honours of Maryang San, Kapyong and Long Tan, deserve better than this.
Dayton McCarthy
